Tag Archives: Editorials

Irving Lerner: A Career in Context

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOR FURTHER READING

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

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

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

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

Posted on November 11, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KW: How did it come about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LMP: Still have a lot to organize about.

KW: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Blog | Tagged 16mm, Editorials, Interviews, portoluz, Program Notes | 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

Who Wants To See Old Movies?

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Last week the Los Angles Times published an unusual op-ed about young peoples’ attitudes towards movies from Neal Gabler, the writer responsible for such insightful social histories as An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.

I call the article unusual not because its topic is especially exotic (more on that in a moment) but because it reads with such befuddled contempt for an entire generation. Withholding any constructive solution to the supposed problem, Gabler seems less interested in fostering film appreciation than in griping about kids these days. In other words, it calls to mind the class of knee-jerk sociology which Empire of Their Own or Gabler’s more recent Walt Disney biography studiously avoid. Here’s a representative paragraph:

Young people, so-called millennials, don’t seem to think of movies as art the way so many boomers did. They think of them as fashion, and like fashion, movies have to be new and cool to warrant attention. Living in a world of the here-and-now, obsessed with whatever is current, kids seem no more interested in seeing their parents’ movies than they are in wearing their parents’ clothes. Indeed, novelty may be the new narcissism. It obliterates the past in the fascination with the present.

Perhaps Gabler speaks of narcissism with more affection than I can ascertain, but the curiously moralizing proposition remains: some inner deficiency prevents kids today from grokking their parents’ favorite movies, passing them over in favor of Twitter or iPads or whatever new widget commands their attention. (This claim is especially suspicious given that Gabler opens his article with a complaint about The Amazing Spider-Man supplanting collective memory of 2002’s Raimi-Maguire Spider-Man—a less urgent or sincere crisis could not be imagined. For an article nominally about marketing imperatives distorting cultural priorities, Spider-Man is one loaded proposition.)

Gabler goes on to pronounce the situation totally different from prior generation gaps, incredibly citing his own baby boomer compatriots as avid consumers of antique media. “[B]oomer audiences didn’t necessarily believe their aesthetics were an advance over those that had preceded them,” Gabler writes, though for every ’60s student who hung a W.C. Fields poster in her dormitory, there were doubtless many others who reflexively distrusted any old John Wayne Western in the wake of The Green Berets. Boomers had their Rolling Stones and their Zappa, but surely they too longed for the way Glenn Miller played just like Archie Bunker, no?

Boomers, Gabler says, followed critics like the late Andrew Sarris, who excavated the movies of the past. (This is the same decidedly non-boomer Sarris who once revised his opinion on 2001: A Space Odyssey “while under the influence of a smoked substance that I was assured by my contact was somewhat stronger and more authentic than oregano on a King Sano base.”) But these days even film students find Citizen Kane and The Godfather boring, insufficient distractions in today’s 24/7 media landscape:

What this points to is that movies may have become a kind of “MacGuffin” — an excuse for communication along with music, social updates, friends’ romantic complications and the other things young people use to stoke interaction and provide proof that they are in the loop. A film’s intrinsic value may matter less than its ability to be talked about. In any case, old movies clearly cannot serve this community-building function as they once did. More, the immediacy of social networking, a system in which one tweet supplants another every millisecond, militates against anything that is 10 minutes old, much less 10 years.

This is a paragraph that swells with strange contradictions. Movies today are, on one hand, mere adjuncts to social experience, just another Facebook update. They’re not autonomous works of art to be studied and revered on their own terms. And yet the classic movies fail to fulfill their ‘community-building function’—something they presumably achieve only by acquiescing to the whims of said community. (Perhaps even on Facebook, where over 2,400 users have linked Gablers’ article?) Somehow, people getting together and talking about movies doesn’t count as people getting together in the first place.

