Tag Archives: Program Notes

Irving Lerner: A Career in Context

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOR FURTHER READING

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

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

From the Bottom Up: Mostly About Subtitles

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Posted in Blog | Tagged Cinema By Other Means, Program Notes | Comments Off

Get Lost

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

What do Upstream, The Devil’s Passkey, Mare Nostrum, The Last Moment, A Woman of Paris, London After Midnight, The Old Dark House, The Case of Lena Smith, and Little Man, What Now have in common?

In 1967, all were included on a ‘rescue list’ issued by the then-brand-new American Film Institute. Collating the 150 or so important American films presumed beyond salvage or in imminent danger of disappearance, the list dictated priorities for scavengers and preservationists alike. With the Library of Congress acting as an on-again/off-again repository for American films and the privately-funded efforts of the Museum of Modern Art and George Eastman House receiving little exposure and minimal scrutiny, the urgency of such an undertaking was obvious. Some evidently important titles were gone outright: Theda Bara’s Cleopatra, Laurel and Hardy’s Hats Off, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Patriot, Lon Chaney and Tod Browning’s The Unknown. (The latter would eventually be found in the archives of the Cinémathèque française under the familiar but generic heading INCONNU—as in, Unidentified Film.) Undisputed classics like Stagecoach and Scarface (AFI selections both) circulated in wretched 16mm prints, with considerable doubt that prime 35mm elements even existed anymore. Amateur film scholars held out hope for an extant copy of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed in its complete, unreleased version. As the latter-day Internet Movie Database would advise, check your attics.

The AFI list remains fascinating, largely because roughly half the titles have since been found while the other half have remained elusive. The ready availability of DVD and Blu-ray versions for many titles has diminished our sense that they were ever lost in the first place. It’s difficult to imagine an account of film history without access to key titles like American Madness, Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Front Page, The Penalty, or Street Angel. (Too, the AFI overlooked several titles with considerable contemporary renown, such as George Loane Tucker’s The Miracle Man and Maurice Tourneur’s Prunella. Whether the AFI’s spotlight could have helped turn up complete versions of these films is unknowable.)

Lost films have always held a particular fascination for historians and the general public alike. More than most art forms, the industrial behemoth of cinema left ample traces of its extinct ranks—trade paper coverage, continuities, press books, posters, publicity stills, promotional memorabilia, to say nothing of the memories of the tens of thousands who saw these films when they were new. Whole books have been devoted to the subject—not only painstaking reconstructions of vanished masterpieces (such as Herman G. Weinberg’s coffee table tomes on the unexpurgated Greed and The Wedding March) but volumes that undertook the critically and semantically impossible task of determining the most important films that could not actually be reviewed. In his 1995 survey Flickers, Gilbert Adair selected a hundred emblematic film stills, one for every year since 1895; for 1926, he pointedly reprinted a lovely image from King Vidor’s Bardelys the Magnificent as a tribute to the peerless promise of lost films. (It doesn’t diminish Adair’s case that Bardelys was recovered by Serge Bromberg and re-issued on DVD in 2009; if anything, the irreverent impulses of Vidor’s film look impudent next to the ethereal stills.)

What’s the big deal about lost films anyway? Curator Paolo Cherchi Usai has cannily noted that the sifting, organizing, and recounting of film history necessarily entails the loss of certain titles. It could not be otherwise. (This has a certain logic: by definition, films are lost because no one especially cares about their whereabouts, whether by neglect or by design. Short of a vault fire, it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment when a film becomes lost.) Historian William K. Everson trudged further into the weeds of the particular and produced a damning notice in 1978:

Long unseen films from the prestigious directors of the twenties—James Cruze, King Vidor, Henry King, Rex Ingram—invariably prove disappointing as they become available again. They are skilled, slick, and yet somehow lifeless, adding nothing to our knowledge of those directors’ work, and if anything, detracting from their reputations ….

