Radical Spinach: Wild Boys of the Road

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Who was this movie made for?

Often the answer is obvious enough (housewives, teenage boys, the Friday night drive-in bumpkin, the half-conscious grindhouse denizen, etc.), but in some special cases, the interrogation itself opens up and deepens the mystery of the film in question. In those instances, the absence of a readily identifiable target audience makes the fact of a film’s production and release all the more beguiling.

Let’s talk about Wild Boys of the Road. It’s commonly reckoned an exemplar of the social problem film as developed by Warner Bros. in the 1930s. As Nick Roddick points out in his study of the studio corpus, A New Deal in Entertainment, such films were memorable and distinctive, but hardly plentiful. Warner Bros., like every other major studio, released a film a week in the 1930s, most of them bread-and-butter pictures that kidded campus life or military hijinks. The ambitious, socially-conscious pictures like Black Legion or They Won’t Forget were the exception to the surly, comfortable rule.

On a film-for-film basis, the distinction between the Warners output and that of every other studio seems to shrivel. Jack Warner made no effort to keep his politics off the backlot and modern audiences are still somewhat surprised by the forthrightly partisan gestures that crop up in the studio’s films, like the FDR portrait in Footlight Parade or the ubiquitous National Recovery Act eagle in judge’s chambers in Wild Boys. But Fox’s contemporaneous The Man Who Dared showed no compunction about the stridently Democratic remarks made by politico Preston Foster, a transparent stand-in for the recently assassinated Anton Cermak. Warner’s famous I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is strong stuff, but so is RKO’s less-heralded chain gang picture Hell’s Highway. Urban poverty permeates the Warner Bros. pictures, but it’s equally strong in Columbia’s Man’s Castle or UA’s Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.

The whole notion of a studio-specific attitude towards daily life is a convenient critical device, but one that sometimes runs at compelling cross-purposes with the way the studio itself tried to position its films. In the case of Wild Boys of the Road, it was one of a handful of titles triumphantly announced by Warner Bros. in June 1933. (Depression or no Depression, the 1933-1934 season would see the largest capital commitment on Warner’s part in the past eight years.) The centerpiece of that announcement was, of course, the immediate production of Footlight Parade, the natural follow-up to the mega-hits 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933. Without any marquee names, Wild Boys took a back seat to numerous star vehicles—including some that never reached the screen, like the Napoleon biopic that Edward G. Robinson was supposedly set to make right after completing Red Meat (itself re-titled, much less evocatively, as I Loved a Woman before release.)

The adults in Wild Boys of the Road were below-the-line character actors in decidedly supporting roles. (Ward Bond, recognizable today but totally unknown in 1933, played the bit part of the freight train rapist.) The juvenile leads were hardly the stuff to hang a publicity campaign on. To get some idea of just how far afield Wild Boys was from a conventional business proposition for Warner Bros., consider the studio’s big pre-release gambit in the New York Sun:

Dorothy Coonan has many freckles—182 in fact. Now in her teens, Dorothy earns her living by facing the cameras and exposing her good-looking but freckled countenance to the public gaze on movie screens. [Coonan had appeared uncredited as a chorine in several Busby Berkeley musicals for Warners.] Her contract provides that she’s out of a job if she loses her freckles. So yesterday she applied for $100,000 worth of freckle insurance.

If only those kids in Wild Boys of the Road had freckle insurance; no riding the rails for them. (Coonan never had to cash in her insurance claim; she married director William A. Wellman in 1934.)

Was Wild Boys a daring social problem picture with a touch of uplift, as we tend to regard it today, or an awkward exploitation challenge with no ready roadmap? It certainly wasn’t promoted to the public as a righteous act of corporate protest. Warner’s trailer promises something like the vaguely educational cinema-smut hawked not in conventional theaters but in ad hoc fairground tents:

the LIVING TRUTH about
600,000 WILD BOYS
… INNOCENT GIRLS
Driven to
VAGRANCY!
CRIME!
FATES worse than DEATH!

JOLTING FACTS about humanity’s SHAME
THE ABANDONED GENERATION!
A Thousand Times More Sensational Than
“I AM A FUGITIVE”

SHOCKING ENOUGH
to make the very earth TREMBLE IN TERROR

By all accounts, when the Wild Boys were released into the wild, box office returns proved disappointing. (It didn’t help that Wellman ran $29,000 over-budget for a lean, 68-minute movie destined for double bills.) Exhibitors can be forgiven for lax support in light of Variety’s extraordinary notice:

Granting that boys on the road is a vital public question and that this picture gives it absorbing treatment, the outstanding fact is that it makes a depressing evening in the theatre, one that the general fan public would gladly avoid. Fact is that while the picture has been very well done, it should never have been done at all for general commercial release. Subjects of this class as a business proposition are a good deal like a man who ran a restaurant and insisted upon putting on his bill of fare only those items that he felt sure were good for his customers—spinach for instance—and ignored the desires of his customers for viands that might not be so good for them in general, but which they liked and wanted to buy. You might applaud his good intentions, but you’d have a poor opinion of his business capacity.

Indeed the very merits of ‘Wild Boys of the Road’ are its difficulties. The acting is so gripping and the incidents so graphic that they conspire to make the hour’s running of the subject one of considerable discomfort to the spectator. The picture presents a distressing condition only too absorbingly ….

It may be a public service to herald these facts to unwilling ears, but the theater cannot well hope to prosper materially in such a venture …. The times, in short, have anxieties enough without going to the theatre to learn about more.

Perhaps the bottom line-oriented Variety misjudged the effect of the admittedly downbeat subject. The Motion Picture Herald advised exhibitors that the air of familiar unease could be a net-positive at the box office, with possible community tie-ins. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported that Warner Bros. sponsored a preview of the film for a hundred boys from the local forestry camp, who offered a different verdict: “The boys considered the event a great lark and undoubtedly a source of satisfaction to view themselves portrayed as besting both railroad and city police in pitched battles in their travels over the land. Judge Sam Blake of the juvenile court said the picture revealed stories he hears every day in court.”

(Boys will be boys: the Wild Boys extras were paid three dollars a day to throw eggs at the police, decidedly better than standing in a breadline.)

No one would deny that Wild Boys of the Road is a confused venture on many levels. The social challenge of Wild Boys of the Road has received skeptical treatment from subsequent critics, who are quick to note that the original, harsher ending was softened and re-filmed at the behest of the studio. Yet the optimism of the finale hardly negates what’s preceded it: the half-serious notion of the kids setting up a squatter’s republic, the basically untroubled endorsement of violent resistance to police brutality, the barely-expressed but deeply felt account of fluid adolescent sexuality. (It’s a testament to artless efficiency of Wild Boys of the Road that its implied ménage-a-trois is much more affecting than the explicit arrangement of Lubitsch’s Design for Living from the same year.) These facts are more than enough to confirm Wild Boys’ radical credentials. (And besides, the re-tooled ending provides the set-up for one defiantly exuberant gesture and a related moment of recognition that’s as devastating as anything else in the film.)

A follow-up article in the Times offered an equally upbeat account of the city’s migrant youth dilemma, going so far as to conclude that “from them Los Angeles might gain the leaders for the next crop of useful citizens.” It’s this attitude that makes Wild Boys of the Road a quintessential picture of New Deal ideology—for once in American life, the system was blamed and the victim lionized, rather than vice versa. In today’s austerity atmosphere, where centrist wisdom supports entitlement cuts and bolsters the status quo on foreclosure, taxation, and all manner of other destructive policy choices, Wild Boys of the Road remains a rare achievement in empathy.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening Wild Boys of the Road in a 35mm preservation print from the Library of Congress on May 2 at the Portage Theater as part of our Classic Film Series. Please see our current calendar for more information. Special thanks to Rob Stone and Lynanne Schweighofer. Wild Boys of the Road is the inaugural screening in our collaborative series with portoluz. Please visit portoluz to learn more about their WPA 2.0: A Brand New Day programming.

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What Reanimated Russian Dog Heads Can Teach Us About Programming: The Legacy of Amos Vogel (1921-2012)

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Last week’s news of Amos Vogel’s death, at 91, brought the expected—and deserved—tributes for the enormous influence of two ventures that he co-founded: Cinema 16, the New York-based film society that ran from 1947 to 1963, and the New York Film Festival, which Vogel programmed from 1963 to 1968.  (In these ventures, equal credit must go, respectively, to Amos’s partner Marcia Vogel and the critic/curator Richard Roud, both deceased.) The lineup of filmmakers whose work Vogel introduced to New York audiences is certainly imposing: Polanski, Ozu, Brakhage, Anger, Cassavetes, Bresson, Resnais, Rivette, Varda, Naruse. The list could go on.