All movies were, of course, once new, and likewise competed for the attention of addled young people against the considerable appeal of the jukebox, the radio, the sock hop, comic books, and endless television programming—or, in another era, the Atari arcade and the disco. Having seen a movie was always just as much a bragging right as an aesthetic privilege. How else would movies foster community other than acting as disposal cultural currency? Likewise, how much consideration did previous generations give individual movies when they automatically saw two or three a week as a cheap and rewarding form of recreation? Are these experiences any less legitimate if moviegoers forgot the details ten minutes after the show ended? Ultimately, it comes down to whether you think films are degraded by being part of a broader cultural flotsam or whether they’re inextricably and productively bound up with those circumstances.

What would Gabler think about Michael King’s account of the audiences at our predecessor, the late LaSalle Bank Cinema, who resolutely refused to revere the holy celluloid:

[T]hey were just movies. More than anything, the Bank was a throwback to an even earlier time, when movie theaters were social hubs for the surrounding community. People don’t show up at the AMC River East hours before every single show to talk with friends that they made there, and then hang around talking afterwards until the last possible minute, when the programmer sends them home. This happened without fail, before and after every Bank show I ever worked, and is ultimately what I’ll miss most about the place: the feeling that the movies were incidental.

But this deeply social idea of film-going—with the community as an end, rather than the films themselves—is unfashionable these days. Perhaps as unfashionable as kids rushing out to see their parents’ movies.

But the fact of the matter is that Gabler’s grim observations are nothing especially new. Almost ten years ago, Ty Burr penned a much more respectful, if equally puzzled, piece in the Boston Globe Magazine surveying the ‘roughneck new canon’ of Pulp Fiction and Run Lola Run. (Burr also interviewed a few hot-shot auteurs for the piece, including David Fincher, who ruled that ‘Casablanca now feels like a stage play. It’s beautifully, classically made, but in terms of the language of cinema, it’s almost irrelevant.’)

As someone who is under 30 and has spent his entire professional life showing films and trying to get other people to see them, let me suggest a semantic distinction with rather far-ranging implications. I’ve never thought to describe any movie as ‘old,’ just as surely as I’ve never promoted one on that basis. Though the vintage of a film may tell us a lot about what to expect with respect to attitude, pacing, and craft, it reveals next to nothing about quality or lasting value. (There’s an endless supply of bad old movies, just as surely as there are an overwhelming number of worthwhile modern ones.)

Instinctively, of course, many people do leap to these judgments at the sight of, say, a black-and-white film on television. For what it’s worth, I’ve found that this antipathy has no significant correlation to the age of the viewer, with some of the oldest folks expressing the most vehement objections. If such a prejudice does exist, why exacerbate it by putting forward ‘old movies’ as a category of cultural patrimony? (Can the government make you buy broccoli?, Antonin Scalia recently mused, fishing for reasons to gut the Affordable Care Act. Perhaps conservative jurists would have prevailed in NFIB v. Sebelius with the equally frightening question, Can the government make you watch old movies?)

In enumerating some sample reasons that millenials may be disenchanted with old movies, Gabler pointedly broaches the possibility of the movies being “politically incorrect,” as if too-sensitive souls reject them out of misplaced offense. But taking note of an older film’s misogyny or racism or homophobia actually represents a critical engagement with the material and acknowledges the film as a legitimate artifact of evolving social mores. Would it be better to simply ignore this content and lionize the movies anyway?

Simply stated, pushing ‘old movies’ misstates the reasons for being excited about them in the first place. Why should anyone watch something for the sole reason that it’s old? This is a sputtering revanchist position guaranteed to provoke backlash. (Gabler draws an analogy to literature, but never promotes the cause of ‘old books,’ much less ‘old plays’ or ‘old music.’ Does anyone?) It’s unrealistic, too, to assume that young people will flock to ‘old movies’ on the basis of the nostalgic sales pitches—the stars, the memories, the magic of the silver screen!—which they often receive these days. How can anyone feel authentic nostalgia toward things that predate one’s own life?

