Tag Archives: 16mm

Saving Vintage Animation One 400-Foot Reel at a Time:
An Interview with Tommy Stathes

Posted on December 2, 2012 by Julian Antos

Photo courtesy Lazara Stathes

Several of the shorts in our Wladyslaw Starewicz program (Screening Sunday 11/2 at 7pm at Cinema Borealis) are coming from film collector and animation historian Tommy Stathes. We exchanged a few questions with Tommy by e-mail about some of his ongoing projects and his role in keeping film alive.

For more information, visit Cartoons on Film & the Bray Animation Project

JA: What came first, your interest in film collecting or your interest in animation? How did you first get involved with both?

TS: I was definitely deeply interested in animation as a very young child, well before the moment when I understood that I could collect anything. Growing up in the early 90s, I was seeing most classic animation by way of VHS tapes given to me as gifts by older family members, and less occasionally, on television. As for why I gravitated toward animation so much at such a young age, I’ll never know, although it’s generally accepted that most infants, toddlers and older children simply love cartoons. My fascination and urge to see more and more and eventually learn about their history was the unusual aspect.

My parents and grandparents were all instrumental in seeking out more tapes once I started showing a great interest in the ones I already owned as a toddler. It was probably around 1995 when I realized I could start looking for tapes in stores on my own (with mom’s or dad’s assistance, of course!), and that began a little collecting craze. However, my knowledge was limited as this was before we had a computer or the internet at home, and I was still a very young child. A couple years later, my father happened upon a small collection of 1940s 16mm cartoons in bright, attractive Castle Films boxes and acquired them for me, knowing I would love the packaging. I didn’t have any clue what a reel of film was or how it could be used, though, and it took awhile before an elderly family member dug out a 16mm projector and introduced me to the magic of actual film projection. I was immediately hooked, and the rest is history. I estimate that by age 13 or so, I began seriously collecting film prints and today I own over 1,000 silent and early sound animation subjects in my personal archive.

JA: A lot of film collectors (and collectors in general) tend to only provide “access” to their materials when dealing with other collectors and close friends (e.g. secret basement screenings), but you sort of bridge a gap between the private collector world, the archiving world, and the exhibitor world by maintaining a collection and providing access to it via digital transfers and public screenings. What do you think the responsibilities of a collector are in an increasingly digital world? What’s the mission of Cartoons on Film?

TS: I originally began collecting film prints not only because it was a fascinating medium, but also because in most cases, 16mm prints were the only examples of many of these films that could be viewed–a shockingly low percentage of what survived or was still accessible in the 1980s and 1990s had been transferred to video, and even less than that was available to the average VHS consumer. I was very frustrated to read about early animation history and not be able to go to the video store or look in a mail order catalog and find the films I was reading about. So, once I discovered 16mm, that was also the method by which I could actually see some of these films, and I believe others should be able to see them as well.

As you mention, today there is a necessity for reliance on digital mediums. I’ve provided access to some of my material in the way of unrestored, standard-definition DVD transfers so that any researcher, fan, or historian can watch and own a copy of some of this material. Remember how I mentioned that so little of what survived in 16mm was transferred to video? Even more bothersome is the fact that little of what was available on VHS has been made available on DVD, and I’ve tried to fill that void with my own home-brewed collections. That being said, though, I do have lots more in the way of 16mm than what I offer on DVD. We’re in a transition period, though, and it looks like the trend for video consumption is now moving to the online realm. I will be sharing more of my material with the public, but it’s not clear yet whether to invest in and rely on the DVD market for much longer.

In the meantime, I have the great pleasure of curating occasional 16mm screenings in the NYC area (something I’d like to greatly increase) as well as making some prints available to fellow exhibitors and screening venues. Film is an art form that was meant to be seen and shared and while collectors have every right not to share what they own, I feel that a mutual consumption of film is what benefits us all the most. Viewers are usually very appreciative to see rare film material, and print owners are often celebrated for their collecting efforts in this arrangement.

The trouble with digital anything is the risk for limitless copying and filesharing, so some caution needs to be exercised when circulating rare material that way. Rampant sharing of films on the internet by people other than the collector who generously digitized a film can often downplay that collector’s efforts in the field, and often even cut into any living he or she makes by curating and screening the physical material. Unfortunately, the attitude of some people nowadays is “If I can see a film in low-res on YouTube or the Internet Archive, why should I buy a DVD, attend and pay for a physical screening, or pay a collector and lecturer to show a film in my community?” In other words, digital is a double-edged sword. It’s marvelous for quick access and reference, but can be awful when an intellectual property is exploited in a way that negatively affects someone’s ability to afford food. It’s also not a great archival medium.

JA: You started the Bray Animation Project in 2011. Can you tell us a little about the studio and your goals for the project?

TS: Gladly! In short, the Bray Studios was the first fully-functioning animation studio, and it helped create and also held ground in the new industry for several years. Founded in 1913 by J.R. Bray, the New York City ‘assembly line’ cartoon factory produced animated content throughout the silent era, and helped launch the careers of classic animation moguls like Max Fleischer, Walter Lantz, and Paul Terry among others.

The studio’s films were, surprisingly, better archived than most product of its time throughout the decades, but sadly the surviving material has been largely unavailable and obscured since the 1950s. I’m doing my best to try and amass the largest archive of the studio’s films so they can once again be studied and enjoyed. I currently have just over 200 of their roughly 600 animated comedy and educational cartoons, and my main goal is to keep searching, discovering, acquiring and copying more of them as they turn up in private collections and archives. My second and more long-term goal is to bring the films (and the stories behind their production and archiving) back into public view, especially as I get closer to collecting complete series. Many are lost, but “lost” films do turn up every so often!

JA: You’re in the process of making new 16mm prints of two Walter Lantz cartoons. How difficult is this to do? Do you have any more “film-to-film” (to borrow a phrase from the Academy Film Archive) preservation projects planned?

TS: This is not difficult at all to do. Providing a film element can still run through lab equipment (as these can), there’s a simple process involved: make a new internegative, and then master and reference prints off that new negative. I hope to do this for several other cartoons as funds allow. It’s not immensely expensive, either, but requires some fundraising and creativity since I cannot fund all this out of pocket. As I said earlier, digital is simply not an archival option, at least not in my eyes. If a rare, valuable film exists in a film format, I believe it should be preserved in its native format instead of simply being copied to digital.

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The Old Way of Getting It Out: An Interview with Lucy Massie Phenix About You Got to Move

Posted on November 11, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Introduction
Everyone brings their own personal baggage to the movies, and I don’t think I’m alone in treating them too readily as literature. Much of the vocabulary we apply to film comes from long-ago high school English classes. We assume that every detail is a puzzle piece that leads inexorably to a deliberate display of thematic unity and artistic expression. Analyze this film, we’re asked, and we begin to point out a camera movement like it’s an enjambment in a poem. We’re blessed with a bag of critical tools but we apply them as if every work is a self-contained thing that we can understand without leaving the house.

