Kubelka and Vertov.

"With a filmography that is only 63 minutes long, avant-garde master [Peter] Kubelka (born in Austria in 1934) has progressed film by his metric and metaphoric montages, which are attentive to tactile qualities and mechanics that are exclusive to film," writes Michelle Silva in the introduction to her interview with Kubelka in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "Since the 1950s, Kubelka has remained a committed proponent of film as a pure medium, leaving an indelible mark on international film history and culture, establishing the Österreichisches Filmmuseum in Vienna, then cofounding Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 1978."

The occasion of the interview, in which Kubelka insists that cinema will survive "because it has a heart core which cannot be replaced by any other medium" and that "the imitation of cinema is definitely not what the digital medium can do, should do, and will do," is a series of lectures and screenings continuing at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley tomorrow, and then, on Sunday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. And it should be mentioned that the San Francisco Cinematheque has a hand in all this as well.

Should be mentioned in part, too, because putting these programs together and getting them on their feet in even just a few cities costs money - and getting them anywhere outside the limits of a major city would simply not be financially feasible. Kubelka's right, naturally: films do need to be seen projected on a screen in a dark theater. But if you're living far and away from a cinematheque, second best is better than none. And second best is DVD.

That makes a new DVD series, "Edition Film Museum," produced by the afore-mentioned Austrian Film Museum in cooperation with other German-language film museums, all the more valuable. The first title's just out: Dziga Vertov's 1930 film, Entuziazm (Simfonija Donbassa), which, as the back cover reads, "was praised by artists like Charlie Chaplin, was subsequently forgotten, and rediscovered by the avant-garde movement of the 1960s."

What's doubly interesting is that Peter Kubelka has overseen the restoration (the two-disc release includes the original print held by the Gosfilmofond, Kubelka's restoration and Joerg Burger and Michael Loebenstein's doc, Restoring Entuziazm); doubly interesting because Vertov understood immediately that advent of sound opened up radical new possibilities for cinema, a concept Kubelka touches on in relation to his own work in Silva's interview.

I'm intrigued enough to have been emailing the Austrian Film Museum's Franziska Schuster over the past few days. "The first person who came up with the idea of a joint DVD Edition Film Museum was the director of the Munich Film Museum, Stefan Drössler," she writes. "He initiated the association of German-speaking film museums and archives to release films on DVD which are very rarely exhibited due to marginal market interest. These films belong to the valuable stock of the participating archives and are, notwithstanding their rare screenings in film theaters, of utmost significance for the history of film."

The aim of the series is to release eight to twelve titles a year. The next four in line are:

• Curt Goetz's Friedrich Schiller: Eine Dichterjugend (1923).
• Erich von Stroheim's Blind Husbands (1919).
• Richard Oswald's Different From the Others (Anders als die Anderen, 1919).
• Veit Harlan's Bewildered Youth (Anders als du und ich, 1957).

And how is the Edition going about selecting its titles? "Every participating film archive and museum is free to designate films as contributions to the Edition," replies Franziska Schuster. "This way, the Edition benefits from the experience and expertise of all the participants as well as from the focus of their particular film collection. The association will remain open for more institutions to join and deepen the pool of available 'content.' Besides silent pictures, which will, without a doubt, play an important role in the edition, there will be a focus on independent films from the 60s, 70s and 80s, as well as on selected currents in contemporary cinema. From our own archive at the Austrian Film Museum, we will be releasing more Soviet Revolution films, such as the 1930 Vitaphone version of Battleship Potemkin (the only existing sound records from that version are in Vienna), as well as other films by Dziga Vertov, and maybe also Pudovkin, Dovzhenko and others; and we'll be releasing important works from the avant-garde and experimental cinema of the 1960s, 70s and 80s."

By the way, it should probably be be noted that there'll be subtitles in English and German, occasionally other languages as well, and that these are Region 0 releases, PAL format, yet if you're in the US and your player and TV are relatively new, there should be no problem (though you might want to check).

Posted by dwhudson at October 19, 2005 1:07 PM