Tag Archives: Interviews

Cinema By Other Means:
An Interview with Drew Dir About Manual Cinema’s Lula del Ray

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

“Film is Dead,” proclaimed one Logan Square art gallery last February, referring not only to the imminent end of film manufacture, but more broadly to moment when ‘film’ lost its currency and accuracy as short-hand for a diverse range of artistic activities. If everybody’s shooting on video/digital/data, then why persist in applying the genteel label of film to anything with the slightest genetic relation to sprocket-and-emulsion-based celluloid?

It’s an important question, albeit one that might be posed a bit less antagonistically. After all, film gains about as much from being associated with gallery installations as video artists do from being confused for 16mm cinematographers. Greater medium specificity and more precise vocabulary ultimately help everybody.

Or so we think. We could be content with these directives if artists themselves weren’t so interested in confounding these distinctions and boundaries. Consider Ken and Flo Jacobs’s recent Nervous Magic Lantern events. The Jacobs presented one such performance at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center last year; I caught a similar one at the Pacific Film Archive in 2009. The experience is akin to being inside an aquarium, or perhaps a particularly languid cabinet of curiosities. Chunky colors and object-like masses float across the screen, accompanied by a selection of unclassifiable records that retain the musk of a certain Greenpoint junk shop.

Manohla Dargis has outlined the importance of the Nervous Magic Lantern concept as well as anyone:

“I have no idea what I’m watching,” I scribbled into my notebook. I was more right than I knew.

What I watched was beautiful, hypnotic, mysterious and as close to a representation of three-dimensional imagery as I’ve ever seen without wearing funny glasses. It was pure cinema. As it happens, it was so pure that no celluloid had threaded its way through a projector. I hadn’t been watching a film, after all, or digital images, only light and shadow. Using an illusion machine of his own invention that he calls the Nervous Magic Lantern — an apparatus containing a spinning shutter, a light and lenses that he hides behind a black curtain when he isn’t performing what he calls “live cinema” — he had taken the experience of watching moving images back to its origins….

Now, with the Nervous Magic Lantern, [Jacobs] is re-asking one of the fundamental questions about the art: What is cinema? Is it celluloid? Digital? Movement? Light and shadow?

Chicago’s own Manual Cinema is posing comparable questions.

Although Manual Cinema’s principals claim no particular familiarity with film history or theory, their latest show, Lula del Ray, engages them all the same. (Like Jon Moses and Albert Birney’s The Beast Pageant, it’s essentially an outsider’s avant-garde film made by artists without the contaminations of influence or the temptations of imitation.) Pointedly called a ‘feature-length’ production and projected onto a Da-Lite portable screen that approximates the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, Lula del Ray reconstructs cinema grammar from ground zero. Replete with wipes and superimpositions—all achieved with three overhead projectors, their light often obscured and regulated by hands and cardboard shutters—Lula Del Ray is a shadow-puppet performance told in alternating medium close-ups and wide shots. Its light boasts a solidity and texture that can only be recognized as cinematography. Images are fused together as one might expect from a film by Bruce Baillie, but it’s also a projector performance that recalls works like Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again or Harry Smith’s Mahagonny—but again, almost incidentally.

Ultimately, what makes Lula del Ray remarkable is the organic quality of its ideas. Throughout the show, the silhouettes of live actors interact fluidly with the puppets, miniature props, and projected transparencies; a live band strums alongside a pre-recorded soundtrack; expressive flashes of light burst behind the screen, overwhelming and scrambling the delicate on-screen compositions. These tensions are likewise reflected on the thematic and narrative level, especially when a crucial late revelation turns on the recognition of the puppets’ two-dimensionality as a state of being. Rather than demanding a suspension of disbelief, Lula del Ray exalts the reality of surfaces. It’s about puppetry and, by natural extension, cinema. We’re never less than totally aware of the artisanal craft at work, but somehow the show manages to make a singular case for a very different kind of (mass) cultural experience. Lula del Ray asks us to accept the physical and emotional integrity of machine-art. Cinema becomes a form of empathy—understanding through light.