Luckily, there are some films that demand a different kind of engagement and derive the whole of their meaning and impact from what we do with them afterwards. They can’t exist without oxygen. Every Oscar season we’re inundated with films that we’re assured are ‘inspiring’ in a non-threatening, heart-warming sort of way (witness The King’s Speech, War Horse, or this year’s Flight), but it’s another thing to talk about a film that aspires to instigate its audience to action.  (I like especially the card that ends the second part of Hour of the Furnaces, Fernando Solanas’s four-and-half-hour essay film about the history of neocolonialism and resistance in Argentina: “Intermission—for debate.”)

For the past seven years, Amy Heller and Dennis Doros have been working to resurrect a forgotten strand of agitational American political films through the Milliarium Zero imprint of their distribution company Milestone. Winter Soldier, the first Milliarium Zero release from 2005, documents a landmark 1971 hearing organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. It’s a film with such unimpeachable moral clarity that it makes every other war film I’ve seen look tremulous and small. (Winter Soldier is also a film record of the short-lived rectitude of John Kerry, who offers sharp testimony about Vietnam atrocities in a cameo; his performance is a universe removed from the uncritical military pageantry that engulfed his 2004 Democratic National Convention.)

Following Winter Soldier, Milliarium Zero handled theatrical distribution for UCLA’s restoration of Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives, an oral history of queer Americans who had outgrown, outlasted, and overcome the closet. Long before LGBTQ became a standard acronym, Word Is Out already demonstrated that label’s inadequacy.  (And right now, Milestone is also raising funds to restore another cinematic artifact that explodes received notions of queer history: Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason, the shaggy dog monologue of a singularly self-contemplating male hustler.)

It only makes sense, then, that Milliarium’s latest release, You Got to Move: Stories of Change in the South, charts society’s advance through the self-empowerment of everyday people. Its co-director, Lucy Massie Phenix, who also contributed to the collective productions of Winter Soldier and Word is Out, spoke with us last week about the film and its implications for present-day political problems.

KW: Let’s start out by talking about why you made the film.

LMP: The film was made to be an organizing film. I’m sure that there are many other factors involved, because I wanted it to be a really good film in the time that it was made. But the film was always meant to be a film that inspired people to go out and get involved themselves. I think of it still as an organizing film, even though it’s about a time that is now historical. So when it’s shown, it’s really nice to have it shown in the context of people going out and using it and to find their own role in the change that we’re challenged to make in these times. And that’s the reason I’m so happy that you’re showing it.

KW: How did it come about?

LMP: In 1980, I had just finished editing The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter. I was learning a lot about propaganda, especially propaganda during the Second World War. A lot about unions during that time. But I also was very aware that we were moving into a different era because of the election of Reagan. I happened to go to a conference organized by the Physicians for Social Responsibility on the medical consequences of nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

That was something that was very much in the forefront of our consciousness then. It wasn’t just Reagan. Carter had just signed the First Strike Initiative, which said that we would make a first strike in a nuclear confrontation. I got very, very affected by that conference when I went to it. I was already feeling pretty powerless. I was wondering whether making films was the way I could be most effective in bringing about change.

Shortly after that, Myles Horton came out to lecture for a few days at the University of California at Berkeley. I had been involved with the Civil Rights movement and had gone to the Highlander Folk School back in the mid-’60s, so I knew Myles. It was what he said when he came out here that made me realize that Highlander’s work had always addressed itself to the question of people coming into their own power. It started out with unions in the South in 1932 and even the organization of unemployed workers in Grundy County, Tennessee. Highlander had always addressed itself to people who wanted to move on their own power and also really wanted to feel their own power.

The influence and philosophy behind Highlander really had to do with bringing people together to analyze what their powerlessness consisted of. Analyze what was going on in their communities, and analyze what could be done, who were the forces at work, and what part it is that the people in the community wanted to effect.

I thought, ‘This is worthy. This is what I want to make a film about. How do people who feel powerless come to realize that they are empowered?’ And I had that question because I felt it myself and I think that’s a perennial question. It comes up with all of us from time to time.

KW: In the years since the film came out, do you think these questions have changed? Sometimes our era seems more receptive to this kind of discourse but in other ways, more hostile. Union busting is now a bipartisan political tactic.

LMP: I’m glad you’re showing it now because I think we’re in another place like that. It’s certainly relevant for people looking at what has been happening and what is right now happening with unions. We’ve just come from an election where we have to say we have a very divided country.

KW: It wasn’t an accident that we scheduled You Got to Move for the first weekend after the election. Of course, we didn’t know the outcome when we made the booking. Either people would be very discouraged and have a lot to organize about or be happy and—

LMP: Still have a lot to organize about.

KW: Exactly.

LMP: As soon as the election was over, the work has become for me, and for the people around me, how do we organize now to put pressure on Obama? How do we organize to understand the forces on him so that the pressure we apply can really be creative? How do we move from here? We can’t get stuck by any of this. I’m not at all interested anymore in the election. I could look at it and analyze it, and I’m sure that’s what the pundits are doing, but to me it looks like I learned a lot from what happened with Occupy.

I can’t speak from experience, because I wasn’t really involved in Occupy, but if you’ve been following what’s been going on in Far Rockaway, where Hurricane Sandy was really devastating, it was the Occupy people who really knew how to come in there and help the local people because some of the Occupy people were the local people. How to get organized and deliver what people needed, including food and flashlights and diapers. How to make a relevant response to a real crisis.

We really need to work across the traditional divides and discover the ways that people in communities can come together to make changes. Redefine what the ‘we’ is, as Myles put it.

We also have to redefine what it is that we’re doing. There’s this fiscal cliff that they say we’re on. And we’re not on a fiscal cliff. This country isn’t broke. People are being robbed. But as long as they define it as the fiscal cliff, we’re accepting other people’s definition of our struggle. I think this film has the power to make people see beyond.

KW: Can you talk about the distribution that You Got to Move received after you finished it in 1985?

LMP: It was never distributed well enough. It was screened at the York Cinema in San Francisco. There were places that it was screened—not big theaters, but university settings and community settings. It’s never been on public television and I think that’s a real shame. At one point, the MacArthur Foundation selected You Got to Move for inclusion in its Library Video Classics Project, which meant that they put copies in every public library with a circulating VHS collection. That’s the way that it was really most widely seen at the time.

As soon as VHS was defunct and before DVD came in, You Got to Move was just not seen by anybody. People would contact me and see if they could use a copy. That’s why it was so wonderful that Milestone wanted to pay for the remastering and get it out on the DVD.

