Those of us who put in full-time hours (and often more) in the repertory cinema game are sometimes apt to lose sight of just how limited our ‘specialty aud’ looks these days. Old movies, once a staple of theater bills, are now relegated to a handful of screens. When was the last time a studio even attempted a major re-issue push, 3-D retrofits of The Lion King and The Phantom Menace excluded? In 1998, Paramount released a 20th Anniversary edition of Grease to over 2,000 screens. In 2010, the same studio bowed a re-tooled Sing-a-long version (much superior, incidentally, and rather a brazen act of corporate graffiti aimed squarely at one of the company’s blandest evergreens) in a dozen theaters and wound up grossing barely two percent of the ’98 take.

The dedicated repertory house is practically invisible to the industry and the general public. I think it’s fair to say that the repertory business received its widest airing ever in 2005 when Rush Limbaugh incredulously informed his substantial dittohead radio audience of an incident first reported by the Washington Times: a recent screening of Don Siegel’s 1964 version of The Killers at UCLA Film & Television Archive had roused the “prestigious crowd of actors, actresses, writers, reviewers, scholars, researchers and film preservationists” (i.e., a leftist cabal!) to cheers when gangster heavy Ronald Reagan was shot and killed on-screen. The same crowd also booed Reagan’s name in the opening credits, though a band of Reagan supporters provided some counterrevolutionary applause. Would that every Don Siegel retrospective attract this level of media attention.

In a more sympathetic context, last week’s Atlantic devoted a column to the plight of repertory theaters in the digital age. This topic has received only cursory treatment thus far. Many articles have focused on the digital conversion’s effects on ‘mom and pop’ theaters—independent operations that often show a narrow selection of blockbuster films otherwise available in five or six local multiplexes. The industry-wide switch from 35mm to DCP (Digital Cinema Package) exhibition is expected to be completed in the next two years, with theaters not sufficiently capitalized to finance the transition effectively forced to close up shop. These exhibitors are clinging to 35mm because it allows them to use existing projection equipment with minimal and rather predictable maintenance costs. It’s an incidental objective.

Showing films in 35mm is a mission on a different level of magnitude for repertory venues. The programmers and projectionists and theater managers who work at these venues often believe that viewing a film in its original medium is intrinsically bound up with any claim to appreciating or understanding that film. Usually these arguments have to do with a nebulous sort of authenticity—the “film look” that partisans find lacking in “cold” digital presentations. We seem no closer to resolving this debate but not for lack of vocabulary: we have countless metrics of comparison (colorspace, pixels counts, contrast ratios, foot lamberts, etc.) that have, so far, done little more than convince people of the positions they hold already.

Put all this aside for a moment and instead consider 35mm and what it means for programming. Most people (including me some years ago) tend to think that putting together a repertory calendar simply involves a programmer picking a selection of her favorite films. Every night is either a masterpiece or a personal favorite and the thing that winds up on screen is a more or less uncompromised and uncomplicated expression of somebody’s taste. If you can name a film, you can pick up the phone and arrange a playdate.

Though this scenario has a tinge of narcissistic appeal, the reality of the situation is actually far more compelling. Simply stated, the entire history of cinema is not available for public viewing in any given format. Some films are irrevocably lost altogether, victims of neglect or outright destruction. Other films still circulate on 35mm, whether it be in tattered original copies, newly restored ones, or something in between. Many of these 35mm titles are not of sufficient commercial interest to justify the production, marketing, and inventory costs associated with conventional DVD and Blu-ray releases. (Increasingly, niche-driven manufactured-on-demand discs like the Warner Archive imprint have supplanted retail releases of library titles, but these receive a fraction of the public attention that brick-and-mortar discs once did.) Still others are near-impossible to obtain in 35mm prints these days, even though decent Blu-rays (often mastered from extant 35mm pre-print material) are widely available.

The reasons for this inconsistency of availability are often prosaic. Perhaps a foreign film was licensed for American distribution for seven years and the contract dictated the destruction of all stateside 35mm prints at the end of the term should the rights not be renewed. A print reaches the end of its natural life, or one particularly negligent venue prematurely but irrevocably damages the last circulating print of a given title. Perhaps a print sat in a warehouse untouched for decades because a systematic evaluation of its chain of ownership and value looked more daunting than familiar inertia. A studio might restore a film in its library and commission a new print to show off its investment or merely to evaluate the quality of the new duplicate negative. (After all, how can you know whether you’ve made a good negative without at least making a positive test?) Conversely, a studio may own the copyright to a film but not hold any physical assets, which have been conserved in the vaults of a non-profit film archive. An archive may possess a copy of a film, but not realize the uniqueness of the title or not even be aware they possess it due to a run-of-the-mill cataloging error.  When all else fails, there’s probably a private collector out there who has a print (but don’t ask him where or how he got it!).

In short, this is a minefield. Not for nothing do I often declare one of the most important parts of programming to simply “know where the bodies are buried.” Sometimes even a glance at the layers and layers of old labels on a single film canister reveals decades of varied use.

At first blush, this chaos would seem a compelling argument for the digital exhibition of repertory titles. The venue books a title and that’s that—no potential to receive a ruined print, no need to overnight the print to another venue because of a tight turnaround, no conflict when two venues want the same print on the same date. Some studios, notably Sony, are demonstrating an admirable effort to make key repertory titles available in DCP (as well as 35mm). Others are, as the Atlantic reported, simply instructing programmers to go out and buy a DVD at the supermarket like any other schmoe.

And therein lies the problem. The digital future always looks brighter than what we have now. (And why shouldn’t it? It’s the future, after all.) We can complain about a given title being unavailable in 35mm—but the prospect of a studio spending a sizable amount preparing a 2K or 4K master for that same movie isn’t encouraging either.  Inevitably, titles will slip through the cracks and the promise of a slightly scratched 35mm print will look mighty enticing.

But there’s also a larger issue here about what repertory programming is. A world where our film history is found on a server or the cloud or the palm of your hand resembles nothing less than the generic rock radio pre-programmed from a very narrow Clear Channel playlist.

Not everything is readily available in 35mm, and that’s a large part of the art of programming. Many programmers book titles they don’t necessarily like because a new 35mm print is making the rounds and the community-sustaining value of supporting the brave few striking new 35mm prints outweighs any personal misgivings. (Next season, we have the good fortune to be presenting a new 35mm print of a film we do like quite a bit from our friends at Criterion Pictures USA: Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo.) At other times, you book a 35mm print because it will only be available for a very brief window of time before, say, returning to France for the foreseeable future. It’s about operating under constraints, but constraints that enrich and challenge and ultimately desecrate our individual biases.

To program a great calendar in 2012 would be different from programming a great one in 2002 or 1982—the archaeological aims shift and the calendar itself becomes a document of what was within reach and worth recognizing and resurrecting at a given moment. Reading through old distribution catalogues, like Films Inc.’s Rediscovering the American Cinema or any Brandon Films directory from the 1950s, disrupts easy assumptions about the supposedly provincial tastes of previous generations; many unadorned (and infrequently booked) titles from 16mm catalogues past would look like inspired coups of programming today. (Last season’s Valkoinen peura is a perfect example—this beachhead for a never-realized Finnish art house wave was hiding in plain sight.)

Let’s examine this season’s calendar and you might get a better idea of what we’re talking about. (I should also mention here that programming duties for NWCFS are shared between Julian and I, and the final line-up reflects a common sensibility and approach.) A Night to Remember is on the calendar as a tie-in with the Titanic centennial. It’s a British film produced by the Rank Organisation. Home video rights in the US are held by the Criterion Collection, but its parent company, Janus Films, doesn’t have theatrical rights. MGM, now managed by Park Circus, has a few prints and we were frankly shocked they weren’t all booked at the time that Julian made our request. Maybe the somewhat convoluted chain outlined above kept folks away.

Programmers crib off each other, too. (It’s not exactly cribbing, though; the economics of this game wouldn’t work very well if people refused to book a print just because someone else had already shown it.) Back Street is a foundational melodrama and an essential part of Universal’s history, though we can’t remember the last time it screened publicly in Chicago. I saw it in a private classroom screening that I crashed in 2006 and have been waiting for a chance to show it ever since. So’s Your Old Man was recently added to the National Film Registry, but it’s not common. I first saw it at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in 2009. I caught the Library of Congress’s 35mm print of Give Us This Day when it screened as part of the Rochester Labor Council’s annual series at the Dryden Theatre the year before. All of these were treasures that we wanted to share with a wider audience. And sometimes there are films we book because we want to see them, too, like …one third of a nation…; we were tipped off to the Library of Congress’s preservation when it showed up on a Turner Classic Movies schedule last year.

It also comes down to studios sometimes. Universal does truly outstanding work in preserving and circulating both their own library and the 1929-1949 Paramount titles. We make a point of supporting their efforts by booking their titles. This season we have 35mm prints of old chestnuts like Sullivan’s Travels, but also rarer items like Angel and Back Street from Universal.

Some other slots are filled more colorfully. We put Liebelei on the calendar after a collector friend in California bragged about scoring a 35mm print. Another collector we know has wanted to publicly screen his original 35mm IB Technicolor dye transfer print of The Ten Commandments for a goodly long time; we were taken with the suggestion, especially because the prints of Commandments that circulate through conventional channels these days are improperly cropped. In more ways than one, the 1956 theatrical experience of Commandments is largely lost to us, so this would make for a truly unique screening. Another print wound up on the calendar only after Becca and Julian fished it out of a dumpster. (We can’t say which one out of respect to the dumpster.)

We had never heard of Turn the Key Softly before a listing for a vintage 35mm print appeared on eBay. It turned out to be as good as we’d hoped it would be and it provided a note of extreme rarity and non-American origin to the calendar. These days we have a few loose rules about our calendars: there has to be at least one western, one musical, a foreign film, an independent production, a few titles most definitely not available anywhere else. The calendar practically programs itself. But the rule about the western is the most important.

The long-term stability and support for this model of programming is precarious. Next month New York’s Film Forum, the most influential rep house in America, will be running a week-long sidebar called ‘This is DCP,’ which argues in its own non-committal way for the integrity of digital presentations of classic films. “But is watching a DCP the same experience as watching a film print?” asks Film Forum. “The jury is still out, so for this one-week series, we’ve chosen the crème de la crème of classics on DCP …. You be the judge.” (If repertory goes digital, it will your prerogative, not Film Forum’s.) Of course, most repertory houses and their audiences won’t have that luxury, as the verdict is, for the most part, economically determined. Those who can afford DCP will likely come around to its virtues and validity quickly enough. Very few venues and screening series are specifically, incontrovertibly dedicated to presenting film-on-film. Our friends at the aptly-named Film on Film Foundation in Berkeley are one notable exception. We aren’t much interested in showing anything but film, either—it wouldn’t be nearly as fun.

This post is part of an ongoing series about the consequences of the current wholesale conversion of cinema exhibition from film projection to digital presentation. Read our earlier entries here, here, and here.

Spend the night with Sherlock Holmes
Hold me tight like Sherlock Holmes
Just pretend I’m Sherlock Holmes …

I can dance like Sherlock Holmes
I can sing like Sherlock Holmes
But I can’t be Sherlock Holmes.

It’s no fresh insight to declare the 1960s the most schizophrenic and unsatisfying decade in Hollywood history. It’s certainly the decade where any responsible account of American cinema cannot focus wholly, or even mostly, on Hollywood product. If a historian wants to spend all his time studying Doctor Doolittle and The Sound of Music while ignoring or ghettoizing the avant-garde work of Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Barbara Rubin, Bruce Baillie, Bruce Conner, Shirley Clarke, Pat O’Neill, Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, and a host of others, I suppose that’s his right.

Still, the studio features of that era do compel a certain fascination, more as half-aware artifacts than as artistic wholes. Hollywood could feel its own irrelevance acutely. The time-shifting aesthetic of Alain Resnais found its way into American art efforts like Petulia and, on the other end of the production scale, cheap thrillers like Mister Buddwing. Even with increasing freedom to show skin and revel in violence, a film like The Collector feels wholly uncomfortable with carrying its sexual content to its unambiguous conclusion. The anger of Seconds is ravishing, but incoherent—not just in its targets, but in its very subject.

