Category Archives: Blog

Chicago Cinema and the Glass Ceiling

Posted on June 14, 2013 by Kyle Westphal

Macho Criticism (From the Seat of His Pants)
Last week WBEZ’s Alison Cuddy interviewed our Executive Director Becca Hall about ‘Chicago’s stunning lack of female film critics and abundance of female film programmers.’ This disparity should be readily apparent and familiar to any sentient person, but its roots and effects merit further discussion.

For better or worse, the dialogue undergirding film culture, here and elsewhere, is usually set by men. It’s something that you can feel acutely when reading a rave review of Nicolas Winding Refn’s hateful exercises in macho posturing or watching the contrived critic’s roundtable on the Pulp Fiction Blu-ray. (In the latter, Stephanie Zacharek provides a voice of reasoned dissent as the middle-aged boys club recites their favorite quotable moments from Tarantino’s anal anxiety breakthrough.) When critics try to address these issues head on, they often make matters worse, as when Mike D’Angelo stuck a blow against “robotic objectivity” in a recent Cannes dispatch. D’Angelo proudly attributed his preference for Blue is the Warmest Color over Behind the Candelabra to the fact that he’s “a straight male who’s indifferent to guy-on-guy action but had to keep adjusting his pants during the lesbian picture.”

The world of film critics (and film enthusiasts generally) suffers for its gender imbalance, much like related subcultures like record collecting. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, where the insular atmosphere discourages many women from participating in the first place.

The American cinema we tend to take seriously is littered with failed fathers and stunted men—the intergenerational post-Method clashes of Paul Thomas Anderson, the slacker gravitas of Judd Apatow, the brittle patriarchs of Wes Anderson, the horny, sad bravado of Alexander Payne, the daddy longing of Steven Spielberg. Reach back further and we find the elegiac machismo of Sam Peckinpah, the ‘cinema fist’ of Samuel Fuller, the breezy camaraderie of John Sturges and Howard Hawks. These are valid subjects for cinema, but are they the only subject? We celebrate films that mourn masculinity, rather than challenge it.

Of course, the vocabulary of auteurism (prevalent in the previous paragraph and elsewhere) almost preordains this result. Women have historically been severely underrepresented in the director’s chair and focusing on films in auteur terms necessarily suggests a stable of personal themes and concerns issuing exclusively from a single (male) ego. So long as we choose to talk about films in terms of directors instead of actors or other behind-the-scenes technicians, we’re privileging one kind of contribution over another. And with a handful of fascinating exceptions (Lois Weber, Ida Lupino, Shirley Clarke, Kelly Reichardt, among others), it’s a very uneven playing field.

It should be noted that Hollywood has employed women as screenwriters and editors with much greater frequency and consistency. Women also won many important below-the-line craft positions in laboratories and studio vaults early on. In an undated fan magazine column, Constance Talmadge advised aspiring actresses to ditch dreams of silver screen fame and focus on stable movieland employment:

The laboratory of every big studio employs scores of young women. Many of the girls get good pay as “splicers.” Other girls “break down” old negatives and positives, prints which they classify under various heads such as “war scenes,” “auto smashups,” “fire scenes,” and the like. These girls also have charge of the film vaults, housing these valuable bits of film which are used in new pictures, for “atmosphere”!

Other laboratory girls run the printers which make positive films from the original negatives. This is well paid, technical work. Other young women are employed in the “soup rooms,” where the film is developed in solutions. The drying drums in many studios are looked after by girls. The sorting and assembling of the various scenes in a production also is done in many cases by young women.

When the film is assembled and the various scenes spliced together in a consecutive reel, there comes the important work of cutting the picture. The girl who has developed a sense of “tempo,” who knows how to give the proper length to each scene and its relation to the picture as a whole, who knows what scenes to leave full lengthy and which to “snap up” — such a clever girl soon gains a reputation as “a good cutter,” and her salary begins to mount.

Admittedly, it’s difficult to imagine a criticism that revolves around these often anonymous contributions. It would be systematic and process-based, economic rather than artistic. (Consider the parallel rise of the “China Girl,” who wound up on the film, but not on the screen.)

But does the failure of criticism stem from the questions being asked or from those doing the asking? Chicago undeniably does have a dearth of female critics, especially when compared to other media markets—Stephanie Zacharek at the Village Voice, Manohla Dargis at the New York Times, Betsy Sharkey at the Los Angeles Times, Carrie Rickey at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Marjorie Baumgarten at the Austin Chronicle.

These critics write for (notionally) print publications and therein lies the issue. Perhaps it’s more accurate to describe the decline of film critics generally rather than female critics specifically. It’s true that there are no female film critics writing for TimeOut Chicago, but the recent capricious dismantling of that publication doesn’t leave much space for any bylines, male or female. We aren’t doing enough to support aspiring women critics, but why would anyone choose this vocation these days? Professional, salaried gigs for film critics are drying up. The conversation continues, but is an unpaid capsule on Cine-File a patch on a column in the Sun Times? (Of course, Cine-File does publish fine criticism, much of it from women, including Shealey Wallace and the prolific Kat Keish. Disclosure: I also publish occasionally on Cine-File, too.)

What Makes a Programmer?
Cuddy reports wildly different outcomes for female programmers, but I don’t share this optimism. From where I sit, the divide nationwide is decidedly more lop-sided than 50-50. Look, for example, at the repertory film programmers’ symposium published by Cineaste in 2010: lengthy responses from fourteen top programmers, thirteen of them men. (The magazine published a substantially different version online.) For what it’s worth, twelve of the fourteen were based on the East Coast, with no representation accorded to the vibrant film cultures of Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Austin. And as Cuddy points out, film programming has an equally sorry record on racial diversity.

As with criticism, questions about programming ultimately revolve around definitions of professionalism. At many prestigious institutions, the curator who writes catalog essays and introduces films and hobnobs with donors is a man, while the assistant who does the heavy lifting (booking prints, coordinating shipping, managing front-of-house operations) is just as often a woman. In a just world, they would both be counted as programmers, but job titles infrequently reflect a different understanding. (There are, of course, notable exceptions, among them Mimi Brody at Block Cinema, Peggy Parsons at the National Gallery of Art, and Susan Oxtoby and Kathy Geritz at the Pacific Film Archive.)

The blogosphere has recently democratized and flattened film criticism, but the world of film programming has always operated in a grey area between hobby and vocation. One of the great film books, Ideas on Film, presents this lesson starkly. Published in 1951, when scarcely anyone was employed full-time as a film programmer, we get programming tips on non-theatrical subjects from labor organizers, librarians, college instructors, public health officials, and film society coordinators. Pearl S. Buck even offered advice gleaned from her amateur involvement in the Green Hills Farm Film Council. (Need I even mention that the expansively democratic Ideas on Film was, of course, edited by a woman—Cecile Starr, who contributed a weekly 16mm column for the Saturday Review of Literature.)

The questions raised by Ideas on Film are no less relevant today. Put bluntly, many outstanding programmers perform this work out of sheer amateur tenacity—i.e., without compensation. Few are drawing salaries from microcinemas and film societies. Does a female programmer have parity with a male one if he gets paid and she doesn’t? What if programming is his sole responsibility while she programs films on the side, or as one duty among twenty others? Men may dominate the cinematheque ledgers, but many of the people who organize the (far more numerous) lower-profile, community-oriented screenings—nurses, school teachers, hotel entertainment coordinators, neighborhood leaders, PTA presidents, county bureaucrats—are women. Are they any less worthy of being called programmers?

Can a Girl Inspect Motion Picture Film?
Of course, as Cuddy notes, Chicago is also notable in its uncommonly high share of female projectionists. People who have never worked in the field probably have only a vague mental image of the typical projectionist. Booth veterans can provide a profile in ten seconds: ‘the old-timer’ or the ‘union projectionist’ instantly invokes a slightly overweight man with a slightly receding hairline, more talkative than most people but somewhat less personable. He refers to every movie as ‘the show’ (as in, ‘What’s the show you’re running in theater two?’) and makes uncomfortably off-color jokes while threading his machine and gets away with it because he can’t remember a lady in the booth since 1975. (He consecrates this private space with centerfolds and nudie pin-ups tacked up over the rewind bench.) He has shelves of used oil cans and lubricants and his skin is always dry and cracked. (Of course, the old school projectionist of lore could also fix absolutely anything with a paper clip and a length of twine, like a greasier version of MacGyver.) Simply stated, female projectionists have historically been an anomaly.

In fact, many issues surrounding exhibition have been highly gendered for decades. Consider the industry’s switch from 1000 ft. standard reels to 2000 ft. reels in the mid-1930s. Distributors and audiences complained of ‘film mutilation,’ and the blame was laid squarely at the (male) projectionists, who were charged with clumsily building up two or three 1000 ft. reels to reduce the number of manual change-overs they would perform over the course of a show. The studios responded by shifting the responsibility for splicing smaller reels together to the exchanges. These local, short-term warehouses handled the final leg of a complex system of national print distribution. They were also staffed almost entirely by women. Naturally, projectionists blamed print issues on lax inspection at the exchanges.

One largely sympathetic story in the March 1937 issue of International Projectionist outlined the conflict:

Can a girl inspect 2,240,000 frames of motion picture film every day for six consecutive days? Can the same girl be forced to work a few extra evenings, and possibly part of a Sunday, within the same week? Is the type of worker obtainable for these long hours for as little as $15 salary a week qualified for this important work? ….

It was established that there were no set hours of work. Each girl is given a certain minimum quota of reels to inspect per day … Thus the girl inspectors face each day not a certain number of hours of work but an irreducible minimum film footage! … This is what the exchanges term “inspection.” What any fair-minded person, knowing the delicate balance of projector mechanism and the degree of heat to which these prints are subsequently subjected, would term this process is probably unprintable in a publication sent through the mails.

To be fair to the exchanges, I’ve also heard of couriers refer to the classic octagonal film cases as ‘bowling balls,’ boasting of rolling them off the end of the dock back to warehouse floor. So the causes for film damage are various.

Chicago’s unusually high number of female projectionists has a number of interrelated explanations. Since the spectacular self-immolation of IATSE Local 110 roughly a decade ago, the barrier for entry for new projectionists, male and female, has been fairly low. The University of Chicago and, to a lesser extent, Northwestern University provide ample opportunities for students to learn basic projection skills, which are increasingly appealing in a stagnant post-graduation economy. And the work of James Bond has invested projection with an artisanal potential—it’s something that Chicagoans want to do and want to do well.

The City That Works
Of course, the non-trivial flip side of this abundance of non-union specialty labor is low wages for projectionists at many venues. With the demise of film at the multiplex, professional projectionists will soon be harder to find, but the economic value of their labor will not rise until audiences acknowledge the importance of these skills and demand quality presentation.

Am I arguing here for the primacy of class identity over gender? Certainly not. Rather, these issues are inter-related and cannot be addressed singly. The lack of professional opportunities exacerbates the gender gap and the homogeneity of voices weakens the economic power of the film community.

Ultimately, what makes Chicago unique, I think, is that all these professional distinctions are particularly difficult to tease out. Less cutthroat than several other cinema ecosystems, the key truth about Chicago’s film community is that there’s so little meaningful or easily identifiable division between critics and programmers, projectionists and audience members. The lines between institutions are porous. Critics such as Fred Camper have organized series under the auspices of the School of the Art Institute and local projectionists like Chloe and Douglas McLaren frequently write up shows presented by ‘rival’ venues for Cine-File. Programmers moonlight as projectionists, film distributors write criticism, filmmakers coordinate screenings, and archivists make critical arguments through their selections. In its own way, too, the Film Society hopes to complicate and integrate these activities, making its patrons and readers privy to challenges that face programmers and archivists. An audience better informed about the technical aspects of projection is a better-informed audience, period.

Of course, self-congratulation does not magically redress gender imbalance. Ultimately, it’s up to everyone to recognize that the constriction or outright absence of women’s voices substantially diminishes the quality, vibrancy, and truth of the conversation. Sexism hurts everyone, including men. Organizing a series or preserving a film or offering a critique—all of these acts are basically about enacting a vision of society. That vision needs to address the society we actually live in and the people who make it up.

Becca Hall, Katherine Greenleaf, Kat Keish, and Ben Kenigsberg contributed substantial critique and discussion. Neil Cooper and Joshua Romphf provided research assistance.

Posted in Blog | Tagged Editorials, Programming | Leave a comment

Searching for Efraín Gutiérrez – An Interview with Chon Noriega

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Kyle Westphal

Much has been written of the enormous strides made by genuinely independent cinema in recent years. In 2004, nearly every review of Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation cited its “budget” of $218 and touted its desktop iMovie roots as a harbinger of things to come. Theatrical distribution for no-budget personal documentaries didn’t last long. YouTube would launch within six months.

