Pack 8 DVD Filmmakers' Cooperative

Aristotle 1965, Super8, color, silent, 3 min
Divinations 1964, 16mm, color, sound, 6 min
Deep in the Mirror Embedded 1965, Super8, color, silent, 14 min
The Recurring Dream 1965, Super8, color, silent, 3 min
Malevich at the Guggenheim 1965, Super8, color, silent, 6 min
September Express 1973, Super8, color, silent, 6 min
Lace of Summer 1973, Super8, color, silent, 4 min
Silently, Bearing Totem of a Bird 1962, Super8, color, silent, 7 min
Ives House 1965, Super8, color, silent, 11 min
A Reticule of Love 1963, 16mm, color, silent, 3 min
The Tattooed Man 1969, 16mm, color, sound, 35 min
Shaman 1967, 16mm, color, sound, 12 min
Journey Around a Zero 1964, 16mm, b&w, sound, 3 min
Third Eye Butterfly 1968, double screen 16mm, color, sound, 9 min
Peyote Queen 1965, 16mm, color, sound, 9 min

DVD9 PAL Interzone • Stereo • Color & B/W • 4:3 • 131 min •BONUS Poems by Storm De Hirsch
+ Booklet with 48 pages of texts by Jonathan Pouthier, Stephen Broomer, Storm De Hirsch

Please please show this film! It's unique, it's real, it's not like any other film. What one sees in it, can not be seen anywhere else. It will shock some, but the fact is that there are shocking things in this world and we should know it and see it, nothing human should be hidden from knowledge. You made a very REAL film about REAL people. One of the most difficult things to do in cinema. I congratulate you.
-Jonas Mekas on Chop Off

Her cinema is marked by a lush sensuality, a concern for light, play and artfully woven soundtrack.
-Barbara Hammer

FILMS
Darling International 1999, 16mm, b&w, 22 min
Bitch Beauty 2011, 16mm, color, 7 min
enduring ornament 2015, 16mm on digital, color, 14 min
Mary Magdalene 2017, Super8/16mm/video, color, 5 min
real to reel Mama 1982, 16mm, color, 20 min
Chop off 2008, Super8/16mm/ video, color, 6 min
Double Your Pleasure 2002, 16mm, b/w, 4 min
Jack Smith's apartment 1990, VHS on digital, color, 8 min
L'amour Fou 1992, 16mm, color, 17 min
eye etc 1982, 16mm, color, silent, 5 min
Turner 1987, 16mm, color, 3 min
Framed 1984, 16mm, color, 1:30 min
Nightfall 1984, 16mm, color & b/w, 1:30 min
NYC 1985, 16mm, color & b/w, 1 min
PPII 1986, 16mm, color, 1 min

DVD9 PAL Interzone • Stereo • Color & B/W • 16:9 • Sous-titres FR • 116 min

Ron Rice - The Flower Thief
'The Flower Thief', filmed and acted by New York and San Francisco "beats," is a collection of improvisations. Ron Rice, the film's creator, attempted to ignore or break all the rules of cinema craft in making this film. Its form is the picaresque novel, a genre dating from the Middle Ages in which a rogue has a series of loosely connected adventures which reveal his personality and his relations to the world around him. Don Quixote in the Renaissance, Huckleberry Finn in the nineteenth century, and the tramp of Charlie Chaplin in our own times are picaresque heroes. Ron Rice's contribution to this tradition is his flower thief, a mad, harmless homosexual. Wandering through the streets of San Francisco with his teddy bear, indifferent to authority, stealing flowers because he likes them, and experiencing the basic human emotions, he is also The Noble Savage.
-P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture

I still think that 'The Flower Thief' is one of the most important modern films, a beautiful absurd poem. And so is his new film, 'Senseless'.The bullfight in negative is a fantastic shot; and so is the sequence with the beatnicks on Acapulco beach; or the train robbery episode; or the shot of the Virgin of Guadalupe surrounded by light; or the oil wells at night. It is beautiful and wild.
-Jonas Mekas

'The Flower Thief', like all significant cinema,holds before society a mirror image of its weaknesses and its disease. The Flower Thief is an eloquent plea for natural and humble participation in life.
- Mary Batten, Film Comment

FILMS
The Mexican Footage, 1950, 8'30"
The Flower Thief, 1960, 58'
Senseless, 1962, 24'
Chumlum, 1964, 23'

bonus : Outtakes - The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, 1982, 6'
Includes a 55-pages bilingual EN/FR booklet with texts by Wheeler Winston Dixon, Barry Clark, Marry Batten & Ron Rice.

Taylor Mead - Home Movies
Years ago, when we asked Jonas Mekas what films we should publish next on DVD, he said without hesitation, "Taylor Mead's home movies." That should be reason enough to be curious. Mead is known as an actor, clown and improviser, "the first underground movie star", but his own films are rarely screened. Blending documentation of the NY underground, snippets of Mead clowning, Mead's own percussive style of shooting and the humor in his gaze makes these films a valuable glimpse into and product of mid-1960s underground New York culture - in stunning Kodachrome.
- Pip Chodorov, Re:voir

In 1964, before Warhol was a pop-art mega-celebrity, he invited Mead on a road trip to California for the opening of a gallery show. They wound up making Tarzan and Jane Regained.. Sort of, a spoof of Hollywood adeventure movies that was Warhol's first partially scripted feature. It started Mead as a Hollywood Tarzan carvorting with a naked Jane in a bathtub at the Beverly Hills Hoel, exercising on Venice Beach and having a bicep-flexing contest with Denis Hopper as a rival Tarzan. Mead would appear in about 10 Warhol films over the next decade, including a curious 76 minute piece featuring his naked rear end. Calling himself "a drifter in the arts", Mead also acted on stage, winning an Obie Award in 1963 for his performance in the Frank O'Hara play The General Returns from One place to Another.
- Elaine Woo, LA Times

