| Summary: | INVERTED NARRATIVES is part of the retrospective UNSEEN CINEMA that explores long-forgotten American experimental cinema. The second most well known collaborative experimental art film production helmed by the avant-gardist duo J.S. Watson, Jr. and Melville Webber produces an exemplary work of experimental cinema. Artfully illustrating "Genesis 19:8", the filmmakers over-sex the screen with lusciously lit bodies and dynamic camera-printer effects. Approaching visual music, the hybrid of sound and image concludes with the fiery demise of Sodom. The biblical illusions are so well crafted that the explicit scenes avoided censor and continue to resonate a meaningful poetry for modern audiences. --BRUCE POSNER James Sibley [J.S.] Watson, Jr. was regarded as a Renaissance man in each of his chosen fields: medical doctor and researcher, man of letters, preservationist, philanthropist, and filmmaker. After graduating medical school, Watson bought and published "The Dial" between 1920-29, a literary journal founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1840. By the mid-1920s, he became fascinated with motion pictures and produced a striking series of films, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1927), "Tomatos Another Day" (1930), and "The Eyes of Science" (1931) among others. --JAN-CHRISTOPHER HORAK / BRUCE POSNER. Melville Webber pursued parallel careers in art history, archeology, poetry, art, and motion pictures. He is primarily known for collaborating on films with Watson, but he also assisted Mary Ellen Bute with "Rhythm in Light" (1934). Soon after, his fortunes shifted, and he suffered a nervous breakdown from which he never fully recovered. --BRUCE POSNER.
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