Nevertheless, digital moviemaking has been embraced as a uniquely democratic avenue, the kind of game-changer that fundamentally alters who makes and consumes media. The ease of digital production and dissemination cannot be denied, but neither should we assume that the film era presented insurmountable barriers to entry. If anything, the disappearance of analog workflows makes the achievements of the past all the more impressive. How did aspiring filmmakers ever master exposure, A/B roll cutting, synchronization, and magnetic sound recording? These technical hurdles were real, but they hardly stopped a flood of alternative media, dissident art, regional filmmaking, and genuine oddities from reaching the screen.

Efraín Gutiérrez is one of the least likely, most bewildering figures of the celluloid era. With minimal capital and technical experience, Gutiérrez managed to produce and distribute three features and one short film in the latter half of the 1970s—the first films to depict the Chicano community from the inside. The details of Gutiérrez’s career became the stuff of legend, particularly after the filmmaker’s 1980 disappearance. Some speculated that he’d been a drug runner or a hit man and financed his films through illicit means. The sympathetic critic Gregg Barrios made a case for Gutiérrez as a pioneering Chicano filmmaker while acknowledging the consensus view that his films were “sexist and racist diatribes that should be ignored and forgotten.”

When the scholar Chon Noriega finally tracked down Efraín Gutiérrez in 1996, more of the story emerged and it proved even more compelling the legend. “I won’t go into detail,” said Gutiérrez about his first feature Please, Don’t Bury Me Alive!, “but I did some bad things to raise some money.” Wildly underestimating the cost of making a feature film, he also hustled money from Trinity University and the American Lutheran Church. On credit, he blew up the 16mm original to 35mm for theatrical exhibition. Upon finding that no theater wanted to show it, Gutiérrez used assorted debts to establish further lines of credit and rent out a theater and advertise the film in local media.

Please Don’t Bury Me Alive grossed $20,000 in the first week at a single four-wall situation and eventually earned $300,000 after playing in Spanish-language theaters throughout the Southwest. After this success, Gutiérrez sold distribution rights to a Mexican distributor who absconded with all the 35mm prints. Gutiérrez plowed ahead with another feature, Chicano Love is Forever. He pre-sold distribution rights and promised his financiers a love story. Instead, he made a bleak but realistic depiction of the challenges facing a young Chicano couple.

Through Noriega’s efforts, Gutiérrez’s films have been restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Though all three features and the short La Onda Chicana have been available from UCLA for over a decade, they have not circulated much. An article published by the San Antonio Current in conjunction with one recent San Antonio screening indicates one reason why:

It’s easy to dismiss the films of Efraín Gutiérrez. His movies are rough, unpolished, and lacking those things cinema experts consider, well, good. If Ed Wood was “the worst director of all time,” you can almost say Gutiérrez is a Chicano Ed Wood with a political conscience — bad acting, weak writing, and lousy camera work. Gutiérrez knows it, but he smiles and takes no offense.

“Three!” he says, holding up three fingers on his right hand. “Three takes! I never took more than three takes!” He’s not bragging about it, but he’s not about to apologize either.

Going into Gutierrez’s films expecting technical finesse or anything like conventional narrative is a mistake. But their existence enriches and enlarges our sense of film history. That these films enjoyed substantial runs in the Southwest throws our notions of Hollywood hegemony into confused relief. Here is an attempt to depict a marginalized community with no concessions to the dominant culture. The dialogue freely switches between English and Spanish without subtitles in either language—presuming a bilingual audience, or a naturally empathetic one. They serve, too, as extraordinary documents of a political moment, when the assertion of Chicano identity was itself radical.

Articles on Gutierrez’s career are few and far between. There’s Gregg Barrios’s mid-1980s career re-evaluation and there’s another brief profile from the My San Antonio website, but the best source for information about Gutierrez remains Noriega’s moving and sincere tribute, ‘The Migrant Intellectual’ in the Spring 2007 issue of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies.

Noriega serves as the Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. I interviewed him earlier this week about Gutierrez’s filmmaking and its unique place in American culture.

KW: You made an effort to track down Efraín Gutiérrez’s films long before you had a chance to see them. How did you first hear about these films and what convinced you that they merited re-evaluation?

CN: I first heard about Efraín’s films in my interviews with other Chicano filmmakers when I was working on my dissertation around 1989-91. He was sort of a legendary figure who showed that Chicanos could make independent feature films working outside Hollywood. He wrote, directed, starred in, and distributed three feature films in the late 1970s—working with his wife at the time, Josie Faz, and other local artists in San Antonio—and then he disappeared.

I began to find traces of his history through articles published at the time in local magazines and newspapers in South Texas. Each time I went to CineFestival at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, I would ask people I met if they had heard of Efraín Gutiérrez. The legend continued to grow, but I could not find the person himself. Then one day in late 1996, I came home to find a message from Efraín. Now he was looking for me!

KW: You spent three years working with Efraín to recover these films. Where were the films found and what elements survived? In what condition did you find them?

CN: When he called, Efraín had just recovered a 16mm print of Please, Don’t Bury Me Alive! from where he had stored it in a relative’s garage. The print had been wrapped up and stored inside a garbage can, and was actually in fairly good shape. But Efraín had just screened it and the print had broken in a few places. I urged him to stop screening the print and place it in an archive so it could be restored and preserved.

What happened next astounded me and set us on a course to recover all his films, and to become good friends in the process: Efraín loaded up the print in his car, along with his family and his daughter’s friend, and drove from San Antonio to Los Angeles, delivering it for deposit in the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Subsequently, Efraín was able to locate a 35mm print of Run, Tecato, Run that he had given to one of the investors for the film; and I worked with the UCLA Film & Television Archive to locate the original 16 mm. color reversal AB rolls and the original 16 mm. master sound mix for Amor Chicano Es Para Siempre. These had been left in the lab Efraín used, but when the lab was sold, these materials became “hidden” within the larger holdings of the new owner. This film became the only one for which we were able to locate original elements.

KW: Academics and archivists often operate on different time scales, with very different goals and priorities. How did you manage to balance the two worlds and work with UCLA Film & Television Archive to assure the proper preservation of these films?

CN: You do need to find a balance, since they are different professional cultures, and also because nothing gets preserved otherwise. Fortunately, I have had the good fortune to have mentors committed to archival practice. My dissertation director, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, was the ideal role model of an academic who saw the community as a site of knowledge production and archival resources. Roberto Trujillo, now Head of Special Collections at Stanford University, hired me to work on new acquisitions to their Mexican American Collection. In the process, I learned a lot about archival preservation and access.

When I was hired as an assistant professor at UCLA, Robert Rosen was both chair of the Department of Film and Television and director of the Film & Television Archive. More than anyone, he helped me understand the issues, ethics, and processes involved in order to preserve these films.

KW: Anyone who’s grown up watching Hollywood films is instantly familiar with its patronizing stereotypes of indigenous culture. But Gutiérrez was also reacting against the clichés of the Mexican exploitation films that dominated Spanish-language theaters in the American Southwest. Can you describe these films and the picture they offered of Chicano identity?

CN: Well, both Hollywood and the Mexican film industry responded to the Chicano civil rights movement in similar ways, converting its demands for social equity into the basis for exploitation films. In the U.S., these were mostly youth-oriented gang films. The most notorious involved teen heart throb Robbie Benson as a Chicano gang member….

In Mexico, the focus was more on the border as a lawless space, involving gangs, drugs, and so on. Gutiérrez was reacting to these portrayals, but he also used them to his advantage in interesting ways. In 1973, Efraín completed worked as an extra on De sangre chicana (Of Chicano Blood), a film being shot in San Antonio. The film, one of a number of Chicano exploitation films produced by the Mexican film industry in that decade, disillusioned him about Mexico as an alternative to Hollywood, especially because the Chicano extras were segregated from their Mexican and Anglo counterparts.

Frustrated, Efraín happened to stumble across the canisters of undeveloped footage in the lobby of the hotel where the production crew was staying. He hid the canisters and then approached the producers, offering them his help in finding the canisters in exchange for an opportunity to “shadow” the director and cinematographer. He used that experience in order to round out his ad hoc education in filmmaking. One thing about Efraín is his determination to learn by any means necessary in order to break down barriers for Chicano filmmakers.

KW: Did Gutiérrez’s films ever play beyond theaters in the Southwest? Did they travel to other Spanish-language communities?

CN: While Gutiérrez’s films had an obvious appeal in South Texas, he did screen them in California and the Midwest. Interestingly, the films became very popular among Chicanos in prisons around the country. He was sort of the Chicano “Johnny Cash” of American cinema! Because the films were gritty and realistic, they offered hope rather than fantasy.

KW: How have modern audiences reacted to Gutiérrez’s films? Are they regarded as political artifacts of a tumultuous, bygone era or films that still speak to conditions today?

CN: These films are sui generis, so it is hard to relate them to other works. Efraín was self-taught as a filmmaker, drawing heavily from his background in community-based Chicano theater, his relationships with Conjunto musicians, and bilingual dialogue that reflected local practice. He also created a unique business model, relying on individual investors, exhibition contracts with Spanish-language theaters (which were losing ground to television), and promotion through local radio and newspapers.

But more than anything, these films spoke to a Mexican American audience that had never seen itself on the silver screen. Good portions of the films consist of entire musical performances as well as long observational shots of local settings. In a sense, the documentary aspect of the films rivals the narratives, which can be strange for viewers used to Hollywood fare, but provides a fascinating window into another time and place. There are no happy endings, or clear-cut good guys versus bad guys, but rather an attempt to engage with the day-to-day experiences and culture of the films’ audience. It is important to remember that these are extremely low-budget films that are essentially creating their own audiovisual language for a Mexican-American or Chicano audience in the 1970s.

• • •

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will screen Amor Chicano Es Para Siempre on June 12 at the Patio Theater. The restored 35mm print appears courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and will be preceded by Efrain Gutierrez’s short film La Onda Chicana (The Chicano Wave). Preservation of Amor Chicano Es Para Siempre was funded by the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States. Preservation of La Onda Chicana was funded by the Ahmanson Foundation in association with the Sundance Institute and the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States.

This screening is offered in conjunction with portoluz’s Old and News programming. Special thanks to Efraín Gutiérrez, Chon Noriega, Steven Hill, Marguerite Horberg, Peter Kuttner, and Demetri Kouvalis.

Posted in Blog | Tagged Exhibition History, Interviews, Program Notes, Restorations | Comments Off

The Anti-Restoration of Portrait of Jason: A Conversation with Dennis Doros

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Kyle Westphal

When Portrait of Jason opened in 1967, there were no LGBT film festivals. Major newspapers and respectable citizens referred to gays and lesbians in appallingly derogatory language. Civil rights pioneer Bayard Rustin had been shunted to the sidelines by Adam Clayton Powell, for fear that this homosexuality would undermine the movement. To be black and gay meant a life on the margin of the margins.

And here was Jason Holliday talking for nearly two hours about his brave, bawdy life before the camera.

There was some precedent for Portrait of Jason in Andy Warhol’s flurry of talkies, particularly the Ron Tavel-scripted Fire Island gabfest My Hustler. Warhol also made film portraits of uncomfortable intensity—Edie Sedgwick going about her daily business in The Poor Little Rich Girl, for example.

The debt to Warhol is economic and logistical, not just aesthetic. The unprecedented mainstream interest in Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls strained the passive distribution capacity of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which booked mostly college showings and underground establishment. To break into first-run theaters coast-to-coast, Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, and Louis Brigante created the more commercially-minded Film-Makers Distribution Center. Portrait of Jason would be handled by the new FMDC, a potential cross-over hit in an era when Hollywood had largely missed recent upheavals in American taste. Holliday even cut a comedy LP.

Unfortunately, Jason had no such luck. It had an unprofitable run in New York and received uneven play in other cities. The Chicago premiere was quietly hosted by Lake Forest College, as part of ‘Soul Week ’68: An Exploration into Afro-American Culture.’

Since the ’60s, Portrait of Jason has maintained a complicated, subterranean reputation. Reel Change, a 1979 guidebook to social issue-oriented films on 16mm, offered a mixed verdict:

Jason is a thirty-three year old black, gay male prostitute. In PORTRAIT OF JASON he dramatizes, with unusual candor, his life experiences of exploitation as a black man and nightclub performer and the discrimination he suffers because he is gay. Interviewed for almost two hours, Jason’s act before the camera is sometimes comic, other times cynical and bizarre. The film does not suggest solutions. However, through Jason’s stories and routines emerges a sense of the tragic realities suffered by many people as a result of racial prejudice and sexual preference. Awareness group and public show material.

“An absorbing revelation of the life of a man who is doubly rejected: as a black and as a gay … should be screened but with discussion or a positive image/action film.” (gays rights activist, San Francisco)

Since the 1980s, Portrait of Jason has been difficult to see. A rarely-circulated 35mm preservation print from the Museum of Modern Art was last shown in Chicago in 2006 at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center as part of Ron Gregg’s Postwar Queer Underground Cinema screening series. The MoMA print subsequently served as the basis of a mediocre DVD released by the British label Second Run, now out-of-print.