The eternally frustrating aspect of the film output of the twenties is that we know there cannot be many more (if any) formal masterpieces awaiting rediscovery, nor is there much more time available for recovery. The intensive preservation crusades by U.S. and world-wide archives quite certainly unearthed all the sizable caches of lost films, which still face the expensive procedure of copying for preservation. James Cruze’s highly regarded Beggar on Horseback was one of the films thus saved—at least in part, for some of it had already deteriorated. But from the almost consistent stolidity and disappointment which mark Cruze’s work in this, his most accomplished period (The Covered Wagon, The Pony Express, Old Ironsides, The City Gone Mad)—all 1923-1926—one had the right to expect from Beggar on Horseback notable content but rather dull execution—and this proved to be very much the case. But against such disappointments, one can fall back on films like Smouldering Fires [Clarence Brown, 1925] or William K. Howard’s notable White Gold (1927), a film that predates and blueprints the better-known and bigger productions The Wind (by Victor Seastrom) and City Girl (by Murnau).

For Everson, the only filmmaker whose recovered work consistently exceeded expectations was John Ford. For decades, the entirety of Ford’s viewable silent output consisted of The Iron Horse and Four Sons, two commercially important but artistically limited and imitative works. The late 1960s and early ’70s brought a deluge of resurrected Fords: Cameo Kirby, Hangman’s House, and the quite major 3 Bad Men. Miraculously, a print of Ford’s very first feature—1917’s Straight Shooting—was found in Czechoslovokia’s Národní filmový archiv and restored with considerable hoopla and self-congratulation from the AFI. Ford attended a revival at the Montreal Film Festival and segments from the re-translated copy aired on NBC! Richard Koszarski included the film in a 1976 survey called ‘The Rivals of D.W. Griffith’ at the Walker Art Museum —pretty impressive for a piece of accomplished juvenilia that had only resurfaced a few years before.

These days, it’s not easy to see Straight Shooting. It’s not lost anymore, but it may as well be for the frequency of its theatrical screenings. A well-maintained archival negative doesn’t equate with a heavily-booked print. The same goes for many of the other rediscovered Fords, including Kentucky Pride, an eccentric 1925 entry (it’s told from the point of view of its titular horse) championed by Ford biographer Joseph McBride. At best, these films are hauled out once a decade in the context of an exhaustive (and exhausting) Ford season at an elite cinémathèque.

Had Upstream been recovered in 1970, rather than 2010, it probably would have met the same archival fate. Upstream may be a hotly anticipated title at the moment through an accident of history, but that’s no reason to be cavalier about it. Kentucky Pride notwithstanding, this is one gift horse.

Upstream has received considerable press as the crown jewel in an ad hoc collection of seventy-five American films repatriated from the New Zealand Film Archive through the efforts of the National Film Preservation Foundation. Matching the orphan films to new American archival homes, the NFPF has undertaken a very ambitious project. In the case of Upstream, 20th Century Fox got involved and paid for a comprehensive restoration at New Zealand’s Park Road Post Production. (Because the nitrate copy was unique and justly famous, it was decided to undertake the duplication work in New Zealand, so as not to risk a catastrophic loss during transit.) The preservation negative of Upstream now lives at the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles; the Academy hosted the American premiere of the restored version in September 2010 and it’s toured some since, opening the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Many of the New Zealand titles—but not Upstream—are streaming on the NFPF’s website.

The extent to which any of the recent major discoveries, like Upstream or the mostly-complete Metropolis found in Buenos Aires in 2008, were really ‘lost films’ is a matter of some controversy. These were not rusty cans discovered in the proverbial attic of some country bumpkin unaware of the pressing cultural imperative of old movies; these films were sitting in reputed archives with professional inventories, backed by solid, documented chains of provenance. Their survival is not exactly mysterious or random.

Upstream was deposited at the New Zealand Film Archive by the family of Jack Murtagh (1913-1989), a projectionist and glass slide salesman who kept a shed full of films acquired on his travels. (As New Zealand was often the last leg on a film’s tour, oversight of a print’s whereabouts was sometimes lacking; would Fox care much if a print of a minor picture like Upstream was never returned, especially since its useful commercial life in major territories was already well over?) The story behind the cache of repatriated American titles has received limited coverage, but the New Zealand Film Archive’s Newsreel has documented these matters with considerable pride [PDF]:

Morris Jackson of Christchurch was responsible for six titles in the collection. Morris operated Film Services in Matipo Road from the 1960s, selling film equipment, projectors and operating a large 16mm rental library specializing in Fox & MGM titles. In more recent years Morris offered a film-to-video service.

Collections of nitrate originally came from the Auckland wine merchant Assid Corban Snr and Invercargill theater owner Warren Sparks. Small places as well as cities have yielded collections: Opotiki, Rangiora, Otorohonga, Wellington, Masterton, and Blenheim.