To appreciate films from this period, it’s best to disabuse yourself of any straightforward relation between intent, effect, and achievement. Surely the experience of something like Wild in the Streets is more complicated than the film’s ultimate conclusion that hippies are just disheveled brown shirts. (And even if they are brown shirts with old-age concentration camps in the offing, Wild in the Streets still notably presents this fascist posse’s multi-ethnic, pansexual make-up as something basically unremarkable.)

It’s a whole different game, though, with something like Paint Your Wagon, one of the saddest spectacles of the sixties. Adapted from a Lerner and Loewe musical nearly twenty years old by 1969, this bawdy show helmed by Joshua Logan is an epic production that cannot recognize the crudity of its material. The craftwork is tops throughout, as if no expense could be spared when presenting such exciting sequences as the miners’ daring nighttime raid on the prostitutes from the next town over. A large part of the film is devoted to celebrating the least progressive version of plural marriage imaginable. It still plays like a family-friendly road show special, as if Paramount executives had genuinely lost sight of who their audience was and just threw up their hands. This is a terminal work that leaves you disgusted and anxious to expunge the whole Lerner and Loewe repertoire from the history of American musical theater.

You might go into Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes expecting something similar. The trailer and the poster prepared audience for something shocking and perverted, as if the secret of Sherlock Holmes’s love life was something you had to see at the drive-in before hearing your mother rehash it ad nauseum from the pages of the Enquirer. This story was going to blow the top off a Holmes racket that most Americans were scarcely invested in. At least the revisionist westerns like The Wild Bunch and Little Big Man assumed that there was something intrinsically and lastingly relevant about who controlled frontier mythos. Since when did Sherlock Holmes (fictional, after all) have a private life to begin with? To the youth market of 1970, you may as well have proposed an éxposé of the venereal secrets of Beetle Bailey to similar effect.

Out of touch? The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was also conceived as a lavish road show, though when it finally made it to theaters in 1970 after a lengthy shoot, the box-office failure of costly hard-ticket shows like Paint Your Wagon and Star! had changed the equation. It would be trimmed from an episodic, nearly four-hour rough cut to a more conventional two hours and five minutes. The excised material—two additional stories, plus an extended prologue and late-picture flashback—has never been recovered in full, though unsatisfying recreations have surfaced on Laserdisc and DVD.

Wilder later described the release version as an “absolute disaster,” “murdered” by his producers and editor in his absence. (Important to note: Wilder had final cut approval on Private Life and left the job to these associates while he began another picture, with further revisions apparently ruled out by time constraints.) But the finished film is no butcher job and editor Ernest Walter bridges the cuts with professional elegance. (Walter, incidentally, also wrote an outstanding manual, The Technique of the Film Cutting Room, and Private Life is, among other things, a master class on his craft.) But unlike something like Greed, Private Life is not a film we watch with constant awareness of what might have been. It works moment to moment and retains a considerable share of its poetry.

Defining what makes The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes special is difficult at first because it feels like an aberration in Wilder’s career. We’re used to satires of American vulgarity through a jaundiced émigré’s eyes, uniquely impervious to the compensating excuses and pieties. When Wilder ventures abroad, it’s usually to poke fun at the stubbornness of the Germans, not the perfidy of the English. But his devotion to this material is total and rare.

Despite the marketing, Private Life underplays its salacious material. Holmes’s dope predilection is treated matter-of-factly and largely off-screen, though the moment when he reaches for a vial in the final scene registers as a lingering tragedy. The sexual aspect is muted, but honest. Homosexuality had long been a central, but submerged, topic in Wilder’s work. In Some Like It Hot, it’s treated as a perfectly silly subject for a farce. (“Why would a man want to marry a man?” “Security!”) One gets the impression that the same juvenile impulse arose here—a gang of smart writers sitting around a lunch counter throwing out wise acres. “Say, what do you think Holmes and Watson were doing in that apartment of theirs? Those smoking robes. What a bunch of fairies, right?”

And yet the finished film is sensitive, if not quite enlightened. Ladies’ man Watson, afraid of a rumor of his alleged gayness spreading to St. Petersburg, is nevertheless palpably jealous upon seeing the attention Holmes lavishes on the mysterious Belgian woman dropped at their door. More to the point, Holmes is entirely at ease with whatever identity and orientation anyone assigns him. He enjoys reminding Watson of his own insecurity, teasing him about it, painting that sexuality rigidity as a weakness. None of this is presented as a with-it anachronism either: Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond offer a plausible account of what cocaine and homosexuality could have meant in London in 1887 and how these characters would have dealt with them.

Generally, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is notable for its economy. Alexander Trauner’s sets are elaborate, but the emotional effects emerge through very plain details. The largely unconsummated love affair between Holmes and Gabrielle Valladon is treated in a few gestures, and ultimately the sound of a flapping parasol achieves a resonance that lesser writers would have underlined with pages of dialogue. The emotional weight of the finale rests on a carefully deployed surname.

If Private Life wasn’t particularly attuned to the expectations of 1970 audiences, this had little to do with Wilder and Diamond being out-of-touch. All the characters in the film live in terror of what the twentieth century holds, with its intimations of dirigibles and submersibles and a permanent era of thoroughly boring crimes. Universal may have sicced Basil Rathbone’s Holmes on the Nazis, but Robert Stephens’s rendition betrays no interest in fighting industrial-scale crime; his methods and milieu are thoroughly artisanal, deliberately old-fashioned in any year. Significantly, this Holmes possesses awareness of his own legend and the degree to which the Watson-mediated Holmes presented in the Strand is a media fabrication. The idea that Holmes claims his own dream life, his own unknowable desires, is a major part of the movie’s unique achievement. He wants to be Sherlock Holmes, too.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes in a 35mm print from Park Circus at the Portage on February 8 as part of its Classic Film Series. Special thanks to Chris Chouinard. Please see our current calendar for additional information.

This week we’ll be screening So’s Your Old Man, one of the finest examples of the elegant craft that characterizes Paramount Pictures’ silent output. Along with Universal Studios, they’re celebrating their one-hundredth anniversary this year. These days that means reissuing library chestnuts on spiffy new Blu-ray editions, but this level of attention to corporate heritage is a rather recent development.

Archivists like to talk about ‘the bad old days,’ when films were disposable, purely commercial propositions. Destruction of film history was business as usual. It was old nitrate prints, after all, that provided the pyrotechnics when Selznick burned Atlanta all over again for Gone with the Wind. The only way to guarantee the survival of a film was to spirit it away to the Museum of Modern Art. Left to their own devices, old movies would probably wind up as targets for jeers on early TV programs like Fractured Flickers.

And yet the truth is a tad more complex. All the studios (and, to be fair, the archives as well) have mixed records of conservation and preservation, a fact that makes present-day restorations all the more difficult. The case of Paramount is illustrative. Their 1929-1949 library (with a handful of exceptions) had been sold to MCA, though the prints themselves stayed on the studio lot. Their silent library sat there too—they had the right to exploit those films anew, but the market for silent films was limited. The silent material was eventually donated to the Library of Congress through a deal brokered by a young American Film Institute employee named David Shepard.

Shepard should be a familiar name to any film student. If you’ve seen a silent movie on DVD with a Film Preservation Associates credit—whether it was issued through Image, Kino, or now Flicker Alley—then you’re acquainted with Shepard’s work. The breadth of projects he’s supervised—from Griffith and Gance to Keaton and Chaplin, but with nods to unjustly neglected films like Boris Barnet’s Outskirts, Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Parson’s Wife, George Loane Tucker’s Traffic in Souls, Maurice Tourneur’s The Wishing Ring, and Raoul Walsh’s Regeneration—is immense.  The massive box sets—Unseen Cinema, Chaplin at Keystone, Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema—speak for themselves.

I recently spoke with David about the Paramount silents, the trajectory of film preservation practices, and his contribution to Martin Scorsese’s Hugo.

• • •

KW: What I wanted to start out with, at least, is So’s Your Old Man. Not that film particularly, but just your involvement with Paramount and all of those films…

DS: The Paramount gift was negotiated in 1968 when I was working for the American Film Institute. Paramount was represented by an attorney named Walter Josiah, a very nice man. They had a lot of prints at the studio—file prints. And they had a smaller number of original negatives—about three dozen—stored at Fort Lee.  They were happy to turn them all over to the Library of Congress.

Those two groups, the file prints from the studio and the negatives in New Jersey, were the heart of the Paramount collection. They also owned a small studio on Occidental Blvd. in Los Angeles that had been Bosworth and Paralta back in the teens. There was a vault of prints there. Most of those were incomplete. But physically like new and almost all films from 1915 through ’17. That collection came about because Robert Aldrich bought the studio and he wanted the films out.

Everything that Paramount turned over was in good shape because, unfortunately, the studio had a policy where if anything was wrong with even the leader or one reel of a film [i.e., nitrate decomposition], they would often junk the entire picture.

KW: Do you know how often they would be inspecting it?

DS: No, but the vaults were very good. They were on the studio lot. They were temperature-controlled. They were clean. And I would imagine that they went through everything at least once a year.

These studio prints were, for the most part, not much used. They weren’t work prints, but many of them were spliced shot-for-shot. There were some release prints, but I think they actually were mostly preview prints. After the editing was complete, and they were ready to try the film out in public, they would make a fresh print from each of the selected takes and conform it to the work print. So there would be nice, clean, new-looking prints for the previews. Those prints, for the most part, became the file prints.

KW: Makes sense. At the time they were turned over to the Library, were they in imminent danger of destruction? Was Paramount going to get rid of them had the Library not stepped in?

DS: They weren’t going to get rid of them, dump them all in the ocean, but they were junking reels. And as I said, usually when they junked the reel, they would junk the whole film. And so a fair number of films were lost just in the six months or so between the time they offered us the films and the time the documents were signed and the films were shipped.

KW: That’s staggering to think of.

DS: So it’s a good thing they were saved.

The Library set up its own laboratory—probably about 1971, and began to do the preservation work in-house. It was supervised by a man named Dick Armstrong, who was elderly and extremely conservative. For example, he did not believe in wet gate. They had an Oxbery optical printer and they did most of the copying that way. Because of the shrinkage in the original material, they could have done them step-register but, for some reason, he didn’t want to do that. The results were rather contrasty and included the dirt and digs and blemishes.

KW: At the time it was Library’s policy to do all the preservation in black and white, regardless of what the original was…

DS: That’s correct, because it was before Eastmancolor was dye-stable. With a color film, we occasionally made an Ektachrome reversal in 16mm. Those turned out not to be very stable either, but they were better than Eastmancolor. So, sometimes the color record would be preserved that way, but for the most part they didn’t go back and copy color until I had long left the AFI. Of course, as you know, it’s possible to create fairly convincing-looking tinted and toned prints from black and white negatives [using the color injection method, known as the Desmet Process in Europe].

KW: After they were turned over and preserved, did you get to see a fair amount of the collection?

David Shepard and Kyle Westphal, Castro Theatre Mezzanine, 2010. Courtesy of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

DS: For some time after I stopped working in the AFI archive, I was managing the AFI theater. It was first at the National Gallery of Art auditorium, then we moved to a commercial theater in L’Enfant Plaza. Then finally AFI built its own little cinema in the Kennedy Center that opened just about a month or six weeks before I left. But I saw a lot of the collection. I had access to run anything I wanted to on a flatbed. I looked at a lot of the nitrates as we got them unpacked and organized.

Whenever we wanted to use one of the Paramount pictures for anything—we ran, for example, some of them at the 1969 New York Film Festival—we would ask Mr. Josiah and he always was very nice about it.

KW: Are there any particular unheralded Paramount silents that you’d like to draw attention to?