Portrait of Jason returns to Chicago thanks to the tireless work of Dennis Doros, co-owner of Milestone Films. Over the last few years, Dennis and his partner Amy Heller have re-released the features of Shirley Clarke under the Project Shirley banner. They’ve already put out The Connection and Ornette: Made in America, but Portrait of Jason posed a unique problem.

Doros felt that MoMA print was a good start, but could be improved. His extraordinary account of the search for the best surviving materials—which ultimately led to an unpromising “work print” in the archive of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research—must be heard to be believed. The restoration, produced in conjunction with the Academy Film Archive and with the support of a Kickstarter campaign, will be making its Chicago premiere on Wednesday at the Music Box Theatre. The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening a brand-new 35mm print, literally delivered straight from the lab.

I’ve booked prints from and talked films with Dennis for nearly a decade. I count him as a friend, as well as a major supporter of 35mm preservation when most outfits are abandoning film altogether. I spoke with him last week about the still-contentious questions posed by Portrait of Jason and the travails of the restoration process.

• • •

KW: I’ve read a lot about your efforts with Project Shirley, but I’m curious: I don’t think I’ve ever read how you first encountered Clarke’s work.

DD: I had known about her films for years. Let me honest, I have to think about this, but it might have been after we started the Project, embarrassingly enough. Perhaps I bought the DVD of Portrait of Jason beforehand when I first thought of it, before we had acquired it. I started watching the films and realized that we needed to do it, that they were important films that weren’t easily seen and weren’t in good condition. As we progressed, I became more and more familiar with the films. I’m still watching quite a few of them.

KW: That’s almost appropriate in a way. If the whole mission of Milestone is to resurrect films that were difficult or impossible to see, you’re talking about a case where you hadn’t even seen them.

DD: It’s sometimes the case, not as often, but it was in this case. It did surprise me, because I was in New York in the ’80s. She was around. Amy knew her through being Dan Talbot’s assistant at New Yorker Films, but we really didn’t see the films until we thought about doing the Project.

KW: How did it come to your attention?

DD: People keep asking me how it got started and the answer is very simple and very long-winded. The simplest part is, we just thought about it. I turned to Amy and said, “What do you think about Shirley Clarke?” She said, “Great idea,” and we went from there.

The long version is that ever since Killer of Sheep, we’ve been considering post-war American independent films. We’ve been reading books and interviews. Watched a lot of films. We’ve been thinking about these directors’ testing of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction.

KW: I know that Killer of Sheep was an enormous success for Milestone [in its 2007 theatrical reissue], but was there anything else that led you to reorient Milestone towards resurrecting works like On the Bowery, The Exiles, and Portrait of Jason?

DD: We’ve always been known for doing a lot of different kinds of films. From doing I Am Cuba to the Mitchell and Kenyon films to Piccadilly from England in 1929. We’ve been all over the map with classic films. We’re still doing a lot of stuff from different periods.

This body of ’60s and ’70s work from American independent filmmakers, it was also political, it was also social. It let people view the world differently than they had thought before they had seen that film. When they walked into the theater, they didn’t know that their minds were going to be changed or that they were going to see something different by the end of the film. That’s something that really is exciting for us and what we find important. Ever since I saw The Sorrow and the Pity in college, where I was completely affected by that film, these films met that kind of test.

KW: What does Shirley Clarke’s work show us that we haven’t seen before?

DD: Oh, so many things. It’s like Melissa Anderson wrote about Jason in the Village Voice, this film “says more about race, class, and sexuality than just about any movie before or since.” Really, she nailed it on the head. This is a film from 1967 when being gay was illegal, before the civil rights reached its fruition in many ways. It’s just as relevant today while telling us so much more about a past that many people never knew existed.

We had a screening up in Harlem before Portrait of Jason opened at the IFC Center in New York. We worked with Imagenation, who promote films of African American content in Harlem. It was an incredible experience. They found this to be an extremely important film—they still know [people like] Jason today, on the borders of society. Still trying to get work, still trying to be accepted in society. They found it an amazing experience and a very moving experience. From screening to screening, from person to person, it will affect you in a different way.

KW: Jason Holliday was at the fringes of culture in 1967, but he still would be in 2013 in some ways. This is a story about civil rights, about gay rights, but it’s not p.c. He’s not a poster boy most organizations would care to claim or adopt.

DD: What they talked about in Harlem was that there were still 16-, 17-, 18-year-old Jasons still in New York, still having a difficult time fitting in to society. They saw this as an incredible educational tool, that it was still part of the American fabric of these people being on the fringes, not knowing where to go, not being white, not being straight.

KW: Shirley Clarke tried to get theatrical distribution for Portrait of Jason, but it mostly wound up getting shown on the college lecture circuit. Have you heard of it being used in a community-organizing context?

DD: I have not found any screenings like that. A lot of her screenings were college-oriented. It wasn’t doing what we did, having a screening in Harlem for the community. Back then, I would have loved for her to try that. I don’t know if distributors did that [outreach] in the 1960s.

KW: There’s also a sense in which these questions—Is Shirley Clarke addressing a white audience or a black audience? Is she addressing an audience of Jasons or an audience that’s slumming by listening in on his life—are part of the tension in the film itself. All of these questions about whether she’s exploiting him or giving him a spotlight or something in between are embedded in the very way that the film works.

DD: She was concerned about that while was editing it. She knew what she was doing. She put herself and Carl [Lee] into the film to show that there was this tension, there was this possibility of exploitation. She had a fascination with African American culture and that’s central to the film. How could you identify without being part of it? Carl was her entrance into the African-American community, of course.

She was not afraid of looking bad in her films. She was not afraid of portraying herself in a bad light. She was pretty self-knowledgeable. Four or five years into our Project Shirley, I’m still finding out new things about her, different facets of her that are sometimes upsetting and sometimes just amazingly wonderful.

KW: Let’s talk about the restoration a bit. You’ve been very forthright in acknowledging that this is the second time there’s been a restoration of Portrait of Jason. The Museum of Modern Art preserved it from less-than-ideal materials about ten or fifteen years ago. It’s actually a fairly instructive story about restoration, where you’re always using the materials at hand and hoping that someone is going to come along and improve upon it later.

DD: I purposely wanted to tell the whole story. MoMA did everything right. They thought they had the last 35mm print in existence and they preserved it to the best of their abilities. They took it to Cinema Arts in Pennsylvania, which is one of the most recognized archival labs in the country.

At the same time, there was another print in Sweden. They did not check the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. I would say that’s because there are so many films to saved, so much work to be done, that no one except the amateur archivist has three years to devote to this kind of search. Kevin Brownlow certainly has shown that with Napoleon. There are many people—Paul Killiam, Raymond Rohauer, even—that have done this kind of work in the past. Archives have done this as well, but they don’t usually have the luxury of time because they’re salaried.

KW: There’s also a way that a restoration like MoMA’s, even if we now recognize it as a stop-gap, was important. It served as the source of the British DVD and that allowed people to see it. It allowed you to see it. It allowed it to circulate and still remain recognized even as the original materials were hiding in Wisconsin.

DD: This is absolutely the case. Archives sometimes will restore a film that has been already been restored by somebody else. There needs to be a continued conversation among archives—that’s what the Association of Moving Image Archivists is for, that’s what the International Federation of Film Archives is for. Continue the collaborations, continue the conversation between archives, find the materials to help each other. I hope that’s what my lecture about Portrait of Jason, which I’ve been taking all over the country, has been doing for students. There is this need for conversation.

KW: In the case of Portrait of Jason, as you’ve pointed out, the way Clarke edited the film fooled everyone for decades. Everyone thought that the original materials were nothing but outtakes.

DD: Even the original inspection reports said work print, but it also said outtakes. [A work print is a rough cut assembled and revised shot-by-shot by the filmmaker during the editing process. The work print guides the conformation of the original negative, but since it’s often spliced over and over again during post-production, the work print is rarely used for preservation projects. – KW] No one really considered this as source material because even if it was a work print, it was an early one and no one thinks of a work print as master material. I can’t say that this is a lesson in life, because I don’t know if this will ever be replicated. I have to say that even though I was correct, I was lucky. This was not something that was easily deduced. It was a shot in the dark. It was my last shot, really, before I gave up and went back to the MoMA restoration.

Really, the main lesson is that the papers—the letters, the correspondence—led me to consider this print again. You need to look at everything, including the papers, when you’re restoring a film. It gives you background, it helps you understand the film better. When you restore a film, you might have a letter where the director says something was printed too light back in 1928 or it ran too fast in 1924. The paper collections are just as important as the film material is.

KW: We’re talking about an area where the question of what a restoration aims to do is relevant. Is it what the filmmaker wanted the film to be or what audiences saw?

DD: There were decisions to be made and we wanted to bring it back to September 1967. There are so many flaws in the printing from [original laboratory] DuArt. There are so many flaws in the opticals she had done. There was a ton of dirt, a ton of scratches. I marked forty places where our negative had flaws that the 1967 print from Sweden didn’t have. I wanted to have them corrected. Vincent [Pirozzi] at Modern Videofilm and Joe [Lindner] at the Academy said, ‘You can spend $10,000 to correct those forty differences, but nobody will see them because to make this film look perfect would cost $100,000.’ And even then you’re not bringing it back to 1967, you’re improving it far beyond what Shirley Clarke ever intended or ever had in 1967. Even if you spent the $100,000, it would be wrong.

So, the choice came back to spending $10,000 to correct these other things that no one would notice. We decided we’d leave it untouched. So it’s a sort of anti-restoration, after putting the film back together.

KW: Anti-restoration is an apt way of summing up the project. Shirley Clarke is trying to make it look distressed, trying to make it look degraded, trying to make it look like outtakes. She lets the camera go out of focus more than any professional crew ever would have permitted. She’s exaggerating the degradation and the rawness in her aesthetic.

DD: Clarke gave two important interviews about this; one was an audio interview with James Blue in 1969 and the other was an article I read from 1965. She talks about her disappointment with The Connection. She had these huge fights with Arthur Ornitz, the cinematographer. He was a 35mm professional cinematographer. He wanted it to look perfect and she wanted The Connection to look rough and beat-up, like a film left behind by a director who gave up on the film. That’s the story The Connection is about.

She was greatly disappointed that The Connection was so clean and so shining. When we were doing Portrait of Jason, boy, did I remember those words! I wanted to make sure that we paid respect to Shirley Clarke’s aesthetic in that film.

KW: I think that’s a great way of summing up. Are there any other projects that Milestone is working on right now?

DD: We are working on Film by Samuel Beckett, which Ross Lipman at UCLA has restored. Actually, Ross is directing the documentary about the making of the film, which is an amazing story. We are working on In the Land of the Head Hunters, the Edward S. Curtis film of 1914 featuring the Kwakwaka’wakw Indians of the Pacific Northwest, who used to be known as the Kwakiutl. That has been restored by UCLA and we’re bringing that out in the next few months.

We’re also doing another Charles Burnett-Billy Woodberry film, Bless Their Little Hearts. That is one of our favorites.

KW: That’s wonderful. We were talking about it a few years ago. We were both enthusiastic, but you said the music rights would be difficult.

DD: They probably are going to be. [Laughs] I haven’t faced that part yet. There is less music than Killer of Sheep. Most of it is by Archie Shepp, so I hope we can get those cleared relatively easy.

• • •

The Chicago Restoration Premiere of Portrait of Jason will be held at the Music Box Theatre on May 29 at 7:00pm. The event is co-sponsored by the Northwest Chicago Film Society, Black Cinema House, and the Reeling Film Festival. Special thanks to Dennis Doros, Dave Jennings, Mike Quintero, Michael W. Phillips, Jr., Brenda Webb, and Beckie Stocchetti.

Posted in Blog | Tagged Avant-Garde Cinema, Interviews, Program Notes, Restorations | Comments Off

CITY STREETS in the Chicago Daily News

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Julian Antos

City Streets opened at the Chicago Theater almost exactly 82 years ago. Here’s the original review from the Chicago Daily News (thanks to Neil Cooper for giving us the article). Check out the mini-reviews for other films on the right!

Posted in Blog | Comments Off

Irving Lerner: A Career in Context

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Kyle Westphal

The Director as Commodity
I couldn’t help chuckling over a poster glimpsed in the Cinemark lobby recently—an advertisement that boasted that only RealD’s 3D system allowed the audience to see the movie exactly “as the director intended.”

You probably don’t need a stereoscopic slogan to recognize that director is routinely and reflexively held up as a film’s author, its artist, and its true voice. Between director’s commentaries and director’s cuts, the fledging auteurism of the ’60s has become commodified and thoroughly unremarkable. Indeed, we’re so inured to the director cult that we often neglect to examine some of the critical assumptions that underpin auteurism.