Two nitrate collections were salvaged from auction houses and estates. The largest of these was the Helliwell Collection discovered in a Berhampore house when Mr Smiles (aka Glen MacDonald), who ran a second-hand shop in Wellington’s Cuba Street, stumbled upon the cans of nitrate while clearing the contents of the late Mr Helliwell’s house.

Is it an indictment of the archives that these films sat on the shelf so long or a testament to their collection stewardship? These films were hardly unnoticed or neglected, nor were they deliberately withheld from public view. If we misconstrued these films as ‘lost,’ it was largely because we artificially constricted the purview of our search.

The case of Metropolis is instructive. Fernando Peña spent two decades tracking down the longest extant cut of Lang’s spectacle before finally verifying the completeness of the 16mm negative held by the Museo del Cine. Though Peña’s discovery earned considerable international attention, the press was less interested in the precarious position of Argentina’s own film heritage.

Preservation is inherently polemical. It’s about cultural priorities—it literally entails choosing which films to save right now and which ones might stand to wait a little longer, even if that means they might deteriorate further (and possibly irretrievably) in the interim. The challenge is to save not just the Ford films that win headlines, but the unknown pictures that don’t.

Above all, it’s supremely important to show the films to the public. An engaged audience is the best antidote to the apathy that lets films get lost in the first place.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society proudly presents the Chicago premiere of the 2010 restoration of Upstream on December 5 at the Portage Theater. The film has not screened in Chicago in over eighty years. It will be accompanied on the organ by Jay Warren. Special thanks to Caitlin Robertson of 20th Century Fox, Brian Block of Criterion Pictures, USA, and May Haduong of the Academy Film Archive. Please see here for additional information.

Posted in Blog | Tagged 35mm, Editorials, Program Notes, Restorations | Comments Off

William S. Hart, Repetition Compulsion, and Us

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Every other week, we seem to get a new lament about the End of Cinema. Usually, the blame falls on modern Hollywood and its infantilizing comic book movies. Never before in the history of movies, claims David Denby in The New Republic, was so much attention and capital devoted to an endless succession of sequels aimed at ten-year-old boys. The eight-decade reign of Adult Movies is a distant memory.

There’s no denying that Disney allocated unfathomable sums to The Avengers, but Hollywood did not become an adolescent assembly-line overnight. Indeed, these industry-wide ambitions stretch back decades. King Kong premiered in March 1933 and RKO managed to release runt follow-up Son of Kong by year’s end. Columns devoted to the lasting eloquence of classic-era adult product like Jezebel rarely acknowledge that these special films existed alongside interminable series pictures aimed squarely at the kiddie matinee trade. A prolific modern franchise like Saw yielded seven entries between 2003 and 2010; by comparison, audiences were treated to no less than forty-eight Bowery Boys features between 1946 and 1958. (Some might suggest that this is a false equivalence, as the average Bowery Boys outing imparts crisper moral education than the torture porn of Saw. These folks have never sat through an entire Bowery Boys movie.)

We cull film history for isolated masterpieces, but the trajectory of the medium can probably be understood better through the typical, repetitive junk that provided producers with steady, safe returns. Sometimes, this product can even intersect with real art.

The films of William S. Hart provide a compelling test case. They’re hardly junk, but even Hart’s partisans must acknowledge that they are repetitive. See them singly over a number of years and each looks like a revelation. Watch a few in quick succession, and the limitations of Hart’s interests and strategies become immediately evident.

Always Hart played the good-bad man and always he glimpsed redemption in an innocent maid. The hostility at the core of civic society never abated. (The exceptions proved the rule: Hart’s deviations from his established screen persona courted instant absurdity, such as his turn as an Aztec chieftain in 1916’s The Captive God.)

This is not a wholly retrospective observation. In 1920, Carl Sandburg reviewed Hart’s latest, Staking His Life, in familiar terms for the Chicago Daily News:

The ingenuity of the studio group surrounding Bill Hart brings fresh admiration with this film. Haven’t they been showing him now for years riding horses, gambling, shooting, getting religion, making sacrifices? And wouldn’t we almost think soon they would run out of fresh plots and fresh air and the wild west would go a little stale? Yes, naturally we might presume just such circumstances. But it would be presumptuous on our part.

These studio workers around Bill Hart seem to be what on Dorchester Avenue they call indefatigable. They either give new stuff entirely, or if they use old stuff they make it more refreshingly antique.

