Avant-garde DVD

Ornery and protean, Tom Verlaine is the lost guitar god of the punk revolution. While his pioneering band Television has been suitably reissued and rediscovered in recent years, his solo work in the '80s and '90s has been ignored. That's unlikely to change with the DVD release of "Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip: Music for Experimental Film," but it should. How many aging rockers are creating scores for avant-garde movies from the 1920s?

Verlaine doesn't appear onscreen, but he and longtime guitarist-sideman Rip create aural soundscapes (recorded at European live dates) that render these seven groundbreaking works of Jazz Age surrealism eerily timeless. The movies themselves are well known to scholars: "The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," both from 1928; shorts by Dada proponents Man Ray and Hans Richter; Fernand Leger's mesmerizing 1924 "Ballet Mecanique." They're from an era when post-World War I art-punks colonized the cinema as a matter of principle; the new scores rescue the films from the past and allow them to breathe again.

Generally Verlaine and Rip give as good as they get. The duo can muster only vague atmospherics for the set's one dud, the limply poetic "Brumes D'Automne," but the Man Ray films, especially 1926's "Emak-Bakia," bring out the fireworks: apocalyptic surf-guitar runs that coast the tidal wave of rushing images, devilish strums, fretboard scrapes, and swirling ascensions to sonic heaven. It's as though artist and musicians were meeting across the decades for fresh bursts of mischief. (Kino, $19.95)