The official story behind the auteurist upheavals goes something like this: for decades, film was not taken seriously as an art form. When it was taken seriously, the wrong movies were celebrated because the wrong artists were singled out: producers, movie stars, screenwriters, and front office hacks. Critics dismissed all kinds of wonderful films because their silly stories and outrageous appeals did not conform to pretentious literary standards. It took Andrew Sarris and his young acolytes to steer the critical ship elsewhere, towards recognition of the director as the most important contributor to a film—its auteur. Sarris’s articles in Film Culture and his subsequent book The American Cinema taught a legion of young cinephiles to ditch the dialogue and focus on the mise-en-scene. Some old-fashioned critics, like Pauline Kael, resisted the auteurist fervor and became irrelevant fossils. (We’re telling this story from the auteurist’s perspective, remember, so disregard Kael’s enduring popularity and reputation, including last year’s Library of America compendium of her criticism.)

The standard version glosses over some important things. Directors were hardly invisible in the days before Sarris, and film histories published before An American Cinema certainly treated figures like Chaplin, Eisenstein, Lang, Hitchcock, and Capra as artists. More importantly, much as the auteurists frequently lambasted literary tendencies among their colleagues, their own criticism tended to treat films as texts—charting a director’s pet subjects and symbols between works, emphasizing thematic continuity over the course of a career. Rather than outlining a new kind of criticism, they adapted the insular close reading of New Criticism to film.

This literary approach to film criticism has persisted since the 1960s. Talking about a director means treating individual films as isolated systems; they interact with other titles in the director’s oeuvre, but rarely with the wider world. Biography becomes trivia, an irrelevant attempt to venture outside the film itself. In this formulation, the director’s political orientation and private causes occupy a place only slightly above tabloid sex gossip.

An Alternative Approach: Irving Lerner
What would happen if we treated the director differently?

The highly varied career of Irving Lerner provides a fascinating counterpoint to conventional auteurism. Looking for thematic or visual continuity is a fool’s errand—there’s no singular “Lerner style” linking his work across the decades. Compounding the problem is the fact that Lerner often worked under pseudonyms or did not receive credit for his work at all. To even describe Lerner as a director perhaps unnecessarily privileges his relatively few directorial credits at the expense of the other productions for which he performed odd jobs. (Indeed, his longtime collaborator Ben Maddow, who contributed to the script of Murder by Contract without credit, described Lerner as “a very wonderful editor but a terrible director. He just didn’t know where to put the camera.”)

The knotty shape of Lerner’s career is not a barrier to understanding; instead, the twists and turns exemplify the challenges and compromises faced by a generation of left-wing artists working in the film industry—sometimes in major productions, but more often at the margins. In some ways, Lerner’s case is emblematic. He appears, Zelig-like, at crucial moments in the development of non-Hollywood filmmaking.

Beginning as a member of the Worker’s Film & Photo League in his early twenties, Lerner cut his teeth on the League’s radical newsreels. Lerner never contributed to the League’s newsletter, Filmfront, but he did write criticism for New Theatre and New Masses. (In the latter, his articles appeared under the byline of Peter Ellis, a pseudonym that Lerner would reuse for some of his documentaries). His New Theatre pieces include a typically tendentious rejection of pioneering documentarian Robert Flaherty:

But nowhere did [Nanook of the North] show the social life of the Eskimo …. Even his Nanook was a Robinson Crusoe in furs. As far as the film was concerned Nanook and his family were the only Eskimos in Canada. And of course there was no class struggle, there was no exploitation, there was no oppression! It was too obvious; too banal for Robert Flaherty.

Lerner’s desire for a class-conscious documentary cinema hardly found better reception at the Film & Photo League. Though everyone affiliated with the FPL was a radical of some stripe, discord and factionalism ran rampant, as they often did on the left in the 1930s. Lerner split from FPL and founded Nykino with Ralph Steiner and Leo Hurwitz. The collective embarked on a series of films that would shed light on right-wing hypocrisies of the day, from religious cant to vigilantism. (One early production, Pie in the Sky, was based loosely on Joe Hill’s anthem and featured the young Group Theatre actor Elia “Gadget” Kazan.) Nykino eventually became Frontier Films, the group responsible (after Lerner’s departure) for Native Land, the feature-length apotheosis of ’30s radical cinema.

Work-for-Hire
Politically-engaged, independent filmmaking was, naturally, difficult to sustain in economically calamitous times. Many left-wing filmmakers—Lerner, Steiner, Willard van Dyke, Paul Strand—eventually wound their way to sponsored productions, taking commissions from city governments and trade associations. A Place to Live, Lerner’s project for the Philadelphia Housing Association, blends fiction and reportage to make a succinct case for urban renewal—a good liberal cause in its day, albeit one whose paternalistic, community-shattering consequences are now routinely (and correctly) decried by latter-day liberals. At least Lerner’s contribution to the urban renewal genre goes about its business in a resolutely color-blind way and looks forward to an integrated society. The same cannot be said for Steiner and van Dyke’s The City, the sensation of the 1939 World’s Fair, which contrasts black urban poverty with the lilly white promise of the suburbs.

As the New Deal gave way to Total War, Lerner found himself working, as many radicals did, for the US Government. On the strength of A Place to Live, he headed up film production for the Office of War Information’s Overseas Unit. He was charged, flatly, with producing government propaganda to sell America to the world. Unlike Capra’s celebrated Why We Fight series, Lerner’s films received no domestic theatrical distribution and thus had little chance of contributing to his critical reputation. Indeed, as made-to-order government propaganda, the films carry titles but no personnel credits—a serious barrier to sorting out who did what. Scholars have attributed the production and direction of The Autobiography of a Jeep to Lerner (it’s a cute film about the superiority of U.S. engineering, narrated by a Jeep), but it’s understandably difficult to establish a full filmography without access to archival sources.

If Lerner lacked a sense of big-time careerism, he nevertheless worked constantly. He knew his way around several different crafts, plying his trade as director, assistant director, editor, and cinematographer. He had an occasional personal project, such as Muscle Beach, which he co-directed with Joseph Strick. Amazingly, Muscle Beach manages to turn a disreputable gay cruising spot into an All-American family playground! Almost totally unknown today (and unnecessarily so, as the Academy Film Archive has done a beautiful job of preserving it), Muscle Beach was apparently the talk of the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1951. The British film journal Sequence reported:

In complete contrast to anything else the evening had disclosed was the already legendary Muscle Beach. Here the poet’s eye strays observantly, ruminatively, amusedly, over a crowded summer beach, where acrobats and weight-lifters are exercising, young people are lying out in the sun, and their children paddle and gape at the strange antics of their elders. So dazzling are the patterns and rhythms of its editing that one can easily miss the shapeliness of the structure of this perfect little film, whose easy transitions from the lyrical to the humorous are so happily enhanced by Earl Robinson’s guitar accompaniment and Edwin Rolfe’s witty and affectionate words.

Lerner’s path was, again, not unique—his choices parallel the changing currents of non-theatrical film. Documentary declined in post-war America and avant-garde film enjoyed a brief vogue, allowing veterans of the left to offer their formalist wares under a new name.

Muscle Beach exists today as a tantalizing abberation. For the most part, however, Lerner was a technician for hire. He photographed The Land for Flaherty and acted as a “production associate” for Robot Monster. (The latter credit is too obscure or too embarrassing for inclusion in Jan-Christopher Horak’s Lovers of Cinema, which otherwise provides the most comprehensive Lerner filmography I’ve seen. It would irresponsible to stress Lerner’s contribution to Robot Monster, but the recovering auteurist in me can’t help but note that Robot Monster and City of Fear describe the perils of atomic annihilation more poignantly than any of their Hollywood contemporaries.)

Careers, Clues, and the Blacklist
With no book or article devoted to Lerner, we can only piece his career together through anecdotes and off-hand citations in memoirs and histories of the documentary. In fact, he seems to have been something of a radical gadfly. He was Woody Guthrie’s conduit to Hollywood as the folk singer tried (unsuccessfully, at least during his lifetime) to bring Bound for Glory to the screen. He established Fritz Lang’s entrée into the left-wing New York intelligentsia and the two became so close that Lerner advised Lang that his wife had become “a little suspicious of our (ahem) relationship.” Lerner compiled the first collection of Harry Alan Potakmin’s criticism and produced the frame enlargements for Jay Leyda’s English edition of Eisenstein’s Film Form. He facilitated off-beat gigs for radical friends, as when he hired Henwar Rodakiewciz, Alexander Hackenschmied, and Roger Barlow for OWI projects or commissioned the artists at UPA to animate the menstrual cycle for a junior high sex ed film. He was briefly consulted to polish up Emile de Antonio and Daniel Talbot’s Point of Order, before the filmmakers recognized that Lerner’s professionalism was too tidy and his fee too high.

Allegedly, Lerner was also one of the USSR’s Manhattan Project moles. (Per Venona: Exposing Soviet Espionage in America, Lerner resigned from OWI after a counterintelligence agent caught him photographing UC Berkeley‘s cyclotron without authorization.) Less speculative is the recognition that Lerner’s whole social sphere in the ’30s and ’40s existed on the radical-Communist-Popular Front axis—associations that immediately raise the question of Lerner’s fate during the era of the blacklist.

Lerner is often reflexively described as a blacklisted filmmaker, but the exact nature of his predicament in this period is difficult to substantiate. He received a director credit on some low-budget, independent projects in the early ’50s (Man Crazy, Edge of Fury). Lerner’s name is missing from the indices of such comprehensive blacklist histories as Naming Names and The Inquisition in Hollywood. Nevertheless, his output in the ’50s does have some of the familiar characteristics of careers destroyed by HUAC: minor gigs on low-budget junk and periods of official inactivity. Like many blacklistees, Lerner might have been officially unemployable, but he was still recognized as a professional who could fix disastrous projects for the studios. Phillip Yordan, who acted as a notoriously unscrupulous front for many blacklisted artists, employed Lerner as his go-to fixer.

Even if Lerner himself experienced fewer career setbacks than his blacklisted colleagues, he essentially worked under the same pressures, in the same milieu. His daughter Margery attended the Westland School, a progressive haven for the children of the blacklisted. (“We were definitely guinea pigs,” she recalled to the Los Angeles Times. “Many of us shared the common bond of knowing our dads were blacklisted or in jail, so … we were in the boat together.”) Appropriately enough, Lerner worked as an uncredited editorial supervisor on Spartacus, the unruly superproduction that broke the blacklist. (He would later perform a similar task on Scorsese’s New York, New York; he died during post-production and Scorsese dedicated the film to his memory.)

During the tail end of the blacklist period, Lerner managed to direct Murder by Contract and City of Fear for Columbia. Were these productions simply so cheap that they flew in under the political radar? Neither has any hectoring socialist monologues, but they nevertheless manage to say deeply unsettling things about pax Americana. These companion films are a world away from the stylized, Expressionist tangle of post-war film noir, locating their violence in unassuming, sunny gas stations, barber shops, and bungalows. In some ways, Murder by Contract stands as the logical culmination of the post-war ‘business noir’ cycle (Force of Evil, I Walk Alone, Monsieur Verdoux), but worked over with a post-Beatnik sensibility that’s considerably more nihilistic than its predecessors. (Vince Edwards states early on that corporate prerogatives and organized crime are essentially indistinguishable.) Contra Maddow, both films demonstrate that Lerner did have good instincts about camera placement. Lerner and Edwards also brought out the best qualities in each other, jointly advancing a low-key style that anticipates Jim Jarmusch.

We can call Murder by Contract and City of Fear the summit of Lerner’s work, but such a declaration would impose a linear orderliness on an essentially unruly career. (These low-budget films also received scant recognition in their own time and hardly advanced Lerner’s professional reputation.) Like all of Lerner’s output, they attest to the singular life of a political survivor. As Andrew Sarris would say, Irving Lerner is most assuredly a subject for further research.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society screens Irving Lerner’s A Place to Live, Muscle Beach, and City of Fear in vault prints from the Academy Film Archive and Sony Pictures Repertory at the Portage Theater on March 27. Please see our current calendar for more information. Special thanks to Chris Lane, Jim Harwood, Mark Toscano, May Haduong, Cassie Blake, and Betsy Strick.

FOR FURTHER READING

Cray, Ed. Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.
Ellis, Jack C. and Betsy A. MacLane. A New History of Documentary Film. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005.
Gordon, Bernard. Hollywood Exile: or How I Learned to Love the Blacklist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.
Haynes, John Earl and Harvey Klehr. Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Horak, Jan-Christopher, ed. Lovers of Cinema: The First American Avant-Garde Film, 1919 – 1945. Madion: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
Kline, Herbert, ed. New Theatre and Film, 1934 – 1937: An Anthology. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.
McGillan, Patrick. Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
Potamkin, Harry Alan. The Eyes of the Movie, ed. Irving Lerner. International Pamphlets No. 348, 1934.
Rose, Marla Matzer. Muscle Beach: Where the Best Bodies in the World Started a Fitness Revolution. Los Angeles: LA Weekly Books, 2001.
Rose, Peter Isaac, ed. The Dispossessed: An Anatomy of Exile. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005.
Rotha, Paul and Sinclair Road & Richard Griffith. Documentary Film, Third Ed., Rev. and En. Glasgow: R. MacLehose & Co. Ltd., 1952.
Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. New York: Dutton, 1968.
Talbot, Toby. The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

Posted in Blog | Tagged Avant-Garde Cinema, Editorials, Program Notes | Comments Off

From the Bottom Up: Mostly About Subtitles

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Kyle Westphal

Aside from Pulitzer-winning source material or a dose of Merchant-Ivory patina, subtitles are often judged the surest indication of a movie’s pedigree. Dialogue that would provoke guffaws and catcalls in its native tongue, the truism goes, reads profound and poetic in subtitled subterfuge.