DS: Well, most of the ones I thought were good forty years ago have surfaced. They’ve been run here and there. One I thought was a big discovery was The Canadian, which was run last year at Pordenone; it was run at Cinecon just before that where the Pordenone people saw it. It’s a film very similar to The Wind. Directed by William Beaudine, which is not a name you would usually go to with the idea that you would find a high quality film.

KW: Or a distinctive one, really.

DS: Yes, but it’s a very fine film. There was the original print of The Wedding March with the color sequence, not that it was unknown, but no one had really seen it. I remember the analogy I used at the time. Like Borneo: everybody knows about it, nobody goes there. And so there was The Vanishing American, a real discovery. There was another Fields—Running Wild. And there was a third one—It’s the Old Army Game. Until then, no one thought of Fields as a silent performer, but they’re good films. Some very interesting things from the teens. The Cheat, which, of course, is also at Eastman House. And The Man on the Box. The Virginian. I’m very fond of films from the early teens.

KW: Those were the ones that were in the studio that Aldrich bought?

DS: They were in the studio. The negatives were generally of later films from about 1924 on.  There were also silent versions or mute versions of early talkies. There was a silent version of Monte Carlo. There were some foreign negatives. For example, foreign versions of some Harold Lloyd films, which Paramount had distributed but didn’t own. When the negatives came back, they vaulted them, they didn’t send them back to Mr. Lloyd.

KW: Generally what was the incentive for a studio like Paramount to keep these at the time, if they didn’t own them or weren’t interested in exploiting them?

DS: Well, they weren’t interested in allocating labor to go through them and throw them away. It’s simple. How much do you have around your place that would be gone if you felt like taking a day to clean it out? It’s easier to just let it sit.

KW: That was the case with most of the studios at that time, except MGM.

DS: MGM, of course, began to do preservation back about 1967 when they had excess laboratory capacity and they had a lot of nitrate films that hadn’t been copied. So MGM filled up its excess laboratory capacity, first with the sound features and then the silent features, of which there were many. Then the short subjects. One has to really admire MGM for that, because that’s when they were selling the ruby slippers to keep the doors open. I think that Roger Mayer, who was head of the lab, initiated that. Their work was not always the finest, but it was certainly good. They didn’t junk the nitrate. The head of the library at that time at MGM was a curmudgeonly man by the name of Morty Feinstein. But he managed to get along with Jim Card, who was equally curmudgeonly, and that’s how all that stuff came to Eastman House. Eastman agreed to take it so that MGM wouldn’t junk it.

KW: And was the desire to junk it out of fire concerns or was it just taking up space?

DS: Well, they did have a fire. A few years before, MGM lost two vaults. That’s when London After Midnight disappeared. They have gaps, they weren’t able to save everything. That’s when they became very aware that they had vaults, which were not air-conditioned, which went back to the twenties and teens when the studio was built. They thought they should probably get the lot out of there. And, as you know, Eastman House had a fire, too.

KW: Well, most every major archive had some fire or disaster …

DS: I don’t think the Library of Congress has, or UCLA, or the BFI.

KW: Of course there’s the famous Fox fire in ’37.

DS: Have you ever seen the footage of that?

KW: No, where is it available?

DS: Youtube. Some guy who lived in the neighborhood went out with a 16mm camera and some Kodachrome film and photographed those vaults burning. It’s quite jaw-dropping.

KW: It’s funny, of course, because Fox had really, at that time, taken the lead on the whole idea of having state-of-the-art vaults.

DS: Those vaults were almost new. But what they did was put the material for each film together, which was particularly bone-headed. In case of disaster, they would lose all of it. What’s left of the pre-1934 Fox is basically what they had in file prints in the studio, or, in some cases, in exchanges.

KW: Moving from the Paramount of the past to the Paramount of the present, when I went and saw Hugo, I stayed through the credits and saw Film Preservation Associates cited for a good number of the clips in that. Is there anything you can say about that experience?

DS: It was very simple. We were asked for them. I’ve known Marty Scorsese for a long time and I guess he sent his post-production team to me. Of course they were particularly looking for the Méliès films and we have all those out of Lobster in Paris. Film Preservation Associates and Lobster Films are really one company. We did the Méliès DVD set, which you’ve seen, probably, right?

KW: I have a copy.

DS: That’s nice. Thank you. I got about 93 or 94 of the films here and mastered those all in HD; all those tapes went to Paris. So all those films were handled from Paris. The ones that they wanted from me are for the scene where they look through a film history book and run across a reference to a film and it leaps into life for a second or two. I had those 35mm negatives stored at the Academy Film Archive and they told me what pieces and we sent those reels over to Technicolor and Tom Burton, who did all the scanning and grading on A Trip to the Moon. Technicolor scanned and graded those, they came back to the Archive, we got some money, and that was that.

KW: But you never would have thought when you were doing the HD scans of all the Méliès films that they would wind up in Digital 3D in theaters across the country, right?

DS: They didn’t turn many of the Méliès films into 3D, but yes, it’s great. Our Méliès DVD set is selling like hamburgers and people are rediscovering these films. Hugo, I think, by the way, is an absolutely beautiful film. I saw it twice in 3D and they sent me a DVD of it, so I have it here at home, too. I think that and The Artist have created more awareness of silent cinema than anything that’s come along in decades.

KW: Have you seen that manifest in ways other than they you’ve had to do another pressing on the Méliès set?

DS: There’s been a lot of press. Do you come to Cinefest every year?

KW: For the last three, yes.

DS: You look at the average age of that audience and the interest in silent films is going to die out pretty soon but for a few freaks like yourself unless something comes along to generate a new enthusiasm. Our DVDs have done that to some extent. I have a fairly wide phone correspondence with high school kids and younger college kids, who discover these films by getting DVDs from the library or I guess sometimes they buy them. They don’t have friends they can make sit and watch them. Or talk about them with. But I’m not hard to find, so they call me. There are people like this all over the country. And I think that Hugo and The Artist are probably going to fertilize a whole lot more minds about the power of silent films.

KW: And the amazing thing about Hugo to me isn’t so much that it’s about silent film, but that it’s actually about silent film preservation.

DS: In part at least, it’s about the magic of movies and the more you know about film, the richer it is. It has all these quotations from the movies we grew up with. You know, they play a song and you recognize it as the song that’s in Grand Illusion; there’s an acknowledgement in the screen credits to Jean Renoir. There’s a lot of stuff quoted from the René Clair Paris comedies. Scorsese really knows film history. We used to sit around a lot and talk about film history when we both lived in Southern California. He’s now been long in New York and I’ve long been in the North Woods. But he reads the reviews. He knows how deeply it touched people. Unfortunately, it’s also been a flop from a commercial point of view. You know, that means it’ll probably be a long time before someone gets to make another multi-million dollar paean to film history.

KW: I’ve recommended it to people and some of them love it. I’ve had people react in a very hostile, irrational way to it as well.

DS: If you look at the comments on the IMDB, they run that gamut. There was a story today I saw where some jerk in England is suing the theater because he went to go see The Artist and didn’t know it was a silent movie. I wouldn’t expect any of the current Republican candidates for president to like Hugo, but I think a lot of people will. As my simple but wise Aunt Irma used to say, there’s a cover for every pot.

I think Hugo’s going to go on a long time. The other thing that I think may make a real splash is this Blu-ray and DVD restoration of Wings, which Paramount is releasing. Obviously they didn’t do it for commercial purposes, they did it for publicity. But they recorded the original score with a fifty-piece orchestra up at Skywalker Sound and did a frame-by-frame digital cleanup of the picture. The reviews have started to come out and people love it. They say that the film is just absolutely great—which, of course, it is. It will be interesting to see whether the average age at Cinefest this year drops to about 70.

KW: We’re talking about things like Wings and of course that had a good deal of photochemical restoration from the Academy but most people are destined to see it in this Blu-ray.

DS: They didn’t use the Academy material. They did it all themselves.

KW: So a far cry from when they were just throwing away whole reels because the leader was starting to go?

DS: Well, that was forty years ago, but they obviously now have people who have some awareness of film. Probably a lot of the current administration went to film school and saw silent movies along the way. I wouldn’t say that it’s a boom. We haven’t seen sales grow to significantly more units with DVD than we used to get with Laserdisc and VHS. But at least we’re replacing the part of the audience that is dying out. We’re doing adventurous stuff. But I think it takes a certain amount of courage to do J’accuse and La roue. We’re working on Gribiche and La maison du mystère and Les nouveaux messieurs. We licensed a whole package of Albatros films from the Cinémathèque Française. And many of those films were never shown here in the United States, or at least were never revived after they were shown here only in cut versions in the 1920s. But I think there’s enough interest in silent cinema to sustain the release of them.

KW: I hope so.

DS: That’s a long way from just putting out The Birth of a Nation, Caligari, and Potemkin, which is where we were, say, twenty years ago.

• • •

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening So’s Your Old Man in a 35mm print from the Library of Congress at the Portage Theater on Wednesday, February 1 as part of our Classic Film Series. Please see our current calendar for more information. Special thanks to Rob Stone, Lynanne Schweighofer, Mike Mashon, and, of course, David Shepard.

Earlier this month we offered a review of the seismic shifts in exhibition that characterized the last year. This week we offer a personal assessment of the films themselves.

Moviegoing is most exasperating at the end of the year. The anointed awards contenders trickle out and carry with them a sense of obligation. I wind up seeing things not because I want to see them, exactly, but because I can’t bring myself to concede the conversation, however trumped-up and market-driven that conversation may be. Nevertheless, everyone has to draw the line somewhere. I can’t summon anything but apathy for The Iron Lady or Albert Nobbs. And if my understanding of cinema is impoverished by skipping Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, I can live with that, too. (I wouldn’t want any part in a cinema where Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was axiomatic.) Criticism, in general, would be better if we dropped the mantle of objectivity and laid out these prejudices up front.

VOLATILE OBJECTS
Expectations are pernicious things. The first time I saw The Tree of Life, I came in with sky-high expectations and left bewildered, actively irritated by its structure, its implicit claims to importance, its unexamined masculinity, its daffy spirituality. I couldn’t imagine sitting through it again (I wouldn’t want any part in a cinema where …), but I did just that the next week with a friend, who had more or less the same reaction I did the first time. But my own experience with it changed considerably: the jangled bits and pieces began to reveal larger structures, flash-forwards registered as such, the arbitrary became deliberate and deeply felt. And, more importantly, the major thing it describes—slowly outgrowing pre-digested notions of family and recognizing the profound injustice of an inherited order—emerged with painful clarity. That Malick records this acid disenchantment while simultaneously positing this very straight model of a mid-century Texas family as a plausible epicenter of the universe (or, more democratically, just as capable of unraveling its cosmic mysteries as anyone else) makes The Tree of Life a maddening, infinitely volatile object. (I’m afraid to see it a third time; in any case, I’ve come to prefer The Future, in which Miranda July deals with many similar issues on a more modest scale. It also describes a specific generational listlessness about the current recession with great acuteness.)

A different set of expectations is built into Certified Copy. As J. Hoberman has noted, Kiarostami’s latest functions exceedingly comfortably as a ‘certified copy’ of a certain brand of talky, travelogue-ready art house cinema. (Even the American one-sheet resembled a generic Miramax release, circa 2000. I even imagined copy for the newspaper ads: ‘SIXTH SMASH WEEK! CERTIFIED COPY IS A CERTIFIED HIT!’) It represents, as well, a stateless, festival-calibrated kind of international cinema—the diffusely-financed, co-co-production with precious few traces of anything politically or culturally specific. In other words, I approached Certified Copy very skeptically.

And yet, here is a masterpiece, bottomlessly self-aware with respect to all of the above but so sincerely invested in the inner lives and contradictions of Juliette Binoche and William Shimell that it’s affecting, even heartbreaking, moment-to-moment. It’s a puzzle film, to the extent that a certain narrative twist—casual at first, then drolly conceivable—midway through calls into question what we’ve seen before. But it’s a salutary kind of puzzle. Unlike Memento or Mulholland Dr., it doesn’t leave viewers debating the correctness of competing interpretations. The possibilities, resonances, rhymes, and congruities comfortably co-exist; each gesture and line takes on multiple valences and acknowledges the validity of multiple emotions. (In this respect, its pleasures are comparable to those of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.)

