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In 1928 James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber produced a short 'amateur' film in Watson's father's stable in Rochester, New York. To visualize Edgar Allen Poe's famous tale, The Fall of the House of Usher, they created a dazzling array of superimpositions and distorted images through mirrors, prisms and lenses. Watson stated at the time that neither he nor Webber had read the Poe story in ten or fifteen years, giving them the freedom to reimagine it rather than slavishly illustrate the work.1 Soon to become the most widely seen American avant-garde film of the era, The Fall of the House of Usher was hailed by the Chairman of the National Board of Reviewas themost outstanding contribution to the motion picture as an art form since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).2 The film was screened both theatrically and non-theatrically hundreds of times all over the United States. The Amateur Cinema League (ACL) bought a 16mm reduction print for its lending library.3 While beginning pre-production in the spring of 1930 on Lot in Sodom (1934), their next major avant-garde work, Watson and Webber also initiated at least three other projects: a narrative short with dialogue, a local newsreel for Rochester, and an 'industrial' for the Bausch & Lomb Company, The Eyes of Science (1931). The last-named film would have almost asmuch of an impacton loversofcinema as their first, remaining in constant distribution for over a decade. As one writer commented retrospectively: 'Dr. Watson's name, as the producer of The Fall of The House ofUsher and of The Eyes of Science, is outstanding in the entire world of amateur films'.4
One may ask, why discuss industrial film within the context of the history of avant-garde cinema? Formalist criticism has, of course, consistently defined film art and aesthetics in opposition to film genres that also serve utilitarian purposes. This splitting of formfrom content excludes not only industrials and other non-fiction forms from serious discussion, but also constructs false dichotomies. If we return to the avant-garde discourses of the 1920s and 1930s, it becomes abundantly clear that contemporaries of Watson and Webber eschewed distinctions between l'art pour l'art and informational/documentary forms. For example, two short films produced by Hans Richter, which long ago entered the avant-garde film canon,...