Tag Archives: Cinema By Other Means

The Spoken Cinema

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Can anything else be said about The Night of the Hunter? After a BFI monograph, two book-length accounts of its production, an exhaustive Criterion Collection edition, and numerous critical appreciations, one fears not. Robert Mitchum’s monologues are quoted with giddy abandon and the spectral image of Shelley Winters underwater is recalled with undiluted emotional immediacy. James Agee’s screenplay (long ridiculed by associates who outlived him) is now released under the banner of the Library of America—an honor that the screenplay basically aspired to long before such a collection existed.

By now, this strange picture, roundly rejected upon its initial release, has been overtaken by its own special class of critical clichés. It blends the pastoralism of Griffith with the angular terror of the Weimar Cinema. It’s a horror show with a strong Sunday School message. It’s a great challenge to (or affirmation of?) the auteur theory—the sole film directed by Charles Laughton, at once sui generis and a heartbreaking suggestion of what wonders he may have produced afterward were it not for the film’s box office troubles. (And we’re not exempt from this either: in calling The Night of the Hunter a Christmas classic, we’re hoping to promulgate a new cliché, no ill will towards It’s a Wonderful Life or White Christmas intended.)

The freshest way to look at The Night of Hunter is actually to listen to it. It’s much more provocative and productive to take The Night of a Hunter not as an directorial outlier but rather as a climax to Laughton’s work across several media.  In the early fifties, Laughton’s film roles were few, but he remained an inescapable public presence. The theatrical partnership between Laughton and producer Paul Gregory encompassed a busy lecture tour and three extraordinarily well-received stage productions: Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell, Benet’s John Brown’s Body, and Wouk’s The Caine-Mutiny Court Martial. All these events revolved around the special quality of words read aloud, with Laughton literally hauling a stack of books up to his lectern when presenting An Evening with Charles Laughton. The more elaborate productions of Shaw and Benet were not really so much more elaborate—Laughton’s actors would take the stage, rivet themselves to the stools, and perform the texts in a manner that would now be called reader’s theater.

Laughton’s reading talent was already well-known. The popularity of his recitation of the Gettysburg Address in Ruggles of Red Gap led naturally to a commercial 78 rpm recording of the same. (Those curious about this release can scrounge the junk bins of your local record store or import the British Blu-ray of Ruggles from the Masters of Cinema label, which includes the audio as an extra.)

Regular visits to a Southern California military hospital in 1943 sealed the deal. Per Laughton:

I read innocuous and sentimental things which I thought would please them. I read three times a week, but one day I tried something heavy and tragic, and there was an immediate response. They started to talk about their own problems—being in bombers over Germany, or in foxholes, or how they felt after they had been maimed. And so I found that serious literature was a great help to them because other people in centuries gone and in the present had all the experience that are to be had, and the GI’s felt they were not alone. This resulted in me having to read in a larger room at Birmingham because the first, small room could not contain all those who wanted to come. And then I had to read in a larger hall still. And when I was reading from all the books I loved, I found the business of reading aloud was a matter of making the effort to communicate something you love to people you love.

Laughton’s argument for this intimate brand of performance continued in the pages of This Week, the mighty Sunday newspaper supplement, which offered three pages to ‘America’s No. 1 reader-out-loud’ in a promotional tie-up with The Night of the Hunter:

Moses wrote the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone from divine inspiration. The tablets of stone have long been dust, but the words live. Man’s greatest and noblest works of genius built from brick and mortar crumble and perish, but words do not die…

I was once invited to read the Bible to an audience of ministers at Occidental College. Afterward, one of the ministers told me, “You know, we ministers make a fetish of the Bible. Your turn it into a dramatic, earthy tale of real people.”

I assure you that you can do the same thing if you will try reading the Bible out loud in your own living room, just as our ancestors used to do in their daily Bible readings.

(Is it any wonder that Laughton originally planned to open The Night of a Hunter with a scene of himself reading aloud from the Bible? Or that the film’s soundtrack LP was actually a 35-minute condensation of the story as read by Laughton?)

Laughton’s approach was essentially a more democratic and easy-going rendition of the University of Chicago’s contemporaneous Great Books initiative. While Robert Maynard Hutchins attempted to encyclopedia-ize the landmarks of Western Lit, Laughton promoted the experience of listening as a special kind of engagement. It was primarily emotional, rather than textual, uplift.

Despite its photographic virtuosity, it’s this spoken aspect of The Night of the Hunter that completely sets it apart from its contemporaries. (Its only real companion is The Saga of Anatahan.) Almost every line spoken in the film is delivered with one sort of dialect or another, but it’s never just a gimmick. Laughton and Agee are deeply interested in the patterns of vernacular speech, with each syllable functioning as melody, not rhetoric. It’s pure sound—an unfolding oral ritual that aspires to folk permanence.