This was not only an American sentiment. If anything, French enthusiasm for Hart—known in Gallic circles as “Rio Jim”—was even greater. Consider Louis Delluc’s review of The Cold Deck from a 1919 issue of Paris-midi:

William Hart, the popular Rio Jim, is the tragedian of the cinema. He mounts a horse like Mounet-Sully descends a staircase….

In his domain, William Hart has the same godlike serenity and the same violent ways. He is no ordinary cowboy of the circus or of a thousand and one dashed-off films. He is the synthesis of that plastic beauty which marks the schematic and almost stylized Far West. Transcending the specific details of his characters, William Hart reveals a profoundness of spirit. They used to call him “the man from nowhere.” What a lovely title! We never know where Rio Jim comes from. He just passes through. He crosses the West—and the West is so huge. He arrives on horseback. He leaps down onto the ground where other men live. Generally, the time that he remains there is devoted to suffering, that is, to loving ….

Never has William Hart been so nobly tragic and so simply grandiose. He emerges in the milieu of the usual crowds and decors of this stylized Far West of the cinema, where the splendid fatalism of Sophocles comes alive for us—but it is still too early to say whether the cinema will have as intense a presence as the great Greek spectacles which whole people attended.

With his 1921 essay “From Orestes to Rio Jim,” Delluc settled this question once and for all. “Aeschylus did not create Prometheus on purpose,” concluded Delluc, “it was forced on him. Rio Jim is the advance guard of the coming great film figures.”

If Hart’s films endure, credit must go to the durability of the craft. Watch almost any Hart film and you’re bound to come away impressed with Joseph August’s top-notch photography, a dusty recall of reanimated frontiers. The efficiency and emotional coherence of the staging is also notable, on par with the complex work seen in such contemporary European imports as Victor Sjöström’s Ingeborg Holm. The art titles possess an undeniable graphic beauty, too, enriching and commenting upon the action on-screen. And, of course, we have the immobile but expressive Hart visage above all—a chiseled stoicism that somehow expressed boundless rage and enduring love with the very same tics.

These virtues were not Hart’s alone, but few others insisted upon them with such consistency. The Hart pictures were a brand and a very reliable one for millions of fans.

Yet as technically impressive as many Hart films were and remain, their distinguishing feature lies elsewhere. As Diane Koszarski has observed, “Hart’s characteristic signature as an auteur is the glowing moral intensity of his films; it glimmers fitfully even in a light-hearted piece like Branding Broadway and bursts in apocalyptic glory in Hell’s Hinges and Selfish Yates. No Western stars of his time or later could match Hart’s fundamentalist grandeur (or particularly cared to).”

The Hart films are fiery sermons with no patience for extenuating circumstances or question-begging. He’s a frontier preacher with only one lesson, delivered with slightly different inflections and citations each week. Even more so than his contemporary D.W. Griffith, Hart strives to “show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue.”

If we don’t share Hart’s strain of Victorian-Calvinist conservatism, why should we treat the consistency of these themes as a virtue? This is a difficult question, not least because it embodies a kind of sticky Eastern skepticism that Hart would likely meet with a sock to the jaw. One answer might go something like this:

Hart’s screen career lasted a little over a decade, but those years saw a wholesale transformation of the movie industry that can be traced with extraordinary precision through Hart’s films. All bluster aside, Hart’s earliest screen endeavors really did represent a sort of frontier, before commercial moviemaking became regimented and standardized. The early Hart films, like The Disciple and Hell’s Hinges, give us 200-proof Hart—an artist encumbered only by the moral thicket of his own doubts and recriminations.

As the film industry organizes itself with increasing efficiency after 1917, Hart’s films doggedly try to hold on to their primal, artisanal fury. The films from the early 1920s are not entirely successful, but they are moving as artifacts of an ongoing, bodily struggle. Hart’s films had been formulaic, but they had been his formula. Hart’s absolutism had no need of subplots, auxiliary characters, or comic relief (they were distractions from an already-legible moral lesson) and his films strain mightily under the yolk of these impositions. The over-extended plot of White Oak (1921) meanders indifferently. Hart’s final feature, Tumbleweeds (1925) tries to imitate the epic, multi-character mode of The Covered Wagon but plays like a pre-digested spectacle, ambitious but resigned. It’s a sermon with a circus built up all around it.