Over the last year, I’ve been talking about new strategies for getting it out to people, too, including streaming it on the web, because that’s how people do things now. But we can’t ignore the old ways of getting it out. It was shot on 16mm and it was always shown in 16mm. That’s how it was. I’m not interested in that for nostalgic reasons.

KW: Right now we hear about how digital is this very democratic medium that allows people from all walks of life with a very small investment to create media and agitate. That’s very true, but at the same time, there’s so much hubbub about that, we get a very skewed sense of the past and how widely 16mm was used and how flexible its use was and how varied its audience was.

LMP: I don’t think young people really get it at all. The most obvious thing that comes to mind is how people are all walking around with their phones and watching YouTube on their phones and everyone is watching it by themselves and they send a link to someone else. It’s wonderful that it can move so quickly through the population, but it takes away the power of an audience.

One of the places that we showed the film that was most effective to me was at the American Friends Service Committee downtown meeting. Maybe six or seven years ago. There were all of these young organizers there from the Latino community who just didn’t know that history. But it wasn’t just what people were learning about the subject, but the fact that they were learning it together in the same room. The room just crackled with people who wanted to tell stories to each other and talk about strategy for organizing. That’s why I made it.

If people in the audience have any ideas about the use of the film now, I want to hear from them. It’s not a historical piece, but about bringing history into the fore to make use of it. I hope it’s useful.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will screen You Got to Move: Stories of Change in the South on Sunday, November 11 at 6:00 and 8:30pm at Cinema Borealis, 1550 N. Milwaukee Ave. The 8:30pm screening will be accompanied by a discussion with film critic and Highlander alumnus Jonathan Rosenbaum. The film will be screened in the only circulating 16mm print. Special thanks to Amy Heller, Dennis Doros, and especially Lucy Massie Phenix.

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IB, Therefore …

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Between fuzzy adolescent memories and Amazing Dreamcoats, getting a real fix on Technicolor has always been difficult. A dizzying example of total branding supremacy, Technicolor was not just a process but cultural shorthand for a certain kind of overripe, retina-scarring engagement with the world around us. (It was a Hollywood fantasy, and an irresponsible one.) With the name used as adjective to describe anything from a candy store to a brilliant automobile, it’s time to husk away the shades of grey.

Admittedly, the Technicolor brand and process have hardly been static. A film proclaiming ‘Color by Technicolor’ meant something very different in 1923 than it did in 1928, 1937, 1960, or 1985. These days, Technicolor describes itself as a ‘Technology-driven company for Media & Entertainment.’ It doesn’t make film prints anymore but instead nurtures a massive post-production and logistics infrastructure that encompasses everything from Digital Intermediate work to distribution of DCP hard drives. Still, the American moniker was iconic enough that Thomson, the French firm that acquired the company in 2001, eventually re-named itself Technicolor.

The earliest Technicolor films do not survive, but we still have many examples of the ethereal two-color process that the company pushed in the twenties and early thirties. (We especially recommend the two-color sequences in The Wedding March and Ben-Hur and the totally Tech Doctor X.)  But the ‘Glorious Technicolor’ of official nostalgia is something else again. The classic three-strip Technicolor system was enormously complex, with three separate but simultaneously-shot camera negatives kept in registration through production, editing, and printing. The camera stock was itself black-and-white, but when photographed through an elaborate filter system, each strip yielded a monochrome image whose slightly divergent density characteristics suggested a very robust approximation of the original color information.

Distribution prints were manufactured through distinctly un-photochemical means. Technicolor’s process—known as imbibition to insiders and nerds everywhere—instead resembled lithography: each color record yielded a corresponding matrix roll, which, in turn, transferred Technicolor’s distinctive dyes, layer upon layer, to the final copy. In essence, each color was printed on the film, one after another.  It was no wonder that Technicolor’s individual hues often took on a hard, material presence. These colors really popped.

Although few argued with Technicolor’s final product, the process remained expensive and cumbersome. (For editorial staff and latter-day asset managers, it also meant three times as much film to inventory, evaluate, and catalogue.) The introduction of Eastmancolor in the early 1950s seemed an ideal alternative: with its single strip color negative, the new process yielded a sharper image at considerably reduced cost. The process could also yield a reasonably good color release print. By 1955, three-strip shooting was phased out entirely in Hollywood. (Some studios re-christened the phlegmatic ‘Eastmancolor’ into more sonorous trade names, like Metrocolor and Warnercolor. Don’t be fooled: under the hood, it’s the same process.)

Miraculously, Technicolor continued to produce release prints for another twenty years, modifying their process slightly to accommodate films shot on Eastmancolor negative. Though Eastmancolor introduced real efficiencies during production and post- production, the fully-conformed final cut could easily support the manufacture of separation matrices very late in the game. Splitting the color information contained on the single-strip negative into three matrices, Technicolor effectively simulated the three-strip workflow from scratch. (With red, green, and blue records confined to separate film strips, the process also allowed considerably greater latitude in color adjustment.) The cheapness of Technicolor’s dedicated release print stock—which was essentially a blank receptor, in contrast to multiple layers of photosensitive emulsion embedded in raw Eastmancolor stock—proved its salvation. Though the upfront cost of preparing separate matrices from single-strip negatives was not trivial, the expense was also not prohibitive when large release print runs were required.

Some studios, like Paramount, doggedly held on to the Eastmancolor negative/Technicolor release print model for years. Others, like Twentieth Century-Fox—which had a considerable financial stake in rival DeLuxe Laboratory—abandoned the Technicolor process entirely in short order. (Though dozens, if not hundreds, of labs across the country could make Eastmancolor prints, Technicolor print runs were kept in-house, stripping the studios of another aspect of control.) By 1975, Technicolor’s US facilities ceased production of imbibition prints; like everyone else, they took up conventional photochemical printing. (Some imbibition prints were still manufactured in England and China in the years following, but the age of imbibition was effectively over.)

For film collectors, Technicolor has long held a singular attraction. The prints are known by various interchangeable codenames—Tech, IB, dye transfer—but the appeal is uncontested. Whether through calculation or happenstance, the Technicolor dyes retained their saturation and color properties through the decades. With Eastmancolor prints inevitably fading to magenta (sometimes only five years after manufacture!) and rare Fujicolor versions frequently turning purple and measly, Technicolor copies proved a remarkable investment. (Some persnickety film archivists caution that it would be improper to flatly declare that “Technicolor doesn’t fade.” Fair enough; like Kodachrome prints, if Technicolor copies are fading, it’s on an imperceptible, superhuman time scale.)

But Technicolor prints have value beyond their stability. Simply stated, the colors on view in a good IB copy represent a certain plateau of color cinematography. It’s hard to describe to the uninitiated, but here goes: Technicolor prints have a distinct ability to present a gobsmacking spectrum of color while also making each individual hue somehow distinct. You can read it as a single picture, or take in independent islands of color. (It’s not uncommon to overhear comments like “Did you see the Purple of that dress in the third reel?” or “I couldn’t believe the Yellow in those bales of hay!” from IB partisans following a Technicolor screening.) Everything has a presence that other color prints—let alone digital copies—can only suggest.