Lula del Ray uses no film, but its exquisitely material sense of cinema struck me as completely simpatico with the interests and aims of the Northwest Chicago Film Society.

I interviewed Drew Dir, Manual Cinema member and co-director and co-designer of Lula del Ray, about these issues earlier this week.

KW: You’ve talked about Manual Cinema’s work as an experiment in cinematic time—as if there’s a temporal dimension that is unique to cinema. What distin- guishes it from theater?

DD: Because we’re working exclusively on a screen, and because the overhead projectors stand in for cameras, we’re constructing narrative using editing and montage versus the usual tools of Aristotelian drama (contiguous time and place, etc.). In that sense, we think of time cinematically—I suppose I should qualify that by saying we think of time in terms of conventional narrative cinema. Of course, the audience is also always aware that there are people behind the screen making each and every one of the 233 shots by hand, so that informs the audience’s experience of time in a different way—it combines the lightness of cinema with the heaviness of theater.

KW: The principals in Manual Cinema all come from theatrical and musical backgrounds, but your productions are, of course, also explicitly addressing cinema. Is this a tribute, a corrective—returning the idea of cinema to a more productive origin point—or something else entirely?

DD: I don’t think any of us thought of it in that way when we started. Our company member Julia Miller was the instigator, and her starting point was puppetry. It’s actually been film people who have recognized those ideas in our work and named them for us, and the significance of our name—Manual Cinema—is sort of growing on us as time goes by. In fact, the people most interested in our work tend to be filmmakers and cinema aficionados, and there’s an affinity there that we take seriously and we’re still processing what it means for the work. There’s another group in Chicago we’re friends with called Screen Door who are producing what they call “live movies,” and one of their artists, Jack Mayer, very much thinks of the work he does as restoring or reviving cinema with liveness, but he’s a filmmaker, and he has a different investment in the medium and its fate than we do.

KW: Manual Cinema tends to talk about Lula del Ray as a particular kind of narrative theater, but I found it equally engrossing as an avant-garde film, with strategies that recall the work of artists like Pat O’Neill and Bruce Baillie. Did Manual Cinema have any cinematic reference points during the planning of Lula del Ray?

DD: At least in terms of the cinematography of the piece—if you want to call it that—it’s all based on our own ordinary consumption of Hollywood film: Wes Anderson, Pixar, Spielberg. For the most part our influences are pretty populist. For our previous show, Ada/Ava, which was a kind of fantastical psychological thriller, we did think explicitly of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. And many people have pointed us to Lotte Reiniger’s animated films, though I feel bad admitting that I haven’t yet sat down to watch them.

KW: The projectors are part of your performance—and in earlier iterations of Lula del Ray, you’ve allowed the audience to see the puppeteers at work, hunched over these light machines. I think that most of us haven’t given much consideration to overhead projectors since middle school biology class—and certainly few appropriate them as instruments of art. What is it about these machines that prompted Manual Cinema to build a concept around them?

DD: Our first show used one overhead projector; on our second show we added another, and in Lula del Ray we use three. We can’t really claim credit for rediscovering the overhead projector, though. Especially among our generation of Chicago theater artists, they’re actually unusually prevalent. Redmoon Theater, with whom some of our members have worked, were really pioneers in establishing their use in shadow puppetry, and you can find performance artists all over the country using them to make work. We’re perhaps unusual in that we’ve committed our entire artistic project to working with them. The thing is that we already take them for granted; that is, we don’t think of their use as a “concept.” To us, they’ve simply become our weapon of choice, and we take pride in the fact that we’ve learned a lot about what they can do and how to tell stories with them.

KW:  Film collectors tend to speak of 16mm and 35mm projectors they trust and those they don’t. (I like Kodak Pageants myself.) There’s a sense of connoisseurship but also a respect for a certain strain of industrial craft. How much care goes into selecting the overhead projectors? How does Manual Cinema procure them?

