Tag Archives: 35mm

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

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

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.

Posted in Blog | Tagged 16mm, 35mm, Exhibition History, Program Notes, Programming, Restorations | Comments Off

More on Programming: Not on Video

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Our sixth (and best?) season starts on Wednesday at the Portage with Hands Across the Table. The occasion affords us an opportunity to talk about a programming issue that’s usually not critically aired in public—the impact, presumed or otherwise, that a film’s presence on home video has on its viability in a repertory slot.

Programming a calendar is always a multi-dimensional balancing act, and the availability of the films in other formats is a central factor in that equation. Present a calendar where every title is available on DVD and Blu-ray and your audience is likely to shrug it off—the titles are familiar, perhaps over-familiar, and there’s no sense of urgency in seeing them again. If you miss the screening, you can just pull out the disc from the shelf in the family room. A Casablanca or a Psycho feels omnipresent anyway, and a programmer can’t reasonably expect folks to approach such screenings as anything other than business as usual. (After all, you’ve owned a VHS, a DVD, a special anniversary-edition DVD reissue, a Blu-ray, and if there’s another edition with specially-branded shot glasses or an umbrella, you can’t deny you wouldn’t be tempted…)

Of course, one of the foundational, but often implicit, ideas behind repertory cinema is that its offerings are unique. You can flop into any multiplex and be reasonably sure there’s another showing of The Dark Knight Rises or The Expendables 2 starting sometime in the next 45 minutes. You don’t even have to check the showtimes beforehand. Rep, by contrast, forces people to plan in advance, jot down titles in Moleskines, sometimes change their social plans to accommodate a one-night-only screening.

And nothing says ‘one-night-only’ like a film that’s absolutely not available in any other format. (For those keeping score at home, such items on this season’s calendar include El, Thanks a Million, Upstream, Sand, The Saga of Anatahan, Chad Hanna, Just Imagine, and all the films in the pair of Borealis programs devoted to Home Movies and the Avant-Garde.)

Emphasizing the lack of other options has other useful dividends. If a film isn’t easy to see, then it presumably follows that someone had to perform a good deal of non-easy legwork (e.g., tracking down a print, negotiating with a film archive, navigating a thicket of contradictory copyright claims, procuring promotional stills for films that received minimal promotion in the first place, etc.) to shepherd it back to the screen. Ideally, a super-rare screening works as a teaching moment: it forcibly reveals to the audience all the frequently unseen labors that go into a single screening. And it pays to have a sensitive and well-informed audience: an audience attuned to the challenges facing the programmer and the projectionist tends to be a more appreciative and adventurous crowd.

So why not trumpet the non-availability of certain titles more prominently on our website and in our program booklet?

For one thing, tagging select screenings as ‘NOT ON DVD’ sets up a hierarchy that’s morally at odds with what we do. If the non-availability of Thanks a Million makes it seem a higher priority than, say, The Night of Hunter, then we’re left with the imbedded implication that the existence of DVD and Blu-ray copies of the latter makes theatrical viewing less urgent and imperative. Yet both titles have equal claim to being seen in 35mm and even the beautiful Criterion edition of the Laughton picture is a decisively different thing than seeing that film on film, where it claims the complete measure of its majesty and is most wholly itself. The availability of a substitute can’t diminish the importance of the original. (Put another way: the films we program are like an unruly assortment of offspring, and we officially and actually love them all equally. You should see every one of them.)

But there are more practical matters as well. Though some audience members flock to films on the basis of their rarity (or affectionately remind us that a certain film isn’t really that rare, as the A&O Film Society at Northwestern privately ran it in 16mm in the spring of 1987), many more don’t. A calendar consisting entirely of Not-on-DVD rarities usually alienates all but the diehards. It’s not that the films aren’t good or that the audience doesn’t trust the programmers, per se—only that a core group of recognizable titles helps to anchor, endorse, and contextualize the less-familiar ones.

Indeed, a film’s induction into the Criterion Collection usually raises its profile considerably, with the publicity and prestige associated with that brand making folks more amenable to catching it theatrically, too. (One of the unspoken secrets of programming is that you do play on people’s guilt in tandem with their better angels: ‘You’ve really never seen L’Atalante— and you call yourself a cinephile?’ or ‘You’ve watched The Ten Command- ments on TV twenty times, but do you realize that you’ve never properly seen it on the big screen?)