The snobbism cuts both ways, of course. “It’s already possible to determine whether someone is middlebrow or upperbrow,” Hollis Alpert advised his Saturday Review readers in 1959, “depending on whether the word Bergman suggests Ingmar or Ingrid.” Snarkier still was Mike Rubin’s contention in the Village Voice in 2001 that “the Osama bin Laden videotape was, for most American viewers, probably their first experience watching something with subtitles.” (Grant Rubin the courage of his hilarious convictions, at least; he went on to compare the aesthetic strategies of the terror tape to recent work of Jacques Rivette and Mohsen Makhmalbaf.)

Subtitles are, of course, also thought to seriously limit a film’s box office potential, restricting play to art houses and specialty theaters. Intouchables, the feel-good French drama that’s earned over $400 million worldwide, has grossed a little over $10 million in the US—which is considered outstanding for subtitled fare these days. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon made $128 million stateside thirteen years ago, which was enough for Entertainment Weekly to declare Ang Lee’s neo-wuxia epic the odds-on-favor template for twenty-first-century cinema. By the time, Zhang Yimou’s Hero, the natural successor to Crouching Tiger, appeared on American screens to test this thesis, it was already old news to specialists. (Hero had been circulating on import DVDs for two years.) What’s more, Hero had already been supplanted by the subtitled event of the new millennium (and several millennia before that): Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which proved that even archaic Aramaic was no barrier to wide circulation.

Subtitles have been part of the movie-going landscape for so long that we process that them largely in cultural terms. The technical considerations are secondary.

But subtitles were hardly inevitable or instantly indicative of a cultural divide. They were but one solution to the upheavals of the talkies.

During the silent era, films traveled across borders with considerable freedom. Outfitted with a new set of titles for local markets, films could be shown anywhere. (A confusing semantic point for scholars and general readers alike: contemporary accounts often describe the dialogue cards and narrative interpolations of the silent era as subtitles. As near as I can tell, we retroactively began calling them intertitles after the arrival of the sound era to distinguish from the bottom-of-the-screen, simultaneous translation variety.) Thus the Italian and French film industries briefly eclipsed American efforts—at least until the Great War destroyed every production center aside from Hollywood. American stars dominated screens around the world. Even the Soviet Union loved Yankee personalities, as evidenced by A Kiss from Mary Pickford, a romantic comedy built around a stealth recording of a visit from America’s Sweetheart.

The sound transition facilitated corporate consolidation but simultaneously threatened market share. The major studios survived intact and raised the barrier for entry for independents. Theater-owners required complex financing deals to keep the doors open—a ready parallel to the digital conversion of today. But what about international markets? Audiences wanted to hear actors speak the local argot, which opened up the terrifying possibility of indigenous product actually competing with neo-colonial wares. Poorly-capitalized domestic companies could upend the plans of major studios.

Sound recording and mixing were still in their infancy, so dubbing over an entire soundtrack was impractical and difficult. Subtitles required another stage in the printing process, and anyone who’s seen White Zombie or Wild Girl (both 1932) with their almost indecipherable optical effects can attest to the truly meretricious quality of duping stocks in the early talkie era. The subtitling option was adopted by small-time operators but largely ignored by the majors. In the foreword to his collection Saint Cinema, Herman G. Weinberg recounts being cajoled into developing the primitive process by his employers at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse:

[S]omeone said that was a contraption called a moviola, which had been used for editing films all along. It had a footage counter and now a photo-electric cell that made it possible to measure the length of every piece of dialogue in the film. All that was necessary was to figure out how many words could be read in the time it took them to say it. And I was elected to do it.

I began very gingerly, not more than maybe twenty or thirty translations in the form of titles (at the bottom of the screen, that was the logical place) per ten-minute reel; then I watched the audience in the theater to see if they would have to bob their heads up and down to look at the picture, then read the title, etc.—just as in a tennis match the spectators turn their heads from left to right to follow the players. Nope—they didn’t bob their heads, they just cast down their eyes and lifted them up again. Good! I was emboldened to add more titles and more until, if the dialogue of a film warranted it (like the marvelous Marius-Fanny-César trilogy of Marcel Pagnol, for instance), I might have as many as a hundred to a hundred and fifty dialogue titles to each ten-minute reel.

(The gingerly attitude in subtitling survived long after Weinberg grew out of it. Film collectors and seasoned repertory regulars have learned to expect very sparse translation in prints struck in the ‘50s and ‘60s and beyond.)

And so the third option—the one that seems the most elaborate and wasteful to us now—was briefly adopted: concurrently filming multiple versions of major productions.

Were the alternatives ever attempted on the same scale? Perhaps, but then, a pedestrian dub job could hardly command the same beguiling interest for us today. A folly that lasted a bare two years in Hollywood, the counterintuitive existence of these shadow films must be answered.

Studio production schedules had already been strangled into something resembling a very efficient science by the dawn of the talkies, and most everyone was under contract anyway—contracts that stipulated nothing one way or another about working seven days a week or long past midnight. And so there was a German Anna Christie and a Spanish variant on Laurel and Hardy. Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail was filmed in no less than five simultaneous versions: a widescreen version in Fox’s 70mm Grandeur process and four standard 35mm versions in English, Spanish, French, and German. (The latter was purportedly revived to some success in Germany following World War II.)

And, importantly, Hollywood was not the only production center attempting to corner the international market through alternate versions. Germany also made significant strides in this area, with three versions (German, French, English) of The Congress Dances. The Criterion editions of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and The Threepenny Opera present both the German and the French versions for home consumption.

Scholarly interest in Multiple Language Versions has been a long time coming and it’s not at all clear how many of these curios are still with us. Paul Fejos long enjoyed a higher reputation in France than in the US, on the basis of Lonesome, but also the French-language version of The Big House that Fejos shot for MGM. Francophile Andrew Sarris even cited Révolte dans la prison when putting Fejos forward as a ‘Subject for Further Research’ in The American Cinema, but had he seen it? Does it still exist?

Every film archive faces formidable cataloging challenges, and verifying whether their holdings contain variant editions of established classics demands drudgery with little chance of reward. Unique material is the prize that drives preservation priorities. Every respectable archive has a print of Fritz Lang’s M, so it’s neither surprising nor damning that the BFI did not realize that it held a copy of the forgotten English-language version until 2005. This version is now available as an extra on the Criterion and Masters of Cinema Blu-ray editions of M, with the latter including a realistic and edifying account of the discovery of the English version and the archival issues involved.

Universal’s Spanish-tongued Drácula is doubtless the most celebrated and widely-seen of the Multiple Language Versions today. Its fame stems, in part, from its unlikely re-discovery (a full version was finally assembled when the last missing reel was found in a Cuban archive in the 1980s), but also from the perceived creakiness of the Lugosi classic that it remakes. The Tod Browning-Bela Lugosi Dracula is a great film, but one that requires a specific kind of engagement; seen in anything but a pristine print, the subtlety of its staging and cutting is completely lost. Viewed on TV, it’s merely stodgy. Fans instinctively respond to the lively camera movement of the Spanish version, as well as its earthier attitude. The tops on the actresses are shorter and Dracula’s Transylvanian castle has real vermin. (In the English version, we get armadillos instead.)

For all these reasons, Drácula has earned a substantial following in the horror community. Its ready availability on video hasn’t hurt, either. It’s been co-billed by Universal Home Entertainment with the Lugosi Dracula on three DVD iterations since 1999 and was upgraded to hi-def in the recent Blu-ray box set. And although Universal has a 35mm vault print of Drácula, it doesn’t get shown much because, unlike the DVD, it’s not subtitled.

Subtitling works through an economy of scale. Adding subtitles to a single print is expensive, often prohibitively so—especially when the print is manufactured as a matter of routine asset protection rather than mounted for theatrical release. Although tech-savvy cinephiles have proudly synced home-made subtitle files to DVD rips floating around in the torrent backwaters, doing the work for a film print is considerably more complicated. Video can be measured in timecodes, but films are still counted in frames for purposes of printing and subtitling. A list of translated dialogue and timecodes isn’t sufficient to produce a new subtitled print. A laboratory technician needs to produce a spotting list, which assigns each subtitle a frame-accurate footage position. (What happens if the list isn’t accurate? I recall with some fondness an infamous 16mm print of Aguirre, the Wrath of God where every subtitle in the first reel preceded the dialogue by a few seconds. That print was still circulating as late as 2006.)

The art of coordinating perfect and readable subtitles is often handled by specialty outfits unaffiliated with the lab that produced the print. (Titra and LVT are two such companies.) Producing a spotting list represents an upfront investment on top of the expense of subtitling each print. For small jobs, laser subtitles produced from the spotting list are the most efficient vehicle for translating dialogue, but a wide release can justify the cost of striking a subtitlted negative. Of course, once something is added to the negative, it cannot be removed from the negative or from the prints struck from that negative. Assuming that the producer still wants non-subtitled prints for the domestic market, this means paying for a second negative that will be used expressly for making subtitled prints. If the distributor anticipates making only a handful of subtitled prints, the expense of a second negative is difficult to justify.

Some films won’t see returns enough to justify a subtitled negative or even a single subtitled print. In that case, it falls to the exhibitor for a creative workaround. Sixteen-millimeter college film societies produced mimeographed synopses, an opera-derived practice still used on occasion by Anthology Film Archives. (So storied are the Anthology synopses that I’d read about them three or four times as a teenager, long before ever attending a show there.) Some exhibitors, entranced by the possibility afforded by the theater loud speaker, read a translation aloud from the theater floor.

In recent years, soft subtitling has gained popularity. Impractical on a mass release, even on the art house circuit, it’s the exclusive province of cinematheques. This means that the exhibitor prepares or obtains a subtitle list and transfers the content to a PowerPoint presentation, which is run concurrently with the print from a digital projector elsewhere in the auditorium. Though theoretically such a practice could be automated and left to run on its own, film is inherently a riskier (and sexier) medium than that. What would happen to the synchronization if the projectionist misses a change-over? A human operator, preferably a native speaker, is essential for advancing the slides and judging the temperature of the room. The necessity of a full rehearsal is another aspect that brings the soft-subtitled film closer to a high-wire kind of live theater.

If an exhibitor goes to the trouble of running an unsubtitled print and preparing soft subtitles, it’s a big deal and speaks to major faith in the power and importance of the film on the exhibitor’s part. It’s a lot of trouble, but it’s better than letting the film sit in the vault forever because it’s not subtitled. We did it a little over a year ago with Liliom and we’re doing it again this week with Drácula. We can’t say when you’ll next have a chance to see this in a theater, in 35mm, but this print is certainly going back into the crypt at sunrise.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening Drácula in a 35mm print from Universal at the Portage on Wednesday, February 13. Special thanks to Paul Ginsburg and Dennis Chong. For more information about the screening, please see our current calendar. Have you heard that we’re doing the subtitles ourselves?

Posted in Blog | Tagged 35mm, Exhibition History, Program Notes, Programming | Comments Off

2012 in Review, Part I: No Compromise?

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Last year we presented a two-part analysis of trends and achievements from the preceding twelve months of cinema. Here’s the first part of this year’s edition. — Ed.

Nothing But a Man, the independent feature from 1964 about apartheid conditions in the American South, plays in a new print at the Gene Siskel Film Center this weekend. It’s worth seeing for many reasons, but let’s focus on one detail. It opens with a peculiar credit, made no less disconcerting by the intervening five decades; instead of announcing itself as the product of a film studio, television station, or the star’s vanity label, Nothing But a Man cites the DuArt Film Laboratories as its putative producer.

This is, of course, literally true—DuArt developed the latent image recorded on the original camera rolls and then struck intermediate elements that facilitated the release prints distributed to theaters. In the most industrial sense, they produced the object to be consumed. (Amy Taubin suggests a less totalizing explanation in Artforum: Irvin Young, brother of Nothing But a Man producer/cinematographer/co-writer Robert M. Young, ran DuArt and probably offered free or steeply discounted lab services to the shoestring production.)