DD: Our favored model is the 3M 910 overhead projector. We currently own about ten of them. They’re useful for us because they can be adapted for two different lens configurations depending on how large we’d like to throw the projection. They’re also bulky, so there’s a lot of “off-stage” surface, which allows the puppeteers to keep their shadow puppets “in the wings,” and they’re sturdy, so we can put a lot of weight on them in performance. We source them from eBay and craigslist; I’m constantly scouring craigslist for the right models, and by now the collection we have comes from all over the country. The difficult part is sourcing replacement lenses, which we get from an obsolete electronics warehouse outside of Pittsburgh called MB Electronics. I hope they appreciate the shout-out.

KW: I have the sense that we’re living in an age that simultaneously mourns the passing of an analog world and commodifies what’s left. (You can walk up Milwaukee to Urban Outfitters and find a selection of 35mm still camera film promoted as DIY chic, for example.) Is there a progressive, non-nostalgic place for hand-crafted art?

DD: Manual Cinema is actually working with two obsolete but nostalgic technologies: overhead projectors and shadow puppetry. As a result, audiences bring a lot of their own nostalgia to our shows. We acknowledge that it’s part of our appeal, but we also try not to dwell on that in the content of our shows. As I said before, we think of it as the medium we’ve chosen, and we try to respect it in the same way other artists respect film or video or drama. Our hope is that audiences who might be drawn in because it seems like a gimmick or a parlor trick will leave with an appreciation of the craftsmanship and the story and the ideas.

Lula del Rey runs through December 16 at The Den Theater (1333 N. Milwaukee Ave, 2nd Floor). Photos courtesy Katherine Greenleaf and Manual Cinema. For more information, see www.manualcinema.com

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

Posted on December 2, 2012 by Julian Antos

Photo courtesy Lazara Stathes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on November 11, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KW: How did it come about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LMP: Still have a lot to organize about.

KW: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Forty Years of Film Preservation: A Conversation with David Shepard

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

This week we’ll be screening So’s Your Old Man, one of the finest examples of the elegant craft that characterizes Paramount Pictures’ silent output. Along with Universal Studios, they’re celebrating their one-hundredth anniversary this year. These days that means reissuing library chestnuts on spiffy new Blu-ray editions, but this level of attention to corporate heritage is a rather recent development.

Archivists like to talk about ‘the bad old days,’ when films were disposable, purely commercial propositions. Destruction of film history was business as usual. It was old nitrate prints, after all, that provided the pyrotechnics when Selznick burned Atlanta all over again for Gone with the Wind. The only way to guarantee the survival of a film was to spirit it away to the Museum of Modern Art. Left to their own devices, old movies would probably wind up as targets for jeers on early TV programs like Fractured Flickers.

And yet the truth is a tad more complex. All the studios (and, to be fair, the archives as well) have mixed records of conservation and preservation, a fact that makes present-day restorations all the more difficult. The case of Paramount is illustrative. Their 1929-1949 library (with a handful of exceptions) had been sold to MCA, though the prints themselves stayed on the studio lot. Their silent library sat there too—they had the right to exploit those films anew, but the market for silent films was limited. The silent material was eventually donated to the Library of Congress through a deal brokered by a young American Film Institute employee named David Shepard.

Shepard should be a familiar name to any film student. If you’ve seen a silent movie on DVD with a Film Preservation Associates credit—whether it was issued through Image, Kino, or now Flicker Alley—then you’re acquainted with Shepard’s work. The breadth of projects he’s supervised—from Griffith and Gance to Keaton and Chaplin, but with nods to unjustly neglected films like Boris Barnet’s Outskirts, Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Parson’s Wife, George Loane Tucker’s Traffic in Souls, Maurice Tourneur’s The Wishing Ring, and Raoul Walsh’s Regeneration—is immense.  The massive box sets—Unseen Cinema, Chaplin at Keystone, Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema—speak for themselves.

I recently spoke with David about the Paramount silents, the trajectory of film preservation practices, and his contribution to Martin Scorsese’s Hugo.