That Hart persisted in his strident evangelism from the maw of the nascent studio system is not heroic, per se, but it’s notable when most Hollywood features from the period were so shorn of rough edges and personal conviction. Hart’s films offer us invaluable insight into American cinema, religion, geography, and industry in brief, brittle concert.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society screens William S. Hart’s 1920 feature Sand in an archival 35mm print from the Library of Congress on Wednesday, November 14 at the Portage Theater. Jay Warren will provide live organ accompaniment. Special thanks to Rob Stone and Lynanne Schweighofer. For more information, please see our current schedule.

Posted in Blog | Tagged Program Notes | Comments Off

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

Posted on November 11, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KW: How did it come about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LMP: Still have a lot to organize about.

KW: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IB, Therefore …

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early Talkies: A Primer

Posted on September 30, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Acquired Tastes
If one wanted, for whatever reason, to sketch a dividing line between the casual movie fan and the serious cinephile, the early talkies are probably the place to do it.

Their stars are unfamiliar—flashes-in-the-pan whose popularity is more mysterious and unaccountable than those that came immediately before and after. (Modern audiences instinctively understand the magnetism and sexuality of Valentino and Garbo or Stanwyck and Gabin; not so El Brendel, whose narrow ethnic burlesque is such an acquired taste that it beggars belief he was ever accorded starring roles in big-budget specials.)

Too often, discussion of the earliest sound movies (say, between 1928 and 1932, but especially those made before the summer of 1930) is heavily laced with apology. It’s assumed that they’re successful in spite of incontrovertible deficiencies. Their music often comes across as a soupy, repetitive mess. The sets are sometimes barely dressed. The takes are long and the camera movement minimal. The dialogue is so heavy it’s no wonder they were called talkies.

With eight decades separating us from their original context, it’s an understandable misreading. The late silent era boasted such a consistently high level of craft that it’s somewhat baffling that moviegoers were content to exchange high-toned masterworks like The Sorrows of Satan, The General, The Docks of New York, The Crowd, The Wind, and The Wedding March for Al Jolson in The Singing Fool, the first talking blockbuster. (The ledger looks even more uneven and incredulous when one factors in mute exercises in mass-market formalism from across the Atlantic: Napoleon, Faust, L’argent, Rotaie, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and The Fall of the House of Usher.) Today’s scholars value these films as showcases of dazzling camera choreography, intricate montage, subtle performance style, and a generally ecstatic engagement with the technological promise of cinema—a new language for a broken world. Why discard all this for something so inert? (Until the 1960s, many film buffs refused to do so, with a reflexive and reactionary insistence that the major artistic milestones in American cinema were largely confined to the pre-talkie era.)

There are some potential—and highly condescending—explanations. The Hollywood machine conspired to thrust a false talkie consciousness upon the masses, who were naturally powerless to resist. In the less populist version, the yokels of 1928 had never appreciated the Art of Cinema in the first place and were just knocked out by any damn thing that moved and spoke (or sang or barked or yapped) at the same time. (Of course, many Americans had never heard electronically amplified sound in a public space before the movies began to talk, and that’s not nothing.) Really engaging with the early talkies, though, demands a more charitable framework that allows that the exchange of silence for sound may well have been seen as a fair trade by the average moviegoer.

Ambient
What the movies lost in graphic sophistication was at least equaled by a new polyphonic dimension of strange, ancestral accents, disarmingly elemental sound effects, abstract layers of aural atmosphere, and the newly legible terror of true silence. In aggregate, they had no less claim to art. And indeed, films like Thunderbolt, Alibi, Hallelujah!, Morocco, Enthusiasm, and Berlin Alexanderplatz suggested an entirely new kind of art—ambiance radically conjured through ambient noise. For a western like Hell’s Heroes, the soundtrack served to underline and enhance the severity of the outdoor photography. In style and effect, these early talkies are in no significant fashion different from the recent ‘slow cinema’ features (Syndromes and a Century, say, or the work of Hong Sang-soo) much-lauded on the festival circuit over the last decade.

