In the decade-plus since the introduction of DVD, many cinematic classics have been released in the format. However, the work of avant-garde and experimental filmmakers has been woefully underrepresented thusfar. Admittedly, avant-garde cinema has something of a niche audience, and a collection of experimental works on DVD would never make the splash of a classic narrative film’s debut in the DVD format. Still, despite some notable exceptions like Criterion’s impressive By Brakhage: An Anthology, most of the classics of the various avant-garde cinema movements remain “underground” to this day, available only in battered copies (many of these works exist in a single print) to be seen at museums, festivals, and educational institutions. Because of this, the new DVD set Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film 1947-1986 is a cause for celebration.

Treasures IV, available on DVD today, is the latest in the National Film Preservation Foundation’s “Treasures” series, spotlighting little-seen works in the cinematic medium. But while the first three sets spotlight mostly silent-era and early sound-era works, this one moves forward in time to four key decades in American avant-garde cinema. Pulling from their own archives and those of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Anthology Film Archives, the Museum of Modern Art, the Pacific Film Archive, and even the New York Public Library’s Donnell Media Center, the NFPF selected 26 key films for this collection, most of which were previously unavailable on DVD. In addition, they’ve painstaking cleaned up and restored the films, and commissioned resident composer John Zorn to write new scores for three of the works. Topping it all off is a book that includes information on each of the films, plus a new foreword by Martin Scorsese.

The results are first-rate. The filmmakers included in the set represent a Murderer’s Row of avant-garde greats: Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Joseph Cornell, Jonas Mekas, George Kuchar, Shirley Clarke, Hollis Frampton, Owen Land, Bruce Baillie, Robert Breer, Paul Sharits, Ron Rice, Marie Menken, Harry Smith, and even Andy Warhol. Most of these filmmakers are making their DVD debuts, and that in itself is a reason to pick up Treasures IV. But beyond that, it’s simply an invaluable one-stop overview of this important era in avant-garde cinema. While no single DVD set could possibly encompass the entire spectrum of American experimental film, the films here are a surprisingly diverse lot, ranging from seminal works like Frampton’s (nostalgia) to long-unseen classics like Cornell’s By Night With Torch and Spear, and from the haunting style of Baillie’s expressionistic newsreel about a school for emotionally disturbed children Here I Am to the pomposity-deflating humor of Robert Nelson and William T. Wiley’s The Off-Handed Jape… & How to Pull It Off. Here are three of my favorite works in the set:

Go! Go! Go! (Marie Menken, 1962)- my first exposure to Menken’s work, this film takes newly-shot footage of early-1960s New York City and speeds it up to a frantic pace. The film encompasses a broad spectrum of activity, from a wedding and a graduation to boats sailing up and down the Hudson. But most memorable of all are the shots of people simply going about their business. One wouldn’t think that footage of cars moving and people crossing the roads would make for vivid cinema, but Menken shoots them from high above the streets to emphasize the waves of activity, and by speeding up the footage, she takes it out of the realm of the everyday. One can’t help but marvel at the delicate balance that allows society to run smoothly every day, with everyone presumably acting independently yet seemingly guided by some greater force. Go! Go! Go! accomplishes one of the oldest and most noble goals of art- it allows us to see the familiar through fresh eyes.

Necrology (Standish Lawder, 1969-1970)- one of the more obscure filmmakers in this box, Lawder was a film scholar who made Necrology while studying experimental film. The film consists primarily of dozens or even hundreds of people moving in front of the camera lens- people who, as it turns out, were covertly shot by Lawder as they were riding down an escalator while leaving work one day. Lawder then ran the footage the footage backwards through a projector, to eerie effect. But Lawder saved his most brilliant conceit for the end credits. Shifting his musical score from the funereal strains of Sibelius to an upbeat march, Lawder then proceeds to “Credit” every “Cast member” in the film- apocryphally, as it turns out. Listing such characters as “Pederast” and “Embezzler (at-large)”, Lawder cheekily subverts the audience’s desire to give these people exciting back stories, while simultaneously commenting on the way cinematic representation can turn ordinary people into characters and, in doing so, grant them a measure of immortality.

New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals and Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (Owen Land, 1976)- as with Menken, this was my first exposure to the work of Land (born George Landow), and I hope it won’t be my last. This film, a revised version of his early film Institutional Quality- hence the title- takes as its starting point a test being administered to a middle-aged, stern-looking subject played by Art Gower. As the test progresses, the subject imagines himself in the world of the test, brandishing a giant pencil and writing numbers on random objects in keeping with the questioner’s request. Finally, the subject’s mind begins to wander, and the images become ever more surreal- an enormous woman’s shoe, an approximation of a “China Doll” (right) cribbed from a previous Land film, and an alien carrying a sign reading “This Is a Film About You.” New Improved Institutional Quality, like most of Land’s films, deals with language, but it does so in a way that’s visually inspired and often hilarious. A self-important “Art film” this isn’t.

Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film 1947-1986 would not have been possible without the ongoing efforts of the National Film Preservation Foundation. Click here to visit their official site.