FILMS
My Home Movies 1964, 16mm, 38 min
Home Movies Rome/Florence/Venice/Greece 1965, 16mm, 14 min
Home Movies NYC to San Diego 1968, 16mm, 19min, silent

DVD5 PAL Interzone • Stereo • color • 4:3 • 71 min • + booklet FR/EN

"The Wind is Driving Him Toward the Open Sea" is as poetic as its title. I find it one of the most interesting narrative films that have come out this year. What's interesting about it is that David Brooks manages to fuse in it a number of different techniques which, till now, have been used only in non-narrative, poetic film-techniques such as single frame, free, impressionistic camera movement, almost total plotless-ness, etc. The other thing I like about "The Wind..." is a fascinating melancholy that surrounds it. Its narrative of moods, of reflection, of things lost, gone, like autumn leaves—no tragedy, really, only a mood of melancholy, of sadness—of friends, of ways of life, of cultures gone, of ages coming and going—these are just some of the notes that the film strikes. Romanticism? Perhaps.
-Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal

Any inventory of his films is as meaningless as an inventory of a painting by Bonnard. It is through the lyrical flow of his camera, through his intuitive knowledge of the right length of each shot and the natural grafting of one onto another, that his statements on film assume the quality of poetry.
-David Curtis

David Brooks established himself during the 1960s as one of the most prominent lyricists of the experimental cinema. His work was eclipsed by his early death in 1969 at the age of twenty-four and throughout the next decade by the cooler, more controlled sensibility of structural film. As a consequence, his films are scarcely remembered today, which is particularly unfortunate since at least two of them – "Nightspring Daystar" and "The Wind is Driving Him Toward the Open Sea" – deserve a place as among the most important films of this period.
-J.J. Murphy, Film Culture

FILMS
1963 Jerry 3'
1964 Nightspring Daystar 17'
1966 Winter 16'
1967 Letter to D.H. in Paris 4'
1968 Eel Creek 7'
1968 The Wind is Driving Him Toward the Open Sea 50'
1969 Carolyn and Me 1-2-3 90'

DVD9 PAL Interzone • Stereo • Color • 4:3 • Sous-titres FR • 187 min
EN/FR Booklet by / Livret de Stephen Broomer & J. J. Murphy

Marie Menken is a lyrical poet. The structure of Menken's filmic sentences, her movements, and her rhythms are those of poetry. She transposes reality into poetry. It's through poetry that Menken reveals to us the subtle aspects of reality, the mysteries of the world and the mysteries of her own soul. Menken sings. Her lens is focused on the physical world, but she sees it through a poetic temperament and with an intensified sensitivity. She catches the bits and fragments of the world around her and organizes them into aesthetic unities which communicate to us. Her filmic language and her imagery are crisp, clear, wondrous. There are moments in Arabesque and in Notebook that are among the most inspired sentences in filmic poetry.
-Jonas Mekas

Her hand-held camera directly capturing external light shaped into representational images on film is, at the same time, recording her whole body’s reaction to what she is seeing through that camera. She always tended, when taking pictures, to dance and, when editing those film strips, then, to capture the eye’s dance (rather than, say, some idealized stance- dance of the ‘mind’s eye’). She would hang up the strips and film and study the patterns, right, left, up, down, and splice them together as designs in Time—plenty of ideas arising in these arrangements of rhythmic Form, but no superimposed ideology.
-Stan Brakhage

FILMS
1945 Visual Variations on Noguchi 4'
1957 Glimpse of the Garden 5'
1957 Hurry! Hurry! 3'
1959 Dwightiana 3'
1961 Arabesque for Kenneth Anger 4'
1961 Bagatelle for Willard Maas 5'
1961 Eye Music in Red Major 5'
1961 Drips in Strips 3'
1964 Moonplay 5'
1964 Go Go Go 11'
1964 Wrestling 8'
1965 Mood Mondrian 5.5'
1965 Andy Warhol 18'
1966 Lights 6'
1966 Sidewalks 6'
1967 Watts with Eggs 2'
1968 Excursion 5'

Hilary Harris - Organism

Organism is Academy Award-winning film maker Hilary Harris' epic vision of New York City, shot over 15 years (1959- 1974) during which time he pioneered and contemporized time-lapse film making techniques to achieve a unique experiential view of the world we inhabit.
-Leo Hurwitz

Hilary is unquestionably one of the most original and talented filmmakers of the American independent cinema... he is in a class by him- self, a master of his craft.
-Amos Vogel

Hilary Harris’ nervy tour of Robert Moses’ New York hearkens back to the classic city symphonies of the 1920s but cut to fit the “go go go” energy of the new era. The film can be enjoyed purely as a riot of graphic forms [...] but it’s finally his simple fascination with the changing shape of the road at speed that makes the screen come alive. Bronze medalist at the Brussels International Experimental Film Festival in 1958, Highway today appears a snappy detour between “On the Road” (published the year before) and the early films of the French New Wave (just around the bend).
-Max Goldberg

Why make films at all? To give a richer vision of surrounding reality. My aim is to lift people out of their preconceptions.
-Hilary Harris

FILMS
Longhorns 1951, 16mm, n&b, mono, 4 min
Highway 1958, 16mm, couleur, mono, 5 min
Nine Variations on a Dance Theme 1966, 16mm, n&b, mono, 13 min
Organism 1975, 16mm, couleur, mono, 19 min
Polaris Action 1960, 16mm, n&b, mono, 11 min
The Draft Card Burners 1966, 16mm, n&b, muet, 7 min
BONUS Camera Three: Art of the Filmmaker: Hilary Harris 1964, 16mm, n&b, mono, 27 min