In a category all its own was the music-and-effects movie, that most ephemeral of forms to spring from the early talkie era. Conceived to show off sound reproduction capacities at wired theaters but designed to play comprehensibly in equal measure in old-fashioned houses, they contained little or no spoken dialogue. These delicacies retained the graphic and rhythmic punctuation of the silent-style intertitle while subjecting lucky listeners to a barrage of non-narrative aural information. In their gratuitousness, the music-and-effects movies suggested a poetic overlay upon prose entertainment—a genuinely experimental form arising wholly from economic necessity. The best music-and-effects fusions—Sunrise, Tabu, The Man Who Laughs, Prix de beaute, the international version of All Quiet on the Western Front—combined stock music and new compositions with machine sounds and truly disembodied snatches of indistinct voices.

We need look (and listen) no further than Paul Fejos’s Lonesome for the characteristic music-and-effects masterpiece. (Available for decades only in a heavily-circulated but still underseen 35mm archival print, the latest restoration from George Eastman House was finally released on Blu-ray and DVD by the Criterion Collection last month.) A mutant entirely of its time, Lonesome samples and summarizes three decades of technological progress: straight black-and-white photography, hand-colored sequences, in-camera tricks and optical superimpositions, avant-garde cutting, pokey dialogue interludes, and more. Appropriately enough, the happy ending hinges upon a 78rpm phonograph record—a redemption by (and of) pop culture. (In this respect, and many others, Lonesome suggests an immediate and complementary comparison with its tenement cinema contemporary, The Crowd.)

Some modern-day fans of Lonesome lament its three dialogue sequences as rude interlopers in a ‘pure’ feat of visual cinema. I can only respond that I wouldn’t love this film half as much with these awkward scenes excised. They emanate from a very brief moment in cinema history when the need for dialogue was understood but the imperative to import professional writers from Broadway had not yet ascended to conventional wisdom. The dialogue in Lonesome is not in the least bit literary; indeed, it’s shockingly trivial and, in that sense, reveals depths of vulnerability unavailable to the most seasoned of playwrights. The lines may not represent the way real people talked to each other in 1928, but they do capture the mass-culture-mediated way people talk to themselves in any year. It’s just talk and doesn’t aspire to anything else. (Of course, these verbal exchanges were hardly incidental to the studio’s bottom line; Universal had to the chutzpah to tout Lonesome as its first all-talking feature on the basis of six minutes of dialogue.)

Alchemy
If early talkies are distinguished by their gimmicks and rough edges, they’re also marked by a drive for something more coherent and unified. We might call it genre.

Until 1932, American films are only groping towards pre-fab, assembly-line blueprints. Their tonal shifts and plot twists are wholly their own, with the seeds of genres-to-be freely cross-pollinated. The Great Gabbo is both a backstage musical and a despairing character study. Madam Satan is a comedy of infidelity and a dirigible spectacle for the ages. Is Blonde Venus a maternal melodrama, a swanky musical, or a bawdy fairy tale? Can it all be three at once? How can you even classify a film like Other Men’s Women or The Strange Love of Molly Louvain? They shift moment to moment, not only in their register but in their presumed audience.

By virtue of its peculiar alchemy, Just Imagine probably reigns as the ultimate early talkie. Its existence is a triumph of blind faith in the cumulative power of wholly unrelated mass culture obsessions and idioms. An other-worldly operetta that correctly predicts the promiscuously electronic entertainment landscape of the eighties, Just Imagine looks strangely prescient. (It would take five decades for Giorgio Moroder to retrofit Metropolis as MTV Ground Zero; Just Imagine was already there in 1930.) It’s a truism that period pieces often say just as much about their own time, but it’s especially true of Just Imagine, which seems consciously to strive for time capsule status. (In fulfilling that goal, Fox could cast no better leading man than El Brendel, whose every dumb Swede rejoinder carries an imminent expiration date.) It’s a designer folly that takes itself for a subject.

The soundtrack of Just Imagine is likewise representative. Its musical numbers are uneven, but consistently sincere. The recording quality is primitive, even for 1930—a fact compounded by the questionable lab work that mediates all modern prints of Just Imagine. In one scene, the soundtrack is abandoned entirely, with the track area on the left edge of the print occupied by the ‘noise’ of the picture. (When read by the sound head on a projector, this section produces a garble that would be the envy of any sound engineer in 1930.)

Inevitably, Just Imagine disappoints as a musical and as science fiction. (It’s too serious to be really pulpy, but its statist scenario sounds more like Tea Party paranoia circa 2012.) For a film like Just Imagine to be enjoyed and understood, it’s most productive to treat it, generically-speaking, simply as an early talkie, its concerns and methods shaped most decisively by the rudderless abandon of a new plaything.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening Just Imagine in a 35mm print on September 30 at Cinema Borealis. See our current calendar for more information. Special thanks to Brian Block at Criterion Pictures, USA and James Bond.