We don’t often talk about film laboratories in such exalted terms, and the opportunities to do so are quickly diminishing. Although 2012 saw no shortage of elegies, editorials, and think pieces about The Death of Cinema, the discussion was mostly confined to cranky complaints about the inanities of the latest blockbuster or the way “kids these days” are content to watch movies on their iPhones. Kodak’s long-anticipated bankruptcy announcement in January occasioned many end-of-an-era pronouncements, but too few attempts to grapple with the bigger picture.

Film historians will likely look back on 2012 as the year that spelled the death knell for film as a mass medium. At the time of Kodak’s Chapter 11 filing, Japanese competitor Fujifilm was touted as a healthy rival whose savvy business decisions had allowed it to weather the industry-wide switch to digital. Talk about savvy: by September, Fuji announced that they would cease production on nearly all their film stocks.

In American movie theaters, the digital conversion continued at startling speed, with all but the smallest and worst-capitalized houses making the switch before year’s end. (Many European territories had already reached total compliance.) Specialty laboratories shuttered, including Amsterdam’s venerable Haghefilm and its parent company, Cineco. (Two weeks ago came news—on facebook, no less—that the lab would re-launch as Haghefilm Digitaal, though its future obviously remains precarious.)

Before wading into the implications of these events, let’s examine the reaction. There were nostalgic laments for vanished perfection of photochemical monochrome, such as Daniel Eagan’s piece in The Atlantic, and photo-essays about the disappearing projection booth in Wired. Programmers tabulated the ratio of DCP-to-35mm screenings at major international festivals and shared the results with colleagues on facebook. Archivists argued privately (and sometimes all-too-publicly) about the stability of digital storage and the quality of digital projection. Our own Rebecca Hall even participated in a panel about conserving analog projection equipment at the annual Association of Moving Image Archivists conference in December.

These conversations assumed, sincerely but somewhat naively, that the future of film was in the hands of those who cared about it most. That is, curators, archivists, programmers, projectionists, filmmakers, collectors, and critics could band together and will a reprieve, or at least stipulate the terms of a plea bargain. Film would remain viable, even if it meant we all had to become machinists or open our own DIY labs or petition the studios to maintain 35mm libraries or order enough raw stock to beat back the red ink in Kodak Park.

• • •

Who will step up to save cinema? In 2012, Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson attempted nothing less.

Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises was shot entirely on film, including over 70 minutes worth of footage on the gargantuan, 15-perforation, horizontal 70mm IMAX film. Anderson’s The Master was lensed almost exclusively on 5-perforation, vertical 65mm. (The mute 65mm negative becomes the basis for a 70mm print with the addition of a soundtrack, so it will be referred to as 70mm hereafter.) Both were assembled with conventional analog workflows, with parallel Digital Intermediates also made to serve the marketplace.

It’s easy to spout Kodak’s ‘Film—No Compromise’ slogan, but it’s also undeniable that substantial market forces are militating against giving audiences that choice.

Nolan’s clout and the extraordinary anticipation that preceded The Dark Knight Rises were sufficient to convince IMAX to reboot or reinstall 70mm projection systems in select venues, even though the giant-screen company had been converting many of its site to digital exhibition. Anderson was less successful. The Master played an extended 70mm engagement at New York’s Village East Cinema but its large-format play-off in other markets has been spotty. Chicago has so far seen only one 70mm screening—a pre-release show at the Music Box that sold out in twenty minutes. And that wasn’t the distributor’s idea. The Music Box screening was brought about almost single-handedly by the indefatigable Ben Kenigsberg of TimeOut Chicago, whose blog posts on the subject attracted Anderson’s attention.

To be on Southport that night and see hordes of young people photographing the 70mm marquee made one boundlessly optimistic about public awareness of film exhibition. The next day, Michael Phillips reviewed the show in the Chicago Tribune:

Opening this film wide, in conventional projection formats, is a mistake. It’s not “The King’s Speech.” It’s not “The Artist.” It’s not half as “easy” as Anderson’s previous film, the inspired “There Will Be Blood.” Based on last night’s 70mm screening, the question’s inevitable: Why wouldn’t Weinstein go out of its way to treat this exotic bird with care and to maximize interest and availability in experiencing “The Master” in optimum 70mm circumstances? That’s how he shot it (mostly), and that’s how it should be seen (when and where possible).

People do care about the way they receive images. They want to know they’re getting a good look at a filmmaker’s intentions. “The Master” is an analog novelty. It’ll look good when projected digitally, but not this good.

Phillips wasn’t the only one. The internet swelled with 70mm paeans, primers, and pleas. For a whole generation of cinephiles—the ones raised on Pulp Fiction, Memento, Amélie, Anderson’s own Magnolia, and the endless intertextual swirl of DVD commentaries, making-of docs, and director’s cut—this was the first time they’d been called upon to recognize and fight for film exhibition, 70mm or otherwise.

The Music Box has yet to secure a return engagement for The Master in 70mm. The Weinstein Company typically gives first dibs to chains like Landmark for its major releases, effectively shutting out the only public venue in town equipped for 70mm. The Master didn’t even play anywhere in Chicago in 35mm until the Patio booked it as a second-run title.

Reviews of The Master tended to treat it as a referendum on Anderson’s place in the pantheon—was it an exasperating masterpiece that earned comparison to Kubrick or merely exasperating? I suppose it’s only appropriate that The Master spawn a cult of personality, but film criticism might concern itself with more interesting matters. (Is it edifying to walk out of a movie and declare its maker a genius? Or quibble with your friends about the degree of that genius?)

Whatever else it is, The Master is a film of extraordinary and mysterious ambitions with an unusual integration of thematic concerns and formal strategies. The period recreation is expert, and something more: a plausible account of the social milieu of a righteous minority in mid-century American life, cajoling strangers with leaflets and cozying up to tranced-out dowagers. Though pre-release buzz marked The Master as a Scientology éxposé, the film is actually ambivalent, if not outright sympathetic, towards The Cause as packaged by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. It’s a cult, but it’s also positioned as one of the few forces of organized pacifism in Cold War America. The Cause’s turgid catechism is equally an instrument of enslavement and liberation—it’s the thing finally allows Joaquin Phoenix to relate honestly to another person.

“Laughing at [Scientology] or being negative, that goes away so quickly when your head is inside it,” Anderson recently told the New York Times “and you see how people are talking about getting better and taking control of their lives.” I don’t like metaphors, but it’s not inapt to ask whether 70mm is Anderson’s Cause. Clarity is its own cult. Composed largely of close-ups, rather than the wide angle spectacles that had hitherto been 70mm’s specialty, The Master is itself a fantastic appropriation and an impossible crusade—a private reckoning in the public square. Can a whole system of consciousness be overthrown? What about a whole system of film exhibition?

• • •

Until the 1960s or so, film critics often took it upon themselves to not only champion individual works but to defend the whole system of cinema as a fertile and substantial medium for serious art. Cinema was not—or at least not always, or not only—a witless form of industrial entertainment, but really a means to personal expression and a playground of submerged dramatic, psychological, sexual, and kinetic insight. Hack directors became invaluable auteurs.

This film-as-art operation was a necessary corrective to a certain snobbish tendency in cultural criticism that endeavored to divide everything into opposing camps: high art vs. low, art vs. kitsch, masterpiece vs. trash. And yet today it’s reasonable to ask whether this wholesale shift to the artist—to his (and, far too infrequently, her) themes, strategies, opinions, and claims to creating lasting masterworks—hasn’t left the medium itself out in the cold. In an effort to disavow the commercial, the industrial, the mass-produced character of cinema, we may wind up destroying the artist as well.

I may want to make films, but what if the means to do that are becoming extinct?

The promise of the DIY laboratory greatly underestimates the craft, expertise, and complexity of modern lab work. Hand-processed film stock often yields startling qualities on-screen (vide Ben Rivers’s Two Years at Sea), but such effects are not appropriate for every production. Faithfully translating a decades-old negative to a new print often demands the interpretative sensitivity of a medievalist: examining notches cut into the side of the negative or staples affixed to its perforations to determine the proper contrast values in the printer, decoding similar ‘signs’ to assure that fade-ins and fade-outs occur as planned, guiding shrunken material through an optical printer for maximal stability, repairing decades-old cement splices, agitating the developer with attention to the particular eccentricities of a given film stock, achieving perfect synchronization between sound and image. Such skills are the stuff of apprenticeship and further years of trial and error. They cannot be summoned anew overnight.

Labs provide general services, but many also pursue certain specialties, like 16mm blowup, audio restoration, tinting, etc. Up until now, archivists and filmmakers have had the privilege of working with many labs and selecting the right partner for a particular project based on its expertise. The old Haghefilm, for example, boasted of a special 28mm gate that allowed its technicians to transfer the contents of the obsolete non-theatrical gauge to conventional 35mm. (Our friend Dino Everrett would contest the ‘obsolete’ label being applied to his beloved 28mm, but his revival of this special format is the subject of another column.)

The skills passed down through generations of lab technicians are not facing imminent eradication. Some specialty labs, like Cinema Arts and the much larger FotoKem, are still going strong; and should the day come when the last for-profit lab proves unsustainable, America will always have in-house lab facilities affiliated with its two largest film archives, the Library of Congress and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Presumably, their insulation from market pressure will act as a bulwark against the complete disappearance of quality lab work.

But even labs operating in the public trust need film stock. Will we need a non-profit manufacturer to go with them?

High-quality lab work requires a diverse array of stocks: black-and-white negative stock differs from black-and-white fine grain (or interpositive) and differs again from black-and-white print stock; specialized formulations and workflows reduce the sibilant distortion of the optical soundtrack; camera stocks of different speeds yield different grain structures.

Over the last decade, Kodak has radically scaled back the variety of stocks on offer. The latest victim is 16mm Ektachrome reversal, the high-quality amateur format. Should the company survive, would it see enough profit to continue producing all these secondary and tertiary stocks? (This much is clear: Kodak CEO Antonio Perez has long touted inkjet printing, not film manufacture, as the company’s salvation—or at least he did until Kodak axed its desktop printer line in September.) Fuji, which never tried competing with Kodak on all but the most popular stocks, has exited the stage entirely.

Can cinema be saved? Not until we acknowledge the character of what we’re dealing with. The tension between personal expression, corporate profit, artisanal craft, industrial economy-of-scale, technological innovation, built-in obsolescence, and physical frailty and decay is what makes film worth talking about in the first place.

Check back soon for Part II.

Posted in Blog | Tagged 35mm, DCP, Editorials, Restorations | Comments Off

The Spoken Cinema

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Can anything else be said about The Night of the Hunter? After a BFI monograph, two book-length accounts of its production, an exhaustive Criterion Collection edition, and numerous critical appreciations, one fears not. Robert Mitchum’s monologues are quoted with giddy abandon and the spectral image of Shelley Winters underwater is recalled with undiluted emotional immediacy. James Agee’s screenplay (long ridiculed by associates who outlived him) is now released under the banner of the Library of America—an honor that the screenplay basically aspired to long before such a collection existed.

By now, this strange picture, roundly rejected upon its initial release, has been overtaken by its own special class of critical clichés. It blends the pastoralism of Griffith with the angular terror of the Weimar Cinema. It’s a horror show with a strong Sunday School message. It’s a great challenge to (or affirmation of?) the auteur theory—the sole film directed by Charles Laughton, at once sui generis and a heartbreaking suggestion of what wonders he may have produced afterward were it not for the film’s box office troubles. (And we’re not exempt from this either: in calling The Night of the Hunter a Christmas classic, we’re hoping to promulgate a new cliché, no ill will towards It’s a Wonderful Life or White Christmas intended.)

The freshest way to look at The Night of Hunter is actually to listen to it. It’s much more provocative and productive to take The Night of a Hunter not as an directorial outlier but rather as a climax to Laughton’s work across several media. In the early fifties, Laughton’s film roles were few, but he remained an inescapable public presence. The theatrical partnership between Laughton and producer Paul Gregory encompassed a busy lecture tour and three extraordinarily well-received stage productions: Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell, Benet’s John Brown’s Body, and Wouk’s The Caine-Mutiny Court Martial. All these events revolved around the special quality of words read aloud, with Laughton literally hauling a stack of books up to his lectern when presenting An Evening with Charles Laughton. The more elaborate productions of Shaw and Benet were not really so much more elaborate—Laughton’s actors would take the stage, rivet themselves to the stools, and perform the texts in a manner that would now be called reader’s theater.

Laughton’s reading talent was already well-known. The popularity of his recitation of the Gettysburg Address in Ruggles of Red Gap led naturally to a commercial 78 rpm recording of the same. (Those curious about this release can scrounge the junk bins of your local record store or import the British Blu-ray of Ruggles from the Masters of Cinema label, which includes the audio as an extra.)

