Tag Archives: Home Cinema

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

Posted on December 2, 2012 by Julian Antos

Photo courtesy Lazara Stathes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Instant Cinema: Home Movies and the Avant-Garde

Posted on September 15, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What qualities did the footage have that stimulated you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Sudden Death and Life of Film

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Kyle Westphal

The emulsion is on the wall, so to speak.

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

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

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

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

End of Cinema as Ideology

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

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

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

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

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

Christie Lamphouses on the Disposal Docket. Via Steve Guttag

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

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

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

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

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

Projectionist Activism, 1981: IATSE Local 306

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

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

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

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

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

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

What shape will this new celluloid landscape take?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Becca Hall

By Becca Hall & Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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“Railroaded!” Distilled

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Julian Antos

We think Railroaded! is a very good film by a great director (Anthony Mann, who would claim the cinematic West like nobody else in the 1950s, elevating James Stewart to Shakespearean proportions in films like Winchester ’73 while maintaining the stark photography and relentless pulp of the noirs he made in the late 1940s) – but before it was saved by the auteur theory it was – and still is – at heart a Poverty Row flick, a cheap movie made by a broke studio looking to make a profit.

Which doesn’t diminish the film.

Perhaps the most impressive quality of B pictures was their formal and commercial malleability, present both in the infamously cheap way they were produced (as the old saying goes, in a B movie the sets shake when an actor slams a door), and in the ways they were exhibited – and re-exhibited, and re-re-exhibited. These qualities, originally products of commercial necessity, are what make these films worth watching now.

As part of a casually desperate attempt to bolster income, Producers Releasing Corporation released Railroaded! not only as a feature film on the usual circuit of lower rent movie houses, but also in an edited version (pared down to a quarter of its original length) retitled Uncertain Guilt, intended for exhibition on television. Uncertain Guilt is probably all but lost, but many of these made-for-TV cutdowns still exist, and some survive the features from which they’re assembled. The short we’ll be showing before Railroaded!, Philo Vance, Detective, is one of these. Released by Screen Gems (responsible for the syndication of The Three Stooges shorts) it’s a cut-down of a B movie nobody we know can seem to remember. It features Sheila Ryan, and some other schmuck who stashes a fresh murder victim in the trunk of Philo’s car for the police to find. Ouch.

In the age of DVD canonization and hyper-auteurism the idea of mutilated features, along with things like the Universal horror cutdowns (ten minute versions of Creature From the Black Lagoon or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein available in Super 8 or 16mm versions, sound or silent, purchasable at your local Sears!) that populated the home entertainment market before VHS tapes, seems downright sacrilegious. But when you take a look at these reconstituted bits and pieces of cinema, they take on a dynamic that hits their audience over the head before they have a chance to object, or even realize that anything is missing.

In a sense, the cut-downs contain the unelaborated essence of the films they were assembled from. In Railroaded!, the men beat women and the women beat women (and John Ireland nearly always looks like a quivering boy, so startlingly nervous he could never compose himself enough to be an adult) and nearly every shot is so darkly lit that three o’clock in the morning looks like just around midnight. The plot makes sense because it feels familiar, but the film’s substance comes from gestures, gun shots, and a sense of dread that’s created visually. The idea is that when the film is over, no matter how long it has lasted, it’s the gestures that matter. Railroaded! isn’t memorable as a grand, sweeping epic (it isn’t El Cid, after all), but for a bunch of dirty looks. It’s stock footage for our nightmares.

It would be pretty foolish, maybe downright stupid, to suggest that the practice of cutting down B-pictures and horror flicks somehow elevated them to high art, but at the same time, watching the 18 minute cut-down of Philo Vance suggests that even the shoddiest movies are indestructible, every frame is precious, but every frame is precious in its own right. The faces in these films overcome low production values no matter what the context. (JA)

The Northwest Chicago Film Society Will Screen Railroaded! on Wednesday, March 30th at the Portage Theater. Please see our current calendar for more information.

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