I wish the same could be said of A Dangerous Method, a very skillfully-made movie that delivered exactly what I expected and wanted—and, in doing so, proved disappointing. That is, the material suggests a path for itself: a perfectly naturalistic, non-metaphorical way for David Cronenberg to explore issues of sexuality, bodily revulsion, masochism, and identity dear to the director and his partisans. Speeches and exchanges that would, in any other context, sound academic and rather too on-the-nose here claim the mother of proximate causes: how else would people talk while formulating the tenets of psychoanalysis?

Indeed, the film is exceptional in this respect, not so much in what is said, but in what it means to talk. In A Dangerous Method, the epistolary exchanges are uncommonly riveting because they describe so precisely the feeling of something large and unruly dribbling out over weeks and months, groping towards something upsetting and, yes, dangerous. Spielrein, Jung, and Freud are hurtling towards something they are perhaps unprepared to understand and accept. (The stakes here are somewhat higher than, say, the equally procedural mystery at the heart of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.) And yet so many of the film’s oppositions—Jung vs. Freud, Gentile vs. Jew, Bourgeois vs. Volk, Mysticism vs. Science, pipe vs. cigar—feel pre-programmed and foreordained. The script makes exactly the points it wants to make. There’s no friction in the proceedings, no deviation from the thesis tolerated. For all that, the performances of Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, and especially Keira Knightley abound in resonance even while they lack spontaneity and danger.

WHOSE POWER?
There’s a different kind of oppressiveness operating in The Ides of March: rote cynicism. It’s hard to imagine a timelier premise than the disappointments that come with supporting a supposed political vanguard. And yet The Ides of March isn’t really about this; despite a few applause-worthy stump lines from Candidate Clooney, the plot revolves around the most generic and non-ideological developments. (For a movie about modern politics, Clooney treats abortion in the most apolitical way—as a melodramatic contrivance.) It would be one thing if The Ides of March saw familiar back-stabbing and horse-trading as a tragic impediment to political progress, as we find in Advise and Consent. Instead, this is a movie that likes palace intrigue because it likes being in a palace. (The chummy MSNBC cameos underline this point.) By the end, we see the latest intern climbing the stairs with a round of coffee and it’s treated like the sparrows emigrating back to Capistrano—an operation of clocklike inevitability. The ongoing political disaster is supposed to be entertaining and, on some level, comforting.

Moneyball has much more craft as a movie, but its message is equally upsetting. Like Aaron Sorkin’s previous project, The Social Network, this one tackles a seismic social shift from the questionable instincts of good ol’ boys to the empirical answers of a new technocratic elite. It scores many solid, on-target points about the failures of the old but evinces an uncritical veneration of the new. Its true subject is power, not the righteous of the one who possesses it. Despite the curious approval of the World Socialist Web Site, Moneyball seems to me less about corrosive effect of capitalism upon modern sports than the virtues of axing players with steely style. (This is an impressive skill, but for whom? In this respect, it reveals as much about its class position as Mitt Romney does when he opines, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” Moneyball’s tagline–”What are you really worth?”–is appalling because it intends this question on the most rudimentary, cash-and-stock-options level.)

Two genuinely politically incisive movies failed to garner comparable respect. In Time was a genre movie dumped domestically despite contributions from establishment pros like Andrew Niccol, Roger Deakins, and Colleen Atwood. (It received better treatment overseas.) I can’t remember another movie more sensitive to class markers or the notion that awareness of these markers is a primary weapon of the status quo. It’s in the way that Justin Timberlake fails to recognize that his harried lunch routine gives away his game or the fact that the people with the least time to spare find it perfectly natural to travel by slow, circuitous buses. The ghetto here is defined, totally rationally, by geography: the ubiquity of check-cashing stands and pawn shops is more indicative than the presence of street thugs. (All that, and the CAA offices stand in for the headquarters of the highly profitable mortality industry.) For a big studio picture, In Time is also disarmingly unconflicted about property rights, coming out on the side of armed insurrection against banks without any note of moral hazard.

The politics of J. Edgar are more contentious. Eastwood’s latest, not Tree of Life, was the most divisive film of 2011. Amy Taubin memorably described it as a “late, kick-out-the-jams masterpiece,” but many smart critics refused to engage with J. Edgar, assured that anything less than a full-throated condemnation of Hoover, especially a movie that purported to offer a personal angle, amounted to a white-wash. (I don’t recall similar beyond-the-pale dismissals of Sukurov’s recent cycle on the private lives of Hirohito, Hitler, and Lenin, but those pictures are no one’s idea of aggrandizement.) If J. Edgar was a tribute, it still managed to communicate these essential truths about Hoover: he was a paranoid, racist man, quick to conspire and blackmail on the basis of the most preposterous delusions and speculations, prone to lying about and white-washing his own record, a technocratic terror vested with the authority to bend law enforcement power to correct the imagined imbalances in a fantasy America. The absurd historical suppositions and intersections in J. Edgar—that Hoover is too busy deciphering an alleged MLK sex tape to notice the JFK assassination, that he and Clyde Tolson would concoct Eleanor Roosevelt’s love affair with Lorena Hicock while munching on FBI-branded breakfast cereal—are exactly the opposite of hagiography: they suggest that Hoover’s political life is inevitably tied up with own his pettiness.

J. Edgar isn’t giving Hoover a pass for being a closet case either. In the end, he emerges as a pathetic figure, unable to articulate or recognize his own desires, destined to project his own profound social discomforts onto the nation as a whole. The tragedy is that he got away with it. That said, J. Edgar is also the most radical gay studio film I can recall. In asking the audience to observe the cruel abuse that one ugly old man endlessly inflicts upon another, to contemplate the bond that would keep Tolson sticking by Hoover’s side even as the defeated giant rails against the Nobel Peace Prize Committee from a musty, pre-fab rumpus room, J. Edgar demands empathy for unglamorous bodies and stubborn denials. Armie Hammer’s zombie make-up job succeeds through its inexpressiveness. This may as well have been called The Skin I Live In.

The limitations of J. Edgar are wrapped up in Eastwood’s one-style-fits-all method. Every recent Eastwood movie looks like it was photographed (by the talented Tom Stern) on puke-colored typewriter ribbon, with no attempt to shape or inhabit the material. The best recent films—Meek’s Cutoff, House of Pleasures, Hugo—succeed because they develop their milieus so fully.

RECLAIMING THE PAST
In the case of Meek’s Cutoff, we have a movie that could have been made if the cinema existed in 1845. This contrafactual pre-cinematic experiment—devoid of optical effects, bearing hand-sewn opening titles, night scenes without a sliver of latitude or definition, and crunched sound with minimal recording range—revives the material anxieties of frontier life with staggering effectiveness. (Those decrying Meek’s minimalism are actively denying the densest textural experience this side of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.) Its willfully divided society succumbs along lines of arbitrary and expressly mandated sexual difference. Reading it as a re-heated Bush-era jeremiad short-changes the central question of Meek’s Cutoff, namely whether we have the capacity to recognize and correct the problems of the communities we live in.

House of Pleasures is less coherent. By the end, you’re not entirely sure that Bertrand Bonnello’s position is any more sophisticated than open nostalgia for the courtly ways of the brothels of the belle epoque. (Hey, it’s better than selling it on the street.) But the effect is surely more complicated: we spend two hours in L’Apollonide and come away with an unshakeable sense of a class eking out safe harbor from the twentieth century. There are incursions: mutilation, disappearances, disease. The whores whisper amongst each other about the decline of the house, unable or unwilling to comprehend the changes outside. We remain inside for all but one sequence and the epilogue. The atmosphere is so well-realized that we recognize every creak of the floor board; at the same time, we never begin to understand the house’s floor plan or topography—relationships of all kinds are kept hazy and deliberately uncontemplated. At the same time, the business end of prostitute is constantly illustrated and understood, in admirable detail. Above all, though, House of Pleasures emphasizes the logic of prostitution—the immediate emotional fixations and justifications that make its artificial order appealing and livable. (It shares this quality of interior journalism with Martha Marcy May Marlene, which makes palpable the emotional pull of an upstate New York cult and the massive psychological subterfuge required to normalize its rancid sexual politics.)

Hugo is a different matter. Its physical milieu is less authentic—more a mish-mash of storybook ideas about Paris, an endless succession of cafes and metro stations and underground passageways. One friend complained about its anachronistic accoutrements for the Eiffel Tower. Another thought it compared unfavorably to Cinema Paradiso and still another found its machine discourse an unconsciously fascist gesture, in league with Leni Riefenstahl.

I find this last criticism particularly baffling, especially because it misstates what I find so moving and singular about Hugo. It’s not the fact that it celebrates cinema or film preservation or Méliès. (Indeed, Méliès isn’t even the primary influence here. After a career predicated on violence, here finally is Scorsese in nakedly vulnerable Borzage regalia. Its cluttered frames also recall, of all things, Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, another work that commits an intemperate act of reanimating and finding meaning in pop history.)

At a time when cinema (and all media) is increasingly becoming a digital simulacrum, Hugo argues for a particular interpretation of the mechanical past, one that values the causality, functionality, and coherence of the machine world. It venerates tinkering and understanding yourself through the systems surrounding you. It possesses a moving belief in the purposefulness of things. That it locates these feelings about celluloid and projectors and automatons and Maltese crosses in the midst of their antithesis—a fully digital, 3-D spectacle—only complicates and amplifies the emotional effect.

In any case, its position is more complicated than the proudly retrograde silent cinema pastiche The Artist. Again, expectations are important; before I finally saw The Artist last week, I’d already been asked my opinion about it five or six times, always from people without much previous interest in ‘old movies.’ If The Artist functions as a friendly gateway to the silent classics, then it would be churlish to complain. Yet I can’t embrace the movie or claim that I was moved by it. Its charms, outside of Uggie the dog, feel premeditated, with the approval of the audience placed well ahead of emotional texture.

I don’t much care that The Artist proposes the transition to sound (in 1929!) as an abrupt and senseless event, or that it understates the severity and speed of a nitrate fire in a private screening room. What bothers me is that The Artist defines silent cinema negatively: its lack of sound, lack of color, lack of dialogue. The Artist abounds in nostalgia and affection for the silent era, but treats it like an evolutionary step towards something else. There’s no feeling for the immensely complex interplay of images and text in the best silents. (Part of the problem is that the intertitles in The Artist are functional rather than witty, with none of the economy and wordplay in which period title writers specialized). The recorded score composed and compiled by Ludovine Bource is passable, but it makes The Artist much more of a fixed entity than a real silent, with its variable live accompaniment. What I’m getting at is that The Artist presents silent film as something fun and old-timey, rather than something aesthetically challenging and contested. Even if it aped a silent perfectly, I don’t know how valuable that would be.

Besides, there are two other films around much more insightful about film history and what it can mean to us today. If admiration for Hugo demands a disclaimer about not simply giving Scorsese a pass on account of the subject matter, A Useful Life should require a notarized contract. For obvious reasons, I would probably be interested in any film about the daily operations of a movie theater (c.f. The Projectionist and Porn Theater), but A Useful Life succeeds on its own terms. This (fictional) chronicle of the dismantling of a cinematheque in Montevideo absolutely nails the feeling of working in a failing theater (or, really, any decrepit cultural bureaucracy). It depicts the accumulating disappointments (six people waiting in line for Greed, again) with great emotional accuracy. Most bracingly, though, when so many movies trade on their core audience’s unquestioning devotion to the medium, this one has the courage to leave everything behind and contemplate a life outside the theater.

No such escape is possible in the monumental Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauseșcu, an engrossing three-hour assemblage of official archival footage of the Romanian dictator. Without any voice-over or captions—any contextual interpretation, really—we learn the truth of Ceauseșcu’s rule through footage commissioned with exactly the opposite intent.  Propaganda, like any genre, subsists on tropes that illuminate the very things it tries to obscure. The Autobiography views these moments not as fabrications but vital history. It speaks to the value of compromised artifacts.