Finally, there’s the fact that determining whether a film is available on video has become much more complicated in the last few years. With the demise of deep-catalog outfits like Virgin Megastore and Tower Records, the expectation of finding a given title at a brick-and-mortar outlet no longer seems a relevant metric. There’s no space for all but a handful of classic titles at Wal-Mart and Best Buy. (Likewise, DVDs and Blu-rays, once thought collectible and appointed with lavish booklets, are now perceived as disposal, with a die-cut recycling insignia greeting you upon cracking open the case.)

The high mastering, marketing, and storage costs associated with conventional DVD and Blu-ray releases has led nearly all the studios to embark on manufactured-on-demand discs available exclusively through a handful of online outlets. (Some initiatives, like Twilight Time, which licenses titles from Fox and Sony, sells its limited-edition wares through a single website.) Programs like the Warner Archive Collection of DVD-Rs assume two not-necessarily-compatible demographics: the savvy long-time collector with bottomless hunger for the most obscure titles and the kindly grandmother in Kansas who simply assumes that her favorite Robert Taylor movie must be available on DVD. (Among the titles on our latest calendar, The Big Night has been released on DVD-R in the plain-wrap MGM Limited Edition Collection, while The Miracle Woman is going out this week in an early Capra box set available exclusively from the online TCM Shop.)

Is a movie available on DVD if you have to be an obsessive videophile to be aware of its existence? Likewise, what if a title like After Tomorrow or Wild River is only available as part of a recession-oblivious door stop? (The former is one of twelve titles that Fox Home Entertainment released in its ‘Murnau, Borzage, and Fox’ box set at $239.99 MSRP back in 2008—a worthy and improbable climax to the DVD era.) Such titles are rarely available from rental services, especially the present-day disc-weening iteration of Netflix. Speaking of Netflix, is something available on video if it’s streaming online in a pan-and-scan copy prepared for cable broadcast two decades ago?

The foregoing discussion also tiptoes around the fact that the wide availability of multi-region DVD (and, to a lesser extent, Blu-ray) players further confuses the terms, as Jonathan Rosenbaum frequently details in his ‘Global Discoveries on DVD’ column in Cinemascope. Just one example: If I Had a Million is ‘Not available on video’ if your frame of reference is Region 1 DVD, but there’s a quality Region 2 copy from the UK branch of Universal, available in a ten-disc (!) W.C. Fields box set. Jerry Schatzberg’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child hasn’t merited a domestic DVD or Blu-ray release, but the French label Carlotta has issued a sepulchral Blu-ray edition under the title Portrait d’une enfant déchue last year.

As we said, you should come and see the film regardless of whether it’s available elsewhere or not.

This post is part of an occasional series about the philosophical and practical contours of film programming. For earlier entries, see here and here.

Posted in Blog | Tagged 35mm, Editorials, Programming | 2 Comments

Resurrecting Stage Struck

Posted on July 28, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

If a major American studio falls in the forest, does it make a sound?

To the average movie fan in 1956, probably not. For those who got their Hollywood news from Hedda Hopper’s syndicated newspaper column, RKO’s Stage Struck sounded like business as usual, with casting news and production leaks coming at regular intervals. Early chatter had pegged Jean Simmons for the starring role of ingénue actress Eva Lovelace, but Bill Dozier, Joan Fontaine’s ex-husband and producer of high-class fare like Letter from Unknown Woman, now held the reins at the newly restructured RKO and had his sights set on Susan Strasberg. The 18-year-old actress, daughter of legendary acting instructor and Method prophet Lee Strasberg, had already acquitted herself with supporting parts in Picnic and The Cobweb, but her profile had been raised immeasurably by the Broadway success of The Diary of Anne Frank, then in the midst of a run that would exceed 700 performances. Strasberg was signed. Cameras would roll in January 1957 in New York City.

Henry Fonda’s participation was announced in August 1956. That same month, Sidney Lumet was attached as director. This spoke to enormous confidence in the theater- and television-trained Lumet, whose feature debut 12 Angry Men had already been shot but would not be released by United Artists until the following spring. Herbert Marshall was added to the rolls in September and Christopher Plummer in December.