For programmers, Technicolor prints offer something else. Despite their scratches and splices and other artifacts of age, Technicolor prints promise films in the sympathetic light of their original stature. They are unmediated by the deterioration of original elements, subsequent (and often inaccurate) lab work, modern film stocks, and a host of other necessary stumbling blocks in the restoration process. (It’s important to emphasize that, despite a short-lived revival in the late nineties, the imbibition process is effectively lost to us; new IB prints literally cannot be made without some intrepid freak reverse-engineering the entire process, dyes and all.) In the case of a film like Vertigo, with a controversial 1996 restoration effectively altering its visual and especially aural character for a new generation, an original IB Technicolor print is the only real way to reckon with what audiences in 1958 experienced. (It was extremely heartening to see both screenings of the elusive IB Vertigo sell out at the Gene Siskel Film Center last month.)

Pinning down IB prints is harder than it might initially appear. Just because a film carries a Technicolor credit does not guarantee a dye transfer beauty. Many films initially released in IB versions were printed Eastmancolor on reissue, with the Technicolor credit retained. This is equally true of modern prints manufactured on Kodak 2383 low-fade color stock.

More complicated is the subject of three-strip productions with checkered preservation history. Our choice of a 16mm IB print of Chad Hanna this Wednesday was guided both by the luster of this particular copy and the unique limitations of the alternatives. We know of one 35mm Eastmancolor Chad Hanna print that’s completely faded to pink. There’s another, privately-owned 35mm copy we’ve seen that does its best with problematic elements. When Fox performed an initial round of preservation work on its library in the 1970s, the protection negatives were often made on the also-unstable Color Reversal Internegative stock—with the nitrate originals destroyed after duplication. (Fox wasn’t the only studio operating on this model and the decision should be weighed against the prevailing practices of the time.) So, instead of a decomposing nitrate negative to work from, modern-day studio asset managers have an irregularly-faded CRI of slightly more recent vintage. The result is a final print with wild and unappetizing swings in color temperature, contrast, and saturation. Recent strides in digital restoration make corrections easier, but expensive, especially for a marginal title like Chad Hanna.

So, in the end, the IB Technicolor 16mm print—struck before the production of inferior Eastmancolor prints and the manufacture of imperfect preservation elements—proved the best option for us. We dare you to disagree after seeing it on the big screen.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening Chad Hanna in a vintage IB Technicolor 16mm print at the Portage Theater on Wednesday, October 3. (There’s a Presidential debate that night, but those occur much more regularly than theatrical screenings of Chad Hanna.) Please see our current calendar for more information. Special thanks to Brian Block of Criterion Pictures, USA and Jim Healy.

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Instant Cinema: Home Movies and the Avant-Garde

Posted on September 15, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Since avant-garde movies first attracted a substantial audience in America under the auspices of indecency and subversion of established ideas about politics, art, society, and especially sexuality, many don’t expect that such films can also be exceedingly gentle, even reverential towards their subjects.

But if an artist can engage with material by cutting it up, mocking it, and exposing its strains of hypocrisy and social disease (as, say, Bruce Conner does in A Movie), can’t avant-garde filmmakers also suggest an altogether different kind of awareness and insight by leaving something alone? To edit is to violate. That’s the notion that links the three films we’ll be showing at Cinema Borealis on Sunday night as a prelude to this year’s edition of Home Movie Day. They’re all fashioned from found footage, specifically home movies discovered or sought out by the filmmakers.

Divorced from the personalities and memories they originally sought to commemorate, orphaned home movies nevertheless remain deeply, perhaps uncomfortably, personal. Anonymous 16mm reels are often physically fragile, but they’re also emotionally delicate, as if we’ve stolen a page from someone else’s diary.  We shouldn’t be seeing this. (It’s a testament to the loose norms of home movies that we need only a few frames to establish who’s who in family and community hierarchies. There’s a collective order to be found in miles of unrelated footage.)

Ron Finne, who collected the material seen in People Near Here by placing classified ads in Bay Area newspapers, allows the footage to follow its own logic. Individual clips are unedited, though the final product is definitely shapely and cumulatively moving. The catalog description for the film provided by the Film-makers Coop makes a case not just for People Near Here, but the cultural validity of home movies generally: “In this film, Americans — across stages of life, across decades, in backyards, at a graduation picnic, on a beach and in other ordinary places — reveal silly, happy, intense and sad things about themselves, mostly with exuberance and dignity.”

Ken Jacobs’s Urban Peasant, drawn from decades-incubated 16mm footage from the artist’s wife’s aunt, contains all these things and, in its best moments, adds a note of impossible cardboard wonder—a child’s fantasy in reality’s clothing. Its inhabitants wander through gardens and slums as if in an endless dream. (If ever there was a film that earned Paul Éluard’s famous epigram, “There is another world, but it is in this one,” it’s Urban Peasants.) Most fantastic and heartbreaking of all is Jacobs’s sole intervention—bookending the home movie footage with selections from an Instant Yiddish LP, as if the Diaspora possessed the autonomy to decree an official language in Brooklyn and Eastern Europe.)

We’re also showing a divisive new film called Shit Rat from Dave Rodriguez, Chief Projectionist at George Eastman House. It’s an unedited 1200’ reel with a mysterious backstory. I talked with Dave about Shit Rat over email:

 How did you come upon the film that became Shit Rat?

When I was in graduate school at the University of Florida I discovered that we had a seldom-used archive of 16mm films—mostly educational and industrial shorts and a good amount of reduction prints of feature films.  The place was sort of a wreck so I spent a summer down there reorganizing and recataloging as much of it as I could. In doing so I accumulated a large pile of “unidentifieds” that I would spend my Fridays watching and trying to, naturally, identify.  I came across Shit Rat on such a Friday, and it was the only thing that I watched twice in a row.  I asked around regarding its origins and creator, and nobody could tell me anything.  When I left UF to start work as a film archivist, I took it as a little souvenir.

What qualities did the footage have that stimulated you?

It stands out as something that seems unfinished, or perhaps in the process of becoming something else, especially in the context of everything else I was working with that summer.  The “negative” qualities of the image, the lack of a soundtrack, and the weird juxtapositions hooked me from the start.  That whole sequence in the woods was what really stuck to me at first viewing.  You get to glimpse this harsh, inverted version of the world–white windows, black sky, broken tv’s–what’s not to fall in love with?  That and the fact these images just kind of fell into my lap while I was eating a sandwich in a dark basement made it a truly exciting discovery.

Did the work of other filmmakers who utilize found footage attune you to what’s special about the Shit Rat footage?