A Tentative Ranking
01. Meek’s Cutoff, directed by Kelly Reichardt (OSCILLOSCOPE)
02. Certified Copy, directed by Abbas Kiarostami (IFC/SUNDANCE SELECTS)
03. Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese (PARAMOUNT)
04. House of Pleasures, directed by Bertrand Bonnello (IFC MIDNIGHT)
05. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (STRAND)
06. A Dangerous Method, directed by David Cronenberg (SONY PICTURES CLASSICS)
07. A Useful Life, directed by Federico Veiroj (GLOBAL FILM INITIATIVE)
08. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu, directed by Andrei Ujică (FILM DESK)
09. The Future, directed by Miranda July (ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS)
10. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, directed by Tomas Alfredson (FOCUS FEATURES)
11. The Tree of Life, directed by Terrence Malick (FOX SEARCHLIGHT)
12. J. Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood (WARNER BROS.)
13. In Time, directed by Andrew Niccol (20TH CENTURY FOX)
14. Poetry, directed by Lee Chang-dong (KINO LORBER)
15. Tuesday After Christmas, directed by Radu Muntean (KINO LORBER)
16. Martha Marcy May Marlene, directed by Sean Durkin (FOX SEARCHLIGHT)
17. Silent Souls, directed by Aleksei Fedorchenko (SHADOW DISTRIBUTION)
18. The Skin I Live In, directed by Pedro Almodóvar (SONY PICTURES CLASSICS)
19. Le quattro volte, directed by Michelangelo Frammartino (KINO LORBER)
20. The Beaver, directed by Jodie Foster (SUMMIT)
21. Restless, directed by Gus van Sant (SONY PICTURES CLASSICS)
22. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, directed by Rupert Wyatt (20TH CENTURY FOX)

In 1939, sociologist Margaret Farrand Thorp called the movies “the vampire art” and it’s not difficult to see where she’s coming from. With Hollywood at the height of its powers (economic, cultural, political), everything bowed before the movies. They cannibalized and superseded competing media with finesse. Screen rights to big novels were snatched up before publication. (And the movie version prompted new tie-ups, like Photoplay Editions of the book adorned with production stills.) Unexpected successes were dealt with, too. Studios raced to buy them up, even if screen potential was dubious or non-existent. (So what if the option was never exercised? Always better to stay ahead of the competition, either way.) Thorp’s most staggering example of this mentality is Dale Carnegie’s runaway best-selling self-helper How to Win Friends and Influence People, optioned by an unnamed studio.

As far as I can tell, the cinematic How to Win Friends never got past (or got to?) the development stage. But one equally improbable contemporary made it to the screen, albeit with severe alterations applied both before and after the cameras rolled.

…one third of a nation… was not the first Living Newspaper produced by the Federal Theater Project, but it was unquestionably the most successful of the Works Progress Administration-sponsored plays. Opening on 17 January 1938 at New York’s Adelphi Theater, it ran for nine months and was seen by well over 200,000 people. Local versions played ten other cities with comparable success. In short, …one third of a nation… was, on paper, a dream of a pre-sold property, instantly recognizable to moviegoers all over country. (It helped, too, that the play made headlines even in cities where it wasn’t performed; early in the New York run, a charge of Communist influence was lobbed by a trio of Democratic Senators whose floor speeches were quoted verbatim in the script.)

The premise of the Living Newspaper was simple: marry politically-committed theater and ultra-current broadsheet, with other popular entertainment—radio, newsreel, public lecture—thrown in where possible. The plays were kaleidoscopic, favoring black-out sketches and abrupt shifts in time, space, and scenery over more traditional dramatic virtues. Joseph Manning described a typical scene from one of the earlier Newspapers, Highlights of 1935, in the pages of New Theatre:

The curtain opens on a bunch of scared young girls and reveals the lengths to which small New Jersey towns will go to keep America safe for the exploited open shop. The episode ends with another piece of testimony acted out. One of the young ladies finds her pay is short. She goes to the office girl. She’s right. Her pay is short. But wait— that’s the book for the NRA code inspector. According to the book she gets paid by, the miserable wage she got is all she had coming. No climax. The critics call it anticlimax. The boys of the fourth estate who edit the Living Newspaper are just telling a story for what it is worth. The scene may lack the customary punch expected at the end of a dramatic sketch. Anyone viewing it, though, should be able to see why labor needs some legal protection.

There wasn’t a story in …one third of a nation…, but a subject: the abject state of housing in Depression-era America. This was illustrated with a condensed history of the New York real estate market from colonial times to the present day. Stump speeches, conference negotiations, human dramas, and two burnings of the four-story tenement set were recreated during each performance. Slum statistics were recited over loudspeaker.

Contemporary reviews credited playwright Arthur Arent as ‘managing editor’ and cited 26 researchers who drew the incidents from 20,000 pages of relevant material. Over 80 actors were employed, making …one third of a nation… undoubtedly the most elaborate bit of stagecraft ever deployed in the name of lefty American agitprop. The chief purpose of the production was, after all, keeping theater workers gainfully employed with maximum bang for federal buck.

Actually, … one third of a nation … was a profitable play, even though top admission was $1.10 (compared to $2 or $3 for Broadway fare) and many tickets were sold on a group basis at a heavy discount. It was a blockbuster show, playing to capacity houses for weeks. Eleanor Roosevelt took in a New York performance and the Washington preview was attended by dignitaries from Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to Soviet ambassador Oleg Troyanovsky. It attracted strong reviews, too, even from the Wall Street Journal.

The film rights were purchased in June 1938 and the shooting begun in August while …one third of a nation… was still on offer at the Adelphi. The measly $5,000 offered for the rights went to Federal Theater, rather than Arent, as the play was conceived and understood as public property. (The money was funneled to the WPA’s Federal Writer’s Committee.) The deal would see an independent feature overseen by Broadway producer Harold Orlob, to be filmed on a very modest budget in Astoria’s Eastern Service Studios Inc. Sylvia Sidney was announced to star and this made sense; between Street Scene, Fury, Dead End, and You Only Live Once, she had established herself as the go-to actress for progressive, urban projects. Her new husband, Luther Adler (brother of Stella), was also announced, but soon replaced by Group Theatre loan-out Leif Erikson.

Adapting …one third of a nation… to the screen was both a natural proposition and an inevitable dilution. In the credit column, …one third of a nation… was already a kind of proto-cinema: the play’s hair-trigger mix of facts, dramatic incident, and spectacle had already been likened by drama critic Stirling Brown to Hearst’s March of Time newsreels. Some Living Newspapers productions even incorporated film clips into the battery of didactic evidence.  (And no wonder: Arent’s first paying gig was as film critic for Exhibitor’s Daily Review.)

But this dynamism also worked against screen translation. Like its contemporary, Hellzapoppin’, …one third of a nation… was a kind of epic, unruly theater that resisted the finished form of film. There was too much information, too much history, too many tangents—nothing like this could resemble conventional commercial cinema. The title and the basic thrust were maintained but little else: the panoramic account of housing rights was condensed to one story, and one that allowed for both a tender love angle between Sidney and Erikson and some scenes set in the latter’s tony landlord surroundings, which were alien to the play. There was no loudmouthed loudspeaker recitation in this movie.

Calling the film version of …one third of a nation… a travesty of the play misses the point. Though it was formally quite different, the play itself was not a fixed entity. The New York production was continually updated, as explained by a New York Times account early in the play’s run:

[O]ther changes in detail are being made in the text to keep the play abreast of day-to-day developments in the local and national housing situation. The most frequent changes are made in the speeches of the character of Mayor LaGuardia, because of developments in New York housing news. The actor who plays Mayor LaGuardia therefore does not know when he arrives at the theater what his lines are going to be for the evening.

The stage versions mounted elsewhere made further changes to address local concerns. The Washington iteration had an added scene that recounted details of slums in the District; the Philadelphia rendition changed the tenement fire to a building collapse to mirror recent headlines. The film isn’t the play, but which play? In some sense, the film is just another local edition, told in the terms that the community could understand (in this case, those terms derive from showbiz clichés rather than journalism, per se).

The film version of …one third of a nation… faced more basic problems. Though it was distributed by Paramount, it was wholly financed on an independent basis, largely by Atlas Corp. investment magnate Floyd Odlum. One is not surprised, then, that the play’s impassioned dialogue about the Senate debate surrounding the Wagner-Steagall provision (“Balance the budget? What with? Human lives? Misery? Disease? What was the appropriation for the army and navy for the last four years?”) was missing in the film. Even clips of Roosevelt’s second inaugural speech, from which the title derives, were cut after being declared New Deal propaganda by the financiers. That a socially-concerned film was made at all under such conditions is astonishing.

Reshoots were ordered to stave off presumed censorship trouble and the release date pushed from 1938 to 1939. (This delay was not advantageous, critically-speaking: perhaps …one third of a nation… would have a better reputation today if it had been released in 1938, one of the worst years in Hollywood history, as opposed to being just another GWTW also-ran in the goldleaf glow of 1939.) Industry reaction was, naturally, hostile. The East Coast Threat had receded when Paramount pulled out of Astoria production in 1931 and the last thing Hollywood wanted was a replay of the rivalry. (William K. Howard’s concurrently-produced Back Door to Heaven added fuel to the Astoria headache.) The Los Angeles Times noted snidely that “…‘One Third of a Nation’ isn’t so far removed from Hollywood ideas as the local pundits expected. Its approach to the subject of housing greatly resembles the realistic Warner films to which we’re accustomed, and it is inferior to many of them.”

Critical reaction was otherwise positive. The neutered …one third of a nation… even received a rave notice in The New Masses, which congratulated the company “for the rare feat of making a picture in which the hero is a house.”

Unfortunately, …one third of a nation… has been mighty hard to see for many years. Because Paramount’s terms were for short-term lease, this title was not included in the package of early talkies sold wholesale to MCA. Eventually, it fell into the public domain and its social context faded from memory, an orphan commercially and politically. (Like its cousins Street Scene and After Tomorrow, it leads directly to the sentimental urban melting pot of Sesame Street.) Luckily, the Library of Congress has seen fit to preserve this curious version of an extraordinarily important piece of American theatrical history.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening …one third of a nation… in a 35mm preservation print as part of its Classic Film Series on Wednesday, January 25 at the Portage Theater. Special thanks to Rob Stone and Lynanne Schweighofer of the Library of Congress. Please see our current schedule for more information.

FURTHER READING
Arent, Arthur, et al. Federal Theater Plays. New York: Random House, 1938.
Browder, Laura. Rousing the Nation: Radical Culture in Depression America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.
Flanagan, Hallie. Arena: The History of the Federal Theater. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940.
Kline, Herbert, ed. New Theatre and Film-1934 to 1937: An Anthology. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.
Quinn, Susan. Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times. New York: Walker and Company, 2008.
Federal Theater Project Web Guide at the Library of Congress.

You might get the impression from the films we program at the Northwest Chicago Film Society that we aren’t especially interested in new cinema. Actually, though, we don’t show films from the 1930s to retreat into an uncomplicated past, to shut ourselves off from the present. If anything, we’re often interested in these films for the way they challenge our complacency about received history (of cinema and of society) and the trite frameworks that homogenize cultural experience.

To that end, we have a lot to say about this year’s movies, too.

Just what it meant to go to the movies in 2011 is hardly straight-forward. The irreversible shift from 35mm projection to wholly digital presentations continued apace, with digital penetration breaking fifty percent of American screens sometime in the first half of 2011. We have much to say about the digital conversion and its ideological implications elsewhere, but let’s focus on its most salient results.

