User Reviews

"Aleph" was director Wallace Berman's only film, an eight minute silent short offered as a hand painted color collage on black and white film stock. Berman was a Beat Generation artist who published works by William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The film under consideration was not given a title by Berman himself, it came by way of Berman's son who named it after the first letter of the Hebrew Alphabet which pops up a couple of times in the presentation. The picture is quite odd, with repeated images of some celebrities mixed in among what are mostly hallucinogenic type effects. If one concentrates, you can make out the faces of Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and a couple of the Rolling Stones, notably Jagger and Watts. Given that analysis it's not unusual that a marijuana plant shows up from time to time. I derived my summary line from an image in the short that appears to be a sky diver floating endlessly, hence my idea of a free fall into abstraction. Like many of the offerings in the American Film Treasures/Avant Garde Collection, I find it virtually impossible to offer a recommendation on any of these experimental films. The best I can do is to say that I watched them so you don't have to.