• • •

KW: What I wanted to start out with, at least, is So’s Your Old Man. Not that film particularly, but just your involvement with Paramount and all of those films…

DS: The Paramount gift was negotiated in 1968 when I was working for the American Film Institute. Paramount was represented by an attorney named Walter Josiah, a very nice man. They had a lot of prints at the studio—file prints. And they had a smaller number of original negatives—about three dozen—stored at Fort Lee.  They were happy to turn them all over to the Library of Congress.

Those two groups, the file prints from the studio and the negatives in New Jersey, were the heart of the Paramount collection. They also owned a small studio on Occidental Blvd. in Los Angeles that had been Bosworth and Paralta back in the teens. There was a vault of prints there. Most of those were incomplete. But physically like new and almost all films from 1915 through ’17. That collection came about because Robert Aldrich bought the studio and he wanted the films out.

Everything that Paramount turned over was in good shape because, unfortunately, the studio had a policy where if anything was wrong with even the leader or one reel of a film [i.e., nitrate decomposition], they would often junk the entire picture.

KW: Do you know how often they would be inspecting it?

DS: No, but the vaults were very good. They were on the studio lot. They were temperature-controlled. They were clean. And I would imagine that they went through everything at least once a year.

These studio prints were, for the most part, not much used. They weren’t work prints, but many of them were spliced shot-for-shot. There were some release prints, but I think they actually were mostly preview prints. After the editing was complete, and they were ready to try the film out in public, they would make a fresh print from each of the selected takes and conform it to the work print. So there would be nice, clean, new-looking prints for the previews. Those prints, for the most part, became the file prints.

KW: Makes sense. At the time they were turned over to the Library, were they in imminent danger of destruction? Was Paramount going to get rid of them had the Library not stepped in?

DS: They weren’t going to get rid of them, dump them all in the ocean, but they were junking reels. And as I said, usually when they junked the reel, they would junk the whole film. And so a fair number of films were lost just in the six months or so between the time they offered us the films and the time the documents were signed and the films were shipped.

KW: That’s staggering to think of.

DS: So it’s a good thing they were saved.

The Library set up its own laboratory—probably about 1971, and began to do the preservation work in-house. It was supervised by a man named Dick Armstrong, who was elderly and extremely conservative. For example, he did not believe in wet gate. They had an Oxbery optical printer and they did most of the copying that way. Because of the shrinkage in the original material, they could have done them step-register but, for some reason, he didn’t want to do that. The results were rather contrasty and included the dirt and digs and blemishes.

KW: At the time it was Library’s policy to do all the preservation in black and white, regardless of what the original was…

DS: That’s correct, because it was before Eastmancolor was dye-stable. With a color film, we occasionally made an Ektachrome reversal in 16mm. Those turned out not to be very stable either, but they were better than Eastmancolor. So, sometimes the color record would be preserved that way, but for the most part they didn’t go back and copy color until I had long left the AFI. Of course, as you know, it’s possible to create fairly convincing-looking tinted and toned prints from black and white negatives [using the color injection method, known as the Desmet Process in Europe].

KW: After they were turned over and preserved, did you get to see a fair amount of the collection?

David Shepard and Kyle Westphal, Castro Theatre Mezzanine, 2010. Courtesy of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

DS: For some time after I stopped working in the AFI archive, I was managing the AFI theater. It was first at the National Gallery of Art auditorium, then we moved to a commercial theater in L’Enfant Plaza. Then finally AFI built its own little cinema in the Kennedy Center that opened just about a month or six weeks before I left. But I saw a lot of the collection. I had access to run anything I wanted to on a flatbed. I looked at a lot of the nitrates as we got them unpacked and organized.

Whenever we wanted to use one of the Paramount pictures for anything—we ran, for example, some of them at the 1969 New York Film Festival—we would ask Mr. Josiah and he always was very nice about it.

KW: Are there any particular unheralded Paramount silents that you’d like to draw attention to?

