Tag Archives: Exhibition History

Searching for Efraín Gutiérrez – An Interview with Chon Noriega

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

From the Bottom Up: Mostly About Subtitles

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IB, Therefore …

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

Courtesy Annenberg School of Communication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy Sticking Place Films

Posted in Blog | Tagged 16mm, Exhibition History, Programming | 2 Comments

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

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

Posted on April 7, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011 in Review, Part I: Confusions

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sudden Death and Life of Film

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Kyle Westphal

The emulsion is on the wall, so to speak.

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

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

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

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

End of Cinema as Ideology

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

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

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

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

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

Christie Lamphouses on the Disposal Docket. Via Steve Guttag

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

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

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

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

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

Projectionist Activism, 1981: IATSE Local 306

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

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

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

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

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

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

What shape will this new celluloid landscape take?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Blog | Tagged 16mm, 35mm, DCP, Editorials, Exhibition History, Home Cinema | 1 Comment

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

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Blog | Tagged 16mm, Cinema By Other Means, Editorials, Exhibition History, Programming | Comments Off

Tag Archives: Exhibition History

Searching for Efraín Gutiérrez – An Interview with Chon Noriega

From the Bottom Up: Mostly About Subtitles

IB, Therefore …

Invasion of the Aspect Ratios

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

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

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

2011 in Review, Part I: Confusions

The Sudden Death and Life of Film

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

Recent Posts

Archives

Resources

Blogroll