Certainly the speech is affected: it’s a boy’s adventure yarn where everyone talks with faux Shakespearian grandiloquence. The deviations and eccentricities are expressive in themselves. The lines carry the odd phrasings and wild cadences of a kid trying to prettify a half-remembered poem until it sounds like a lost verse of the King James Bible. The Night of the Hunter would never be confused with naturalism, and that’s the point: in its adolescent yearning and gawky malapropism, in its living memory of an America that never quite existed, it embarks on a project that’s more delicate and insightful than mere naturalism.

It’s also, notably, a world apart from the approach embodied by contemporary films like Some Came Running and Wild River. Great though these are, you can never quite shake the feeling that the screenwriter has resorted to hillbilly verbiage as a shortcut to characterization. The remarkable performances of Shirley MacLaine and Lee Remick struggle mightily against this sociological strait jacket, with even the most emotionally immediate moments damaged by the insistent reminder that these women are irredeemably uneducated.

There’s no such condescension in The Night of the Hunter, largely because the film refuses to exploit class difference for the sake of melodrama. When Evelyn Varden says that she’s more interested in canning than sex, we chuckle, but we also recognize a real preference delivered without a note of doubt or self-consciousness. This is an important distinction that feeds directly into another of the film’s major achievements—its sober hysteria.

As noted, the original reviews of The Night of the Hunter were generally not sympathetic to this contradiction. One would expect some degree of understanding from a specialist publication like Films in Review—what better audience for a feature-length Griffith homage?—but they complained of arty pretension and over-extended ambition like many other outlets. The Chicago Daily Tribune rejected its violence as simultaneously ugly and laughable. The harshest notice probably came from the Washington Post, which accused Laughton of “cheap taste and apparent contempt for simple people,” resulting in “a hideous travesty on the human race.” (Three weeks after that pan, the Post’s movie critic devoted a column to a new trend of cynicism in cinema, bracketing The Night of the Hunter with The Big Knife and Rebel Without a Cause. All these films willfully contradicted the author’s assertion that “the rightness and generosity of individuals are as strong as they have ever been.”)

These reactions are especially interesting because our own feelings about The Night of the Hunter are largely their opposite. After decades of quotable killers in thrillers like The Godfather, Scarface, The Silence of the Lambs, and No Country for Old Men, Mitchum’s charismatic destroyer seems essentially modern and, in that sense, unremarkable. What makes The Night of the Hunter unique today is the manifest sincerity of its small-town values. Though Laughton and Agee acknowledge that horrible evil can visit West Virginia’s Cresap’s Landing, this is no exposé of the repressed void at the town’s heart. Whereas films like Blue Velvet and A History of Violence construct a parody of America to be disassembled, strawman-like, by kinky second-act revelations, The Night of the Hunter keeps the faith. (Literally. For a movie about religious hypocrisy, The Night of the Hunter can still recall chapter and verse.) Lillian Gish is the embodiment of goodness and wisdom, offered with no irony whatever. This is a film that tastes adult pain, but chooses a child’s moral compass anyway.

Is this a copout? Perhaps, but remember that Laughton viewed tragedy as a form of empathy and as an instigator to empowerment. Recognizing the great darkness of the world affirmed the resilience of the children who abide and endure. Like a live reading or a revival meeting, The Night of the Hunter achieves a trance-like conspiracy between speaker and listener.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society screens The Night of the Hunter in a terrifying 35mm print on Wednesday, December 19 at the Portage Theater. (Note the proximity to The Holiday Season.) Special thanks to Chris Chouinard of Park Circus. Please see our current calendar for more information.

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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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Swap Meet Cinema: Sheet Music and the Movies

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

 Can we learn about film history through non-filmic means?

By most metrics, this week’s film, Thanks a Million, is not a very familiar title. It hasn’t screened theatrically in Chicago—or anywhere else, for that matter—in many years. I don’t know of any video release, and I can’t recall many TV airings. It doesn’t have much of a paper trail either, with minimal mention in histories of the musical or American cinema in the ’30s. It’s not discussed in relation to director Roy Del Ruth’s career either, but that’s because far too few people are thinking about that expansive and bewildering subject in the first place. (For one rare and sympathetic take on Thanks a Million, see William K. Everson’s brief Program Notes for a 1978 screening.) We managed to preview a collector’s 16mm print before booking an infrequently-circulated 35mm print from the studio vault for our calendar, but that was a stroke of luck.

We only knew to seek the film out in the first place after coming across some very attractive sheet music for it.

These days sheet music occupies a characteristically low rung on the cultural ladder. Collecting sheet music requires forgiving nostrils and a superhuman patience for sifting through stacks and stacks of third-rate swap meet chafe. Go to a used bookstore and ask the clerk if the shop stocks any and you’ll probably receive a shrug or a vague gesture towards a bin of smelly paper towards the back. Even bookstores that put great pride in the appearance of their first editions tend to dump contemporaneous sheet music haphazardly into dusty crates, with the paper left to crease and curl. (One marvelous local exception is Selected Works, the bookstore and sheet music specialist on the second floor of the Fine Arts Building at 410 S. Michigan Ave.)