Regular visits to a Southern California military hospital in 1943 sealed the deal. Per Laughton:

I read innocuous and sentimental things which I thought would please them. I read three times a week, but one day I tried something heavy and tragic, and there was an immediate response. They started to talk about their own problems—being in bombers over Germany, or in foxholes, or how they felt after they had been maimed. And so I found that serious literature was a great help to them because other people in centuries gone and in the present had all the experience that are to be had, and the GI’s felt they were not alone. This resulted in me having to read in a larger room at Birmingham because the first, small room could not contain all those who wanted to come. And then I had to read in a larger hall still. And when I was reading from all the books I loved, I found the business of reading aloud was a matter of making the effort to communicate something you love to people you love.

Laughton’s argument for this intimate brand of performance continued in the pages of This Week, the mighty Sunday newspaper supplement, which offered three pages to ‘America’s No. 1 reader-out-loud’ in a promotional tie-up with The Night of the Hunter:

Moses wrote the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone from divine inspiration. The tablets of stone have long been dust, but the words live. Man’s greatest and noblest works of genius built from brick and mortar crumble and perish, but words do not die…

I was once invited to read the Bible to an audience of ministers at Occidental College. Afterward, one of the ministers told me, “You know, we ministers make a fetish of the Bible. Your turn it into a dramatic, earthy tale of real people.”

I assure you that you can do the same thing if you will try reading the Bible out loud in your own living room, just as our ancestors used to do in their daily Bible readings.

(Is it any wonder that Laughton originally planned to open The Night of a Hunter with a scene of himself reading aloud from the Bible? Or that the film’s soundtrack LP was actually a 35-minute condensation of the story as read by Laughton?)

Laughton’s approach was essentially a more democratic and easy-going rendition of the University of Chicago’s contemporaneous Great Books initiative. While Robert Maynard Hutchins attempted to encyclopedia-ize the landmarks of Western Lit, Laughton promoted the experience of listening as a special kind of engagement. It was primarily emotional, rather than textual, uplift.

Despite its photographic virtuosity, it’s this spoken aspect of The Night of the Hunter that completely sets it apart from its contemporaries. (Its only real companion is The Saga of Anatahan.) Almost every line spoken in the film is delivered with one sort of dialect or another, but it’s never just a gimmick. Laughton and Agee are deeply interested in the patterns of vernacular speech, with each syllable functioning as melody, not rhetoric. It’s pure sound—an unfolding oral ritual that aspires to folk permanence.

Certainly the speech is affected: it’s a boy’s adventure yarn where everyone talks with faux Shakespearian grandiloquence. The deviations and eccentricities are expressive in themselves. The lines carry the odd phrasings and wild cadences of a kid trying to prettify a half-remembered poem until it sounds like a lost verse of the King James Bible. The Night of the Hunter would never be confused with naturalism, and that’s the point: in its adolescent yearning and gawky malapropism, in its living memory of an America that never quite existed, it embarks on a project that’s more delicate and insightful than mere naturalism.

It’s also, notably, a world apart from the approach embodied by contemporary films like Some Came Running and Wild River. Great though these are, you can never quite shake the feeling that the screenwriter has resorted to hillbilly verbiage as a shortcut to characterization. The remarkable performances of Shirley MacLaine and Lee Remick struggle mightily against this sociological strait jacket, with even the most emotionally immediate moments damaged by the insistent reminder that these women are irredeemably uneducated.

There’s no such condescension in The Night of the Hunter, largely because the film refuses to exploit class difference for the sake of melodrama. When Evelyn Varden says that she’s more interested in canning than sex, we chuckle, but we also recognize a real preference delivered without a note of doubt or self-consciousness. This is an important distinction that feeds directly into another of the film’s major achievements—its sober hysteria.

As noted, the original reviews of The Night of the Hunter were generally not sympathetic to this contradiction. One would expect some degree of understanding from a specialist publication like Films in Review—what better audience for a feature-length Griffith homage?—but they complained of arty pretension and over-extended ambition like many other outlets. The Chicago Daily Tribune rejected its violence as simultaneously ugly and laughable. The harshest notice probably came from the Washington Post, which accused Laughton of “cheap taste and apparent contempt for simple people,” resulting in “a hideous travesty on the human race.” (Three weeks after that pan, the Post’s movie critic devoted a column to a new trend of cynicism in cinema, bracketing The Night of the Hunter with The Big Knife and Rebel Without a Cause. All these films willfully contradicted the author’s assertion that “the rightness and generosity of individuals are as strong as they have ever been.”)

These reactions are especially interesting because our own feelings about The Night of the Hunter are largely their opposite. After decades of quotable killers in thrillers like The Godfather, Scarface, The Silence of the Lambs, and No Country for Old Men, Mitchum’s charismatic destroyer seems essentially modern and, in that sense, unremarkable. What makes The Night of the Hunter unique today is the manifest sincerity of its small-town values. Though Laughton and Agee acknowledge that horrible evil can visit West Virginia’s Cresap’s Landing, this is no exposé of the repressed void at the town’s heart. Whereas films like Blue Velvet and A History of Violence construct a parody of America to be disassembled, strawman-like, by kinky second-act revelations, The Night of the Hunter keeps the faith. (Literally. For a movie about religious hypocrisy, The Night of the Hunter can still recall chapter and verse.) Lillian Gish is the embodiment of goodness and wisdom, offered with no irony whatever. This is a film that tastes adult pain, but chooses a child’s moral compass anyway.

Is this a copout? Perhaps, but remember that Laughton viewed tragedy as a form of empathy and as an instigator to empowerment. Recognizing the great darkness of the world affirmed the resilience of the children who abide and endure. Like a live reading or a revival meeting, The Night of the Hunter achieves a trance-like conspiracy between speaker and listener.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society screens The Night of the Hunter in a terrifying 35mm print on Wednesday, December 19 at the Portage Theater. (Note the proximity to The Holiday Season.) Special thanks to Chris Chouinard of Park Circus. Please see our current calendar for more information.

Posted in Blog | Tagged Cinema By Other Means, Program Notes | Comments Off

Cinema By Other Means:
An Interview with Drew Dir About Manual Cinema’s Lula del Ray

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

“Film is Dead,” proclaimed one Logan Square art gallery last February, referring not only to the imminent end of film manufacture, but more broadly to moment when ‘film’ lost its currency and accuracy as short-hand for a diverse range of artistic activities. If everybody’s shooting on video/digital/data, then why persist in applying the genteel label of film to anything with the slightest genetic relation to sprocket-and-emulsion-based celluloid?

It’s an important question, albeit one that might be posed a bit less antagonistically. After all, film gains about as much from being associated with gallery installations as video artists do from being confused for 16mm cinematographers. Greater medium specificity and more precise vocabulary ultimately help everybody.

Or so we think. We could be content with these directives if artists themselves weren’t so interested in confounding these distinctions and boundaries. Consider Ken and Flo Jacobs’s recent Nervous Magic Lantern events. The Jacobs presented one such performance at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center last year; I caught a similar one at the Pacific Film Archive in 2009. The experience is akin to being inside an aquarium, or perhaps a particularly languid cabinet of curiosities. Chunky colors and object-like masses float across the screen, accompanied by a selection of unclassifiable records that retain the musk of a certain Greenpoint junk shop.

Manohla Dargis has outlined the importance of the Nervous Magic Lantern concept as well as anyone:

“I have no idea what I’m watching,” I scribbled into my notebook. I was more right than I knew.

What I watched was beautiful, hypnotic, mysterious and as close to a representation of three-dimensional imagery as I’ve ever seen without wearing funny glasses. It was pure cinema. As it happens, it was so pure that no celluloid had threaded its way through a projector. I hadn’t been watching a film, after all, or digital images, only light and shadow. Using an illusion machine of his own invention that he calls the Nervous Magic Lantern — an apparatus containing a spinning shutter, a light and lenses that he hides behind a black curtain when he isn’t performing what he calls “live cinema” — he had taken the experience of watching moving images back to its origins….

Now, with the Nervous Magic Lantern, [Jacobs] is re-asking one of the fundamental questions about the art: What is cinema? Is it celluloid? Digital? Movement? Light and shadow?

Chicago’s own Manual Cinema is posing comparable questions.

Although Manual Cinema’s principals claim no particular familiarity with film history or theory, their latest show, Lula del Ray, engages them all the same. (Like Jon Moses and Albert Birney’s The Beast Pageant, it’s essentially an outsider’s avant-garde film made by artists without the contaminations of influence or the temptations of imitation.) Pointedly called a ‘feature-length’ production and projected onto a Da-Lite portable screen that approximates the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, Lula del Ray reconstructs cinema grammar from ground zero. Replete with wipes and superimpositions—all achieved with three overhead projectors, their light often obscured and regulated by hands and cardboard shutters—Lula Del Ray is a shadow-puppet performance told in alternating medium close-ups and wide shots. Its light boasts a solidity and texture that can only be recognized as cinematography. Images are fused together as one might expect from a film by Bruce Baillie, but it’s also a projector performance that recalls works like Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again or Harry Smith’s Mahagonny—but again, almost incidentally.

Ultimately, what makes Lula del Ray remarkable is the organic quality of its ideas. Throughout the show, the silhouettes of live actors interact fluidly with the puppets, miniature props, and projected transparencies; a live band strums alongside a pre-recorded soundtrack; expressive flashes of light burst behind the screen, overwhelming and scrambling the delicate on-screen compositions. These tensions are likewise reflected on the thematic and narrative level, especially when a crucial late revelation turns on the recognition of the puppets’ two-dimensionality as a state of being. Rather than demanding a suspension of disbelief, Lula del Ray exalts the reality of surfaces. It’s about puppetry and, by natural extension, cinema. We’re never less than totally aware of the artisanal craft at work, but somehow the show manages to make a singular case for a very different kind of (mass) cultural experience. Lula del Ray asks us to accept the physical and emotional integrity of machine-art. Cinema becomes a form of empathy—understanding through light.

Lula del Ray uses no film, but its exquisitely material sense of cinema struck me as completely simpatico with the interests and aims of the Northwest Chicago Film Society.

I interviewed Drew Dir, Manual Cinema member and co-director and co-designer of Lula del Ray, about these issues earlier this week.

KW: You’ve talked about Manual Cinema’s work as an experiment in cinematic time—as if there’s a temporal dimension that is unique to cinema. What distin- guishes it from theater?

DD: Because we’re working exclusively on a screen, and because the overhead projectors stand in for cameras, we’re constructing narrative using editing and montage versus the usual tools of Aristotelian drama (contiguous time and place, etc.). In that sense, we think of time cinematically—I suppose I should qualify that by saying we think of time in terms of conventional narrative cinema. Of course, the audience is also always aware that there are people behind the screen making each and every one of the 233 shots by hand, so that informs the audience’s experience of time in a different way—it combines the lightness of cinema with the heaviness of theater.

KW: The principals in Manual Cinema all come from theatrical and musical backgrounds, but your productions are, of course, also explicitly addressing cinema. Is this a tribute, a corrective—returning the idea of cinema to a more productive origin point—or something else entirely?

DD: I don’t think any of us thought of it in that way when we started. Our company member Julia Miller was the instigator, and her starting point was puppetry. It’s actually been film people who have recognized those ideas in our work and named them for us, and the significance of our name—Manual Cinema—is sort of growing on us as time goes by. In fact, the people most interested in our work tend to be filmmakers and cinema aficionados, and there’s an affinity there that we take seriously and we’re still processing what it means for the work. There’s another group in Chicago we’re friends with called Screen Door who are producing what they call “live movies,” and one of their artists, Jack Mayer, very much thinks of the work he does as restoring or reviving cinema with liveness, but he’s a filmmaker, and he has a different investment in the medium and its fate than we do.

KW: Manual Cinema tends to talk about Lula del Ray as a particular kind of narrative theater, but I found it equally engrossing as an avant-garde film, with strategies that recall the work of artists like Pat O’Neill and Bruce Baillie. Did Manual Cinema have any cinematic reference points during the planning of Lula del Ray?

DD: At least in terms of the cinematography of the piece—if you want to call it that—it’s all based on our own ordinary consumption of Hollywood film: Wes Anderson, Pixar, Spielberg. For the most part our influences are pretty populist. For our previous show, Ada/Ava, which was a kind of fantastical psychological thriller, we did think explicitly of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. And many people have pointed us to Lotte Reiniger’s animated films, though I feel bad admitting that I haven’t yet sat down to watch them.

KW: The projectors are part of your performance—and in earlier iterations of Lula del Ray, you’ve allowed the audience to see the puppeteers at work, hunched over these light machines. I think that most of us haven’t given much consideration to overhead projectors since middle school biology class—and certainly few appropriate them as instruments of art. What is it about these machines that prompted Manual Cinema to build a concept around them?

DD: Our first show used one overhead projector; on our second show we added another, and in Lula del Ray we use three. We can’t really claim credit for rediscovering the overhead projector, though. Especially among our generation of Chicago theater artists, they’re actually unusually prevalent. Redmoon Theater, with whom some of our members have worked, were really pioneers in establishing their use in shadow puppetry, and you can find performance artists all over the country using them to make work. We’re perhaps unusual in that we’ve committed our entire artistic project to working with them. The thing is that we already take them for granted; that is, we don’t think of their use as a “concept.” To us, they’ve simply become our weapon of choice, and we take pride in the fact that we’ve learned a lot about what they can do and how to tell stories with them.