Courtesy Annenberg School of Communication

With respect to Cinema 16, the Vogels’ feat is nearly incomprehensible today. Gravitating towards a membership-driven screening series after encountering absurd troubles with the New York censors (who proscribed, among other films, Alexander Hammid’s The Private Life of a Cat from public viewing), Cinema 16 eventually counted over 5,000 individual subscriptions. Such a cultural paradigm is as distant as the epithets once marshaled to describe it: aspiring eggheads, Masscult vs. Midcult, art house.

Operating out of a 1,600-seat high school venue (the Central Needle Trades Auditorium) that would often be filled to capacity for both the early and late performance, Cinema 16 carved out a public profile for avant-garde cinema that it has scarcely enjoyed since.

Of course, Cinema 16 was not exclusively an avant-garde series; to the contrary, Vogel always emphasized that such a programming strategy would be suicidal and counter-productive, for Cinema 16 and for the films themselves. Such a position led inevitably, more or less, to the creation of the New American Cinema Group, the Film-Maker’s Coop, and eventually Anthology Film Archives—institutions formed to address this subject without apology. Stan Brakhage described the conundrum to Scott MacDonald in a 1996 interview:

 Amos was the one hope. He had an audience of five thousand people to whom he would show works that my friends and I regarded as art. That was wonderful, but he showed the films we admired in a mix with scandal movies and documentaries of various shocking subjects. In a way, Cinema 16 programs often didn’t look all that different to me from the newsreels I had attended as a child during the Second World War.

Amos’s main concern and consideration was to show things that you couldn’t see elsewhere, and that was what attracted his audiences. They felt very special; they were seeing things that weren’t allowed into the local neighborhood theaters and later that you couldn’t see on television: censored things, sexual subject matter, dog heads kept alive on tables in Russian laboratories—a mix into which was stirred some of the great American independent films.

This characteristic mix was present from the very first Cinema 16 program in November 1947: Sidney Peterson and James Broughton’s surrealist short The Potted Psalm, a filmed record of a Martha Graham performance of Lamentation, Douglas Crockwell abstract animation Glen Falls Sequence, the anti-Bomb cartoon Boundary Lines, and the evolution documentary Monkey to Man.

So there’s justice in Brakhage’s pronouncement, but also a certain harshness. More than a midway cinema barker, Vogel expounded on his programming strategies with uncommon candor in a series of articles that aimed to galvanize non-theatrical exhibition around the country. It’s a virtue that separates Vogel from most all of his successors. These days, programming and curatorial strategies and museum practices are dissected in graduate-level seminars, but the popularizing impulse is almost entirely absent.

The most successful programmer in America, with ample work on his plate, took the time to explain the minutiae of the job to a general audience: stirring up a following with the help of local store-keepers, securing free legal advice by appointing a lawyer to your advisory board, collecting film catalogs from a welter of similar-sounding organizations (The Educational Film Guide, Educational Screen, Educators Progress Service, etc.), procuring a ‘fifty-cent buzzer-and-code system’ for sending messages to the make-shift projection booth. About the latter, Vogel added, with characteristic humor and fleet social portraiture, “Ask the projectionist to move around quietly and, if he has brought his family to watch him, to wait to discuss personal matters until after the show.” Who knew that every projectionist in New York had a Yiddische Momme?

The Vogel message was essentially democratic. “[W]ith ingenuity, perseverance, knowledge of films, and luck,” he wrote “anyone can operate a film society.” Indeed, for a brief moment, anyone did. It helped that mass-circulation publications like the Saturday Review of Literature printed a regular 16mm column and newer, niche rags like Film Culture devoted space to film society matters. The post-war rise of the film society would ultimately produce a circuit of thousands of such clubs in churches, community lodges, libraries, union halls, campsites, and especially, colleges. (Cecile Starr’s 1956 chapbook Film Society Primer, to which Vogel contributed an article, is an essential and undervalued document of this moment in history, filled with overwhelmingly earnest accounts of successful ventures in towns great and small.)

Of course, the proliferation of film societies was something in which Cinema 16 had no small interest. Beginning with a brief note in a 1948 program notifying peers that select Cinema 16 selections were available for showing at your local film society, the non-profit group ultimately released a series of distribution catalogs, the final one containing some 240 titles for rent.

Vogel intended Cinema 16 as a model for like-minded film societies, perhaps too narrowly. “If you haven’t the feel for balanced programs,” Vogel counseled, “you will fail. The science of programming cannot be taught; it requires psychological insight into the likes of other people and continuing contact with your specific audience to permit you to correct yourself as you go along.”

Programming may not have been teachable full-stop, but Vogel certainly had some prescriptions: mix up features and shorts, with the expectation the latter will often be more free-wheeling and genuinely artistic; include scientific films, art films, educational films, experimental films, old films, new films, telefilms; resist censorship and encourage any easily-offended members to absent themselves; vary the tone of programs, with cartoons often appropriate before more serious social-problem fare. On occasion, Vogel’s practical advice could shade into the cavalier and paternalistic:

If films shown by the film society are entertaining, so much the better; but entertainment value cannot be the sole criterion for film society programming, nor can audience approval or disapproval. Film societies must remain at least one step ahead of their audiences and must not permit themselves to be pulled down to the level of the lowest common denominator in the audience—a very easy, common, and dangerous occurrence in mass media. (We could take to heart the remark made by Frederick Stock, director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who after introducing Brahms to Chicago audiences for the first time said: “They do not like Brahms … I shall play him again.”)

Ironically, as Cinema 16 became the de facto gate-keeper of the independent cinema world, Vogel himself came to resemble a Hollywood mogul, warning filmmakers that their films were too long, pushing to cut out obscure sequences, withholding some films from exhibition until more palatable versions were offered. (It was precisely this set of circumstances that led Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and others to break away.)

One can, of course, admire Vogel’s achievements without subscribing to every detail of his doctrine. The network that Vogel sought to seed does not exist anymore in any easily recognized form. Campus film societies these days are rarely student-run and student-programmed. The social spaces that gave over a dingy hall to the local film club one Thursday a month have themselves largely vanished. Commercial repertory houses are under threat from digital projection. Cinematheques continue, but with nothing like the public profile that Vogel envisioned.

Perhaps the closest equivalents in recent times were the MoveOn.org-sponsored house parties of the Bush years, which brought neighbors together to see the agitprop documentaries of Robert Greenwald. Sadly, the cultural comforts of the Obama Age have squelched much of the energy behind these kinds of initiatives.

More’s the pity. Much of Vogel’s advice remains surprisingly current and sharp. We would still benefit from its wide enactment.

Courtesy Sticking Place Films

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Programming: Selecting/Unselecting

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

The Northwest Chicago Film Society is starting its fifth season this Wednesday with a 35mm print of The Trouble with Harry, a film that has the strange distinction of usually being regarded as ‘minor Hitchcock’ despite the fact that most everyone quite likes it, especially around these parts.

After that, we’re embarking on a collaborative series with portoluz, a local and like-minded non-profit organization devoted to, in their words, “creating sanctuaries for progressive culture.” Throughout the summer, portoluz will be sponsoring and curating a variety of cultural programming that re-examines the travails of the Depression and its policy legacy—a timely focus given renewed efforts to rollback and eradicate the progressive achievements of the twentieth century.

Though we feel there’s long been a political consciousness running through our programming and this blog, we had no qualms about making this commitment explicit.

But in many ways, the whole idea of running a series as such did represent a shift in what we do, and we want to talk about it this week on the blog.

When the Northwest Chicago Film Society began assembling its first schedule in late 2010 after news of the imminent closure of the Bank of American Cinema, we opted to emulate the programming style of the old calendars. Though there would be an occasional, very loose series on a given calendar in the Bank days—like Michael King and Michael Phillips’s storied Mustache Cinema series in the latter half of 2006—these were the exception rather than the rule. Mustache Cinema is actually an emblematic example: while Gene Kelly in The Pirate, Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter, and Humphrey Bogart in Virginia City all sport uncharacteristic mustaches, no one would ever look at that grouping and conclude it represented a serious critical position rather than an amused, up-front diversion. (To talk about Mustache Cinema at any length here is to undercut its self-evident force and perfection.)

But the decision to run Northwest Chicago Film Society without a series template—just one film after another, week after week—was a conscious one, born out of something larger than inertia.

When working as a programmer, there’s a heavy temptation to conflate the final product with the perfect distillation of your own taste and erudition. Programmers instinctively think in terms of double features, even if their venues don’t run double features.  “The Devil, Probably is so amazing—and it would make a great pairing with Gus van Sant’s Last Days, wouldn’t it?” or “I really want to program Johnny Guitar, but I can wait until there’s a new print of Rancho Notorious. They would make for a wicked double feature, am I right?” While there’s nothing wrong with these hypothetical match-ups, they beg the question of what the point of programming is in the first place.