Posted in Blog | Tagged Program Notes | 4 Comments

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.

Posted in Blog | Tagged 16mm, Avant-Garde Cinema, Home Cinema, Interviews, Program Notes | Comments Off

The Demon in the Machine: Approaching Tony Scott

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

“Sometimes miniature electric train cars simply will not stay coupled. At some crucial tunnel, curve, or grade, the locomotive charges forward, leaving uncoupled cars behind and possibly derailed. It often seems that extra exertion at switches, curves, and grades has something to do with the uncoupling.

“Much, perhaps most, of the film footage that you project is coupled into “trains.” Like those miniature trains, films must stay coupled and on track through something like tunnels, curves, and grades, and switches. Therefore, couplings—let’s, of course, call them splices or joins—are crucial. Making good splices is one of your key responsibilities as a film handler. ”

– The Kodak Book of Film Care, 1st Edition, 1983

Films on Fire
Sometimes I’m afraid that the migration of film writing from the page to the blogosphere has made it more difficult for us to conceive of déclassé, orphan cinema. Can we access and understand the sense of complete aloneness that first-generation auteurists felt when championing Marnie or Red Line 7000 or 7 Women? Although Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes aggregate an instant consensus, the unruly infinity of film blogging assures that, somewhere, every film has an eager on-the-record advocate. No product is truly marginal and every ‘outrageous’ critical position has been spoken for. (See, for example, Zach Campbell’s apologia for Anna Faris.)

At least this was my governing assumption until I met a teenage art student when I returned to my high school a few years ago. My reputation undiminished as the school’s reigning cinephile, a teacher thought to introduce me to another such up-and-comer. Our exchange was pleasant enough. I tried to feel out his taste.

He proclaimed Tony Scott’s Man on Fire his favorite film ever.

The visceral disconnect I felt upon learning of this valuation is difficult to describe. He patiently described the technical virtuosity of the film, Scott’s attention to varied lens and film stocks, the fluidity of the montage, but I couldn’t keep up. I had never seen a Tony Scott film and was genuinely surprised to learn that Man on Fire had any popular following. It was common enough to hear young cinephiles rate Fight Club or The Matrix as a pinnacle of cinema, but this was entirely unexpected. I remembered the simple and literally flaming one-sheet for Man on Fire, but knew nothing of the film itself. Wasn’t this just another macho actioner with a standard-issue Denzel Washington performance?

One some level, it was electrifying to play the dowdy John Simon to this student’s upstart Andrew Sarris. I was twenty-two and already destined for the cinema compost bin, too old-fashioned to grok the underground’s new auteur. My progressive advocacy for Jia Zhangke and Wong Kar-wai immediately felt like calcified consensus. Was he crazy or was I?

I’m not prepared to answer that question, but he had a point about Tony Scott.

Stateless Art
After the pounding (and undeniably well-crafted) excesses of The Hunger, Tony Scott became a prototypical blockbuster director for producer Don Simpson. With Top Gun, he created official state art for a capitalist-democracy that thought itself above such things. Not only a recruitment film in itself, Top Gun provided an advertising template and aesthetic for all branches of the armed forces—a template, one might add, that survived the traumas of Afghanistan and Iraq stunningly intact.

Thus, for any socially-engaged film viewer, Scott’s name represented not only a certain strain of mindless entertainment gobbled up by the mass audience (from which we claimed to stand apart), but also a real political legacy with genuine culpability for extending and consecrating an ever-militarized, bipartisan international policy. Why should anyone get excited for the latest Tony Scott film?

I’ve never managed to sit through Top Gun, but the equally right-wing Man on Fire is a real piece of ugly work. In one scene, divinely-ordained counter-insurgency black ops expert Denzel Washington inflicts rectal torture upon a corrupt Mexican police official. Another half-dozen thugs are treated to humiliating and fatal ‘enhanced interrogations.’ (Cosmically, Man on Fire opened in theaters the week before revelations of appalling prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib gained media traction through 60 Minutes II and Seymour Hersh’s reporting in The New Yorker.) Like a morally unclouded variation on Dirty Harry, Man on Fire is a vigilante movie that casts retribution in world-historic terms.