When I found Shit Rat I immediately thought of Ken Jacob’s Perfect Film and the Film Ist series by Gustav Deutsch.  I’m not sure how much in common (stylistically, ideologically) Shit Rat has with these other works, but as a hoarder of VHS tapes and any old scraps of film I can find I appreciate any attempt at re-purposing moving images outside of their original production/intent.  My own work has kind of followed this track and it’s something I hope I can continue to do for a long time working in film preservation.

I remember that, when first seeing the film, I couldn’t decide whether it was a negative or positive, whether I had threaded it in the projector backwards. At times it looks hand-processed. What do you think it is exactly?

My guess is that some filmmaker, probably a student or professor at UF, shot this on b/w reversal stock, hand processed it at UF (I know this is technically possible there) and either forgot about it or just left it down there.  There weren’t any identifying markers on the print and the thing didn’t even have leader until you and I watched it together.  Whatever it is, it’s my problem now.

I’ve long had a theory that people who work as projectionists, by virtue of their very tactile relation to film itself, tend to view and experience films on screen differently than most do. In many cases, I think, it makes them more sympathetic to avant-garde films. Is this crazy or does it make sense?

It definitely makes sense.  When I’m inspecting and then projecting a film you get to experience its double life as an object and an image; you see it’s scars, splices, filth, what-have-you in all four dimensions. And I feel personally drawn to works that play with these issues of physicality, works that traditionally fall into the canon of avant-garde/experimental/critical/underground/etc. cinema.  It’s not crazy, but I don’t think it’s something your casual movie-goer thinks about or even considers.  With viewing experiences going more digital, people are thinking less about where moving images actually come from or how they’re created.  There’s a weird sense of entitlement attached to it…but I pontificate.  And who I am I to tell you how to enjoy a movie?

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening People Near Here, Urban Peasants, and Shit Rat in 16mm prints at Cinema Borealis on Sunday, September 16. The show is co-presented by Chicago Film Archives in conjunction with the tenth anniversary edition of Home Movie Day. (Mark your calendars: October 20.) For more information, please see our calendar here. 

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

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

Courtesy Annenberg School of Communication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy Sticking Place Films

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The Sudden Death and Life of Film

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Kyle Westphal

The emulsion is on the wall, so to speak.

Film is finished as a mainstream exhibition format after more than a century. Roger Ebert, a long-time video projection skeptic, proclaimed as much a little over a week ago.

One can see where he’s coming from. High-end digital projectors have overtaken 35mm in the multiplexes. Kodak shares briefly flirted with penny stock status. The only good news coming from the company lately was, ironically, the leasing of laser projection patents to IMAX, which will shortly replace its last remaining 70mm installations with digital machines.

As film’s share of the market shrinks, there will be increasing pressure to discontinue the format altogether. The studios would rather it had been discontinued yesterday.

At first glance, digital represents a clear cost-saving. No more laboratories, no more prints, no more warehouses, no more trucks—a frictionless distribution infrastructure without the grease and rust. The future is shiny: hard drives, servers, eventually satellite transmission without any physical medium whatsoever. The next time some fussy filmmaker is haggling over final cut a week before release, there won’t be any rush orders at Technicolor—4,000 prints by Wednesday. The newly conformed digital intermediate can be uploaded by supper.

End of Cinema as Ideology

Of course, for the time being, trucks will still need to transport these hard drives, and, come to think of it, they will still need to sit on shelves in some physical building. (Call it an Asset Fulfillment Center if ‘warehouse’ sounds too industrial.) The distributors will save millions—though server farms aren’t free, either, and the bandwidth required to transmit 200 GB files to every theater in America is by no means trivial.

In part, this transformation presents ideological, rather than actual, advantages—allocating capital towards supposedly forward-looking ventures (IT infrastructure) rather than musty, out-moded industrial models. We can spend $200 million on the latest blockbuster but, at the end of the day, it will be built up from reels and spliced together with Neumade tape, projected on analog equipment that may be decades old. Efficient and reliable as this status quo has proved to be, it sounds vaguely second-rate, lacking in the largesse and casual flaunting of wealth that blockbusters demand. A new 4K digital projector fits the bill better.

Better yet, the new digital models boast a level of encryption that film could never match. The distributor can dictate when and how often a film is shown; access to the file is forbidden without the proper, studio-supplied ‘key’ (and, sometimes, it is forbidden or muffed even with the key, but that unforeseen problem is the subject of another column).

The advantages for exhibitors are less clear. It is true that the digital projector practically eliminates the need for the projectionist. But the projectionist’s union is a shell of its former self and many chains are already employing projectionists at compensation barely above minimum wage—and with the expectation that said employee oversees a dozen or more shows simultaneously. (It’s common to train a promising concession stand kid for projection duties—with the expectation that she returns to the floor and rips tickets or sweeps the floor between shows.) In other words, the labor savings are real, but marginal—and, in any case, in no way comparable to the capital outlay required for a new Sony or Barco.

High investment with minimal concrete return has kept many exhibitors from converting to digital. In many respects, the history of digital cinema can be told almost wholly in terms of the cost-sharing and financing measures pushed by trade groups over the last decade—proposed, reneged, rejiggered, abandoned, and eventually successful.

Christie Lamphouses on the Disposal Docket. Via Steve Guttag

The ultimate solution—the Virtual Print Fee—finances the conversion through a credit that exhibitors receive for every title that they show digitally. The contracts between exhibitors, distributors, and manufacturers often stipulate, as Ebert points out, that the film projection equipment be discarded, dismantled, or destroyed—though it’s often in fairly good condition and may even be a recent installation.

Who pays for Digital Cinema 2.0, when the first generation of DCI-compliant projection equipment reaches the end of its natural life in the next few years, is an open, and important, question. Whereas Simplex and Century 35mm projectors survived and thrived for decades, with minimal and easily performed maintenance, today’s digital projectors are expected to last five to ten years. Will exhibitors shell out for new projection equipment that frequently?

One might cynically suggest that the conversion is designed to be non-reversible for this reason. In five years, some exhibitors, with aging digital equipment and some reliable analog parts in the closet, might be tempted to return to film, maybe even demand it. It is difficult to imagine a more unsettling, disruptive prospect.

The future of film is, necessarily then, not in the multiplex, or even the art house. The latter, in fact, is the most endangered species today; if unaffiliated with chains, they face substantial barriers to financing the digital conversion of their screens. Likewise, small distributors fronting independent and foreign films stand to see real savings through digital bookings—if only their client venues could afford the machines to play them.

And yet the mountain of film produced in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries will neither disappear nor become intractably obsolete. The mass consumption viability of 35mm distribution and exhibition may well have an expiration date, but the individual prints do not, so long as existing equipment is well-maintained and the skills to project them are valued. Films are cultural treasures, after all, not old cartons of milk at the back of the refrigerator. Some short-sighted studios and production companies might discard their film holdings in whole or in part—but then, this has been the case throughout the entire history of cinema.