Hiring film critics with minimal programming experience has been a fad as of late: witness Elvis Mitchell at LACMA. But the two jobs are quite distinct. While film programming obviously involves opinion and judgment, they are not its reason for being. (Compare this to film criticism in the pre-Internet days, when the lay readership giddily flipped through the Friday paper in hopes of finding a savage review with quotable bon mots.) Programming means bringing films to the public and sustaining the institutions that disseminate them.  The audience should emerge with a broader understanding of film history and social history and with some consciousness about the material screened (e.g., a new print from a years-in-the-planning restoration). Knowing where a particular film falls in the programmer’s personal Top Ten Films of 1974 is considerably less important.  (It’s also essential to remember that programming has its own unique skill set, which occasionally intersects with criticism, but also equally with theater management, logistics, advertising, fundraising, public relations, preservation, accounting, institutional politicking, and scavenger hunting.)

Series necessarily impose an overt critical framework on the films being presented. Sometimes it’s a simple and uncontroversial framework, like a director or actress retrospective. (I’ve had a Zita Johann season in my head for a while now.) Such series are easy for the audience to understand and allow the programmer to recede somewhat: when the calendar advertises an Ingmar Bergman retro, hardly anybody gives thought to the programmer. Doesn’t a series like that just program itself?

Yes and no. Our friend Jason Guthartz has imported to the film world the useful vocabulary of ‘selected/unselected’ from the jazz percussionist Paul Lovens. When winnowing a long career down to the digestible series, films need to be selected and unselected, with emphases and omissions putting forward an (often-unstated) interpretation.

And yet programmers are not always free to select and unselect. Can you imagine that Bergman retrospective without The Seventh Seal or Persona? Or take a case like Robert Mitchum. Any self-respecting Mitchum series needs to include The Night of the Hunter, and that’s all well and good. The Night of the Hunter is one of the indisputably great films and it could stand to be shown every week without diminishing the experience. And even though it’s a much lesser movie, it would be odd to exclude Cape Fear from our hypothetical Mitchum season, as it’s such an iconic working-out of the whole psychosexual Mitchum case. The noir aficionados expect you to program Out of the Past, too. Pretty soon, you’ve filled up your appointed five or eight or ten slots, but through obligation and convention. For the last slot, you show The Locket and the regulars whisper that you’re making a daring gesture towards the received canon. (Or try a massive, seemingly impartial, comprehensive Mitchum series and that’s another kind of gauntlet gesture: by showing the totality, you’re attaching a certain weight to Mitchum’s body of work.)

To show these movies singly—not in the context of Mitchum but amidst a clutch of other, seemingly random selections—changes the equation considerably. Each stands or falls on its own merits. Anyone for Two for the Seesaw?

But again we’ve fallen into treating film programming as a critical activity: Does this Mitchum selection have integrity on its own terms? Do we have the space to put forward a meaningful summation of his career?

But programming considerations are more often practical. Is the series framework a net positive for the films themselves? For the venue? An Alfred Hitchcock series sells itself. But what about a more obscure auteur like John M. Stahl?

In our experience, repertory audiences, even dedicated and curious ones, select and unselect with impunity. You read through an extensive calendar and can’t possibly attend everything. You make choices and series help facilitate those choices. You discriminate. You’ve never heard of that director. You don’t like Westerns. You’re tired of depressing films about immigration or alcoholism. You’re enrolled in a class at the local Alliance Française and gravitate towards French-language films this month.

To call these decisions ‘prejudices’ may sound harsh, but that’s what they are, reasonable or not. You look at the series and make a snap judgment about it before getting down into the weeds of the films themselves. The individual capsule might be a beautiful sell job, but it’s irrelevant if you check out before reaching it.

We tend to prefer the non-series approach for this reason. Without guideposts, everyone has to read about each film before jumping to conclusions. We try to use our capsules to make the case in multiple registers. You might not like Westerns, but we don’t spend a preponderant amount of space describing The Halliday Brand in those terms. It’s also a political allegory, a terrific Ward Bond vehicle, an impressive low-budget triumph for Joseph H. Lewis.

Series also tend to bring about a certain fatigue. Even if you do like Westerns, do you really want a straight diet of them for a whole month or two? Some folks would be very interested in a Japanese New Wave retrospective but can’t pencil in twelve successive Thursday evenings because, unlike programmers, they have lives and commitments outside the cinémathèque. Does the series cannibalize or intimidate the audience?

To be sure, there are many pragmatic reasons for pursuing series. When staring at a blank calendar that you’ve been tasked with filling, there’s a certain efficiency in thinking in series terms, rather than coming up with twenty one-offs. In some situations, series are a necessity: a foreign archive or consulate is more likely to devote time and energy to helping a venue scrounge up prints, rights, and guest speakers in a series context. The series represents a buy-in for all parties involved.

Of course, series aren’t always so clear-cut. The more conceptual outings—freed from personality, genre, or period—walk a very fine line. At their best, such series help us to see more clearly. Some years ago, when Ian Birnie was still at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, they mounted a series about Hollywood’s representations of psychoanalysis. The usual suspects like Spellbound were there. But Ian also programmed Sleep, My Love—a dreadful Douglas Sirk film with Claudette Colbert in the Gaslight or Suspicion mode. If one were programming a Sirk series or a Colbert series, Sleep, My Love would be unselected during the preliminary rounds. Programmed singly at the Northwest Chicago Film Society, we would have a great number of disappointed patrons. But in the right context, this minor film becomes a major one, a key text in the elaboration of a particular line of argument. (Are we shading into criticism again?) Most importantly, it’s about finding a context where a film is essential and satisfying on its own terms.

I could cite many other examples: Miriam Bale’s Bluebeard series at Anthology Film Archives, Peter Conheim and Steve Seid’s Southern (Dis)comfort at PFA and the Roxy, Kian Bergstrom’s Impossible Adaptations at Doc Films. All of these drew together films that are otherwise not often programmed. (But none of them is Mustache Cinema either.)

The latitude required to pursue series like these is often dictated by mundane things like the venue’s calendar layout. In the Doc Films example, the calendar itself has been more or less unchanged for the last twenty-five years: a 24”x36” poster with an eight-column, ten-row grid of capsules. Each column represents a series and each row is a week in the academic quarter. It’s a great format for a barren dormitory wall, not so great for reading on the Red Line. If the idea of the series isn’t immediately clear, the reader will skip over to the next column. On Film Forum’s calendar, week-long runs get extensive coverage, but individual films in big series get a single line, if that.

Our favorite repertory house of old, the late Bruce Trinz’s Clark Theater in the Loop, didn’t run series, but produced a grid calendar where every film received a catchy couplet, like this one for The Public Enemy: “He made a career / On killing and beer.”

Generally speaking, the more complicated the series and the more involved the explanation behind it, the less room the designer and editor have for capsules. Add in pictures (especially pictures for every screening) and you’re down to fragments. It’s a trade-off that speaks to a venue’s values.

Luckily, the internet has freed up programmers and designers alike. A short version of a capsule can be edited for the print publication and a longer version can hit the web. Blogs can provide in-depth coverage of a particular film or series without any thought towards word count.

In the case of our collaboration with portoluz, we felt the series framework was productive without imposing too much. The general idea is to look at films of and about the Depression, but the berth is sufficiently wide to include everything from a neglected Fritz Lang-Kurt Weill musical to a cheerfully fascist DeMille pageant. We made a particular effort to minimize series fatigue by varying the tone and genre as much as possible. At best, we hope the films are more legible for being in dialogue with one another. At the same time, we won’t carp if you don’t even recognize the series as such.

 

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Waiting to See Au hasard Balthazar: The Case for Snoozing and Other Bad Behavior in the Movie Theater

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Bill Everson, close friend of many decades, writer, historian and teacher, at a film festival announced that his notion of hell would be to have all the films in the world but no projector. My own hell would be to have a projector and all the films but no one around to see them with me. – James Card

• • •

Last week Drew Hunt, a blogger for the Chicago Reader’s Bleader, voiced an increasingly common attitude towards theatrical movie-going, namely that poorly socialized audience members are so prevalent these days that you may as well not even bother buying a ticket. Such behavior isn’t just confined to The Hunger Games at your local multiplex:

Most of the films I’ve seen in recent weeks have been at either the Gene Siskel Film Center or the Music Box, places where one would assume the audience to possess a certain refinement. However, members of the audience at both theaters weren’t averse to whispering loudly with their friends about things unrelated to the movie, texting, fiddling with their snacks, chewing food loudly, or even falling asleep.

When I really think about it, most theatergoing experiences I have are disrupted by behaviors such as these. Considering this, I’ve drawn the admittedly imprecise but no less eye-opening conclusion that the people who care most about movies are the ones who stay home.

Admittedly, as film exhibitors by trade, we have strong feelings about this subject and about Hunt’s conclusion. Exhibitors are feeling exceedingly under siege these days, and complaints about audience behavior are only a part of it. At a time when the Hollywood studios are gung-ho to migrate their business from traditional theaters to streaming and video-on-demand platforms, strong feelings are unavoidable and necessary.

