A collection of films you'll find nowhere else for the serious film history buff . If I was getting a gift for TCM host and film historian Robert Osborne, and I knew he didn't already have this DVD set I would (a) be very surprised and (b) buy it for him. This DVD set is for film buffs who aren't satisfied with the essentials that everyone knows about - "Birth of a Nation", "The Jazz Singer", "Frankenstein", etc., which are great films, but don't tell the whole story of early cinema. The set was organized by Bruce Posner and runs to some nineteen hours, and is an astonishing achievement. The set consists of seven discs each of which explore a different aspect of early cinema.     Among the films included are Douglass Crockwell's "Simple Destiny Abstractions", plus some animations with some very good detail on the level of Windsor McCay. The 1928 version of "The Fall of the House of Usher" focuses more on displaying some complex optical work than the story, reducing Poe's tale to only ten minutes in length. "Night on Bald Mountain" is an example of pinboard animation, in which a film is made completely using shadows from a pin screen. This technique continued to be used for decades. Suspense - a 1913 melodrama in which a housewife and her baby are nearly attacked by a knife-wielding drifter - is included because of its split-screen techniques. However, it is also interesting as the beginnings of what became the psycho-thrillers that exist to this day.    For the budget conscious, the disc entitled "PICTURING A METROPOLIS, New York City Unveiled" is the only disc available for individual purchase. This particular disc is great for history buffs as well as film buffs for all of its views of New York City life during the period from 1890-1940. The New York City disc moves from early footage of the city, including the Edison Company's famous and poetic Coney Island at Night, to Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's well-known Manhattan, to some work by Rudy Burckhardt, the film-maker, photographer, and painter who was also one of de Kooning's earliest friends in New York.    There are also some films financed by the depression-era WPA. Among them, Elia Kazan makes an appearance in a rather odd socialist movie about the poor of New York. There are some pictures sponsored by Labor Unions that offer 'alternative newsreels' that expose illegal business thuggery and a reactionary murder cult known as The Black Legion. Entertainment figures that are later blacklisted for their political beliefs and actions also make an appearance here - most notably, Paul Robeson, an actor often forgotten because of this. Robeson can be seen narrating a film on organized labor in this collection.    The disc entitled "The Beginnings of Ciné-Dance" has quite a bit of variety, but is still clearly delimited, opening with Annabelle Moore's "Butterfly Dance" and offering near its end David Bradley's Peer Gynt of 1941, starring a teenage Charlton Heston.    Some of the best material on the set is from Hollywood, probably due to the larger budgets involved. Included in this category would be some of the original montages of Slavko Vorkapich that were done for some MGM movies. This includes a bit of film in which the entire Napoleanic war appears to play out in just two minutes. Also included is Vorkapich's opening montage to "Crime Without Passion" in which three banshees fly about and terrorize the streets of Manhattan. The Ernst Lubitsch "touch" also apparently includes montages, and there is an excerpt from 1926's "So This is Paris" that shows a flapper dance in montage. It does a good job of conveying the wildness of the place at that time, which is part of the central theme of the movie. Also included are Busby Berkeley's numbers "Lullaby of Broadway" and "By a Waterfall", which are light compared to the other pieces with their more hidden deeper meanings.     I could go on forever describing the contents of this DVD set, but these were the pieces that stood out the most to me, anyway. The label of "Avant Garde" does not really fit this collection as we know the meaning of the term today. After all, there is work here by the Edison Company, D.W. Griffith, and a host of other people who have secure places in mainstream motion picture history. The "Avant Garde" label is more of an indication that film as an artform during the time period covered was inherently avant-garde just because it was new. The quality of the video is quite good considering the probable shape of the originals. I personally love this set and think it is well worth the price
Output: POS