If young people are still going to find old movies relevant in the new century, it stands to reason that a different kind of case needs to be made on their behalf, one that’s less about received opinion and instead acknowledges these films as living, contested, strange, and sometimes dangerous things. Perhaps Citizen Kane and The Godfather are now too familiar to provoke awe and mystery, but perhaps, too, this is a good reason to promote a less static canon. (Anyone up for My Son John, Uptight, The New Centurions, Force of Evil, or One Way Passage?) Shifts in narrative structure, editing rhythm, screenwriting technique, political consciousness, and, yes, fashion, have rendered earlier run-of-the-mill productions baroque and beguiling. The entirety of silent cinema is now unfathomably radical and interactive in its unfinished, natively open-ended form. But only for those who want to be surprised.

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Invasion of the Aspect Ratios

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

This week’s feature, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, has long been regarded as a political hot potato. Like High Noon, it’s either a preachment for vigilance in the face of a Communistic menace or a cautionary allegory of a conformist overreaction to that selfsame menace. But for a certain kind of cinephile, the aspect ratio of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is just as contested as its ideological underpinnings. Moviegoers shouldn’t be passive pods for received wisdom, so we thought it would be edifying to discuss the context of theatrical exhibitions in the 1950s and beyond. – Eds.

The shape and configuration of theatrical film has been basically unchanged since the earliest days of the twentieth century—35mm in width, four uniform perforations per frame. The relative apportionment of image and sound within that frame has changed tremendously, however, and projectionists have long been expected to extract images of all shapes and sizes from the same old film strip. Through a combination of specialized lenses, lens attachments, aperture plates, and screen masking, they present a range of rectangular images known in industry parlance as aspect ratios.

These shapes are expressed in numeric terms, as a ratio of image width to image height. The common aspect ratio 1.37:1, for example, means that the image on screen is 1.37 times wider than it is high. Counterintuitively, many of the wider aspect ratios like 1.85:1 achieve this apparent horizontal superiority simply by artificially constricting the height of the frame; since we’re talking in ratios rather than absolutes, cropping the top and bottom from the frame does yield a wider image, albeit with some loss of clarity when blown up on an enormous theater screen. The ultra-wide Cinemascope—2.39:1—uses a two-piece lens to anamorphically stretch a heavily compressed image on a conventional film strip.

Did scholars and fans talk about these things in any detail before the internet? Film history textbook discussions of aspect ratios were often limited to perfunctory descriptions of Hollywood’s competition with television in the early 1950s, with the enduring Cinemascope ratio treated in the same paragraph as the relatively short-lived ‘gimmicks’ like Cinerama and 3-D.

Things have changed, but not necessarily for the better. These days, aspect ratio debates tend to provoke passion and bad manners in equal measure. Fan fervor was immediately evident a decade ago when Warner Brothers decided to release a clutch of Stanley Kubrick films in 1.37:1 on DVD, on the controversial principle that the director favored open-matte presentations over letterboxing. (Ironically, there was almost equal consternation when the same studio later released the same films in 1.78:1 transfers on Blu-ray.) Debates raged over Criterion’s 2:1 rendering of Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession and Universal’s 1.85:1 cropping of Touch of Evil. The exception that proves the rule: not to be undone, the British imprint Masters of Cinema recently and hysterically released a two-disc Blu-ray edition with the Welles picture in five possible configurations, ranging from an open-matte, 1.37:1 rendering of the original theatrical release version to a 1.85:1 transfer of the 1998 reconstruction that approximated the cut outlined by Welles in a 58-page memorandum. (The Masters of Cinema team wanted to include a sixth iteration, but found the transfer supplied to be inadequate.)