The National Association of Theater Owners—a rabidly anti-labor trade group with whom we rarely agree—has done much to fan this paranoid, but not necessarily incorrect, interpretation of recent industry developments. According to NATO, theaters will strike back by screening ‘alternate content’—industry-speak for opera, concert, and sports telecasts. Patrick Corcoran, NATO’s Director of Media & Research, even took to the pages of Boxoffice this month to spin an extended Moneyball analogy about how theaters need to modernize their programming instead of persisting on ‘a tired home run that is still wheezing around the bases a couple of months after it hit the ball.” (But don’t count NATO out on the rude patron front, either; they propose a ‘culture of civility,’ which presumably includes some of the other things that they tout, like ‘auditorium monitoring devices’ and ‘guest response systems.’)

And yet quite independent of this intra-industry fight are routine declarations that film-going is simply dead, often from journalists whose considerable apathy has done much to kill it. Hunt is actually the exception in this respect; at least he saw eight films at the Siskel’s EU Festival. Contrast that with this indiewire article from Jamie Stuart, who proudly proclaims that his sweet HDTV set-up was more than enough to dissuade him from venturing into a theater for the first eleven months of 2011. (And, of course, that’s a sufficient vantage point for him to declare that 35mm is obsolete and that “[s]omeone needs to slap Spielberg in the face and tell him to wake up” about this fact so that history can move forward apace.)

These proclamations are dispiriting chiefly because they frequently manifest a thoroughly anti-social, even misanthropic, attitude towards public spaces and other people. Absent any notion that film is an irreducibly social medium, we’re left screeching about how the friggin’ guy in the next row—the one smacking his lips so loudly on each cashew—is destroying our communion with cinematic art. Can you believe that the woman sitting two seats away simply fell asleep in the middle of the movie? (This is an odd criticism; surely she didn’t come to the movie with the intent to nod off and she certainly didn’t do it to spite you either.)

How times have changed. Until the 1960s, it was expected that people would enter and leave movies as they pleased, regardless of any printed showtimes. (This is the probable origin of the phrase “This is where I came in.”) Theaters have always been chaotic, unruly spaces, unless you believe that children, teens, and many adults were simply less defiantly disaffected in decades past. The grindhouse experience so affectionately remembered today was practically defined by audience behavior that makes texting look positively cordial. (My favorite anecdote from a friend’s recollection of the milieu: a screening interrupted by a fight that culminated in the unforgettable line, “You’re sorry? You’re sorry? You piss on my girlfriend and say that you’re sorry?”)

Above all, the calls for genteel screenings express a strangely anti-septic desire: going out without encountering or being reminded of other people. At best, they’re disruptions or distractions, never positive contributors to the experience.

I frequently find the opposite to be true. Would Hunt have been horrified by the matinee audience with whom I saw The Passion of the Christ for the first and only time? On one side of me, there was a middle-aged woman reflexively screaming “Oh Jesus!” at the bloodier moments. On the other side, a trio of kids, none of whom could’ve been older than nine; one was reading every single subtitle aloud to the other two in a devout whisper. A twentysomething man constantly wept in the row in front of me. Their reactions were distinct from mine and suggested a range of emotions that I could scarcely access or begin to understand on my own. What would I have learned about Gibson’s film or the quite genuine fervor it inspired if I’d caught up with it at home on DVD?

Granted, sometimes audience behavior has nothing immediately to do with the movie at hand. But sometimes this indifference is itself a statement and, in a sense, a form of criticism. If it’s offensive to fall asleep at an art movie, why can’t it be a protest to snooze during the latest violent shoot-’em-up?

There’s another argument in Hunt’s post that demands some unpacking:

I wasn’t made privy to the allure of cinema until my early 20s, and I feel as if I’ve been playing catchup ever since—which is why I value home viewing as heartily as I do. If I were to delineate percentages for my viewing habits, the results would heavily favor the DVD or streaming format. Without these options, I would’ve missed the pleasure of a plethora of great films. The nourishing experience of, say, Au Hasard Balthazar would have had to wait until the Film Center’s recent Robert Bresson retrospective. Who could bear such a thing?

Considering this, I’d venture to say that home viewing—though certainly not in the intended format—is the more intellectual exercise. To watch a film at one’s leisure, to have the power to pause, rewind, and examine a film, frame by frame, is an invaluable practice.

There is, of course, some truth in this account. Home video is an important research tool and the ability to revisit and dissect films is often essential to writing about them, as we do on our calendar and on this blog. But to elevate that kind of academic viewing experience over the theatrical one is an odd choice. Surely films derive at least some of their power from a sense of internal force and rhythm, an emotional-physical engagement that resists being paused. Imagine an analogous declaration about opera; listening to a CD recording is not just a scholarly adjunct to a live performance, but something that makes the performance nearly superfluous.

In some ways, Hunt is simply continuing the tradition inaugurated by the Reader’s long-time former film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. Though sufficiently alarmed by university film programs’ almost-total reliance on home video surrogates in the classroom to devote three pages to this phenomenon in his 2000 manifesto Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See, Rosenbaum quickly came around.  Scarcely four years later, he would speculate in his Reader column that “the most meaningful film watching in this country in 2003 was done at home.” In his more recent articles, Rosenbaum has embraced economically destructive bootlegs as the future of cinephilia, with the theatrical model derided as an out-moded paradigm.

Out-moded or not, repertory screenings are bound productively by time and place. Yes, that might mean waiting a few months or years to see Au hasard Balthazar, but that’s the point. The wide dissemination of great films is a positive thing for scholarship, but there’s value, too, in screenings that are themselves social events—things that people actually make plans to see and experience together. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s recent ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ presentation of Abel Gance’s Napoleon is an extreme case-in-point: the full orchestra, the Polyvision triptych, the latest iteration of a restoration that required the cooperation of a number of parties to reach the screen.

This logic applies to less rarified screenings, too. Public screenings allow people to see films whose rental and shipping would be prohibitively expensive on an individual basis. Again, this is a positive thing; in the very least, it acknowledges the fact that the conservation and preservation of film history requires a considerable investment, both monetarily and ideologically. Sometimes one simply has to wait for the stars to align. Is this an elite position? No more than the belief that supporting local businesses is essential to sustaining vibrant communities. One should always leave a screening feeling proud to be alive on this spot, in this moment.

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‘A Mental and Emotional Red Sea’: The Ten Commandments (1923)

Posted on April 7, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Tonight we’ll be screening an original IB Technicolor 35mm print of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments at the Portage. This 1956 epic is unequalled in its elemental power—its confusing mix of knotty, alien carnality and religious fervor has rightly frightened generations of children. (It’s also sufficiently iconic and hip enough to earn a nod in Arnaud Desplechin’s recent A Christmas Tale, alongside Nietzsche and Blackalicious.) But this four-hour spectacle wasn’t DeMille’s first attempt at bringing the Exodus to the screen. As a prologue to tonight’s festivities, we’re presenting a lengthy account of DeMille’s 1923 version. (To put that in some perspective, Charlton Heston was born in 1923.) Written in 2008, but previously unpublished, we hope you enjoy this article. And remember: You cannot break the Ten Commandments—they will break you. – Ed.  

• • •

“Intolerance unfortunately was the picture really that broke [Griffith], because he made a dramatic error that should never be made,” remarked Cecil B. DeMille in 1958. “He told four stories under the guise of one, and consequently all four failed. Because that is a formula that so far as I know has never been successful on the stage. One-act plays can be successful but not … the same theme running through four separate stories as one play.” DeMille himself never made any film as structurally ambitious as Griffith’s masterwork but his first rendition of The Ten Commandments perhaps comes closest. Intrinsically bifurcated rather than mosaical, DeMille’s 1923 super-production nevertheless stands as one of the very few Intolerance descendants to seriously attempt anything resembling Griffith’s thematic integration of parallel spectacles.

DeMille embarked on his own ‘dramatic error’ after a string of failed pictures. The latest of them, Adam’s Rib, struck many critics as another unnecessary entry in that most frivolous of genres, the high-society marital farce, which DeMille had practically created in 1918 and had been more or less confined to working in ever since by the Famous Players-Lasky front office. Meanwhile epic pictures from Fairbanks’s Robin Hood to Universal’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame were brought to the screen in hopes of sating a public primed for expensive costume spectacles by German imports such as Lubitsch’s Madame DuBarry. Famous Players-Lasky even had the effrontery to let James Cruze, then a relative neophyte, spend $782,000 on The Covered Wagon while forcing its star director to hew to a formula of diminishing appeal. Unlike Griffith, DeMille’s screen career began with and paralleled the development of the feature, his name practically synonymous with a certain notion of middle-class entertainment. Producers everywhere now laid claim to an audience that DeMille had nurtured. DeMille insisted on entering the million-dollar picture race himself, which would mean working on a scale he had not been permitted since Joan the Woman of 1916.

To make especially sure that his next picture would strike a chord with audiences DeMille made the unusual maneuver of soliciting scenarios directly from the public through a contest in the Los Angeles Times. Among thousands of submissions, DeMille was particularly taken with that of one F. C. Nelson, Lansing, Michigan, lubricant manufacturer: “You cannot break the Ten Commandments—they will break you.” For that line Nelson won a thousand dollars.

