Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941 premieres a comprehensive 20-program retrospective of the pre-Maya Deren inspired avant-garde film movement in America. Over 160 films in newly preserved and restored 35mm and 16mm film prints survey the hitherto unknown accomplishments of pioneer filmmakers working in the United States and abroad during the formative period of American film. The series postulates an innovative and often controversial view of experimental cinema as a product of avant-garde artists, of Hollywood directors, and of amateur movie-makers working collectively and as individuals at all levels of film production during the last decade of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.

Instants encompasses a new film by the Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach and a literary text by the French archeologist and writer Joël-Claude Meffre. The artistic project and the publication that was created for it, with an essay by Marco Baschera (“Thinking in Images”), are devoted to a central point of convergence of the arts: the INSTANT. In photography, film, or literature, the instant in its “entrance” or “descent” signifies a performative opening in the sequence of time that radically breaks through any concept of linearity. 

VARIATIONS includes twelve Canadian moving image and sound artists interpreting Poem (1957) by Michael Snow. The artists selected for this project approached the work from a number of different angles, perspectives and emotions.

Snow's poem provided an anchor for the contributing artists’ work to be fastened to, while giving them the freedom to allow their subjectivity to influence the result.

A DVD+book boxset containing four restored films by Gunvor Nelson and a 124-page book of interviews and critical articles by Julie Savelli.

The Swedish-American artist Gunvor Nelson figures among the most important experimental filmmakers of her generation. Her work considerably influenced the New American Cinema at the end of the 1960s, as much by its themes (women, the body, memory, dreams) as by its formal investigations (animation, collage, found footage).