In some sense, it’s only natural that home video releases stir such feelings. DVD and Blu-ray versions tend to fix a film in time and space; the image is immune from the scratching and cinching that occasionally afflict film prints, but it’s also removed from the realm of interpretation and manipulation available to the projectionist or archivist. There’s no adjusting the focus or framing after a studio QC tech has ruled the matter closed. Magnificent Obsession is either 1.37:1 or 2:1, but not both. (The recent vogue for 16:9 HDTV sets, which approximate fairly closely the 1.85:1 theatrical ratio, often dictates the ultimate answer, just as decades of 4:3 sets once assured a very different outcome, with the left and right edges panned-and-scanned away for cropped consumption.) For asset managers and telecine operators alike, the question of the proper aspect ratio can yield but one valid answer.

Long-time fans often dispute this answer. They recall television broadcasts or 16mm prints seen in decades-old campus film society screenings and the widescreen versions simply contradict the emotional and aesthetic unity they found in these open-matte prints. Trade papers and studio records may dictate a wide aspect ratio for a given film, but the fan holds onto details at the far reaches of the frame that look artistically indisputable. In some sense, this is the ultimate form of auteurism: the director intended things that the entire motion picture industry, from mogul on down to projectionist, conspired to cover-up. The great auteurs defiantly went about their business anyway. (Incidentally: if you ever do watch Touch of Evil in 1.37:1, notice, for example, the way the shadows seem to dance on the ceiling in some shots, a baroque extension of Welles’s and DP Russell Metty’s claustrophobic design.)

What’s the right answer? We can argue about intent all day, but whose intent matters here in the first place? Is it what the studio dictated in their press book or what the lab printed in the leader? Is it what the director wanted on screen or what the cinematographer saw in the viewfinder? And what if that intent is deliberately confused or clouded? Famously, Paramount produced Shane in 1.37:1, but released it with a suggested ratio of 1.66:1 at the dawn of the widescreen era, fearful that its backlog product would look antiquated in wider pastures.

Rather than jockey for the ‘correct’ aspect ratio for a given film, we should respect the multiplicity of possible answers suggested by material circumstances of the exhibition sector. During the transition to widescreen and again today in the waning days of the multiplex, the intended ratio (whether conjectured, intuited, or proven on paper) often ran up against the constraints imposed upon (and often by) the exhibitor. In the tumultuous year of 1953, studios weighed and hedged against various technological innovations (widescreen, 3-D, curved screens, magnetic sound, etc.) and announced new in-house aspect ratios before the autumn unveiling of Fox’s The Robe in Cinemascope and high-fidelity, four-track surround sound. (For more about this period, see John Belton’s detailed account in the long out-of-print Widescreen Cinema.)

Until the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers standarized non-anamorphic American productions to 1.85:1, the studios released product in a variety of ratios. RKO and Paramount preferred 1.66:1. Disney and United Artists suggested 1.75:1. Columbia and Warner Brothers put out 1.85:1 product. Universal-International released 2:1. These prints often looked identical to the naked eye, with the different ratios being entirely dependent on the proper lens and aperture plates for the projector. Surely these ratios prevailed at studio screening rooms but were these dictates respected anywhere else? Cinemascope was itself an expensive proposition, with many showmen balking at the high cost of equipping a theater for magnetic sound, as Jack Theakston has discussed. Did exhibitors, historically disinclined to spend a cent more than necessary to get an image on screen, invest in equipment for all these variant ratios, especially when the anamorphic Cinemascope was the only one that carried any name recognition with the public? (Paramount allowed its VistaVision prints to be shown at a number of different ratios, as the conceit of the brand had more to do with high-quality origination on an enlarged camera negative than with the final shape on screen. Anyone who’s seen an original 35mm IB Technicolor print from VistaVision elements will likely agree with Paramount’s reasoning.)

Aside from the investment in lenses, plates, and masking controls for these competing widescreen ratios, what of the inherent limitations of theater architecture? Whether working in former legitimate houses or purpose-built cinemas, the exact ratio on screen was often determined by relatively pedestrian factors like the throw distance between the projectors and the screen, the focal lengths of available lenses, the shape of the proscenium, the constraint of the curtain, and the pictorial sensibility (or lack thereof) on the part of the management. In other words, 1.66:1 was never quite 1.66:1 anyway. And cinematographers expected this fluctuation, exposing a camera negative that could yield a satisfactory print at a variety of almost-there ratios.