In its heyday, sheet music was ubiquitous. The 1892 release of Charles K. Harris’s “After the Ball” achieved success on an unfathomable scale, selling five million home editions. Previously, a hundred thousand sales constituted a blockbuster. This is the moment when the publishing trade became the publishing industry, mass-producing commodities for a broad public. This wasn’t music as mediated by minstrels or street performers, but a product sold directly to the consumer. Whether the tune inside was an aria, a hymn, or a waltz, it was functionally little different from a stick of chewing gum.

Sheet music also expounded a certain democratic idea, if only by necessity. With the recording industry in its infancy, sheet music presented a warm and economical form of entertainment—a musical gathering of family and friends with whom one could interpret and render personal the popular tidings of the day. This aspect is a central part of Beck’s latter-day revival of the form—a new “album” due out next month as a sheet music exclusive. “The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d expect from their author,” advises publisher McSweeney’s, “but if you want to hear “Do We? We Do,” or “Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard,” bringing them to life depends on you.” Consumers are encouraged to buy the sheet music to facilitate recording and virally distributing their own versions. (Shades of Be Kind, Rewind? The pitch reminds me of the brilliant track that closes Albert Brooks’s 1973 LP Comedy Minus One, in which the listener is instructed to follow a printed script and form a stand-up duo with Albert.) Pre-release reaction has been divisive; in a reversal for the ages, Beck’s latest proved too much for Austin hipsters but earned hyperbolic praise from a branding guru at Forbes. (“A Genius Innovation … an idea that is so good, so fresh, so amazing that I … [need] to stand up to let the energy fill my body.”)

Beck can’t singlehandedly revive sheet music, but his Song Reader—a literal concept album—does draw attention to American sheet music’s considerable significance as indigenous, popular art.  The cover illustrations for many forgotten songs are themselves breathtaking.

Sheet music was, of course, also used to sell other media, especially movies, with tie-in songs launched long before the films themselves were able to sing and talk. Though many pieces of film-related sheet music reuse and recycle artwork from poster campaigns, it would be wrong to think of such ephemera as just a shrunken-down version of pre-approved marketing material. One-sheets, banners, lobby cards, billboards and the like targeted the mass audience, but were not products in themselves. You bought a ticket to the movie, not a copy of the poster. Sheet music was different, with the text, layout, color, and image all geared towards a sale of the thing itself. Sheet music was a revenue generator and a rubric of direct public reaction.

(It’s also instructive to compare the market for film-related sheet music to the collector’s market for film posters. Obtaining an original one-sheet for Top Hat or a lobby card for Casablanca might set you back thousands of dollars. Very attractive original sheet music, which displays just as well on the wall, can be had for a few bucks, provided you’re up for rifling through musty boxes and staining your fingertips.)

We’ve scanned some absolutely gorgeous examples and invite your indulgence below. Please click on the thumbnails to enlarge.

 

 

“Mickey.” Words by Harry Wiliams, Music by Neil Moret. Waterson, Berlin, & Snyder Co., 1919.

Silent films were often promoted with songs, even though there was no fixed soundtrack or score accompanying the film itself. This is a relatively early example from Mack Sennett’s Mickey. It’s dedicated to its star, Mabel Normand. Pearl White of The Perils of Pauline was also subject to sheet music tribute.

 

 

 

“Oh! Susanna.” Words and Music by Stephen Foster. Jack Snyder Publishing Co. Inc., 1923.

Silent films also provided publishers with a certain freedom to revive old favorites that might plausibly be connected with the latest hit. Here is one enterprising example, with Stephen Foster’s perennial standard benefitting from association with Paramount’s blockbuster western. Shown here in an “Old Masters Edition.”

 

 

“My Dream of The Big Parade.” Words by Al. Dubin, Music by Jimmy McHugh. Jack Mills Inc., 1926.

There were also knock-offs of a different sort throughout the 1920s. Here we have a song obviously inspired by King Vidor’s Great War saga, The Big Parade, an enormous success from the year before. (It wound up grossing more money than any other film of the silent era.) The songwriting team of Dubin and McHugh did have some credentials in this area, having penning the bawdy doughboy standard “Hinky Dinky Parley Voo?”

 

 

“Tip Toe Through the Tulips With Me.” Lyrics by Al Dubin, Music by Joe Burke. M. Witmark & Sons, 1929.
“Dance Away the Night.” Words by Harlan Thompson, Music by Dave Stamper. DeSylva, Brown and Henderson Inc., 1929.
“In the Land of Make-Believe,” Words by L. Wolfe Gilbert, Music by Abel Baer. Leo Feist, Inc., 1929.

