Unseen Cinema 4: Inverted Narratives

Streaming video - 1910

INVERTED NARRATIVES is part of the retrospective UNSEEN CINEMA that explores long-forgotten American experimental cinema.. In this collection, early directors D.W. Griffith and Lois Weber develop the radical language of cinema narrative through audience-friendly melodramas made for nickelodeon theaters. Experimental fantasies are depicted in such independent productions as MOONLAND (c.1926), LULLABY (1929), and THE BRIDGE (1929-30). Depression era films by socially-conscious filmmakers reshape drama as demonstrated in Josef Berne's brooding BLACK DAWN (1933) and Strand and Hurwitz's biting NATIVE LAND (1937-41): each pictures a raw reality. Parody and satire find their mark in Theodore Huff's LITTLE GEEZER (1932) and Barlow, ...Hay and LeRoy's EVEN AS YOU AND I (1937). David Bradley's SREDNI VASHTAR BY SAKI (1940-43) boasts an inadvertent post-modern attitude.. 12 films by featured directors: Roger Barlow, Lionel Berman, Josef Berne, G.W. “Billy” Bitzer, David Bradley, Boris Deutsch, Frontier Films, Mike Gordon, D.W. Griffith, Harry Hay, Theodore Huff, Leo Hurwitz, Irving Lerner, Ben Maddow, Neil McQuire, NYKino, William A. O’Connor, Le Roy Robbins, Philips Smalley, Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, Seymour Stern, Willard Van Dyke, Charles Vidor, Lois Weber, Christopher Young.. Curated by Bruce Posner and produced by David Shepard. “Just one of the amazing things this series of early American avant-garde films drives home is just how far into the belly of the Hollywood beast the experimental filmmakers progressed.” - The Guardian. "The creative explosion that took place at the margins of Hollywood." - Le Monde more