In the multiplexes of the 1980s and 1990s, built in shopping malls with no real connection to the material history of film exhibition, the projection booth was often only equipped with two lenses: 1.85:1 and 2.39:1. Exhibiting films from the first half-century of cinema was a simple impossibility, unless one opted to crop away a substantial portion of the 1.37:1 frame. When studios released re-issues, they either ignored this issue entirely or optically reduced the original frame to fit within the narrow height of its latter-day relative. As with the imagined auteurs of the past, some filmmakers like Gus van Sant and Kelly Reichardt released films for 1.37:1 projection, modern exhibition practices be damned. Jean-Luc Godard made 1.37:1 films that he himself disclaimed as such.

In other cases, the availability of a film in its correct aspect ratio is unduly influenced by the vagaries of survival and preservation. Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers was photographed in a standard, open-matte version, with the probable assumption that it would be screened theatrically in 1.85:1. Between production and release, however, Allied Artists decided to modify the film for SuperScope release. The SuperScope system boasted a 2:1 aspect ratio but, confusingly, achieved this shape in a manner very differently than Universal had. The flat negative was optically adjusted in the lab to produce cropped intermediate elements and release prints with a prominent squeeze. The image would be stretched out again in projection with a Scope-like lens. (Strictly speaking, the whole idea behind SuperScope involved producing a Cinemascopesque image without paying any royalties to Fox.) What resulted was a moderately wider image with substantially reduced quality owing to the optical adjustments in the pre-print stage.

The original, unstretched camera negative for Invasion of the Body Snatchers is lost and any attempt to produce a quality 35mm print or digital version must make do with the Superscoped elements that have come down to us. The only way to get a glimpse of the original is to look at vintage 16mm prints produced from the flat negative before its disappearance or destruction. (To approximate Siegel and DP Ellsworth Fredericks’s intended compositions from the open-matte 16mm print, one would need a specially-cut small gauge 1.85:1 aperture plate—but what hardcore collector and basement showman doesn’t already have one?) Either iteration is surely more pleasing than the early video transfers, which sliced the already-cropped Superscope frame to miniscule, incomprehensible proportions.

It’s fitting that one of the great, volatile classics of American cinema cannot be wholly contained or represented in a single print. We would be better off celebrating this abundance of expression and meaning rather than arguing about it.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening a restored 35mm Superscope print of Invasion of the Body Snatchers this Thursday at the Portage Theater. Please see our current calendar for more information. Special thanks to Judy Nicaud at Paramount Classics.

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The Cinema-Century

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

In 1995, cinema celebrated a distinctly ambivalent centenary, with most activity occurring at the intersection of Europe’s cinematheques, universities, and state-funded production centers. The collective commemoration yielded renewed scholarship on early cinema and even a few productions, such as the omnibus Lumière et compagnie and the BFI-commissioned ‘Century of Cinema’ documentary series. (Stateside, we made due with Chuck Workman’s nine-minute clip show ‘100 Years at the Movies,’ endlessly replayed on Turner Classic Movies and elsewhere.) Here’s to the next century!

The bureaucratic anniversary stirred a few notes of dissent, notably Susan Sontag’s widely-published think piece about the decline of film culture. Almost entirely absent from these discussions, though, was the possibility that cinema would radically transform itself over the next fifteen years.

Since 1995, cinema has become an increasingly digital medium. Beginning with the introduction of spectacular cgi f/x, the computer began to encroach on the generations-old crafts practiced in the film laboratory. (Look at the unfairly maligned Alien³ on the big screen and you’ll immediately appreciate the exquisite expertise that went into 65mm effects at the twilight of that particular art.)