After the shoot began the following month, Walter Winchell fanned whispers that Strasberg had been romancing James MacArthur, her co-star in the upcoming Underdog. (The son of Helen Hayes, MacArthur suggested a parallel, irresistible case of theatrical royalty.) Another syndicated columnist, Leonard Lyons, noted that the Stage Struck crew had briefly rendezvoused with the FBI when the feds paid a visit to photograph the Commies assembling at the Chateau Garden next door. The Washington Post reported on Mrs. Lee Strasberg watching her daughter with “hawklike intentness” every day on the set. “Isn’t she amazing?,” the stage mother asked. “How her grandfather would have adored her. She just IS theater, isn’t she?” Talk about Method.

All conventional stuff.

More informed industry observers saw a very different picture. Stage Struck went into production amidst the ugly and protracted unwinding of RKO, the final blow for a studio that had been mired in one crisis or another almost consistently since its founding a generation before. By the time Stage Struck finally limped to theaters in 1958, RKO itself was gone.

Stage Struck was announced as a remake of Morning Glory, an RKO hit from nearly a quarter-century ago. As Morning Glory and the Zoe Atkins play from which it was adapted were conceived fairly narrowly as vehicles for Katharine Hepburn, tailored carefully to evoke the actress’s own familiar New England-to-Broadway ascent, this was not a natural property for a Technicolor facelift.

The recent success of Warner’s remake of A Star is Born surely helped, but probably not as much as the fact that cash-strapped RKO would have found any pre-existing script appealing in 1956. After a disastrous seven years under the lackadaisical management of Howard Hughes, the studio had recently been sold to the General Tire & Rubber Company. Inheriting a barely functioning studio with massive debt, General initiated a fire sale of corporate assets throughout 1955-’56. Hughes’s regular production shutdowns, cash flow problems, and endless tinkering had left a puny theatrical slate, which the new RKO complemented with an uncommonly high number of reissues—re-releasing not only proven box office hits like King Kong and I Walked with a Zombie but also a half-remembered succès d’estime like Citizen Kane. It’s a measure of RKO’s desperation that they pushed The Lusty Men, scarcely four years old and no exhibitor’s idea of hotly-demanded return engagement, as a reissue attraction.

But theatrical oldies were, at best, a side story for RKO in 1956, which had recently made a decisive step towards disseminating its library assets through TV. General Tire’s television subsidiary, General Teleradio, had already demonstrated tremendous success with its Million Dollar Movie slot on New York’s WOR, which in its earliest incarnation ran the same movie sixteen times (!) over the course of a single week. But quality product was hard to come by, with the major studios extremely reluctant to license their back catalogue to TV. British fare and low-budget independents were the rule, with studios sitting on the sideline. (Remarkably, the studios’ collective reticence to lease their libraries to television at rock-bottom prices was pursued—unsuccessfully—as an anti-trust action by the Justice Department; remember that studios, following the Supreme Court’s 1948 Paramount ruling, were under intense scrutiny on all matters with any appearance of collusion.)

General Teleradio—now merged with RKO into a new entity called RKO Teleradio—saw the immediate potential to unload its assets. Selling the entire 741-feature library outright to cola manufacturer C&C, which in turn licensed the films in perpetuity to stations across the country, RKO had gone whole hog for television.

In 1956, RKO Teleradio circulated a glossy catalogue of its library offerings, RKO’s Finest Fifty-Two, which promised a year’s worth of quality television programming. (Even civil servants with long-standing concerns about the vertically-integrated film industry could never have anticipated this new market efficiency: the hard-cover RKO’s Finest Fifty-Two was bound in Bolta flex, a product of General Tire & Rubber Co.) For a studio with its back against multiple walls, the RKO Teleradio catalogue struck a notably triumphalist tone in describing recent broadcast history:

Network television itself began to change. The hour-and-a-half “spectacular” or one-shot came into being. But the formidable production costs and difficulties of such shows ruled out the possibility of sponsorship on any regular basis. And there was no guarantee that anyone could come up with a hit every time he took a gamble on one of these shows.

What might happen then, some advertisers began to wonder, if a sponsor or group of sponsors could provide a weekly program of feature films of network caliber—finished, polished to Hollywood’s highest gloss, and already proved in the decisive arithmetic of box-office success?

The answer was, nobody could. The major Hollywood studio vaults remained locked to television.

And then General Teleradio unlocked them. And overnight the whole film-on-television picture changed.

