Kino video

A documentary on the life and films of F.W. Murnau

An absorbing portrait of one of the most colorful and revered figures in world cinema, 'Paradjanov: A Requiem' offers an affectionate and insightful look at the tumultuous career of the late Sergei Paradjanov; artist, dissident, romantic and iconoclast.

From the little theaters of the 1920s to the ad hoc film societies of the 50s, avant-garde cinema knew no established form and held no predictable position. The boundaries of its history are still hotly debated, but its rough sensibilities informed and permeated the city symphonies of Alberto Cavalcanti, the visual music of Mary Ellen Bute and John Whitney, the classroom films of Sidney Peterson, the confessional film poems of Willard Maas and John E. Schmitz, the Lettrist cinema of Marc’O, and even marginal exploitation films and home movies. Drawn from the rich collections of Raymond Rohauer and the George Eastman House, Kino’s third volume of experimental films continues to illuminate the degree to which cinema’s evolution has been influenced by those filmmakers who occupy its periphery.

In the latter half of the 20th Century, Raymond Rohauer was one of the nation's foremost proponents of experimental cinema. This collection continues Kino's tribute to the Rohauer Collection, including the early works of Stan Brakhage and influential films by Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, Marie Menken, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Jean Mitry, Sidney Peterson and others. The pièce de résistance is Jean Isidore Isou's passionate manifesto of film aesthetics Traitéde Bave et D'eternité (Venom and Eternity), which sparked a riot when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951.