Seven other entrants also suggested a Commandments picture and each received comparable compensation, but it was Nelson’s phrasing that had the strongest influence on DeMille’s conception of The Ten Commandments.  Late in the film an intertitle reprints Nelson’s injunction, but his sense of vernacular bluntness hangs over the whole enterprise.

At first DeMille instructed his regular scenarist Jeanie Macpherson to translate Nelson’s dictum into a string of parables, each one illustrating the consequences of breaking one or perhaps two Commandments. When that structure proved unsatisfactory Macpherson concocted a convoluted scenario in which one emblematic modern man violates all ten. That was better but something was still missing.

“‘Seeing is believing,’” recounted Macpherson, “and we believed the spectator would be much more impressed with a story based on the Commandments if he first had seen the history of them, how they were given and what effect they had upon the people who had come in contact with them during that far-away time of the birth of the Decalogue, than as if this spectator had merely a vague memory from far off Sunday-school days that somewhere at some time the Ten Commandments had been given to somebody.”

No viewer of DeMille’s version would fail to recollect the story of the Lawgiver. Whether Adolph Zukor or Jesse Lasky knew it or not, no expense would be spared in the commission of this holy spectacle. “I cannot and will not make pictures with a yardstick,” DeMille told Zukor, though neither was shy about releasing the following statistics for purposes of ballyhoo: the Exodus was recreated in Santa Barbara’s Guadalupe sand dunes with the labor of 500 carpenters, 400 painters, and 380 decorators. The construction of the entrance to Rameses’s city required 300 tons of plaster, 55,000 board feet of lumber, and 25,000 pounds of nails. Costumes used 16 miles of cloth. The scenes themselves would require some 3,000 animals and 2,500 extras, including a smattering of Orthodox Jews to lend authenticity. The cast and crew lived out of a tent city that measured 24 square miles, with two mess halls, 125 chefs, and 10 tons of hay consumed by the livestock on a daily basis. Communication was facilitated by an extensive army field telephone system, the largest of its kind used since the Great War.

(Considering the scale of the production, the trick photography marshaled to achieve the parting of the Red Sea was rather modest: technical director Roy Pomeroy devised a traveling matte system that allowed the Jews to march across the seafloor between two wavering mountains of gelatin.)

The Ten Commandments had no less than six cinematographers—four credited technicians along with additional inserts by famed photographer Edward S. Curtis and color footage by Ray Rennahan. His employer, the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation—which had already released its own feature, The Toll of the Sea, through Metro—hoped to induce more Hollywood producers to utilize their two-color system. They offered Rennahan’s services on ridiculously generous terms: if DeMille liked the footage, he could use it in the picture gratis and if he did not it would be destroyed. Though DeMille preferred the more artisanal (and expensive) look achieved by the Handschiegl stencil process, he could not refuse Technicolor’s deal and agreed to let Rennahan shoot the Exodus and the parting of the Red Sea. (Release prints included the Handschiegl footage, the Technicolor footage, or some assortment of both, though the Technicolor version was predominant.)

By this time DeMille’s profligacy had well exceeded that of Cruze, whose western saga had already settled into a very profitable eight-month run in Hollywood. DeMille agreed to waive his guarantee but insisted on his keeping his weekly salary. Neither this gesture, nor DeMille’s promise that The Ten Commandments would be “the biggest picture ever made, not only from the standpoint of spectacle but from the standpoint of humanness, dramatic power, and the great good it will do,” much assuaged Zukor, who seriously contemplated selling the negative back to DeMille and forfeiting Paramount’s stake in any profits for a million dollars. Lasky prevailed upon him, however, and DeMille went forward with location shooting in San Francisco for the modern story. The final cost was $1,475,836.93. To remain solvent in light of that sum, Famous Players-Lasky shut down all other productions from October 1923 to year’s end.

Early reaction in the industry was overwhelmingly positive. Lasky himself lauded “the sincerity with which Cecil has handled this tremendous subject … almost as if he were inspired, a new and much bigger Cecil DeMille.” This theme was repeated by Motion Picture Magazine: “Just when humorists were finding in the DeMille tales of distorted society life ample material for their somewhat mordant jesting, he comes forth and blazes his name on the roster of the great.” Moving Picture World echoed that sentiment, too, proclaiming that “[e]very member of the large cast gives an excellent performance and all seem to be imbued with the bigness of the theme.” At Photoplay James Quirk went further still: “The best photoplay ever made. The greatest theatrical spectacle in history. The greatest sermon on the tablets which form the basis of all law ever preached. Strong words, indeed, but written two weeks after seeing it, after serious consideration of Griffith’s Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation. It will last as long as the film on which it is recorded.”

Any sympathetic account of the picture has to engage with the context from which it emerged. The 1922 rediscovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb had touched off immense popular interest in all things Egyptian, so much so that the Los Angeles Times printed an Egyptologist’s critique of DeMille’s film that alleged that, as the historical record was concerned, Rameses was the ‘Wrong Pharaoh’ for the Exodus saga. More significant, however, was the emergence of a new brand of evangelical Christianity in America, exemplified in the figure of Aimee Semple McPherson, who embodied many contradictions not dissimilar to DeMille’s own. McPherson brought that most ‘old time’ of all religious denominations—Pentecostalism, including speaking in tongues and faith healing—into the Hollywood mainstream, dressing like a starlet and delivering sermons in the form of elaborate production numbers that rivaled the proscenium prologues of the big picture houses. The passion play was quickly being replaced by a less anti-Semitic, inherently more ecumenical form of mass religious address with the aesthetics of Hollywood and the Holy Land converging into one unbeatable box office formula. (DeMille’s own King of Kings would go even further in this respect.)

For his part DeMille apparently subscribed to a kind of Millenarianism that elegantly dovetailed with the promotion of his latest picture: “The world is eagerly awaiting a universal religion. The time is ripe for a greater and truer religious understanding…The world is weary of creeds, dogmas, forms, rituals, and isms, but it finds that without religion it is like a ship without a rudder…. Religion does not need to be clothed in the garment of Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, Mohammedanism or any other set form of worship. The principles of all are the same. Look up the covenants of each, and you will find the essentials of the Ten Commandments of the Mosaic law.”

Some journalists, particularly those at the newspaper that had sponsored DeMille’s scenario gambit, found that C. B.’s new film agreeably cut through much doctrinal dross. One Los Angeles Times columnist opined: “I wonder if there is any religious creed or cult that is based strictly and exclusively upon the Ten Commandments … As those Ten Commandments are flashed in mighty forcefulness direct from Heaven in the film story, one is conscious of amazed surprise at their straight-forward simplicity…. There isn’t a word about prohibition, gambling, dancing, smoking, women’s clothes, divorce, prize fights, card-playing, evolution, nudity, or any of those bitterly controversial subjects that occupy so much attention from some pulpits.”

Precisely by ignoring these contemporary concerns and focusing instead on Technicolor, tumbling jute cathedrals, and Franco-Chinese leprosy-carrying vamps did The Ten Commandments become the quintessential frivolous-sincere expression of spirituality in Coolidge-era America. It might have earned its costs back on that basis alone, but DeMille and Paramount could not have taken such a risk.

Zukor was still bitter about the cost overruns, a fact reflected in the virtual absence of The Ten Commandments from the firm’s trade paper ads, leaving outfits like Simplex and Technicolor to tout their affiliation with the project in their own full-page spreads. That spite did not spill over to the film’s public profile. Zukor signed off on a quarter-million dollars’ worth of accoutrements for the film’s 21 Dec 1923 New York premiere at the George M. Cohan Theatre, which included much Egyptian lobby décor and two screen-sized tablets that flew open like stone curtains at the start of the picture. At the end of its 36-week run at the Cohan, The Ten Commandments moved to the Criterion, which had recently hosted 59 weeks of The Covered Wagon.

The Hollywood premiere of “DeMille’s ultra-drama of the ages,” conveniently held at Grauman’s Egyptian on 4 Dec 1923, boasted some 300 Lasky celebrities and a stage show, “A Night in Pharaoh’s Palace.” As the picture’s seven-month run wore on “Pharaoh’s Palace” purportedly drew as many spectators as the feature itself. This prologue to a prologue, copyrighted by Sid Grauman, was seized upon by Paramount as an example for other big houses to emulate, filming its last performance for that very purpose. Attendees of the 350th screening of The Ten Commandments at Grauman’s received miniature bronze replicas of Moses’ tablets.

The road show continued with a touring twenty-piece orchestra that played Hugo Riesenfeld’s score at every performance. Eighteen weeks at Chicago’s Woods. Fourteen at Philadelphia’s Aldine. The initial three-week engagement in Washington, D.C. was expanded to five; the National was still doing capacity business when it had to pull the picture to make way for a long-standing booking of Music Box Revue. “It is realized,” noted the Washington Post, “that the De Mille epic is not a movie super-special of the kind that plays a flock of neighborhood houses directly [after] the “key” run at a downtown theater is concluded. In fact, no version of The Ten Commandments will be put into movie houses for many months to come.” The Ten Commandments did not return to the capital until 1926!