DCP (the Digital Cinema Package, or files uploaded from a studio-owned hard drive to an exhibitor-owned local server and beamed to projector) has wholly remade the infrastructure of film distribution. A sub-contracting agreement between Deluxe and Technicolor has centralized key operations to an extent hardly imaginable a few years ago. All major 35mm release prints are now made at a single Deluxe facility, with a noticeable decline in quality control. Instead of striking every reel from a 2,000-foot roll of raw stock, it’s not uncommon now for the lab to join together a few leftover 600- or 700-foot raw sections to service a single reel during printing, with quite prominent ultrasonic splices protruding mid-frame and appalling density fluctuations appearing mid-reel.

A mid-frame ultrasonic splice from a contemporary print. Its presence is especially apparent when projected on a large screen.

Technicolor now handles all 35mm distribution and logistics for new prints, which means that Deluxe has shuttered all of its regional depots save for the central hub at the Van Nuys Airport. In practical terms, this means anyone booking a repertory print must now pay shipping to and from Los Angeles, rather than simply returning the print to the nearest local depot. Local couriers who sub-contracted delivery of these Deluxe depot prints are all but gone.

In other words, 35mm prints have become more expensive to obtain and often less satisfying to view in proportion to that effort. Lab closures and consolidations overseas have made prints of new foreign films more expensive as well, leading indie distributors to a particularly difficult crunch. Digital distribution to the rescue –but for the fact that DCP has seen woeful penetration among independent and small-time exhibitors.

DCP promises a single and uniform standard for digital exhibition—but only, of course, for those who can afford to shell out for the system. Many important new films are prohibitively expensive to release on 35mm—this year’s Mysteries of Lisbon or last year’s Carlos, being two prominent (and universally acclaimed) art house examples. So exhibitors offer them in two formats: DCP for the sufficiently capitalized venues and Blu-ray for everyone else, which is the super-majority of American art houses. But Blu-ray—especially when it’s a disc burned on someone’s computer, rather than manufactured as a consumer product—is a fairly unreliable and glitchy format.

Some companies, like Emerging Pictures or IndieFilmNet, have stepped in and pitched theaters on a sub-DCP solution for a substantial maintenance fee: a server and access to operas from La Scala and titles from select distributors like IFC/Sundance Selects. They can be projected with prosumer equipment, forestalling the purchase of an expensive new DCI-compliant 2K or 4K digital projector. But the major studios and their indie boutique labels, which require nothing less than fully compliant equipment, have not signed on with these sub-DCP solutions. In practical terms, this means that an art house might contract with Emerging Pictures to get access to the latest IFC release but without laying down any investment for continued access to things like Fox Searchlight’s The Descendants—the kind of semi-indie title that most venues need to book to stay open.

For the moment, year-end art house tent poles like The Descendants are available in 35mm and DCP, but this complicated and costly parallel distribution system cannot last very long. The intricacies and confusions of the short-term solutions to this problem are necessary caveats to any discussion of the best movies of the year. A band of younger critics recently took to the Twitter-verse to pressure Searchlight into standing behind Kenneth Longergan’s Margaret, the six-years-in-the-unmaking project that was unceremoniously dumped in a literal handful of theaters earlier this year without the benefit of any advertising or critics’ screenings. (It played one week at the AMC River East, but you had to do a fair bit of sleuthing to find this out.) Two prints were struck and presumably some bookings were DCP.

But many independent and foreign films would be lucky to have two prints in circulation. Though the indie outlets (Kino, Zeitgeist, Cinema Guild, IFC, etc.) are doing their best to support venues that still screen 35mm, this often means an unpleasant calculus where film venues must wait longer and longer for the single circulating print to become available, especially when the venue is not in a major market or cannot promise more than a single evening’s engagement. Prints, once merely the means to an economic end, are now precious commodities that must be parceled out carefully lest a venue ruin the only copy in the midst of a run with a dozen other bookings on the horizon. Such a situation hurts both the distributor (who wants more bookings) and the exhibitor (who wants more to choose from).

To put L’affaire Margaret in further perspective, it’s not uncommon for other independent films to be released with comparable levels of fanfare. Though screener DVDs are plentiful for even the most obscure agit-prop doc, which wasn’t the case with Margaret until the Twitter episode, many other titles are not supported with once-deemed-necessary exhibitor material like posters and trailers. In the very least, Margaret received these. Meanwhile, FilmDistrict, a mysterious distributor that no one had heard of before this year, manages to open the Cannes-approved, Euro-nihilist neo-exploitation Drive on over 2,900 screens.

In other words, we’re living through an unaccountable moment in the history of cinema, with questions of which movies get seen and which don’t dictated not by any overriding and meticulous capitalist conspiracy, but by the arbitrary fruits of a poorly-understood industry upheaval. (Of course, that the upheaval itself suggests various elements of collusion, cronyism, and control gets us right back to the conspiracy angle, but that’s the subject for another column.)

My own viewing this year reflects this confusion. The menu included films shot and projected on 35mm (J. Edgar, Tuesday After Christmas), shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives), shot digitally but also distributed on 35mm (The Future, Melancholia), shot on 35mm and shown via digibeta tape (A Useful Life), shot on 35mm but seen at home on Blu-ray (Poetry), shot digitally and projected on sub-DCP equipment (Certified Copy, Cold Weather), shot on 35mm but screened on DCP (Crazy, Stupid, Love, Rise of the Planet of the Apes), shot digitally and viewed in 3D DCP (Hugo). I saw Tree of Life (which originated with a mix of 35mm, 65mm, and digital cinematography) twice—once on DCP and again in 35mm. Colors were more vibrant in the former but more evenly balanced in the latter. Ironically, the digital effects looked more convincing in the film version.

To complicate matters further, most every film shot on 35mm these days goes through a Digital Intermediate, which subsumes many traditionally analog post-production tasks like sound editing and color correction. The final, approved Digital Intermediate is the ultimate source for both the 35mm and DCP release versions. So, regardless of what we see and how we see it, it likely includes some mix of film craft and digital technique.

By now we’re sure you’ve heard that the Village Voice has laid off J. Hoberman, senior film critic since 1988 and a regular Voice contributor since 1977. This is a devastating decision, but not entirely an unexpected one. After all, the Voice has also blithely sacked Robert Christgau, Nat Hentoff, and a number of other A-list writers in recent years.

All appearances to the contrary, Hoberman’s writing remains a paramount influence on what we do at the Northwest Chicago Film Society—how we think about movies, what we emphasize when we write about them, the specific cultural contours that inform our discussions. But the thought of a Hoberman tribute in this space would amount to a kind of premature eulogy—there’s vanished light but also light that we vanish. Surely Hoberman’s prodigious output will continue; this past year, in addition to his Village Voice column, he began a website (a premonition of platforms to come?) and published his latest book, An Army of Phantoms.

Right now, the author’s Biography on the aforementioned website concludes with this now-wistful line: “Two daughters, a happy marriage, and eleven books aside, the thing of which he’s most proud is surviving for over 35 years in New York without the benefit of a normal job.” And that’s the rub: more than anything, the Voice’s decision signals (or, at this late date, seals) the end of an era in film criticism.

But again, not in the way that you may have heard. Since the blood-letting began in 2006 (was it really more than five years ago that the Voice fired Michael Atkinson and Dennis Lim?), the future of film criticism has not exactly been an obscure topic. A number of high-profile events (Variety’s axing of Todd McCarthy, the winding down of Roger Ebert’s television show) and more diffuse trends (like the elimination of the film critic post at all but the highest-circulation metro newspapers) have kept the spotlight focused on this question. Over the past few years, seemingly every film festival and academic cinema conference has sponsored a panel on the state/future/end of criticism.

These events, while well-intentioned, usually devolve into misleading binaries: new media vs. old, newspapers vs. blogs, movie theaters vs. iPhones, old fogeys vs. sexy young cinephiles. (A spectre is haunting cinema…but I still don’t know anyone who’s admitted to watching, let alone preferring, a feature film on a smart phone.) The whole apparatus of film appreciation is collapsing—but look, there are kids writing passionately about Jean Eustache or Abel Ferrara! Take that, Newsweek—as if you would ever devote a spread to the genius of Philippe Garrel. The internet has opened/democratized/expanded criticism as never before! Criticism is healthy, even if you don’t have a job anymore.

Indeed, the Village Voice does represent a relic of, as the kids say, the dead-tree industry. Everyone has her own golden age and everyone remembers a time when the Voice was much better than it is now—and even then, there was someone telling you that your beloved Voice was but a cruddy imitation of its former self. (Should we date the official decline to the moment the Voice was name-dropped as a transparently outré gesture in that “La Vie Bohème” number from Rent?) But this isn’t just the patina of nostalgia; I think the Voice is objectively, abjectly less compelling than it was when I began reading it in 2003—less political coverage, less reporting, less of a genuinely counter-cultural, politically-informed attitude. And yes, that 2003 Voice was much diminished from the old broadsheet.

In its heyday, the alternative weekly floated an outrageous, but effective, business model: almost unlimited space for unwashed, if literate, flotsam, subsidized by ad revenue. The text was just there—a bonus. Was anyone even editing it?  It didn’t matter whether you cared about the latest avant-garde provocation, you might pick up the paper for the classified listings, the personals, the phone sex ads, the movie listings, Life in Hell, or the gallery notices. It was an unconscious beast.

Whether someone looking for a good time at 2 am ever actually accidentally read about Aki Kaurismäki or Hou Hsiao-hsien is beside the point. The whole theoretical idea of a newspaper—alt or otherwise—was that someone looking for sports scores or lotto picks had to plow through all this other crap to find what he was looking for. It forced you to encounter other things. The newspaper was an ink-stained spatial representation of the culture itself—full of noise and distraction and all manner of uncomfortable juxtapositions, up-to-the-minute and infinitely disposable. (Hoberman understands this better than almost anyone, by the way; seek out his out-of-print monograph on 42nd Street from the British Film Institute and you’ll find a historian giddy with the free associational cultural collisions suggested by reading Depression-era newspapers on microfilm…)

Now, of course, the tables have turned. Rather than letting the sex support the articles, the new Voice produces more and more sex and fewer articles. Go read J. Hoberman’s final Voice review (appropriately enough, of Ken Jacobs’s latest at Anthology) and you’ll see a sidebar touting the online Voice’s original content:

I doubt anyone ever got rich writing for the old Voice, but their work was valued in a way that criticism today generally is not. Nathan Lee—who replaced Lim and Atkinson at the Voice in 2006, only to be let go himself in 2008—described his admirably and resolutely unconflicted position with S. T. VanAirsdale shortly after the first shake-up:

I’ve never had a staff position before. I’ve never had health benefits in my entire adult life. Dental care, health care, none of it. I have that now. So we can talk about the reputation of the New Times and the drama and the horror of the things they’ve done, but I have a job to do: I see movies and I write about them. For me it’s very simple, and for other people it’s not. I anticipate getting some flak for taking this job, but it’s just a job. I review movies. It’s what I do for a living.

Let’s be blunt about this: a staff position was a unionized position and that meant a baseline level of compensation and benefits. (Hoberman’s sign-off to his Voice colleagues, which he posted on his website, closes with a humble note of appreciation for allowing him to represent them in recent union negotiations.) The move to eliminate Hoberman isn’t all about his championing of “difficult” films by Cristi Piui or Raúl Ruiz or panning The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Hoberman’s replacement will likely not be a senior film critic, in any familiar sense. More likely is a string of free-lancers from other New Times papers, with substantially less drag on the bottom line.

Is film criticism a vocation or an amateur hobby? The internet has blurred, if not destroyed, this line. Ridicule old media all you want, but newspapers and other analog outlets eventually devised models that allowed people to make a living. The digital tide that threatens to wash it all away has not. Online journalism has scarcely proven profitable for the publishers (fantasy dead-ends like metering notwithstanding), let alone managed to compensate the writers decently. We’re all writing blogs now, but, aside from a few very rare instances, not getting paid for it.

In some ways, this reflects broader attitudes in American society, a near-libertarian zeal for pursuing creative and individualistic endeavors for personal, effectively extracurricular reasons, rather than according ordinary work the dignity it demands. Even talking about compensation and benefits makes most people feel vaguely dirty, like a cold-hearted, materialistic appeal that sounds awfully impolite in a country whose school children are constantly indoctrinated about the virtues of volunteerism and hear next to nothing about labor history. And this in a landscape where college graduates with liberal arts degrees (often obtained in exchange for decades of real debt) scramble for employment scraps.