DS: Well, most of the ones I thought were good forty years ago have surfaced. They’ve been run here and there. One I thought was a big discovery was The Canadian, which was run last year at Pordenone; it was run at Cinecon just before that where the Pordenone people saw it. It’s a film very similar to The Wind. Directed by William Beaudine, which is not a name you would usually go to with the idea that you would find a high quality film.

KW: Or a distinctive one, really.

DS: Yes, but it’s a very fine film. There was the original print of The Wedding March with the color sequence, not that it was unknown, but no one had really seen it. I remember the analogy I used at the time. Like Borneo: everybody knows about it, nobody goes there. And so there was The Vanishing American, a real discovery. There was another Fields—Running Wild. And there was a third one—It’s the Old Army Game. Until then, no one thought of Fields as a silent performer, but they’re good films. Some very interesting things from the teens. The Cheat, which, of course, is also at Eastman House. And The Man on the Box. The Virginian. I’m very fond of films from the early teens.

KW: Those were the ones that were in the studio that Aldrich bought?

DS: They were in the studio. The negatives were generally of later films from about 1924 on.  There were also silent versions or mute versions of early talkies. There was a silent version of Monte Carlo. There were some foreign negatives. For example, foreign versions of some Harold Lloyd films, which Paramount had distributed but didn’t own. When the negatives came back, they vaulted them, they didn’t send them back to Mr. Lloyd.

KW: Generally what was the incentive for a studio like Paramount to keep these at the time, if they didn’t own them or weren’t interested in exploiting them?

DS: Well, they weren’t interested in allocating labor to go through them and throw them away. It’s simple. How much do you have around your place that would be gone if you felt like taking a day to clean it out? It’s easier to just let it sit.

KW: That was the case with most of the studios at that time, except MGM.

DS: MGM, of course, began to do preservation back about 1967 when they had excess laboratory capacity and they had a lot of nitrate films that hadn’t been copied. So MGM filled up its excess laboratory capacity, first with the sound features and then the silent features, of which there were many. Then the short subjects. One has to really admire MGM for that, because that’s when they were selling the ruby slippers to keep the doors open. I think that Roger Mayer, who was head of the lab, initiated that. Their work was not always the finest, but it was certainly good. They didn’t junk the nitrate. The head of the library at that time at MGM was a curmudgeonly man by the name of Morty Feinstein. But he managed to get along with Jim Card, who was equally curmudgeonly, and that’s how all that stuff came to Eastman House. Eastman agreed to take it so that MGM wouldn’t junk it.

KW: And was the desire to junk it out of fire concerns or was it just taking up space?

DS: Well, they did have a fire. A few years before, MGM lost two vaults. That’s when London After Midnight disappeared. They have gaps, they weren’t able to save everything. That’s when they became very aware that they had vaults, which were not air-conditioned, which went back to the twenties and teens when the studio was built. They thought they should probably get the lot out of there. And, as you know, Eastman House had a fire, too.

KW: Well, most every major archive had some fire or disaster …

DS: I don’t think the Library of Congress has, or UCLA, or the BFI.

KW: Of course there’s the famous Fox fire in ’37.

DS: Have you ever seen the footage of that?

KW: No, where is it available?

DS: Youtube. Some guy who lived in the neighborhood went out with a 16mm camera and some Kodachrome film and photographed those vaults burning. It’s quite jaw-dropping.

KW: It’s funny, of course, because Fox had really, at that time, taken the lead on the whole idea of having state-of-the-art vaults.

DS: Those vaults were almost new. But what they did was put the material for each film together, which was particularly bone-headed. In case of disaster, they would lose all of it. What’s left of the pre-1934 Fox is basically what they had in file prints in the studio, or, in some cases, in exchanges.

KW: Moving from the Paramount of the past to the Paramount of the present, when I went and saw Hugo, I stayed through the credits and saw Film Preservation Associates cited for a good number of the clips in that. Is there anything you can say about that experience?

