Think less "avant garde" and more "treasures"...

Above, a typ­ic­ally arrest­ing image from George Kuchar’s hil­ari­ous and strangely humane 1977 I, An Actress, star­ring Kuchar and Barbara Lapsley, one of the 26 films col­lec­ted on Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, the latest offer­ing from the American Film Preservation Foundation and Image. I write about the­beau­ti­fully put-together box over at The Auteurs’, con­cen­trat­ing largely on the vari­ety of the pieces con­tained therein and how they con­trib­ute to an ever-malleable defin­i­tion of the term “avant garde.” What I don’t think I con­vey suf­fi­ciently is how fab­ulous a lot of these pic­tures are, and how some of them are still work­ing on me. I need to look at, for instance Christopher Maclaine’s The End, Hollis Frampton’s (nos­tal­gia), and Wallace Berman’s Aleph some more, and soon. The Treasures pro­ject is some­thing that deserves every cinephile’s sup­port, I think, so even of you believe you’re sort of “meh” as far as this sort of thing goes, you still might wanna con­sider get­ting this—it’ll stretch you some, and in some hope­fully enjoy­able ways.