International screenings proved similarly strong and equally ham-fisted. The Prince of Wales and the royal family purportedly attended the picture more than once during its 250-performance London engagement. Australian exhibitors hoping to present The Ten Commandments faced stiff contracts that stipulated an American-style publicity campaign. Eleven road shows toured the continent; each came with a Paramount agent who would spend two weeks in a given territory prior to the premiere, rustling up media coverage and recruiting locals to perform in the “Grand Atmospheric Egyptian Prologue.”

Skeptics emerged. A Presbyterian church board member of St. Paul, Minnesota, related that “When I saw the first [half] of this photoplay I said to myself I would like to show it to my Sunday school class. But when I saw the second half I said it wouldn’t do.” One rogue Los Angeles Times correspondent who attended a New York screening noted “[t]he audience was wildly enthusiastic over the colored photography so who am I to say that it looked to me like a geographical case of measles. Throughout the biblical sequence the enthusiasm ran high but the modern story did not go over so well.” ‘Mae Tinée,’ the composite critic at the Chicago Tribune, reprimanded DeMille for a complicated two-part structure and then delivered the ultimate blow: “As in Intolerance one suspects the average picture-seer will leave the theater after having seen this production asking aloud or otherwise: ‘What’s it all about, anyways?’”

DeMille disagreed. Defending Macpherson’s scenario as ‘Euripidean,’ he speculated that those who applauded the prologue but maligned the modern story “probably somewhere on their mental horizon have been affected far more than they knew, not by the actual Red Sea catastrophe, but by its modern prototype, the scenes where a single man is just as surely destroyed by a mental and emotional Red Sea.”

Engulfed, uncomprehending, or otherwise stupefied, picturegoers continued to flock to The Ten Commandments, which topped exhibitors’ polls as the most popular attraction of 1924 and 1925. More dangerous than tepid critical reaction was the very real antipathy towards DeMille on the part of Zukor and other Paramount executives. Though this holy folly eventually grossed an impressive $4,169,798.38, DeMille found himself confined to cheaper programmer pictures throughout 1924. Unhappy with material like The Golden Bed, DeMille formed his own independent company when his Paramount contract expired in 1925—by which time M-G-M’s six-million dollar bill for Ben-Hur made DeMille’s extravagance look like a pittance. With some not insignificant exceptions, the remainder of his career would be devoted to films rather more in the mold of the Ten Commandments prologue than that of the modern story.

By 1932, however, DeMille was back at Paramount, which had recently used his 1923 footage to bring a ten-day anti-Bolshevik quickie called Forgotten Commandments up to feature length. Not content to see his great achievement made obsolete by the talkies, DeMille eventually remade the picture in 1956 as a four-hour, entirely Biblical Vistavision blockbuster. For the second time in the studio’s history The Ten Commandments emerged as Paramount’s most expensive venture to date.

 

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You Ain’t Done Nothing If You Ain’t Been Called a Red

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

When Reds was released in late 1981, its admirers tended to downplay its political dimension. It was a sweeping romance that happened to be about Communists—a perhaps necessary bluff (or a revealing delusion) after American politics had taken a sharp swing towards the right. “It is that personal, human John Reed that Warren Beatty’s ‘Reds’ takes as its subject,” Roger Ebert assured us, but not without cautioning that “there is a lot, and maybe too much, of the political John Reed as well.” Andrew Sarris, who had frequently used his Village Voice perch to mock routinely liberal movies, finally found one he could get behind. “Reds is more a love story than a revolutionary chronicle,” Sarris wrote, “and as it happens, I prefer love stories to revolutionary chronicles.”

The detractors tended to agree with the brunt of this assessment, but understandably saw this as a liability. Pauline Kael called it “the least radical, the least innovative epic you can imagine” and the Soho News corrected the record with “What Reds Won’t Tell You About Louise Bryant.” It was a movie about John Reed that even Reagan could love—and indeed, he did. One can easily imagine him nodding along with Beatty’s Reed as he denounces Zinoviev for his individual-annihilating, freedom-denying brand of Communism.

Paramount’s 2006 small-scale reissue of Reds clearly addressed a shift in the political landscape. The trailer for the DVD positioned Reds as a blockbuster rendition of a prototypical Daily Kos diary, fired up with indignation over an illegal war and a dissent-crushing mainstream. Implicitly, Reds inaugurated a tradition that now included such softly provocative left-wing cinema-events as The Constant Gardener and Syriana.

Do we yet have the tools and sobriety to reckon with Reds? Its technical achievement is unimpeachable. There’s a moment early on in Reds when Bryant buttonholes Reed for an interview after his very brief speech at Portland’s Liberal Club. When can we talk? “Now,” and editors Dede Allen and Craig McKay cut on that word, that syllable to a scene in her apartment. The whole movie has this clipped quality, all tumbling out and jammed up together in a rush of decisions and judgments. In a sense, Reds feels like the culmination of the Resnais-influenced, half-glance New Hollywood editing style that Allen herself initiated in Bonnie and Clyde. Reds is the movie that fashions a working and supple grammar out of it. Nothing carries the appearance of classical cross-cutting here, even when that description is perfectly apt—the shots seem to hover, always looking stitched together and brittle, as if the whole edifice will atrophy when the music stops.

(Less remarked upon is the still-staggering level of background knowledge that Reds assumes from its audience. It’s a long movie with little conventional exposition that simply presumes that viewers already have a basic familiarity with Pictorialist photography, the Armory Show of 1913, the IWW, Eastern European geography, and the distinctions between assorted Socialist/Communist/leftist factions in America and abroad. More radically, Reds also suggests that these things are often and intimately related, a continuum of thought.)

The main story is also constantly interrupted by the troubling testimonies of ‘The Witnesses’—the elderly bohemians and gadflies scooped up by Beatty and his researchers through a nationwide dragnet of classified newspaper ads. Sitting in front of a black screen, they recount what they did and didn’t know about Reed and Bryant, misremember, repeat, contradict one another, sing. Cumulatively, they lend an air of Borsch Belt irreverence to history.

Perhaps we needed an intervening thirty years of televised documentaries to appreciate the radicalism of Reds. Its interviews superficially resemble those of endless history buff cable programming, but the departure is crucial. The Witnesses’ words rarely connect with the action on-screen and no speaker is identified by name, except in the opening and closing credits. Rather than ratify the facts and move the narrative along, they confuse and coerce it towards an aggressively intimate meander. Their anonymous voices are too discordant to be a chorus, obviously authentic but vaguely inscrutable.

The immediate cultural legacy of Reds—Woody Allen’s misformulated appropriation and parody of this structure in his 1983 Zelig—cannot begin to approach the seriousness of its source. When everything becomes a winking fiction, where’s the space for tension and divergence? (Unlike Peter Jackson and Costa Botes’s great hoax Forgotten Silver, Zelig never goes so far as to implicate the documentary form itself as a crucial means of disseminating misinformation.) It’s fitting here to note, as well, that the Laurent Bouzereau-produced Witness to ‘Reds’ making-of documentary that appears on the DVD and Blu-ray release of Reds goes a long way towards illustrating the value of Beatty’s approach. Several interviewees note that sharing memories of the movie on the skimpy, non-descript set calls to mind the testimonies of the original Reds Witnesses—but captions always inform us who’s speaking and there’s little disagreement on tap. Even capitalist magnate Barry Diller insists that everyone from the studio chiefs on down were on the same page, valiantly unafraid of any political controversy! (Everyone except Diane Keaton, whose non-participation in the retrospective cannot help but undercut the consensus Bouzereau strives to fabricate.)

Rare for a Hollywood film and rarer still for an epic one, Reds operates with the assumption of multiple strands of consciousness and simultaneous channels of empathy. Frequently, we’re not even sure who’s speaking or remembering or thinking. Reds continually interrogates its own designs and interpretations, not least with the central Reed-Bryant relationship. It can emphasize Reed’s charisma (it’s a productive limitation that Beatty largely conceives and interprets Reed as a movie star whose worst nightmare is a fickle audience) while acknowledging his inability to understand the roots or soundness of a feminist critique of the prevailing social order. That he cannot recognize, much less renounce, his own complicity in this injustice is the major human tragedy of the film.

‘What as?’ Bryant asks when Reed suggests she accompany him to New York. This is the deeply political question that Reds asks, and not just about Bryant and Reed. Continually the characters struggle to live up to their own political ideals; they contend with their own complex relationships to pre-conceived ideas of sex, marriage, domesticity, art, and integrity, never quite steely enough to will themselves a set of completely enlightened desires. On some level, they realize that building a new world from the ashes of the old requires self-immolation.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening Reds in a 35mm print from Paramount Pictures on Wednesday, March 21 at the Portage Theater. For more information, please see our current calendar. Please note that we will be starting earlier than usual at 7pm to accommodate the unusual length of Reds.

