Geodesic Disques has announced the Blu-ray release of
Prismatic Music: The Super 8 Films of Joseph Bernard. The 40-film collection includes a 24-page booklet with essays, film notes, historic documentation and images in color. The set itself is part of a series called
Beneath Detroit, a project by Jeffery Plansker, celebrating under-recognized area artists. The release is already available for purchase.
Shot in Detroit and Provincetown from 1975 to 85, the
Prismatic Music films have had no prior release, finally existing as a 2K scanned Blu-Ray edition clocking in at six hours. Bernard, a student of Stan Brakhage, worked and taught film in Detroit before returning to painting in 1986.
Prismatic Music breathes new life into these small gauge, highly hand-crafted entities. The enclosed booklet's essays are written by L.A. and NYC filmmakers, a director, a cinematographer and an architect. They provide valuable insight and access to the work. The menu treatment and overall packaging design has been fastidiously fine-tuned.
These films date back from the mid 1970's to mid 80's and all of them are purely visual and intentionally silent. There've been occasional screenings of selected titles, most recently at the 2014 52nd Ann Arbor Film Festival. Over 100 works were originally produced and although prints were made in both S-8 & 16mm, none were either in distribution or had been sold until now.,