The Rainbow Is Yours

(Fri., 8 p.m., $6, Moore College of Art and Design, 20th and Race sts.)

Secret Cinema's archival program promises a trip through the history of color film, where sparkling Chevys and freshly harvested cranberries radiate colors long since vanished from the screen. Samples of dye-transfer Technicolor, Kodachrome, Ansochrome and Cinecolor will scorch every eyeball in attendance.

(Fri.-Sun., Nov. 18-20, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542)

Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid and Easy Rider make up this three-day salute to the literary prankster and counterculture icon. Southern's son Nile introduces the kickoff screening of Strangelove (Fri., 7 p.m.), followed by Loved One (Sat., 7 p.m.), Cincinnati Kid (Sun., 2 p.m.) and Easy Rider (Sun., 7 p.m.).

(Sat., 7 p.m., $5, Space 1026, 1026 Arch St.)

No rhyming prose here—in fact, apart from Bill Brown's chatty Buffalo Common, the short films in Small Change's hour-plus program employ almost no dialogue at all. Focusing on urban dislocation and rootlessness, the half-dozen films explore the terrain of American strip malls and downtown Hong Kong, the green-lit glow of San Francisco trolleys at night, and the abandoned plains of North Dakota, some of which just happen to cover nuclear missile silos. In Strip Mall Trilogy, Roger Beebe uses the grainy beauty of Super 8 film to transform the clinical sameness of neon-lit logos, while N. Judah 5:30, from Weather Underground's Sam Green, limns the loneliness of public transport, ending with a tentative attempt at contact that oddly echoes Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Café Lumiere. In addition to the films, Philadelphia photographer Zoe Strauss will stage a live projector performance (i.e. slide show) of "hidden people and places," accompanied by duo Drums Like Machine Guns.

($99.99 DVD)

Despite its massive size—seven discs, 155 films, some 19 hours of footage—this voluminous collection, subtitled "Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941," doesn't aim to be comprehensive. Bruce Posner, who first assembled Unseen Cinema as a touring program, isn't out to assemble a canonical history of the pre-WWII avant-garde, since by some estimations, there is none. According to most histories, like P. Adams Sitney's Visionary Film, the American avant-garde starts in 1943, with Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon. But Unseen Cinema shows that American filmmakers were expanding the medium's boundaries long before the 1940s—in fact, almost before the medium had any boundaries to speak of.

The first of the boxed set's seven thematically assembled discs, The Mechanized Eye, demonstrates that early filmmakers like G.W. "Billy" Bitzer were constantly experimenting in an effort to grasp the potential of the new medium. Best known as D.W. Griffith's cameraman, Bitzer was a visionary in his own right, as the awe-inspiring detail of "Westinghouse Works, Panorama View, Street Car Motor Room," or "Panorama from the Tower of the Brooklyn Bridge" attest (the latter was filmed in 65mm, the better to absorb the gritty texture of 1903 Manhattan). As their titles imply, Bitzer's short subjects were conceived as "actualities," brief statements designed to display the cinema's power for conveying time and place. But there's an artistry to Bitzer's "Interior New York Subway, 14th St. to 42nd St." that transcends its demonstrative purpose. The five-minute film involves three trains—one in front of the lens, one carrying Bitzer's camera, and one towing a lighting-rigged flatbed on a parallel track—in a delicate push-pull ballet, with flickering patterns of light and shadow creating an almost hypnotic effect. Equally enthralling is the glimpse of the New York subway system in 1905, with its ironwork trains and formally clad commuters.

As Bitzer's films show, you don't have to be a devoted experimental film buff to be swayed by Unseen Cinema. As much as a historical claim, Posner's curation is an argument for a way of watching, a philosophy that the avant-garde is where you find it. You'd be hard-pressed to find a textbook that lumps Busby Berkeley in with the likes of Norman McLaren or Oskar Fischinger, but when the Berkeley-choreographed "By a Waterfall" number from Footlight Parade is placed alongside the geometric abstractions of self-described "modern artist" Mary Ellen Bute, their common interest in replicating forms is impossible to miss. Let the taxonomists haggle over whether that qualifies Berkeley as an experimental filmmaker, but if his elaborate, alogical fantasias don't class him as a surrealist, it's hard to think who deserves the term.

Aside from the thrice-excerpted Berkeley, no Hollywood talent benefits more from Posner's curation than Slavo Vorkapich. Although his contributions rarely exceeded a few minutes of film, Vorkapich's Soviet-influenced montage sequences, or "Vorkapichs," made him a legend in his day. (His two-minute survey of Washington landmarks in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington may be the best known today.) Light Rhythms, Unseen Cinema's third disc, excerpts several Vorkapich sequences, including a few minutes from the shadow-puppet animation The Life and Death of 9413, A Hollywood Extra, co-directed with Robert Florey. But the jackpot is an unreleased battle sequence from The Firefly (1937), an MGM drama starring Jeanette MacDonald as a Spanish singing spy. Vorkapich's version is a death's-head collage where grinning skulls fly through the air like cannonballs and bayonets slice through the clouds; MGM's cut cherry-picks Vorkapich's most obvious images (booming cannons, a tumbling flag which signals defeat) and adds a kitschy climax in which a freed prisoner lifts his sundered chains to the sky.

Unseen Cinema has its share of established art-world figures as well. There's a heaping helping of works by Joseph Cornell, the American artist whose films extend his interest in collage. Children's Party, for example, re-edits amateur and home-movie footage so that a baby seems to be transfixed by a knife-throwing stage act, or the spinning chair on a seal's nose is transformed into a whirling acrobat. (Curiously, Cornell's best-known film, Rose Hobart, is absent, but it can be found on the Treasures from American Film Archives set.) Paul Strand, whose vivid photography of post-WWI New York set new standards for expressive realism, is represented by his Blake-inspired documentary Manhatta, often called a precursor to the city symphony although it lacks a firm structure, and an excerpt from Native Land, a pro-union propaganda feature in the mold of The Salt of the Earth. Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Rudy Burckhardt, Douglass Crockwell, Dwinell Grant and Francis Lee are also represented, all defying the separation between fine art and filmmaking.

Perhaps the greatest joys of Unseen Cinema are the flat-out discoveries, the genuinely unseen gems that arrive like bolts from the blue. Where else could you find 1933's Tomato Is Another Day, an outrageously deadpan satire of early sound films in which zombified characters uselessly narrate their own actions? Co-directed by James Sibley Watson, best known for his expressionist adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher (also included), Tomato's affectless postmodernism is Saturday Night Live avant la lettre, a comic broadside that still seems ahead of its time today. Unseen Cinema is literally packed with such revelations, too many even to list. It's a shame the set's program notes don't extend further than a text-packed screen or two before each film; with so many new names to take in, it would be nice to have more opportunity to put each one in context. Brief bios are available as DVD-ROM files, and a catalogue for the original screening series is available at www.unseen-cinema.com

, but the lineups don't entirely overlap, which means you'll be spending substantial amounts of time shuttling between the TV and your Web browser. But the bottomless curiosity that Unseen Cinema stokes is an entirely pleasant cross to bear.

Classics all 'round: The County/Bryn Mawr/Ambler triumvirate screens Buster Keaton's masterpiece Sherlock, Jr. and his winning Cops (Mon., Tue. and Wed., respectively, all at 7 p.m.); Chestnut Hill Film Group screens John Ford's Stagecoach, which is less a classic Western than the prototype for the modern action movie (Tue., 7 p.m., Chestnut Hill Free Library); and I-House threads Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple (Mon., 6:00 p.m.).