Optical printing was hardly the only victim. Avid offered the possibility of non-linear editing, allowing the filmmaker to cut and re-cut sequences in virtual space, albeit at substantially diminished resolution. For a time, these lo-fi rough cuts provided a road map to the negative cutter, still charged with conforming hundreds of bits and bobs of the original camera rolls into the proper sequence laid out by the editor. (Because it is, by definition, unique and irreplaceable, the camera negative was traditionally withheld from cutting until very late in the process, with surrogates like 35mm work prints and video copies endlessly fussed over until a satisfactory ‘fine cut’ was achieved.)

Early in the new millennium, the digital intermediate process made this step irrelevant: the camera negative could be scanned at such a high resolution at the start of the game that its physical whereabouts became essentially irrelevant after its ingestion. Now the editor would work from high-quality digital files that could themselves constitute the finished product—a self-conforming copy. The post-production process became entirely digital, with film entering the equation again only at the very end, when the digital files were recorded back to a 35mm internegative, which could be used to strike dozens or hundreds of release prints. (And, of course, a 35mm camera negative has also become a luxury, with 2K and 4K digital cameras, like the RED and the Arri Alexa, claiming a dominant market share on the ‘image capture’ end.)

Over the last three years, the print itself has been pushed out of the marketplace, with fully two-thirds of American screens offering digital presentations. The conversion rate has been even faster abroad, with many governments essentially subsidizing the replacement of 35mm equipment as a matter of state policy.

For many, these data constitute a purely technical, and fairly obscure, landmark. Movies are about stories and actors, whether delivered through analog or digital means. The cinema continues, because the idea of it is longer and grander than a mere recording and projection medium. (The jarring and inherently political contrast between cinematography and videography that was once a staple on the art house scene—think of Stanley Kwan’s Actress, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Blue, Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, or Jean-Luc Godard’s Eloge de l’amour—has subsided, with many productions seamlessly and guiltlessly shifting between the two.)

On some level, the field has been making preparations for this moment. Academic film studies departments settled on more politically-correct vocations like ‘Cinema Studies,’ ‘Media Studies,’ or ‘New Media.’ The closest thing we have to a professional alliance for film archivists is the cagily-named Association of Moving Image Archivists. Rochester, New York—once renowned for its optics titans Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch and Lomb—pushed itself as ‘The World’s Imaging Center’—a brand of committee-decreed boosterism that tourists themselves hardly understood.

Let’s consider the possibility that the celluloid film strip was not incidental to the notion of cinema, but an irreducible foundation of it. Such a possibility shifts considerably the very boundaries of cinema. As scholars and archivists have begun to suggest, ‘film history’ must take in all varieties of productions shot, edited, and exhibited on film—not just features from Hollywood and elsewhere, but cartoons, educational shorts, industry-commissioned promotional films, avant-garde art, home movies, telefilms, and commercials. Some definitions might even allow for microfilm as a critical cinema adjunct.

The age of film began in 1895 and will end, presumably, in the next few years. Its reign lasted slightly longer than a century, but that framework is still productive in rhetorical terms, albeit in a different way than the Europeans envisioned in 1995.

The entirety of the twentieth century was filmed and no other medium has ever been so inextricably and exclusively bound up with such a span, destined for terminal extinction. On some level, we must acknowledge that interest in film is inevitably a study and validation of the twentieth century in social, economic, political, and technological terms.

This is a double-edged clarity. It demands an active and critical engagement with the idea of the twentieth century. So long as we believe that the century can still yield lessons, films will still be relevant. This is not a given. Years of nostalgia and confusion could well turn the film scholar into the functional equivalent of the Civil War re-enactor.

The history of the twentieth century could be studied in video versions, if we believe that film is merely an innocent carrier of content. We may as well retrace the Oregon Trail from the comfort of our Chevrolet.

A slightly different version of this article was published in The Moomers Journal of Moomers Studies in June 2012.

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Programming: Selecting/Unselecting

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Blog | Tagged Editorials, portoluz, Programming | 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

Tag Archives: Editorials

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Invasion of the Aspect Ratios

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Programming: Selecting/Unselecting

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

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