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Is a Film More than the Sum of Its Reels?

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Sometimes even I wish that the digital conversion would just hurry itself up, if only so that we could forever forsake the journalistic convention of punning on matters of real and reel. You know, or could make up, the headlines: Professor examines reel history, Local woman finds reel love, Reel inflation fears send real a-reeling.

What this ubiquitous usage tends to do is lay down a bright line between movies and everything else, as if even eight-figure corporate deals are a bit precious and fantastic because they touch the movie business. (If only I could quit my real job and get a reel one…) We’re still living in the dream factory, even when those dreams are increasingly violent and downbeat.

A generation from now, the reel might lose its currency as an imaginative symbol. Right now, though, it still stands in for the broader idea of the movies: look no further than the logos of your local film festival, film commission, or indie video store. All this despite the fact that most people have never handled a reel of film. Walk around a theater lobby with a 16mm Castle Film before the show and see just how many people think you hold an entire feature in the palm of your hand. More realistically, a two-hour feature would encompass six or seven 35mm reels about 14 inches in diameter apiece.

Significantly, Denver-based Goldberg Brothers, which has produced metal reels and other exhibition essentials for decades, now cannibalizes and parodies its own market. Its website includes two divisions: Commercial Products and Decor Products, the latter hawking reel-themed wine racks, end tables, clocks, wall doohickeys, etc. You can order similar products from Skymall—authentic entertainment memorabilia for your basement DVD oasis.

But reels are important—an unexamined unit of understanding the 20th-century cinema. Very few filmmakers knowingly utilized the measure for aesthetic ends, though Andy Warhol’s made-to-order cinema certainly did. The early silents are all assembled from unedited 100 ft. rolls of camera-original reversal stock and the talkies generally run 33, 67, or 100 minutes—depending on how many 1,200 ft. reels comprise a given feature. (You can tell it’s literally the entire reel when the final frames of image are marked by a series of circular holes punched out by the lab to identify each roll—frames that would be trimmed and junked by almost any other filmmaker.) The range of content is dictated not by plot contrivance or budget, but by bluntly material concerns.

Thinking about movies on the reel level provokes a salutary disorientation. For one thing, it shifts the conversation away from the director or producer’s artistic intent (disputable, often unknowable, frequently unedifying) to a concrete examination of what audiences saw and how it was constructed.

These days, filmmakers shift between color and black-and-white, 35mm and Super 8, fine-grained film and blocky surveillance camera video, wide and narrow frames, as if their stylistic credentials depended on it. (Think of Oliver Stone, Darren Aronofsky, David Fincher, Robert Zemeckis, or Alejandro González Iñárritu.) This is made easier by digital workflows, which allow all of these things to be integrated (or created) conveniently during post-production.

But for most of film history, such formal promiscuity represented a real balancing act between artistic conception, laboratory acumen, and exhibition practices. The automated multiplex age has eliminated the possibility of something like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Mystery of Picasso, which requires the projectionist to switch from a flat 1.37:1 lens to an anamorphic 2.35:1 one for the ultra-wide final reel, hopefully coordinated with a well-timed opening up of the curtain or screen masking. The earlier Magnascope process called for an enormous magnification of the screen image during select sequences through use of a turreted lens configuration. (Generally thought to be confined to a few Paramount silents like Old Ironsides and Wings, the process actually had a much longer and more diverse lifespan, as ongoing research by Anthony L’Abbate demonstrates.)

Combining color and black-and-white was a labor-intensive choice in a different way. When three-strip Technicolor was still a luxurious and expensive option in a generally black-and-white world, a few seconds of color could sometimes provide a real jolt. Albert Lewin made this his trademark in the 1940s, with brief inserts (Cinecolor for The Moon and Sixpence, Technicolor for The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Private Affairs of Bel Ami) literally spliced into otherwise monochrome shows. Decisions like this meant a real disruption in business-as-usual labs and exchanges: instead of simply printing a negative from end-to-end on a single stock and then sending it off to the theater, someone had to wind through the given reel and splice in a few feet of color footage into each and every print at a precise, frame-specific position. Instead of an orderly negative-positive operation, this entailed intervening and assembling the final product from literal scraps with a vial of cement. David O. Selznick’s Portrait of Jennie was even more complicated: the final 1,000 ft. reel included three different print stocks—green-toned monochrome, brown-toned monochrome, and a few seconds of full Technicolor for the titular portrait. Combine these shifts with the fact that the final reel was conceived for widescreen Magnascope projection (the rest of the show was standard 1.37:1 black-and-white) and Portrait of Jennie looks more like a disruptive avant-garde piece than a standard-issue work of commerce.

Other productions like Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death posed a different set of challenges. Since several scenes fade from color to black-and-white and vice versa, a simple splice would not suffice. All prints still carry a credit for Technicolor’s proprietary dye-monochrome process, which presumably applied black-and-white images to the blank film strip in the same quasi-lithographic manner as color ones. However, viewing an original nitrate print would be the only way to assess the effectiveness of this process, as all modern prints simply print the black-and-white sections on standard color stock. This isn’t corner-cutting: the original process simply cannot be recreated with modern equipment.

The development of the cheaper (and fade-prone) Eastmancolor eventually supplanted Technicolor for chromatic cinematography and release-printing, but the problem of combining black-and-white and color was no simpler. Printing from a black-and-white negative to color release-print stock rarely yielded a pure black-and-white image, even with good faith effort from the lab. The emulsions are chemically different and require distinct processing workflows. A filmmaker who wanted to switch between black-and-white and color had two choices: splicing back and forth between stocks on hundreds of release prints or accepting a streamlined process that rendered the black-and-white scenes with a tinge of blue or yellow or brown. (I’ve seen black-and-white scenes in all these variations—the accuracy or deviation being a reflection of the skill and temperament of the laboratory’s color timer.)

Original 35mm prints of Raging Bull opted for the former route, the color home movie footage spliced into each and every otherwise b&w print. This yielded a more accurate palette, but looked aberrant enough for at least one projectionist to splice out the color footage. According to editor Thelma Schoonmaker, the projectionist assumed that the lab had accidentally inserted another client’s home movies (in 35mm?) to the Raging Bull release print and took it upon himself to correct the error.

When transferring these films to video, these details matter. Criterion’s Blu-ray of Wings of Desire switches between pure black-and-white and vibrant color, which is either an improvement upon or a distortion of the original theatrical experience, depending on your tastes. The same company has switched its position on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. On its first DVD release, the b&w scenes were rendered as such after Criterion consulted cinematographer Vadim Yusov and determined that long-standing blue tints were a lab error; the subsequent Blu-ray and DVD reissue reverted the monochrome scenes to blue. Perhaps a lab error that might be better understood as a lab norm inextricably linked with presenting something like Solaris in 35mm, whether in 1972 or 2012.

Again, it makes sense to separate intent from the economic forces that dictate the final product. In the silent era, it was simply accepted practice that each print be positive-cut—that is, the final continuity was not established in the negative but assembled piece-by-piece in each release print. Because silent films often utilized an array of tints and tones, with each color developed in separate chemical baths, the prints were struck in tinting order and re-cut to narrative order afterwards. Each print represented a significant investment of labor and craft (and an exponentially increased risk of the heavily-spliced print breaking or buckling at hundreds of vulnerable points.)

Compare this to the rollout of a modern silent like The Artist. All the 35mm prints are printed on polyester color stock (Kodak 2383), even though high-quality black-and-white polyester stock is still available (Kodak 2302).  Though the stock itself is not significantly more expensive, printing it at Deluxe’s high-turnover plant is. With black-and-white processing in low demand, keeping a dedicated processing line for such orders is impractical. When a black-and-white order does come in, taking a machine offline to switch out its processing chemicals is a costly proposition that disrupts normal productivity quotas. Very few clients are apt to shoulder this premium, and so something like The Artist (or Weinstein’s other recent monochrome feature, Control) goes out in blue-and-white prints. Because there’s some inherent shift in color temperate from one reel to another, the 35mm version of The Artist switches ‘tints’ every twenty minutes or so. Each print is an amalgamation of uniquely shaded reels. By comparison, the DCP version of The Artist is reportedly straight b&w—the simplest of 1927 laboratory practices ‘only’ available digitally these days.

A simple lesson to draw here would be that digital is inherently more flexible, accurate, and cost-effective. But this conclusion treats film history in a backwards and unproductive fashion—decades of analog innovations simply groping towards something that digital would cleanly fix, a century-long evolution that ambles towards a pre-determined point. But thinking about a tradition of labor practices and cinematic crafts in this manner (posing them against a phantom future alternative) denies them the weight and logic that originally characterized them. The further we move away from photochemical filmmaking, its solutions, challenges, work-arounds, and tricks looks all the more complex, admirable, and irretrievable.