So, in effect, the question before us isn’t so much whether film criticism is dead or can suffer the blow of Hoberman’s abrupt Village Voice exit, but whether criticism is sustainable, whether we’ve actively devised models to make it worthwhile in the digital age. It can survive as a specialized thing, where bloggers talk amongst themselves, without any hope of compensation or contact with the broader public.

Loathsome establishment figures like Cass Sunstein tend to describe the internet as a social catastrophe that allows users to burrow further into tribal echo chambers with no exposure to dissenting views, but readers aren’t to blame here. They’re only seeking out what interests them, and finding an outlet for ultra-specialized expertise that was too esoteric, even for the old Village Voice. The well-educated, general-interest reader was always a fanciful conceit, but not a worthless one. We need a new conceit now.

Acknowledgment: This piece benefited extensively from discussions with Becca Hall and Edward S. Choi.

Most every account of Sullivan’s Travels describes the movie as being something between autobiography and artist’s testament. It’s easy to see why: the central character, John L. Sullivan, is a comedy director whose string of uncomplicated hits has pleased the studio but left the man deeply unsatisfied. Sullivan sets out to make his first serious movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a raw examination of uncomfortable times.  And likewise laugh maestro Sturges carves out a new and grim register—a socially conscious contemporary portrait. (With a little sex in it.)

Everyone assures Sullivan that he underrates comedy; only a highly paid Hollywood professional would be so aloof to think that the common man prefers a dash of humanly-scaled cinema-soot to a good chuckle. By the end of Sullivan’s Travels, we may as well concede the point, too: a Pluto cartoon (and a very unfunny one, at that) earns pride of place in a rural black church, with no competing tract in sight. I may falter sometimes, Sturges seems to be saying, I may fall prey to Social Significance now and again, but I don’t doubt that comedy is king. Don’t you doubt it either—I’m doing my part, in my way.

It’s a testament to the complexity and craft of Sullivan’s Travels that this clean, somewhat self-aggrandizing thesis falls far short in describing what’s going on here. Sturges hardly practices what he preaches; one doesn’t leave Sullivan’s Travels complaining about all the hobo stuff and longing for an extra reel of slapstick. (Indeed, the latter sequences rival “Playful Pluto” in provoking a non-reaction among modern audiences. As Otis Ferguson aptly noted in his mixed review of Sullivan’s Travels, “when [Sturges] wants fun in a swimming pool, no less than four people have to fall or be pushed in.”)

Sullivan is also rather an inapt surrogate for Sturges. Much as he would later complain of his scripts being insensitively treated by other directors in the decade before he commanded the megaphone himself, Sturges’s 1930s output in no way resembles Sullivan’s Hay Hay in the Hayloft or Ants in Your Plants of 1939. (For what it’s worth, it was Preston Black accorded the unenviable reins of the Three Stooges’ 1936 two-reeler “Ants in the Pantry,” depths to which Sturges never sank.) Indeed, Sturges received sole credit and a percentage of the gross on The Power and the Glory and got the chance to adapt Ferenc Molnár for The Good Fairy. His two scripts eventually realized by Mitchell Leisen, Easy Living and Remember the Night, are elegant classics with adult concerns undiluted by lowbrow concessions.

When we arrive at the projects written and directed by Sturges, the analogy totally disintegrates. His first effort, The Great McGinty, won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Exhibitor Arthur Mayer cited it among a dozen other low-budget pictures that bested five-million-dollar blockbusters for innovation and quality. It’s a personal project, not the product of a studio cog, calibrated for small-town popularity. What’s more, The Great McGinty is a film of obvious, if confused, social dimensions. It’s about machine politics, ballot-stuffing, graft, and garden-variety corruption.

Actually, it’s the political aspect of The Great McGinty that wears thinnest today. As satire, it feels casually toothless, resolutely non-partisan and free of ideology. Brian Donlevy rises from bum to alderman to reform mayor to machine-backed governor, but without any discernible convictions or constituency. That’s the cynical and unearned point: the American people don’t know what they want, an empty suit is as good as a genuine populist, it’s all a game for the sophisticate’s amusement. (H. L. Mencken would’ve loved it if he’d ever sullied himself with a mere movie.) If The Great McGinty is worth revisiting today, it’s for the depth and shading of the performances by Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff and the completely unexpected and sensitive account of the marriage of convenience between Donlevy and Muriel Angelus.

Sturges’s next film, Christmas in July, beautifully integrates the political and personal strands where The Great McGinty faltered. There is no more tender reproach to the righteousness of the prevailing economic order in all of American cinema. Here is a film about how people live, the small delusions they tell themselves, how they relate to other people, what they want and the tentative ways they express it. Early on in Christmas in July, Harry Hayden, playing Dick Powell’s supervisor, delivers an extraordinary monologue about a career in middle-management that fleetly sketches the emotional imperatives of capitalism:

I used to think about $25,000, too, and what I’d do with it. That I’d be a failure if I didn’t get ahold of it. Then one day I realized I was never going to have $25,000, Mr. MacDonald. And then another day a little bit later—considerably later—I realized something else. Something I’m imparting to you now, Mr. MacDonald. I’m not a failure; I’m a success. You see, ambition is all right if it works. But no system could be right where only half of one percent were successes and all the rest were failures. That wouldn’t be right. I’m not a failure. I’m a success. And so are you—if you earn your own living, pay your bills, and look the world in the eye. I hope you win your $25,000, Mr. MacDonald, but if you shouldn’t happen to, don’t worry about it. Now get the heck back to your desk and try to improve your arithmetic.

The incisiveness of this passage stands in immediately evident contrast to the literal allegory that opens Sullivan’s Travels, with Capital and Labor scrapping it up atop a moving train car.

It’s true that Sullivan’s Travels, like The Great McGinty, falls short as social expose. Sturges is most comfortable with characters enfranchised through eloquence; anybody can get by so long as she carries half a dozen readymade retorts in her back pocket and can dish it out at 200 miles per minute. (It’s a measure of Sturges’s democratic spirit that one-liners are equally divided between headliners and bit players; in a Sturges movie, the butlers and janitors and Pullman porters speak as intently and confidently as anyone else.) Montages of the downtrodden, as we get in Sullivan’s Travels, are flatly not Sturges’s talent. Indeed, they’re to be observed in silence, with none of the unwashed getting in any wisecracks. As both social insight and social empathy, these scenes fall well below the standard set by The Grapes of Wrath and innumerable Warner Brothers pictures of the ‘30s (Wild Boys of the Road and Heroes for Sale being the unkindest comparisons).

But to complain of this is to confuse Sullivan’s Travels for O Brother, Where Art Thou? The subject of Sullivan’s Travels is not so much comedy or art or poverty but the shortcomings of well-intentioned and well-heeled activism. (It shares this quality with 1941’s other great liberal satire of liberalism, Citizen Kane.) First-time viewers are often put off by the herky-jerky narrative line of Sullivan’s Travels; it constantly interrupts its own satire, short-circuiting plot developments to send Sullivan back to Hollywood, back to luxury, back to the unsettling conclusion that maybe he really isn’t qualified to opine on any of this. This vulnerability and doubt is the heart of the movie, not least because we’re often inclined to agree with it; what does Sullivan know about garbage cans?

In scrutinizing the erosion of Sullivan’s certainty—from the earnest conviction that challenging times demand gritty art to the realization that his own privilege cannot be imagined away, despite the costume department’s very best tramp get-up—Sullivan’s Travels challenges us in the way a genuinely apolitical movie never could. It records experiences that are familiar, even for those without a filmmaker’s wealth: the feeling that we can’t get away from our station, the fear that our efforts at understanding other people will reek of fraudulence. Comedy’s hard, but empathy’s harder.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will open its 2012 season with a screening of Sullivan’s Travels on Wednesday, January 4 at the Portage Theater. Please see our current calendar for more information. Restored 35mm print courtesy of Universal, special thanks to Paul Ginsburg and Dennis Chong.

Recently, David Bordwell devoted a post on his blog to a crucial but undervalued question: where do you sit in the movie theater?

Speaking for myself, I can’t fathom sitting anywhere but the first five or six rows, making some allowance, of course, for the design of the space. Many first and second row seats are too close, placed by bottom-line-minded corporate architects without any thought towards whether the full width of the screen is visible without distortion. The further one gets from the screen, the more the show begins to look like television, with comparable distractions priced into the equation. Much like the preference for watching TV with all the lights on, cinema screens viewed from the back of the auditorium tend to get lost in a mess of ambient light—exit signs, aisle markers, foyer spillover. There are definite, cheerfully imposed barriers between your body and the image. An anti-engagement.

Naturally, this taste makes for awkward social occasions. You try to describe your preferences in a non-incriminating way, waving towards the screen and simply saying that you like to sit close. Most people take this to mean ten rows from the back rather than five.  How do you compromise with a compromise?

On the rare occasion that a back-row regular is coaxed towards the front, the results are usually violent, a constant mélange of bewilderment and complaint. In college, a group of us students sat in the first row at every show; one night we were joined by the spouse of an instructor. She thought we were crazy but vowed to give it a shot. Unfortunately, she picked the wrong movie for this experiment—a pristine 35mm print of Shock Corridor from UCLA, a highly assaultive work in its own right, made all the more assertive seen from that vantage point. It was terrifying. The next night she returned to her usual spot.

In some ways, of course, Shock Corridor is absolutely the right movie to test the front-row hypothesis. The full effect of that film, or Fuller’s earlier Underworld U.S.A. or Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’arc, can only be garnered from the front; the gigantic close-ups, viewed from the middle of the theater, register as standard-issue film grammar rather than the uncomfortable intimacy they yearn to create.

Of course, for people who make their livings projecting films, the front row is rarely an option. At first blush, the projection booth is the very worst place to watch a movie. There’s an undifferentiated sea of white noise from the exhaust, the rectifier, the projector motor, the lamp house; the soundtrack is often heard through a tinny (and monaural) monitor speaker; viewing ports are rarely designed with enjoyment of the show in mind, with some not even providing a good view of the entire width of the screen; and the task of threading, rewinding, changing over from one reel to the next suggests debilitating distraction.

Some projectionists solve this conundrum by simply not liking, or at least not caring much, for movies. It’s just a job. (This is something of an understandable position: can you imagine projecting the road show presentation of The Sound of Music day-in, day-out for two years straight, a very real fate for many small-town projectionists of an earlier generation?)

But for some of us, this is an antithetical position. We handle this stuff all day long and cannot imagine not feeling connected with it. The notion that we could project films and not really see them or think about them would exemplify a supremely alienated kind of labor. (“Oh, I never saw that one. I just projected it.”) To be sure, watching a film from the booth requires some caveats—and not small ones, at that—but caveats should not be confused with limitations.  In fact, the projection booth constitutes a radical seat for viewing cinema.

I projected that movie, I know it well.

First off, projecting suggests the movies are not primarily narrative vehicles. When you lace up the reel, adjust the framing, check the thread path, you invariably miss bits and pieces. You’re not entirely sure about which character is which, or their precise relationships to one another. Rather than being an unsatisfying or incomplete experience, projecting forces a re-orientation of what makes up a movie.

The mechanics of the job already suggest a partial answer. Generally speaking, it makes the projectionist an active participant in the craft of filmmaking. A good projectionist is constantly monitoring focus and framing, hyper-attenuated to any fluctuations or mistakes, although most are imperceptible to the audience. It’s a hard, physical awareness of the frame as a unit of construction, one that can be unbalanced or incorrect. It gives solidity and consciousness to borders and lines that are otherwise made indistinct by the masking, curtains, and darkness of the auditorium.

(Many contemporary prints are stuck with the full height of the frame exposed on the print, but with the intent that the projectionist will crop the image to an aspect ratio of 1.85:1 using an aperture plate in the projector gate. Framing such a print incorrectly often reveals boom mics and the like to the audience—a remarkably sloppy mistake that cinematographers simply trust projectionists not to make.)