Projectionist Activism, 1981: IATSE Local 306

What remains? Thousands upon thousands of 35mm distribution prints, some heavily used and others barely played. The holdings of the non-profits archives, thousands more prints. Expand our sights and we find thousands more 35mm and especially 16mm prints scattered across universities, libraries, schools, churches, and community organizations throughout the country.

If we recognize that studio and archive holdings are, at best, incompletely cataloged and the rest hardly cataloged at all, then we are faced with the frightening and exhilarating fact that we scarcely understand film history—not just the totality of it, but simply the artifacts still within reach.

Whether this imposing body of film circulates in a post-film world is another question.

To be sure, we cannot assume that quality labs will be around forever. Many, including New York’s legendary DuArt and San Francisco’s Monaco, have either closed or become wholly digital operations in the last year. Short of an industry-wide initiative to keep film manufacturers and photochemical laboratories solvent, we may well face a future where film prints cannot be easily or cheaply replaced—or, indeed, replaced at all. DIY film processing units are an inspired thought, but even artisanal partisans must admit that a staggering amount of laboratory craft will disappear as workers with decades of experience retire or find themselves downsized. Operating an optical printer may well become a monastic skill.

Can any projectionist be trusted with an irreplaceable art object formerly known as a projection print? Can you trust the transport of such an object to FedEx or UPS? Would any theater owner willingly take on this liability when a digital copy is available? (That is, of course, assuming that a digital copy is available—an assumption worth serious scrutiny.)

Suffice it to say, those who cling to film will do so completely, evangelically—not, like many theater owners today, through historical inertia.

What shape will this new celluloid landscape take?

IATSE Local 306 Members Install a Sony Digital Projector at AMC Empire 25 in NYC

Ask an archivist or programmer or critic, and you’re likely to get one of two answers.

In one scenario, film becomes an elite activity. Patrons dress up and stand in line and pay premium ticket prices and speak in hushed tones of this original 35mm IB Technicolor print of McCabe & Mrs. Miller projected with xenon, or maybe even carbon arc. Like going to the opera—another once-popular art form now subsidized by a global elite. Venues can only borrow 35mm prints after a sizable investment.

Leaving aside entirely the political question of whether we want the cinema to become an elite experience, we must consider the practicality of implementing such a vision. Will people be able to see the difference between film and digital (Ebert says he often cannot anymore and he is not alone) and will they be willing to pay for it? More importantly, will elite institutions with conservative trustees and entrenched bureaucracies ever be the natural allies of the celluloid evangelists? Will they really be the best homes for the earnest, ideologically pure, materially-specific appreciation of cinema?

The future of film is probably a minority experience, but not necessarily an elite one. The other scenario revolves around individual action and essentially underground exhibition. Private film collectors will be around forever. They will build and maintain basement screening rooms, as they have for decades. Collectors will loan to each other and trade prints, like they do today.  (All those prints being thrown into the dumpsters will have to go somewhere, right?)

Remember the point about multiplex chains discarding projectors as quickly as they can? In the next two years, there will be ample (and quality) projection equipment on the grey market priced scarcely higher than the cost of transportation. Anyone who wants a 35mm projector in her living room (bless her!) will be able to afford a true home theater. Inconceivable at any time in the past century, 35mm may well become a democratic medium.

In ten years, going to see a film may well mean going over to a friend’s house and seeing a 35mm print while reclining on the sofa. You will know everyone else in the room, or be introduced in short order. It will be a genuinely and deeply social experience, fully integrated and conscientious; you will be surrounded by people who care about the same things you do, coming together to witness another unreeling of this prized object.

Likewise, public venues that show film will trumpet this in every facet of their brand and obtain their prints through this underground network.

These parallel futures are not incompatible, but they are not likely to coincide. Neither will claim longevity or stability unless the people who truly care about film work towards such a future. With so many knowledgeable technicians and craftspeople still with us—in the lab, in the projection booth, in the archive, in the post-production house, in the film depot, even at the multiplex concession stand—we must begin the project of saving cinema and, perhaps, understanding it for the first time.

Watch this space for future articles about preserving cinema in a post-film world.

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TV on Film: A Historical Sketch and an Ode to the Eastman 25

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Kyle Westphal


There has always been an artificial divide between cinema and television. The latter, it was prophesized, would bring about the death of the former. Movies quickly embarked on out-flanking TV with innovations like widescreen, stereo imagery (3-D) and stereo sound (four-track magnetic playback), Eastmancolor, and, eventually, sex and violence that would make any network censor blanche. Cinephiles proudly declared they didn’t own a television set and TV buffs shook their heads over the expense and inconvenience of going to the movies. Frank Tashlin satirized this division early on (and hilariously) in The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

In reality, the two media were often closer than partisans would admit, with moguls freely shifting talent and resources from one to another. Universal, the studio that invested most seriously in TV production, would reap the benefits many times over.

In a more material sense, the first few decades of television broadcasting would be inconceivable without film. Local stations, especially unaffiliated ones that relied on syndication deals and back catalog feature film packages to fill out their schedules, were grindhouses in all but name, projecting celluloid prints of TV content hour after hour.

The artifacts of this era are still floating around the collector’s market today.

How do you know a TV print when you see one?

Odds are, it has more change-over cues than usual. Instead of the usual, discreet circles in the corner every twenty minutes, prints shoved through the TV wringer may possess them every five. There may be multiple sets—the original ones printed over from the duplicate negative, scratch cues scribed by a station manager, star-shaped hole punches in triplicate, whatever else you can imagine.

Whereas change-over cues in theatrical prints serve to guide a smooth and inconspicuous switch from one reel to another, TV cues functioned in exactly the opposite fashion, facilitating interruption, namely commercials, station identification breaks, sponsorship spiels, news updates, and the like. Today former TV prints still carry this additional content or, more commonly, bear traces of it in the form of slugs (a small length of black leader).

Credits, especially main titles, were often re-photographed with the aim of re-branding corporate product, re-naming properties so as not to conflict with newer programs, or simply making the text more legible on a 10-inch screen.

This abuse was standard, as indicated in Movies for TV, an early (1950) guide for station directors:

[T]here may be cases where the station has bought a film or agreed to edit some. This often gives the [station’s] film director a heaven-sent chance to eliminate some shots which detract from its over-all enjoyment due, perhaps, to an overabundance of medium long shots or long shots. For a half-hour airshow, we use twenty-seven minutes of film. [A high proportion. It was later whittled down to twenty-two or twenty-one. – Ed.] This may mean that three minutes or more have to be cut from the film under consideration. Very dark shots can be eliminated; perhaps some which are too contrasty with a large amount of white in them can be dyed and toned down by graying the whites.