According to RKO, its antique wares represented hundreds of millions of dollars in mature investment, each film filled with star power that TV producers could never afford to attain. RKO features had already been audience-tested and audience-approved. (“Movies are better than ever—on television,” said RKO, cheekily tweaking an industry slogan launched to get the audience back in the theater. Did they even care anymore?) Further, RKO features reminded sophisticated viewers of production values they’d come to miss on TV programs, for “Hollywood budgets of time and money permit actual background and locations.” “Never a fluffed line or the sight of a mike boom or stage hand to break the illusion,” RKO chortled.

In truth, RKO was caught up in its own corporate illusions. Despite cracks about unprofessional product, RKO would need to emulate TV methods if it hoped to maintain any standing as a studio. Industry veterans took notice when television vets Morton Fine and David Friedkin adapted tube practices to deliver the 86-minute Capital Offense (re-titled Hot Summer Night for release) to typically bloated M-G-M in a mere nine days. Meanwhile RKO contracted to release The Violators, an independent production shot at New York’s Production Center Inc., a flexible three-sound-stage facility that leased space to television crews between film shoots.

Just before Christmas, 1956, RKO President Daniel O’Shea denied rumors that the company planned to shutter its Hollywood studio, while allowing that RKO was indeed shuffling some personnel to a Culver City office and had already discharged many of its 2,000 staff. (The Culver City office, still known as the old Pathé lot, would soon be rented out as a studio-for-hire, allegedly at a profit.) All four productions planned for early 1957 (including Stage Struck) would be shot on location and the studio itself had thus become superfluous. RKO promised an investment of $10 million for this quartet. Disarray was rampant, with new details trickling out in trade rags like Boxoffice. One big production, Bangkok, was postponed when topline talent proved unwilling or unable to travel to Thailand during the optimal seasonal timeframe of December-January. Around the same time, the studio quietly announced it had sold two pieces of Washington, DC real estate (including its flagship Keith Theatre) for $1.5 million.

As planned, Stage Struck began filming on 14 January 1957. The next week, RKO announced the dissolution of its domestic distribution infrastructure, which resulted in some 800 pink slips at 32 exchange offices throughout the country. Universal-International would handle ongoing theatrical requests on the studio’s 1953-’56 product, slashing mounting red ink for RKO. The studio’s publicity staff was cut to two people. All appearances to the contrary, RKO maintained it was still a going concern. After all, it was making Stage Struck, wasn’t it?

Incidentally, Universal had not contracted to distribute Stage Struck or any of the studio’s other unreleased films. To hear RKO tell it, this move demonstrated the beleaguered studio’s good faith intent to resume full operation after eliminating assorted liabilities. But it begs the question: could Universal even bank on the RKO team finishing Stage Struck?

If Stage Struck was the last gasp of a dying studio, the talent betrayed no sympathy for the style and principles that RKO represented. Shooting in the midst of a Gotham blizzard with ace cameraman Franz Planer, 27-year-old producer Stuart Millar relished the location difficulties. “We don’t want any Hollywood sunlight in this one,” he told the New York Times.

Lumet’s bluster went further in shunting traditional glamour:

The movie audience has been shown over and over again what war was like on D-Day. But do they know the tension, the color, the anticipation and the excitement backstage on opening night? Susie’s nervous. The audience is waiting. Lights are ready, curtains, all the technicians are in touch over the squawk boxes. Then the curtain goes up. When Susie makes her entrance, there’ll be an absolute hush. I want to show what it’s really like. No hoke, no propping, no music with violins backing it. The real thing.

Lumet may as well have been describing the behind-the-scenes anxieties plaguing Stage Struck. By May 1957, while Stage Struck was reportedly in the final stages of post-production (scoring and editing), RKO announced Millar’s voluntary departure from the studio. It was only the second picture of the young producer.

Would Stage Struck be released? The film had most definitely been previewed for industry types by August 1957: Hedda Hopper saw it and pushed fresh-faced Christopher Plummer as M-G-M’s next Judah Ben-Hur. “To me, he outshone them all, and I do mean Susan Strasberg, Henry Fonda and Hebert Marshall — and brother, that’s outshining.”