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, here, and here.

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Closed City: Give Us This Day

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

What do they call this place we are going to?
Paradise.
No, I mean, other people.
Oh, they call it Brooklyn.

What to do with a picture like Give Us This Day?

For one thing, it stands up very well as a domestic drama, a successor in certain ways to King Vidor’s The Crowd. It’s about how the everyday luxuries that constitute the fabric of America culture are not, contra magazine spreads and stump speeches, simply the logical reward of hard work and individual initiative. Give Us This Day shows, in scene after painstaking scene, how a family with the best of intentions may well never achieve its dream. That this obvious fact of sociology nevertheless sounds radical and unexpected in entertainment terms makes a film like Give Us This Day quite bracing, especially today. Indeed, to watch Give Us This Day now invites a certain wistful nostalgia for a moment when a family headed by a sporadically-employed immigrant bricklayer could even contemplate owning a home, an unspeakable ambition for a generation’s worth of college graduates and advanced degree holders these days.

But Give Us This Day is notable for far more than its rarely-fashionable grimness. Like Salt of the Earth, its more storied successor, Give Us This Day is a movie made by blacklisted talent exiled from Hollywood and unusually committed to feeling out what a socially-implicated narrative feature might look and sound like. Inarguably, the answer offered by Give Us This Day is curiously circumspect: aside from an errant ‘CP’ scrawled innocently on a beam in the background of an early scene, there’s next to no acknowledgement of the radical political ideas that halted the careers of actor Sam Wanamaker, writer Ben Barzman, and director Edward Dmytryk. Though such issues as workplace safety and incentive structures that pit workers against each other form important plot points, the possibility of unionization is hardly broached. A ‘union meeting’ is cited once—as the half-assed alibi that Wanamaker supplies when visiting his mistress (Kathleen Ryan).

In short, this is a film that diagnoses a social ill but prescribes nothing but human decency—certainly not Communism, or even a slightly more socialized public sphere. Nevertheless, Give Us This Day was sufficiently ‘controversial’ to merit protests and pressure from the American Legion—effectively destroying any semblance of a release. It screened in New York for two weeks and took six months to reach Los Angeles—and even then, under a new title, Salt to the Devil. Distributor Eagle-Lion’s promotional material for 1949 doesn’t even acknowledge the film’s existence. It’s less reputable than Red Stallion in the Rockies and four promised “Red Ryder” Cinecolor westerns.

The project began as neither Give Us This Day nor Salt to the Devil, but Christ in Concrete, a proposed adaptation of bricklayer Pietro di Donato’s experimental proletarian novel of 1939. A surprising Book of the Month Club selection, Christ in Concrete was destined to attract Hollywood attention. Paramount contemplated making it in 1945 and hiring di Donato as a staff writer. Di Donato took a meeting with Frank Capra and rejected the possibility of a collaborative adaptation. (“You capitalist pig, there’s no way I’m going to let you touch this beauty” he reportedly said.)

Di Donato discovered a sympathetic producer in Rod Geiger, the American GI who bluffed his way into ‘producing’ Roberto Rossellini’s Open City. Geiger contracted with Di Donato to translate and subtitle Open City for American distribution through Arthur Mayer and Joseph Burstyn, who promoted it quite successfully as a lascivious sm piece. The profits, which were unprecedented for a foreign film in the US, allowed Geiger to meet his obligations in bankrolling Paisan and bring Rossellini to America to investigate his next picture—Christ in Concrete. (Rossellini had read an Italian translation of the novel, which he liked sufficiently to recommend di Donato for the subtitling job.)

Why Rossellini dropped out remains unclear. (Luchino Visconti’s purported involvement is another tantalizing what-if.) In any case, di Donato’s viewing of Crossfire prompted the author to request that picture’s director, Edward Dmytryk , helm the movie version of Concrete.

The decision to hire Dmytryk was consequential. A recent hostile witness before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, Dmytryk could not work on any studio picture. Christ in Concrete was shot entirely in Denham, England but for a few second-unit shots of New York City. It was the British censors who insisted on the title change—any mention of Christ in a title was deemed sacrilegious.

Despite the temerity that earned Dmytryk a spot among the Hollywood Ten, the director was not an especially political character. As Norma Barzman would recall, “Eddie joined the party, but never read anything, never understood anything, never really should have been near the Communist Party or anything political because he didn’t understand it.” After the abortive release of Give Us This Day and the jail time he would serve in contempt of Congress, Dmytryk recanted his hostile HUAC testimony and named names.

The standard rap on Give Us This Day (especially from David Kalat, who produced this exhaustive DVD edition, released through his label, AllDay Entertainment, in 2003) is that Dmytryk’s status as a political pariah, unwanted on the right and on the left, damned the movie to undeserved oblivion. One can certainly understand why the left would want nothing to do with Dmytryk, who continued to position himself as an anti-Communist long after HUAC had closed up shop. Complaining to the Los Angeles Times in 1966 that it was a mistake to ‘laugh off’ the Party, Dmytryk warned that subversive elements were capable of infiltrating decent liberal causes like civil rights marches and peace demonstrations. In recalling his friendly testimony, the ‘extremely liberal’ Dmytryk displayed a damning lack of empathy. “They’re responsible,” Dmytryk offered of fellow black-listed talent like Barzman and Wanamaker. “It is wonderful to be a martyr in a just cause but stupid to be a martyr in an unjust one …. I’d do it all over again.” He boasted, too, that ‘our kind of democracy’ had weathered the Red Scare more or less unscathed.

Easy for him to say. Dmytryk’s career, post-recantation, saw steady Hollywood employment. In contrast, Barzman, who was never even paid for Give Us This Day, had to write scripts pseudonymously in exile. Wanamaker devoted his career to theater and was largely responsible for the renovation of Shakespeare’s Globe. (A Chicagoan, Wanamaker is commemorated with an honorary street sign at Randolph and State.)

Dmytryk’s uncontemplated and ugly sense of political entitlement should never go unmentioned, but other equally loathsome players in the HUAC drama have seen some rehabilitation. The left doesn’t much like Elia Kazan either (and with good reason), but that hasn’t suppressed his work. Indeed, the notion that Give Us This Day has been ‘buried’ by the left because of Dmytryk’s friendly testimony is self-evidently absurd and, come to think of it, resembles the intellectually worthless crazy-mirror contortions of a Kazan scenario: the Communists are the all-powerful state auxiliaries and the informers the lone individuals who risk everything by valiantly collaborating. (The reasons for Give Us This Day’s invisibility are more prosaic: its one-off production company, Plantagenet, was dissolved and no prints were kept; rights reverted to di Donato, but he could do little with them without a copy of the film. After discovering that a copyright registration print had been retained by the Library of Congress, the film was still kept out of circulation as di Donato and his agent planned a never-filmed remake with Robert DeNiro.)

No political rebel, Dmytryk’s career is neglected because it’s frequently so aesthetically impoverished. And yet it’s difficult to read over the list of post-Give Us This Day Dmytryk projects and fix upon any worth remembering or revisiting. Who else could blow so much money on Raintree County—along with Ben-Hur, the only other feature shot in M-G-M’s ultra-widescreen Camera 65—and deliver a picture so witless and dull that terming it a ‘folly’ would be a generous stretch? (There’s not enough passion or delirium for that.) Dmytryk’s The Carpetbaggers was a major blockbuster in 1964 and barely remembered today, even among those fond of skewering out-of-touch sixties studio efforts. Even his Oscar-nominated direction of Crossfire is a dull slog that never manages to translate the rote anti-anti-Semitism of the material into something emotionally or formally involving. There’s political passion here, but it’s muted—made to look small and tentative, even when aspiring to outspokenness. It’s telling that Dmytryk isn’t included anywhere in Andrew Sarris’s seminal 1968 auteurist survey The American Cinema; no one takes him seriously enough to qualify for ‘Strained Seriousness’ or holds him in high enough regard for a deflating ‘Less Than Meets the Eye.’

And yet Give Us This Day emerges as an emotionally complex—and well-directed!—film. A large part of the effect comes from the knowledge that the picture was shot almost entirely in England. The integration of rear projection footage of New York is exemplary and the locations are frequently convincing. (The British accents of Wanamaker’s children are the most serious fissure.) Like Chaplin’s A King in New York, Give Us This Day is moving precisely because it tries so desperately to recreate and critique the nation the filmmakers know only as a memory and a tarnished ideal. If anything, Dmytryk’s subsequent actions make its clarity even rarer—a country twice lost.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening Give Us This Day in a 35mm print from the Library of Congress on March 7 at the Portage Theater as part of its Classic Film Series. Please see our current calendar for more information. Special thanks to Rob Stone and Lynanne Schweighofer. The research for this piece draws heavily from the materials assembled by David Kalat for his AllDay Entertainment DVD edition of Christ in Concrete.

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Programming: How to Do Things with Films

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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.

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“…but I can’t be Sherlock Holmes”

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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.

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