The narrative derangement all but guaranteed by this system (the same guide earlier suggests the elimination of close-ups of letters and notes or the outright rejection of films containing such hindrances) throws our sense of screen history into befuddled disbelief. What was and was not seen on TV was dictated by prosaic concerns as often as political ones. Anything goes.

For all the haphazard-seeming practices perpetuated at local stations, the distance of history also provokes genuine admiration of the operation. To take but one example, consider the Eastman Model 25—also commonly known as the Eastman Television Projector. (The basic design and guts of the 25 were later branded as the 275, the 285, etc., but they are all functionally identical.)

The Eastman 25, introduced in March 1950 for $3,675, constituted the film part of an early film chain—station speak for a film projector aimed at a television camera, transmitting the content direct-to-air. In the video age, the film chain principle was adapted into the telecine, later the datacine and the high-resolution film scanners used for transfer today.

If your experience of 16mm projection is limited to portable machines, the Eastman 25 is a quiet revelation. To be sure, 16mm was predominantly shown on table-top set-ups—in classrooms, churches, union halls, camp sites, army bases, etc. The equipment was made to match—relatively light-weight, replete with plastic rollers, often slot-loaded or almost-fully automated. Bell & Howells, Elmos, Eikis, and their imitators had to be loaded on A/V carts and transported through hospital corridors and factory floors—a roving educational unit.

The Eastman 25 is totally different, and a fitting subject for historical archeology. Every part is metal. Nothing in its threading path is automated or hidden behind a faceplate. It is imposingly permanent, with a footprint as large as many 35mm models. Indeed, it even includes features—such as the lever to lock the focus knob—that would be very useful in, but are often omitted from, 35mm machines. And in a way, this makes sense: though the limitations of transmission equipment and home sets were formidable, each 16mm television projection commanded a larger audience than most any auditorium presentation in either gauge.

In other words, the Eastman 25 is an industrial-strength 16mm projector meant to run film every hour of every day for years and years. Though the Eastman 25 was designed squarely for television use, its robust excellence later made it a very attractive model for repertory houses, cinematheques, laboratories, and other institutions that required a permanent and reliable 16mm installation.

In an age when business increasingly turns to consumer hardware and forgoes the proven durability of wholly mechanical equipment, operating an Eastman 25 still feels like a rare privilege.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be presenting TV on Film tonight at Cinema Borealis. Five hours of vintage television programming, all shown in 16mm and 35mm prints. Come and go as you please. Please see here for more information.

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Other People’s Lives: The Politics of Home Movie Day

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Becca Hall

By Becca Hall & Kyle Westphal

Twenty years ago, or even ten, the place of home movies within film history and film culture was contested and precarious. Thinking about them was uncomfortable. You remembered posing for the camera, mom rushing into the shot to fix your hair, dad barking directions, your sister rolling her eyes while her camera-less friends enjoyed a real vacation. Even the archivist’s preservation instincts butted up against memories of interminable reels of last summer in Sedona and being held hostage in the den as dad recounted each detail to any passing interloper. Is it so strange that documents of such profound embarrassment and coercion came late to respectability? (At the box office a few weeks ago, a man was looking at the Home Movie Day poster we had on display. “Oh, are you going to come? Do you have any home movies?” His reply: “Looking at those things is always so sad…”)

Yet these films—posed, planned, rehearsed, fussed over, and haphazard nevertheless—often say and show a great deal more than their makers intended. They spur us to recognize the highly social character of our relationships and routines (our whole lives, really) in a distinctive way.

With Home Movie Day fast approaching, it’s easy to take the present stature of these films (itself very much a product of HMD’s laudable successes) for granted. In their heyday, home movie makers reinforced each other’s activities with an array of periodicals and hobbyist clubs–but outside of the insulation of enthusiasm, their type became well known and a frequent target for satire. An early example: in 1939, Robert Benchley made a short for M-G-M, Home Movies, that promised tips for the amateur. As Benchley’s audience falls asleep or gets up to make a telephone call, the cinematographer-editor-projectionist-narrator goes on about using red filters and attributing out-of-focus shots to bad lenses.

Indeed, there was no baser insult than to suggest that a film (Hollywood or otherwise) possessed any resemblance to a home movie. When Pauline Kael wanted to rip 2001: A Space Odyssey, she called it “the biggest amateur movie of them all, complete to the amateur-movie obligatory scene—the director’s little daughter (in curls) telling daddy what kind of present she wants.” Arthur Knight, assuring the readers of the Saturday Review that they needn’t pay much heed to the so-called New American Cinema, invoked more familiar tropes in his review of Dog Star Man: “Brakhage, like so many talented amateurs, has a tendency to fall in love with every frame he shoots. He must find a place for every precious foot, be it overexposed, underexposed, or out of focus.”

In short, if you wanted to convey displeasure with a film—beyond an unsatisfying performance or an unlikely plot twist, but something so unsettling that it rightfully exiled the film from the broader cinema—you invoked those fuzzy 8mm reels and the consummately boring people who made them. In an era when much of America was proudly square, here was an unfortunate figure that even squares could snicker over. Nothing was less compelling than someone else’s family memories.

It’s relevant, then, that Home Movie Day was instigated by a generation that came of age in the twilight of the form, or afterwards. Nowadays we get together every October 15th—International Home Movie Day—and pore over other people’s reels. Many of us are young enough to have grown up with no filmed record of our own lives. We don’t have baggage around home movies, nor, on the other hand, a nostalgic yearning for a magically resurrected past (we never lived in it).

What we do have is a materialist consciousness about history. While local HMD organizers often offer tips about where and how to transfer old films to DVD, the emphasis is on screening the films themselves in their original state. Often, curious community members will traipse in with a box of Super 8; there might be a projector in the attic and it probably doesn’t work, or at least, I tried to turn it on once and I think it sparked. Is it supposed to do that?

From this point of view, a part of the value of looking at old home movies is that they reacquaint us with our machine selves. We marvel at a sizable portion of the public threading cameras, choosing lenses, and splicing bits and pieces with an ease that seems very remote now, even and especially for those who make their livings through video editing. Our amateur grandparents really did all this?

But the physical fascination goes beyond this—even divorced from their Bolexes and Bell & Howells, the films themselves carry an attraction. They were recorded on film stocks with distinctive characteristics that enlarge and make solid their subjects. One can be totally uninterested in a stranger’s fishing expedition or a periwinkle birthday party or in any of the feelings or aspirations that originally made those subjects worth recording to the people who picked up the camera – but fascinated by the form they inhabit on screen, the beautifully refined grain of a b&w reversal or the vivid saturation of a Kodachrome reel. (It is ironic—and perhaps just—that Kodachrome maintains its brilliant color today while contemporaneous big-budget Hollywood features have faded to magenta mush.)