The talkie revolution also brought a new scale to marketing tie-ins, with musical films yielding scores with three, four, five, or more individually salable songs. (Note that “Tip Toe Through the Tulips With Me” is one of nine songs offered from Gold Diggers of Broadway.) This complicated period registers several quite important absences for the film historian, with many transitional titles surviving fragmentarily or not at all. In such cases, the “lost” films are often best approximated in flavor and atmosphere by paper ephemera that remains—stills, lobby cards, and especially sheet music. Recent preservation efforts have salvaged about a fifth of the otherwise-lost Gold Diggers of Broadway (including the “Tip Toe Through the Tulips” number) but the spirit of the vanished original is conveyed elegantly by the sheet music. Likewise, Fox’s Married in Hollywood survives only in a brief fragment, but the sheet music leaves a vivid impression of the idiom the film occupied for contemporary audiences. I have no idea whether the Tiffanytone production of Molly and Me survives (many key films from important but under-capitalized mini-studio Tiffany-Stahl are gone), but I can’t imagine the film approaching the lyrical delicacy of the still that illustrates the cover of “In the Land of Make-Believe.”

“Broadway Melody.” Words by Arthur Freed, Music by Nacio Herb Brown. Robbins Music Corporation, 1929.
“Waiting at the End of the Road.” Words and Music by Irving Berlin. Irving Berlin, Inc., 1929.
“Taking a Chance on Love.” Words by John LaTouche and Ted Fetter, Music by Vernon Duke, 1943.

Films and sheet music were both highly lucrative commodities, but they traveled in different commercial channels with divergent expectations. Compare the treatment accorded to two roughly contemporaneous, all-talking, all-singing productions from the same studio, M-G-M. The Academy Award-laureled Broadway Melody receives absolutely beautiful, full-color sheet music, which includes original art and inset photographs of major cast members. King Vidor’s Hallelujah!  was a prestige production shot on location with an all-black cast. Its exhibition was proscribed in a number of Southern states. Its sheet music—a wonderful song from no less than Irving Berlin—is remarkably generic. It’s the end of the road, all right. I can only speculate, but the lack of star billing and any allusion to the actual content of the film suggests a canny marketing move from Irving Berlin Inc.: this is a product that can be sold south of the Mason-Dixon Line without offending the racial sensitivities of local bigots. (Just because Southern theaters won’t play Hallelujah! shouldn’t mean that music fans should be denied the chance to throw some coin toward Berlin.) The cross-promotional value accorded M-G-M is quite slim; it takes a moment to even recognize the piece as a movie tie-in. If this opportunistic interpretation sounds far-fetched, consider the very similar treatment that the all-black Cabin in the Sky received some fourteen years later.

 “A Farewell to Arms.” Words and Music by Allie Wrubel and Abner Silver. Keit-Engel, Inc., 1933.
“The Treasure of Sierra Madre.” Words by Buddy Kaye, Music by Dick Manning. Remnick Music Corporation, 1947.

You don’t remember theme songs for these somber pictures? Too much lilt? Sheet music titans beg to differ. Did you know that the arms in the Hemingway picture are not military implements but those “arms that caressed me?” At least this fanciful interpretation is rooted in the romantic drama of the film. More puzzling is “The Treasure of Sierra Madre,” which manages to find sex appeal in a movie totally devoid of women:

I didn’t find the fortune I was looking for
I didn’t find the fortune, I found much more
For you are the treasure of SIERRA MADRE
And your love is the gold that I tenderly hold in my arms (!)

 

“It’s a Hap-Hap-Happy Day.” Words by Al. J. Neiburg, Music by Sammy Timberg and Winston Sharples. Famous Music Corporation, 1939.

This charming promotional piece for the Fleischer Studio’s full-length cartoon Gulliver’s Travels is one of the few pieces of filmic sheet music that explicitly refer to the filmmaking process. (There are a few too many perforations per frame, yes, but the Fleischers are hardly the first to take such license.)

 

 

 

“Rock Round the Rock Pile.” Words and Music by Bobby Troup. Robbins Music Corporation, 1956.

Not all sheet music was intended for home use. Remarkably, the novelty song from The Girl Can’t Help It was accorded a special edition for radio broadcast. Though Edmond O’Brien belts “Rock Around the Rock Pile” to memorable effect in the Tashlin film, the real linchpin is Jayne Mansfield’s seductive prison siren sound effect, which no sheet music can adequately replicate.

 

 

 

Special Thanks to the University of Chicago Regenstein Library Map Collection for their outstanding large format scanning facilities and kind staff. All images come from the private collection of the author.

For much, much more vintage sheet music, check out the Sheet Music Consortium maintained by UCLA, which collates records of digitized depositories from around the country.

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

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Kyle Westphal


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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