DS: It was very simple. We were asked for them. I’ve known Marty Scorsese for a long time and I guess he sent his post-production team to me. Of course they were particularly looking for the Méliès films and we have all those out of Lobster in Paris. Film Preservation Associates and Lobster Films are really one company. We did the Méliès DVD set, which you’ve seen, probably, right?

KW: I have a copy.

DS: That’s nice. Thank you. I got about 93 or 94 of the films here and mastered those all in HD; all those tapes went to Paris. So all those films were handled from Paris. The ones that they wanted from me are for the scene where they look through a film history book and run across a reference to a film and it leaps into life for a second or two. I had those 35mm negatives stored at the Academy Film Archive and they told me what pieces and we sent those reels over to Technicolor and Tom Burton, who did all the scanning and grading on A Trip to the Moon. Technicolor scanned and graded those, they came back to the Archive, we got some money, and that was that.

KW: But you never would have thought when you were doing the HD scans of all the Méliès films that they would wind up in Digital 3D in theaters across the country, right?

DS: They didn’t turn many of the Méliès films into 3D, but yes, it’s great. Our Méliès DVD set is selling like hamburgers and people are rediscovering these films. Hugo, I think, by the way, is an absolutely beautiful film. I saw it twice in 3D and they sent me a DVD of it, so I have it here at home, too. I think that and The Artist have created more awareness of silent cinema than anything that’s come along in decades.

KW: Have you seen that manifest in ways other than they you’ve had to do another pressing on the Méliès set?

DS: There’s been a lot of press. Do you come to Cinefest every year?

KW: For the last three, yes.

DS: You look at the average age of that audience and the interest in silent films is going to die out pretty soon but for a few freaks like yourself unless something comes along to generate a new enthusiasm. Our DVDs have done that to some extent. I have a fairly wide phone correspondence with high school kids and younger college kids, who discover these films by getting DVDs from the library or I guess sometimes they buy them. They don’t have friends they can make sit and watch them. Or talk about them with. But I’m not hard to find, so they call me. There are people like this all over the country. And I think that Hugo and The Artist are probably going to fertilize a whole lot more minds about the power of silent films.

KW: And the amazing thing about Hugo to me isn’t so much that it’s about silent film, but that it’s actually about silent film preservation.

DS: In part at least, it’s about the magic of movies and the more you know about film, the richer it is. It has all these quotations from the movies we grew up with. You know, they play a song and you recognize it as the song that’s in Grand Illusion; there’s an acknowledgement in the screen credits to Jean Renoir. There’s a lot of stuff quoted from the René Clair Paris comedies. Scorsese really knows film history. We used to sit around a lot and talk about film history when we both lived in Southern California. He’s now been long in New York and I’ve long been in the North Woods. But he reads the reviews. He knows how deeply it touched people. Unfortunately, it’s also been a flop from a commercial point of view. You know, that means it’ll probably be a long time before someone gets to make another multi-million dollar paean to film history.

KW: I’ve recommended it to people and some of them love it. I’ve had people react in a very hostile, irrational way to it as well.

DS: If you look at the comments on the IMDB, they run that gamut. There was a story today I saw where some jerk in England is suing the theater because he went to go see The Artist and didn’t know it was a silent movie. I wouldn’t expect any of the current Republican candidates for president to like Hugo, but I think a lot of people will. As my simple but wise Aunt Irma used to say, there’s a cover for every pot.

I think Hugo’s going to go on a long time. The other thing that I think may make a real splash is this Blu-ray and DVD restoration of Wings, which Paramount is releasing. Obviously they didn’t do it for commercial purposes, they did it for publicity. But they recorded the original score with a fifty-piece orchestra up at Skywalker Sound and did a frame-by-frame digital cleanup of the picture. The reviews have started to come out and people love it. They say that the film is just absolutely great—which, of course, it is. It will be interesting to see whether the average age at Cinefest this year drops to about 70.

KW: We’re talking about things like Wings and of course that had a good deal of photochemical restoration from the Academy but most people are destined to see it in this Blu-ray.