It’s also a singular work of cinema.

Tony Scott’s movies are often held up as the poster children for our fallen art—the hyperkinetic, the MTV-derived, Ritalin-fueled infotainment with Average Shot Lengths (ASLs) so trigger-happy as to foreclose on any possibility of responsible adult storytelling. (One representative critical bromide aimed at Scott from The Onion’s evaluation of Déjà Vu: “Rarely have Bruckheimer and Scott been so upfront about insulting people’s intelligence.”) And yet Scott is also an unheralded practitioner of such long-out-of-favor screen grammar as the slow fade and the lap dissolve—an improbable link to the utopia of such works as Sunrise and Lonesome. Man on Fire also incorporates unexplained flash-forwards and highly abstracted bursts of ultra-saturated color.

Laying out Scott’s devices one-by-one makes Man on Fire sound like an overzealous film school exercise, one that crams together unmotivated technique to demonstrate a student’s multi-faceted skill. The effect of Man on Fire is quite different. There is one sequence in which Washington sits in a room and contemplates suicide. Dramatically and spatially, it’s a simple set-up, but the cutting fragments it in wholly unexplainable ways. From one shot to another, we’re outside of chronology and outside of space; at moments, we cannot quite say whether one scene has slipped into and displaced another, or whether any physical integrity has been maintained at all. The material world has become voluptuously fragile. If we come away from Man on Fire with the question, “Where am I?,” it is not out of a disgruntled desire for conventional continuity, but a proactive embrace of dislocation.

Parallel Tracks
Is it any coincidence that the first person I knew who recommended Unstoppable, Scott’s unintended swan song, was a projectionist and model train hobbyist? The fundamental analogy between railroad track and film strip has been reiterated often in recent years, not least in the reactions to James Benning’s extraordinary RR and Lynne Kirby’s book-length study Parallel Tracks. Partisans of rail and reel are, after all, often one and the same.

While not nearly as manic as Scott’s underrated satire Domino (a pre-fab, wannabe punk touchstone whose genuine marginality, especially among actual punks, almost accords it such a laurel), Unstoppable is still a mighty abstract action picture, one where color, speed, and mass are expressive tools and the thing being expressed. It’s one hell of a film for train-watchers, especially since Scott and cinematographer Ben Seresin photograph it in an ultra-saturated, ultra-grainy texturalist fashion. (Scott’s late films all originated on 35mm, with editing and color-correction performed through the now-standard Digital Intermediate process. Unlike many of their contemporaries, however, Scott’s films burnish their film aesthetic with an almost comical devotion. The pronounced grain is just another industrial accoutrement on a macho chassis.)

Some advocates of Unstoppable, like Ignatiy Vishnevetsky and Mark Peranson, have bolstered its working-class credentials—a course I find both appealing and somewhat frustrating. Politically-speaking, it’s a blinkered, contrafactual film, where the grizzled freight veteran has survived three decades without a contract and the next-generation college boy represents a union wave. Corporate profit motive is pitched as a foe of public safety, but Hooter’s is advanced as a symbol of upward mobility.

And yet, there’s a sense in which the plot mechanics of Unstoppable are uncommonly sophisticated. The suspense at the heart of the movie issues not from an omnipotent megalomaniac (like, say, Tom Hardy in The Dark Knight Rises or Dennis Hopper in Speed and a hundred other descendants of Dr. Mabuse) but from everyday workplace carelessness. Without a media-savvy villain to pump up the action, we’re left with an unthinking, irrational, and wholly mechanical source of terror. No less than Lars von Trier’s The Boss Of It All (with its randomly selected camera angles), Unstoppable is a product of this very machine, replete with unmotivated camera pans and infinite set-ups. (Scott, somewhat ingeniously, justifies his endless helicopter coverage by incorporating the camera crew into the diegesis, with Fox News always hovering nearby and providing instant replay. Talk about corporate synergy.) Stephanie Zacharek, a long-time Scott skeptic, was quite correct when judging Unstoppable “a thing of majesty and menace … one gleaming machine paying tribute to another.”

As tributes go, Scott couldn’t ask for one more concentrated and beautiful than Unstoppable.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening Unstoppable in a 35mm print at Cinema Borealis on Sunday, September 9 at 7:00 and 9:15pm. Please see our calendar for more information. Special thanks to Brian Block.