In October, industry buzz linked Strasberg to a new project, William Dieterle’s The Texas Trail. “She is still to be seen in the unreleased Stage Struck with Henry Fonda in the pictures,” the Los Angeles Times noted dryly. On 15 March 1958, Strasberg appeared with Arthur Knight and Yael Woll in a pilot episode of The Story of Film Techniques for New York’s WRCA-TV. A clip from the forthcoming Stage Struck was to be discussed. The New York Times promised a charity premiere “late next month” to benefit the Actors Fund of America.

Stage Struck finally opened in Los Angeles on 9 April 1958. The New York charity premiere followed on 22 April. At last—a promise kept!

Only it wasn’t RKO presenting Stage Struck at the Normandie. Distribution was overseen by Buena Vista, the Disney subsidiary established in 1954 when the animation studio feared the imminent collapse of its releasing partner of the past two decades—RKO. Exhibitors in sophisticated eastern cities like Boston and New York returned above-average grosses, but the film stalled out west, with Los Angeles, Indianapolis, and Denver reporting mediocre box office.

The reputation of Stage Struck has hardly shifted since 1958. Its cast and crew rarely mentioned it in subsequent interviews and home copies remain scarce. (Does anyone even know who owns it these days? Presumably not InterGlobal Video, the outfit that released it on VHS in 1986.)

In one respect, Stage Struck was crucially and uncharacteristically lucky. Buena Vista saw fit to treat this maligned orphan to release prints in IB Technicolor. Although new 35mm prints of Stage Struck have likely not been made since 1958, original copies still retain their brilliant, garish color. (‘Baghdad-on-the-Hudson,’ the New York Times called its Greenwich Village footage.) This is more than can be said for original prints of M-G-M and 20th Century-Fox productions released with considerably more fanfare in ’58, by which time both studios had foregone the expensive Technicolor dye-transfer process. Stage Struck is more than due for a reevaluation—and thanks to private collectors, it can have one.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening Stage Struck in an original 35mm IB Technicolor print on August 1 at the Portage Theater as part of its Classic Film Series. Print courtesy of the Radio Cinema Film Archive. Please see our current calendar for further information.

Posted in Blog | Tagged 35mm, Program Notes | 1 Comment

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

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Blog | Tagged 35mm, Editorials, Exhibition History | 1 Comment

Is a Film More than the Sum of Its Reels?

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Programming: How to Do Things with Films

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Blog | Tagged 35mm, Editorials, Programming | 1 Comment

2011 in Review, Part I: Confusions

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Difficult as it is to navigate this transition and grapple with what it means, the past year was certainly not bereft of notable films (especially when one counts many titles that screened on the festival circuit in 2010 but did not receive a regular theatrical engagement in the US until 2011.) I’ll examine a few of them in this space next week.

UPDATE: This article has been updated to address comments from Ira Deutchman of Emerging Pictures, specifically the characterization of Emerging-approved digital projectors as ‘prosumer’ equipment. All parties agree that these are not true D-Cinema machines–and indeed, that’s the appeal, as it allows art houses and other specialty venues the ability to screen digital content without the heavy cash outlay required for DCI-compliant equipment. Deutchman prefers the term ‘i-cinema,’ which distinguishes Emerging’s package from the amorphously defined e-cinema (e for electronic), which truly does describe everything from a tabletop conference room projector to a basement home theater system–basically, anything that you can aim at a movie screen. (It should be noted that ‘i-cinema’ is Emerging’s coinage and is not in general use.)

While the 3-chip DLP projectors that Emerging promotes are indeed more expensive than most home systems, they are still far removed from standards-based, DCI-compliant equipment required by the studios. And ever-improving prosumer equipment is catching up to, if not exceeding, the baseline specs that Emerging quotes for ‘i-cinema.’ (Emerging advises venues that 720p machines and 10-12GB files are adequate for large-screen projection, though consumer Blu-ray Discs carry content that is 1080p and 25GB.) Emerging is undoubtedly providing a useful service to many smaller venues, but their aims are explicitly separatist, encouraging art houses to take a path incompatible with Hollywood product. (This isn’t an interpretation or opinion. The ‘i-cinema’ think piece begins as follows: “Art house cinemas would clearly benefit from a different digital cinema standard than mainstream Hollywood studio films and commercial multiplex exhibitors do.”) Whatever its faults, 35mm was a universal standard; the digital alternative continues to splinter.

Posted in Blog | Tagged 35mm, DCP, Editorials, Exhibition History | 2 Comments

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