Focus is something else. Once the projectionist has established that the film is not warped, that it’s traveling through the projector gate smoothly, that the lens mount is steady, then the film itself becomes a play of focal planes. You realize intuitively which movies possess a narrow depth of field by design, which ones would appear to be out-of-focus but for the fact that you know damn well they aren’t because you set the lens yourself. You’re immediately aware of variations in grain structure, the physical building block of cinema.

Change-overs, on the off chance that the theater maintains two projectors rather than one, propose another kind of attention. While waiting for the four frames (i.e., one-sixth of a second) of black dots (or white circles or red slashes or unsightly puke-colored rings), the projectionist is riveted to the screen. To do otherwise would raise the possibility of one reel ending without the motor on the other machine sufficiently up to speed to make a superior and seamless transition between reels. The eyes turn toward the top right corner of the frame. You stop reading the subtitles. You consciously try to ignore any kinetic noise subsuming the rest of the frame. You get nervous as the cutting becomes quicker—don’t the editors know not to place a change-over cue in the middle of a frantic scene where it’s likely to go unnoticed? You judge the pacing and style to be untranquil and upsetting, though the audience is cognizant of no such modulation.

Films that employ shock cuts are especially enervating. You make the change-over and the first image of the new reel has nothing especially to do with the last image of the reel that preceded it. There’s no continuity. You begin to wonder, even though you checked the head leader three times, whether you did not, in fact, simply thread up the wrong reel, violating the linear progression of the story.

What I’m trying to say is that projectionists possess a characteristic perspective, attuned to films in a unique and particular way. (You can see why a 1927 issue of The Amerian Projectionist campaigned to re-christen the projection booth as the projectatory.) Films possess a level of subliminal style, something invisible to the average viewer but indelibly important to the experience. These are aesthetic considerations so minute and precise to have escaped proper names and considered correlations. It’s something that hangs over the whole film, more substantial than any missed plot point or actorly touch. Projectionists are both dissociated from the films they see and watching them more intently, more queerly, than everyone else.

There’s even a certain kind of film that plays better from the booth, things like Le Quattro volte or The Second Circle that demand a certain kind of concentration difficult to maintain in a nap-friendly theater. Projectionists see motion even when things look still. It’s no accident, then, that projectionists are, on the whole, more sympathetic to the whole idea of avant-garde cinema than many film critics and curators. They’re already watching films in an avant-garde way.

Needless to say, this interpretation is based on cinema as a material, specifically celluloid-based, thing. Something that we can manipulate, correct, perfect, and silently maintain, something still susceptible to human intervention and judgment. It would be a pity to lose this radical seat in the digital transition.

Most people talk about movies on the basis of stars, directors, plots, sometimes genres. In some ways, though, the surest indicator of tone, style, and resonance, if not overall quality, is the production company.

Film programmers tend to think about this rather often. More than we like to acknowledge, repertory screenings are dictated by the vagaries of which studios make continued efforts to circulate their titles and which don’t. Booking prints is more complicated than it might sound at first. Keeping tabs on who has what demands a near-encyclopedic command of corporate merger dates, decades-old television licensing agreements, the whereabouts of archival deposits, and individual tastes of collectors and curators long since gone. It’s easy to take for granted today, for example, that a film made by Warner Bros.-First National seven decades ago can be rented directly from Warner Bros.; for a long time, the classic WB titles were held by United Artists Classics, later MGM-UA, subsequently Turner Entertainment, itself now conveniently under the Time Warner umbrella.

It’s easy to forget about studios when the studios themselves made such all-encompassing efforts to divest of their back catalog. RKO’s library traded hands from one disinterested owner (the General Tire and Rubber Company) to another (C&C Television Corp., a cola company subsidiary). Paramount’s 1929-1948 holdings were sold off to an MCA shell-company, EMKA in 1957, with many titles forever after only available in copies that bare the marks of quick, cheap, and frenzied duplication for television distribution. (Luckily, MCA’s subsequent acquisition of Decca Records, itself the parent company of Universal-International, brought the Paramount library under the auspices of a studio that would demonstrate exceptional stewardship of this complex collection.)

Once we find a path through this thicket of malleable ownership, we begin to notice qualities common across a studio’s production schedule. Their form speaks to the ideology. The Warner Bros. picture of the 1930s is, of course, instantly recognizable—rarely more than 75 minutes, rough around the edges, focused so intently on elemental striving that it neglects to notice or much care about the finer things in life. M-G-M’s features of the same period are, with only a handful of exceptions, insufferable—invariably half an hour longer than they need to be, never content to simply show something when it can be spoken, repeated, and hammered home in expository dialogue delivered disarmingly late in the picture. Watching M-G-M output can actively make you angry: so much waste on such pallid, undercooked, but overdetermined material. After the anger subsides, you feel a strange pity: the pictures demonstrate such an enfeebled, narrow notion of class that the monolithic (and conservative) M-G-M house style just sounds tinny.

(The best M-G-M product of the period is either pure aberration—Freaks, Hallelujah!, Mad Love—or a well-oiled example of the small, but quite genuine pleasures, afforded by the studio’s respectable formulae, such as Private Lives or Skyscraper Souls. At the other end of the scale, what other studio could draw upon the talents of Howard Hawks, William Faulkner, and Gary Cooper and produce a film so useless as Today We Live?)

Let’s be clear: Paramount produced the most consistently sophisticated and clear-headed film fare in the 1930s and early 1940s. The top-line continental talent roster—Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, Billy Wilder—was matched by a bevy of craftspeople who collectively evinced an overarching sense of taste that easily outstripped M-G-M’s tacky idea of the same. Even when making ‘B’ pictures and lower-budget fare, Paramount’s technicians accorded a baseline standard that was very high indeed. (Compare a ‘minor’ Paramount film like 1932’s Hot Saturday to quickie output of any other studio, and every set-up and edit looks uncommonly professional and considered.) Above all, they’re adult in their concerns and conclusions.

Paramount didn’t do everything well, of course. Its straight melodramas are frequently less urgent, less dangerous than parallel efforts at other studios. (Paramount’s perfectly good 1933 Claudette Colbert vehicle Torch Singer is nevertheless a bedtime story next to Universal’s devastating 1934 version of Imitation of Life.) Its horror films are impressive, but unfocused, really needing the control of a director like Universal’s James Whale to sculpt their disturbing images into coherence. Its Astoria-shot Broadway adaptations occasionally go limp—and then a shot is held a bit longer than you expect and the whole thing takes on an intensity of brutal observation that still grips.

Selecting Paramount’s masterpiece of this period is difficult, though not for lack of plausible candidates (among them, The Wedding March, Docks of New York, Morocco, The Smiling Lieutenant, Trouble in Paradise, A Farewell to Arms, Million Dollar Legs, Duck Soup, The Scarlet Empress, Peter Ibbetson, Make Way for Tomorrow, Midnight, and Christmas in July, to select only a handful). If I Had a Million may not be on the level of those films, but as a representative sample of Paramount’s virtues during the ’30s, it can’t be beat. To some degree, it exceeds and amplifies the usual virtues.

Getting a handle on the planning and production of If I Had a Million during the summer and fall of 1932 is somewhat difficult. A notice in the Film Daily publicized Paramount’s efforts to solicit story material from “50 of the world’s leading writers.” The production was mentioned in the same breath as such obviously serious and industry-uplifting efforts as Strange Interlude. The cast list seemed to be updated every other day. Gary Cooper’s participation was announced barely a week before the film’s Los Angeles preview. A steel magnate decides to disperse his millions to random strangers, and that’s all you need to know.

(Perhaps not the “New Deal in Entertainment” that Warners would soon be offering, Paramount’s publicity nevertheless spoke of the set as a sort of WPA avant la lettre. “A group of old-time stage actresses, many of whom have been ill, unable to work, or actually destitute, found that Hollywood has a heart after all when production of ‘If I Had a Million’ … was underway,” reported the Los Angeles Times. The charity casting included stage and screen veterans like Margaret Mann, Ruby Lafayette, Gertrude Norman, Lydia Knott, Edith Yorke, Ida Lewis, and Emma Tansey. In describing the travails in the final segment set in May Robson’s old folks’ home, the Chicago Daily Tribune struck a particularly cruel vérité note: “It wasn’t acting for a lot of the old ladies, for these things are grim and real things to them. The crying was quite real in this scene, so touching that the director himself had trouble with his eyes.”)

The final print boasted eight stories, fifteen stars, eight directors, and no less than sixteen writers. (And those were just the ones credited on screen; undoubtedly others contributed without citation, inclusive of all the cinematographers, assistant directors, editors, and countless other contracted crew given unusually short shrift here.) Exactly who did what behind the camera was left murky at release time. Nearly every contemporary review attributes the Charles Laughton segment to Lubitsch, a fact that Paramount promoted to the exclusion of the other directors’ participation. (It’s an out-sized bit of publicity for the shortest, and most unwaveringly linear, segment.) Some reviews linked specific stories to individual writers and directors, but a measure of ambiguity was preserved. Later critical accounts and filmographies offer divergent answers about who did what and some have devoted considerable space to parsing this question.

This matter of credit is not important for auteurist reasons (is the Charlie Ruggles episode A Film by Norman Z. McLeod or, perhaps by Stephen Roberts?) but for the way it speaks to the overall nature of the production. More than most Hollywood features, If I Had a Million is a corporate product, the result of committee-thought. The exact contributions of its human laborers are purposefully obscure. Its author is Paramount Pictures in a significant way.

It’s bracing, then, that If I Had a Million is not only tonally varied and emotionally measured, but surprisingly reasonable and non-loathsome in its attitude towards money. The critic Dave Kehr has, with justice, characterized contemporary Paramount efforts as fantasies of an ‘Uptown Depression,’ one which ‘seemed to have its greatest effect not on switchboard operators and taxi drivers, but on Park Avenue socialites, Broadway stars and well-heeled bootleggers.’ And yet no one in If I Had a Million instinctively reaches for new minks or sables at news of the seven-figure windfall. If these characters buy stuff, they destroy it willfully and immediately (as in the Fields and Ruggles segments). Nearly all use the money for some act of defiance against illegitimate economic overlords. Prostitute Wynne Gibson’s decision to rent herself a hotel room and sleep alone for the first time in memory is a sly rebuke to ruling forces too diffuse to be dispatched with something like Laughton’s Bronx cheer proffered in the boss’s doorway.

No one in If I Had a Million is delirious from hunger, but their everyday psychological deprivation is acute. This ‘capitalist’ film reflected Depression-era realities and attitudes and pointed towards legitimate grievances that increasingly looked irresolvable through conventional political channels. While If I Had a Million was playing second-run at the Southtown at 63rd and Halstead, the Chicago Defender coincidentally posed a comparable question in its ‘What Do You Say About It?’ column. Most of the hypothetical reader-millionaires wrote of building schools and other high-minded activities, though one Boisey Williams of Chicago proposed a “campaign to debunk the so-called present day Race leaders. In each principal city I would put certain radical leaders on my pay roll to attend all the meetings that are held under the guise of ‘uplift movements,’ and when the speakers begin to sell us to the white people, who are always present for a purpose, one of my associates would ask important questions that would break up the meeting and discredit the ‘sell-out’ leader.”

Nothing in If I Had a Million approaches that solution, of course; nevertheless, few films are more direct and insightful about hating and protesting your position in society. (It’s also forthright enough to acknowledge that even a million bucks doesn’t go nearly far enough in a rigged police state with other priorities.) Fantasy or not, If I Had a Million is about the same inchoate political dissatisfaction that’s presently driving thousands into the streets of a newly Occupied America.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening a 35mm print of If I Had a Million as part of our Classic Film Series at the Portage Theater on Wednesday, November 23. Print courtesy of Universal, special thanks to Paul Ginsburg and Dennis Chong. Please bring any visiting in-laws and check out our current calendar for more information.