Unseen Cinema

Tonight's prime-time lineup on TCM, starting at 8:00 PM as always, is two compilations of shorts, together titled Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941. I have a feeling this one aired quite a few years ago, since the full set of movies together premiered back at the beginning of the century. Also, a box set of the shorts was released a few years after that, in 2005. I wouldn't be surprised if that's when I saw some of these on TCM. Unfortunately, I've only got the TCM schedules going back to 2007, and since I switched to a Linux box, searching based on words within text or word-processor documents isn't working so well.

Anyhow, that box set has seven discs, and that's a lot more than they can show in only one night. So the selection has been culled down to about four hours. The article on tonight's programs explicitly mentions Charlton Heston in a version of Peer Gynt, although this only shows one dance scene if memory serves. The same footage shows up in the Private Screenings interview Robert Osborne did with Heston way back when. I think this is the collection where I may have seen Mechanical Principles, although I'm not certain. The article doesn't mention Mechanical Principles.