DS: They didn’t use the Academy material. They did it all themselves.

KW: So a far cry from when they were just throwing away whole reels because the leader was starting to go?

DS: Well, that was forty years ago, but they obviously now have people who have some awareness of film. Probably a lot of the current administration went to film school and saw silent movies along the way. I wouldn’t say that it’s a boom. We haven’t seen sales grow to significantly more units with DVD than we used to get with Laserdisc and VHS. But at least we’re replacing the part of the audience that is dying out. We’re doing adventurous stuff. But I think it takes a certain amount of courage to do J’accuse and La roue. We’re working on Gribiche and La maison du mystère and Les nouveaux messieurs. We licensed a whole package of Albatros films from the Cinémathèque Française. And many of those films were never shown here in the United States, or at least were never revived after they were shown here only in cut versions in the 1920s. But I think there’s enough interest in silent cinema to sustain the release of them.

KW: I hope so.

DS: That’s a long way from just putting out The Birth of a Nation, Caligari, and Potemkin, which is where we were, say, twenty years ago.

• • •

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening So’s Your Old Man in a 35mm print from the Library of Congress at the Portage Theater on Wednesday, February 1 as part of our Classic Film Series. Please see our current calendar for more information. Special thanks to Rob Stone, Lynanne Schweighofer, Mike Mashon, and, of course, David Shepard.

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On the Vitaphone: Show Girl in Hollywood

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Kyle Westphal

Can we talk about a fundamental division in film-going?

Most of us look at movies and see stories and actors—shifting pleasures for which the highest praise is timelessness. A performance that endures, dialogue that remains quotable, storytelling that ‘holds up’ on repeat viewing, whether in a theater or on television or streaming over Netflix. (The virtues can be consumed and appreciated in any medium.) It’s common to overhear laments that a film ‘doesn’t stand the test of time’—implying that a film can be a great emotional experience in one moment and merely an antique in another, creaky and tinny precisely because it gives dramatic form to an outmoded concern or a topical obsession. Such does not a classic make.

But there’s another kind of film-going, rooted in things rather than professionally timeless. The good folks at the Vitaphone Project are interested in early talkies for their specificity (in time and in technology), but in an expansive way. Emphasizing the recording and playback method, not necessarily the thing being heard, sounds odd at first—a cart without a horse. Continue reading →

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Native Son – Shot in Buenos Aires, Restored in Dayton

Posted on July 2, 2011 by Kyle Westphal

I first became interested in the film version of Native Son when I was reading over a list of films that the Library of Congress had preserved in 2004. Amidst countless Vitaphone shorts, the original Superman serial, and silent features from forgotten and one-off production companies like Davis Distributing Division, Paralta Plays, Inc., Arrow Film Corp., and Ivan Films, Inc., there was also Native Son, seemingly removed from the others by time and space. As I read up on the film, it just became more interesting—an independent production that starred the author of the landmark novel, shot not in America but Argentina. Even Oscar Micheaux, ever-marginal, never had to make a film in exile.

Contemporary accounts of the film throw the nature of that exile into relief.  The book had already been adapted for the stage in 1941 by no less than Orson Welles; actor Canada Lee was cast as Bigger Thomas and the play went on to a long run. It proved popular enough to entice Hollywood. Even MGM, the studio with the sensibility farthest afield from Wright’s, expressed interest. Wright eventually turned down a $50,000 offer for the screen rights, fearing that the film would desecrate the book. (He was undoubtedly right: talk centered on a white-cast version with assorted cuts to appease Southern exhibitors.)

Renewed talks for a screen version began at a Parisian café, where director Pierre Chenal, producer Jaime Prades, and Argentina Sono Films head Artillo Mentasti convinced Wright that an unexpurgated rendition could be filmed in Argentina, which had also seen long runs of the stage production (in Spanish, with a white cast). Believing that Argentina was anything but a US client state, and thus indifferent to the potential consequences of an incendiary picture of American race relations, Wright set up shop at Sono Film. Continue reading →

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