American Cinema of the '50s: Eastmancolor vs. Kodachrome

As Patricia Zimmerman has exhaustively documented in her book Reel Families, the literature directed at home movie makers was endlessly prescriptive, continuity-orientated, and generally imitative of Hollywood values. (Some pages from Kodak’s How to Make Good Movies, circa 1950, serve as illustrations throughout this post.) But the experience of watching home movies does not demonstrate these lessons. The practical challenges of working with non-professional equipment often dictated something quite different. The relatively brief recording times afforded by the size of small-gauge camera rolls and magazines necessitated a precious and considered style of shooting. No one wanted to waste footage, and few had the patience to edit it later. Rapid cuts and brutal changes of scenery in amateur productions abound. (Watch enough home movies and the technique looks closer and closer to avant-garde cinema.) The camera would glimpse something for a few seconds at a time, or maybe a few frames. The ecstatic accretion of landscapes, character sketches, familiar buildings, adorable animals, life’s milestones, and mundane incidents genuinely reflected the unordered psychic life of the amateur cameraman (or woman). It’s personal expression shaped by essentially material considerations of the medium.

The aspects of home movies that irritated acquaintances and supplied fodder for caricatures seem especially notable, even radical, today–not least the naturally social aspects of their exhibition. Home movies (and their kissing cousin, the slide carousel) were screened privately, between friends, often with narration. (The wide diffusion of Super 8 equipped with recordable magnetic soundtracks allowed the amateur to preserve this narration on the film strip itself, along with other supplemental audio. Kodak even issued an LP of music and sound effects tailor-made for this purpose.) Home movies were not flung to the wind or leveraged for amorphous recognition. They were shared purposefully in a frankly intimate way that necessarily affirmed the communal underpinnings of experience. Talk about social media. For those of us whose lives and interactions have been mediated more by Facebook and the internet than by Kodak and the living room, the levels of sustained mutual interest – genuine or not – involved in such presentations is almost unimaginable. Home Movie Day becomes a way of attempting to imagine our lives without the need for privacy settings or “like” buttons.

• • •

We haven’t reckoned entirely with the whole phenomenon of home cinema yet. Often lacking titles, credits, stories, genres, and precise dates, home movies upset our traditional habits of criticism and cataloging. In the list-obsessed milieu of film culture, we emphasize fully achieved, ornately constructed masterpieces; how can a nameless hundred-foot stretch about cows compete? It’s easier to get grant money for preserving local landmarks than you might think (you should try it!), but the difficult work required to assure its circulation and exhibition is too often an afterthought. Home movies record real people in real places–and deserve real dissemination rather than virtual real estate on YouTube.

Archival consciousness about the value of home movies has been raised in recent years, but there are still pockets of resistance. As late as 2006, The Advanced Projection Manual (a publication of the International Federation of Film Archives, no less!) explicitly denigrated small-gauge filmmaking and strongly advised against its exhibition in cinémathèques. A snide caption reminded readers of ‘Narrow gauge projection in its appropriate context’—a squirrelly-looking boy unspooling a reel by hand. (Needless to say, much more than home movies are swept up in this dismissal of small-gauge cinema; the layout of The Advanced Projection Manual pointedly lavishes attention on the relative handful of 3-D and 70mm productions while ignoring mountains of experimental films, educational reels, sponsored shorts, and Scopitones that populate the substandard field.)

One hopes that such a sentiment would be politically indefensible today. Still, if home movies are henceforth found in archives rather than in living rooms —if they’re to be more than just a plentiful source of stock footage for mediocre television documentaries—we must engage and exhibit them. The social horizon that bred home cinema is gone, but Home Movie Day—the resurrection, affirmation, and expansion of its spirit—only grows.

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A Dispatch from Cinefest 2011, Part II: Unique and Cosmic

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Kyle Westphal

Last week we posted an overview of Cinefest and a few of the films on offer. We conclude this week with an extended account of four more Syracuse rarities.

Not many folks seemed to like Stolen Heaven (Paramount, 1931), a shot-in-Astoria doomed romance with Nancy Carroll and Phillips Holmes as a pair of fugitives blowing through stolen bills at a posh resort, but its concentrated intensity (often confused for early talkie stiltedness) is definitely something to be reckoned with. In this respect, it recalls (but does not reach the heights of) its near contemporaries, One Way Passage and After Tomorrow; Stolen Heaven is cut from the same cloth of romantic delirium, with an integrity of time and space (but not necessarily plot) that feels particular to its period. Holmes’s anxious, ex-working stiff (lately of a radio factory) is just boyish and skittish enough to convince us that love and larceny derive from a common and unripe source. Carroll constantly and impressively modulates her dignity and exudes excited awareness of her own sexuality. While the film does not follow through on all of its chilly implications, the result is still attractively spare and effective.

The Phantom President (1932) rounded out the Paramount highlights. Perhaps not as fully realized as Hallelujah I’m a Bum, Rodgers and Hart’s urban operetta of the next year, Phantom President still succeeds as a wonderful film record of a living legend, George M. Cohan, playing the double role of a stuffed-shirt politico and his medicine show lookalike. Simultaneously topical to the point of being mercenary (released on the eve of the ’32 election) and not specific or pointed enough to divulge any partisanship or ideological commitment (beyond showbiz itself, of course), Phantom President nonetheless offers edifying, near quintessential, sketches of a broad swatch of ‘30s potentates and string-pullers, along with a library of au courant phraseology and jabber. (That Hoover would soon offer to install FDR in advance of the inauguration—a literal phantom president!—makes the Cohan Conspiracy look mild indeed.) An extended sequence at the party convention—Cohan flaunting his political wares and ‘sex appeal’ to a gaggle of regional and ethnic caricatures so broadly drawn and played as to suggest a hilarious, monomaniacal reductivism—is so good that one wishes there were more music on whole. (Paramount cut much of it, understandably anxious that singing and dancing pictures had yet to re-prove their box office worth after a spectacular burn-out months before.) An earlier blackface number will probably keep Phantom President out of circulation for a goodly long time, which is silly—no one would ever confuse this for anything but a movie of its narrow, beguiling moment and that’s the best thing about it. Continue reading →

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A Dispatch from Cinefest 2011, Part I: The Scent of Diacetate

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Kyle Westphal

Friends enthuse daily about the treasures they’ve found on Netflix Instant. Old media salutes new, with print critics prophesying a day “before too long [when] the entire surviving history of movies will be open for browsing and sampling at the click of a mouse.” For some, the day has already arrived. “This instant, sitting right here,” Roger Ebert recently observed, “I can choose to watch virtually any film you can think of via Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, MUBI, the Asia/Pacific Film Archive, Google Video or Vimeo.”

The annual trip to Syracuse teaches a very different lesson. Now in its 31st year, the shoestring festival known as Cinefest (organized by the dozen or so members of the Syracuse Cinephile Society) suggests not only an alternate history of cinema but also of cinephilia. I have seen the future and it is a conference room at the Holiday Inn. Continue reading →

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