KW: Film collectors tend to speak of 16mm and 35mm projectors they trust and those they don’t. (I like Kodak Pageants myself.) There’s a sense of connoisseurship but also a respect for a certain strain of industrial craft. How much care goes into selecting the overhead projectors? How does Manual Cinema procure them?

DD: Our favored model is the 3M 910 overhead projector. We currently own about ten of them. They’re useful for us because they can be adapted for two different lens configurations depending on how large we’d like to throw the projection. They’re also bulky, so there’s a lot of “off-stage” surface, which allows the puppeteers to keep their shadow puppets “in the wings,” and they’re sturdy, so we can put a lot of weight on them in performance. We source them from eBay and craigslist; I’m constantly scouring craigslist for the right models, and by now the collection we have comes from all over the country. The difficult part is sourcing replacement lenses, which we get from an obsolete electronics warehouse outside of Pittsburgh called MB Electronics. I hope they appreciate the shout-out.

KW: I have the sense that we’re living in an age that simultaneously mourns the passing of an analog world and commodifies what’s left. (You can walk up Milwaukee to Urban Outfitters and find a selection of 35mm still camera film promoted as DIY chic, for example.) Is there a progressive, non-nostalgic place for hand-crafted art?

DD: Manual Cinema is actually working with two obsolete but nostalgic technologies: overhead projectors and shadow puppetry. As a result, audiences bring a lot of their own nostalgia to our shows. We acknowledge that it’s part of our appeal, but we also try not to dwell on that in the content of our shows. As I said before, we think of it as the medium we’ve chosen, and we try to respect it in the same way other artists respect film or video or drama. Our hope is that audiences who might be drawn in because it seems like a gimmick or a parlor trick will leave with an appreciation of the craftsmanship and the story and the ideas.

Lula del Rey runs through December 16 at The Den Theater (1333 N. Milwaukee Ave, 2nd Floor). Photos courtesy Katherine Greenleaf and Manual Cinema. For more information, see www.manualcinema.com

Posted in Blog | Tagged Avant-Garde Cinema, Cinema By Other Means, Interviews | Comments Off

Get Lost

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

What do Upstream, The Devil’s Passkey, Mare Nostrum, The Last Moment, A Woman of Paris, London After Midnight, The Old Dark House, The Case of Lena Smith, and Little Man, What Now have in common?

In 1967, all were included on a ‘rescue list’ issued by the then-brand-new American Film Institute. Collating the 150 or so important American films presumed beyond salvage or in imminent danger of disappearance, the list dictated priorities for scavengers and preservationists alike. With the Library of Congress acting as an on-again/off-again repository for American films and the privately-funded efforts of the Museum of Modern Art and George Eastman House receiving little exposure and minimal scrutiny, the urgency of such an undertaking was obvious. Some evidently important titles were gone outright: Theda Bara’s Cleopatra, Laurel and Hardy’s Hats Off, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Patriot, Lon Chaney and Tod Browning’s The Unknown. (The latter would eventually be found in the archives of the Cinémathèque française under the familiar but generic heading INCONNU—as in, Unidentified Film.) Undisputed classics like Stagecoach and Scarface (AFI selections both) circulated in wretched 16mm prints, with considerable doubt that prime 35mm elements even existed anymore. Amateur film scholars held out hope for an extant copy of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed in its complete, unreleased version. As the latter-day Internet Movie Database would advise, check your attics.

The AFI list remains fascinating, largely because roughly half the titles have since been found while the other half have remained elusive. The ready availability of DVD and Blu-ray versions for many titles has diminished our sense that they were ever lost in the first place. It’s difficult to imagine an account of film history without access to key titles like American Madness, Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Front Page, The Penalty, or Street Angel. (Too, the AFI overlooked several titles with considerable contemporary renown, such as George Loane Tucker’s The Miracle Man and Maurice Tourneur’s Prunella. Whether the AFI’s spotlight could have helped turn up complete versions of these films is unknowable.)

Lost films have always held a particular fascination for historians and the general public alike. More than most art forms, the industrial behemoth of cinema left ample traces of its extinct ranks—trade paper coverage, continuities, press books, posters, publicity stills, promotional memorabilia, to say nothing of the memories of the tens of thousands who saw these films when they were new. Whole books have been devoted to the subject—not only painstaking reconstructions of vanished masterpieces (such as Herman G. Weinberg’s coffee table tomes on the unexpurgated Greed and The Wedding March) but volumes that undertook the critically and semantically impossible task of determining the most important films that could not actually be reviewed. In his 1995 survey Flickers, Gilbert Adair selected a hundred emblematic film stills, one for every year since 1895; for 1926, he pointedly reprinted a lovely image from King Vidor’s Bardelys the Magnificent as a tribute to the peerless promise of lost films. (It doesn’t diminish Adair’s case that Bardelys was recovered by Serge Bromberg and re-issued on DVD in 2009; if anything, the irreverent impulses of Vidor’s film look impudent next to the ethereal stills.)

What’s the big deal about lost films anyway? Curator Paolo Cherchi Usai has cannily noted that the sifting, organizing, and recounting of film history necessarily entails the loss of certain titles. It could not be otherwise. (This has a certain logic: by definition, films are lost because no one especially cares about their whereabouts, whether by neglect or by design. Short of a vault fire, it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment when a film becomes lost.) Historian William K. Everson trudged further into the weeds of the particular and produced a damning notice in 1978:

Long unseen films from the prestigious directors of the twenties—James Cruze, King Vidor, Henry King, Rex Ingram—invariably prove disappointing as they become available again. They are skilled, slick, and yet somehow lifeless, adding nothing to our knowledge of those directors’ work, and if anything, detracting from their reputations ….

The eternally frustrating aspect of the film output of the twenties is that we know there cannot be many more (if any) formal masterpieces awaiting rediscovery, nor is there much more time available for recovery. The intensive preservation crusades by U.S. and world-wide archives quite certainly unearthed all the sizable caches of lost films, which still face the expensive procedure of copying for preservation. James Cruze’s highly regarded Beggar on Horseback was one of the films thus saved—at least in part, for some of it had already deteriorated. But from the almost consistent stolidity and disappointment which mark Cruze’s work in this, his most accomplished period (The Covered Wagon, The Pony Express, Old Ironsides, The City Gone Mad)—all 1923-1926—one had the right to expect from Beggar on Horseback notable content but rather dull execution—and this proved to be very much the case. But against such disappointments, one can fall back on films like Smouldering Fires [Clarence Brown, 1925] or William K. Howard’s notable White Gold (1927), a film that predates and blueprints the better-known and bigger productions The Wind (by Victor Seastrom) and City Girl (by Murnau).

For Everson, the only filmmaker whose recovered work consistently exceeded expectations was John Ford. For decades, the entirety of Ford’s viewable silent output consisted of The Iron Horse and Four Sons, two commercially important but artistically limited and imitative works. The late 1960s and early ’70s brought a deluge of resurrected Fords: Cameo Kirby, Hangman’s House, and the quite major 3 Bad Men. Miraculously, a print of Ford’s very first feature—1917’s Straight Shooting—was found in Czechoslovokia’s Národní filmový archiv and restored with considerable hoopla and self-congratulation from the AFI. Ford attended a revival at the Montreal Film Festival and segments from the re-translated copy aired on NBC! Richard Koszarski included the film in a 1976 survey called ‘The Rivals of D.W. Griffith’ at the Walker Art Museum —pretty impressive for a piece of accomplished juvenilia that had only resurfaced a few years before.

These days, it’s not easy to see Straight Shooting. It’s not lost anymore, but it may as well be for the frequency of its theatrical screenings. A well-maintained archival negative doesn’t equate with a heavily-booked print. The same goes for many of the other rediscovered Fords, including Kentucky Pride, an eccentric 1925 entry (it’s told from the point of view of its titular horse) championed by Ford biographer Joseph McBride. At best, these films are hauled out once a decade in the context of an exhaustive (and exhausting) Ford season at an elite cinémathèque.

Had Upstream been recovered in 1970, rather than 2010, it probably would have met the same archival fate. Upstream may be a hotly anticipated title at the moment through an accident of history, but that’s no reason to be cavalier about it. Kentucky Pride notwithstanding, this is one gift horse.

Upstream has received considerable press as the crown jewel in an ad hoc collection of seventy-five American films repatriated from the New Zealand Film Archive through the efforts of the National Film Preservation Foundation. Matching the orphan films to new American archival homes, the NFPF has undertaken a very ambitious project. In the case of Upstream, 20th Century Fox got involved and paid for a comprehensive restoration at New Zealand’s Park Road Post Production. (Because the nitrate copy was unique and justly famous, it was decided to undertake the duplication work in New Zealand, so as not to risk a catastrophic loss during transit.) The preservation negative of Upstream now lives at the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles; the Academy hosted the American premiere of the restored version in September 2010 and it’s toured some since, opening the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Many of the New Zealand titles—but not Upstream—are streaming on the NFPF’s website.

The extent to which any of the recent major discoveries, like Upstream or the mostly-complete Metropolis found in Buenos Aires in 2008, were really ‘lost films’ is a matter of some controversy. These were not rusty cans discovered in the proverbial attic of some country bumpkin unaware of the pressing cultural imperative of old movies; these films were sitting in reputed archives with professional inventories, backed by solid, documented chains of provenance. Their survival is not exactly mysterious or random.

Upstream was deposited at the New Zealand Film Archive by the family of Jack Murtagh (1913-1989), a projectionist and glass slide salesman who kept a shed full of films acquired on his travels. (As New Zealand was often the last leg on a film’s tour, oversight of a print’s whereabouts was sometimes lacking; would Fox care much if a print of a minor picture like Upstream was never returned, especially since its useful commercial life in major territories was already well over?) The story behind the cache of repatriated American titles has received limited coverage, but the New Zealand Film Archive’s Newsreel has documented these matters with considerable pride [PDF]:

Morris Jackson of Christchurch was responsible for six titles in the collection. Morris operated Film Services in Matipo Road from the 1960s, selling film equipment, projectors and operating a large 16mm rental library specializing in Fox & MGM titles. In more recent years Morris offered a film-to-video service.

Collections of nitrate originally came from the Auckland wine merchant Assid Corban Snr and Invercargill theater owner Warren Sparks. Small places as well as cities have yielded collections: Opotiki, Rangiora, Otorohonga, Wellington, Masterton, and Blenheim.

Two nitrate collections were salvaged from auction houses and estates. The largest of these was the Helliwell Collection discovered in a Berhampore house when Mr Smiles (aka Glen MacDonald), who ran a second-hand shop in Wellington’s Cuba Street, stumbled upon the cans of nitrate while clearing the contents of the late Mr Helliwell’s house.

Is it an indictment of the archives that these films sat on the shelf so long or a testament to their collection stewardship? These films were hardly unnoticed or neglected, nor were they deliberately withheld from public view. If we misconstrued these films as ‘lost,’ it was largely because we artificially constricted the purview of our search.

The case of Metropolis is instructive. Fernando Peña spent two decades tracking down the longest extant cut of Lang’s spectacle before finally verifying the completeness of the 16mm negative held by the Museo del Cine. Though Peña’s discovery earned considerable international attention, the press was less interested in the precarious position of Argentina’s own film heritage.

Preservation is inherently polemical. It’s about cultural priorities—it literally entails choosing which films to save right now and which ones might stand to wait a little longer, even if that means they might deteriorate further (and possibly irretrievably) in the interim. The challenge is to save not just the Ford films that win headlines, but the unknown pictures that don’t.

Above all, it’s supremely important to show the films to the public. An engaged audience is the best antidote to the apathy that lets films get lost in the first place.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society proudly presents the Chicago premiere of the 2010 restoration of Upstream on December 5 at the Portage Theater. The film has not screened in Chicago in over eighty years. It will be accompanied on the organ by Jay Warren. Special thanks to Caitlin Robertson of 20th Century Fox, Brian Block of Criterion Pictures, USA, and May Haduong of the Academy Film Archive. Please see here for additional information.

Posted in Blog | Tagged 35mm, Editorials, Program Notes, Restorations | Comments Off

Category Archives: Blog

Chicago Cinema and the Glass Ceiling

Searching for Efraín Gutiérrez – An Interview with Chon Noriega

The Anti-Restoration of Portrait of Jason: A Conversation with Dennis Doros

CITY STREETS in the Chicago Daily News

Irving Lerner: A Career in Context

From the Bottom Up: Mostly About Subtitles

2012 in Review, Part I: No Compromise?

The Spoken Cinema

Cinema By Other Means:
An Interview with Drew Dir About Manual Cinema’s Lula del Ray

Get Lost

Recent Posts

Archives

Resources

Blogroll