PARABLE and other neglected films on National Film Registry

The Library of Congress today announced the 25 films added to National Film Registry for 2012.
www.loc.gov/today/pr/2012/12-226.html

Many in archiving, preservation, and orphan film circles are particularly amped about this year's list. Librarian of Congress James Billington, offered up a quite diverse set of American films, the most eclectic group of 25 in his 24 years of being the sole arbiter of all 600 titles now on the Registry.

Among those with an orphan or non-Hollywood status (15 as I count them), there are riches. So too among the Hollywood 10 (if I may). Classics enshrined on the Registry cover a variety of genres and eras. "Just in time for Christmas," the LOC gives us the boomer touchstone A Christmas Story (1983), followed by the Delmer Daves-directed Western drama 3:10 to Yuma (1957), the iconic Siegel-Eastwood cop drama Dirty Harry (1971), a George Cukor comedy remembered as Judy Holliday's best, Born Yesterday (1950), a Blake Edwards comedy absolutely owned by Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961; map the novella and movie here!), the Penny Marshall-directed comedy best remembered for a man's line (Tom Hanks: "There's no crying in baseball!"), A League of Their Own (1992), a William Seiter-directed Hal Roach comedy starring Laurel & Hardy, Sons of the Desert (1933), and the franchise/zeitgeist movie about which nothing more need be said here because it's all around us all the time, The Matrix (1999).

Add to the Hollywood-distributed titles two features we might call "independent" in today's sense. Otto Preminger, truly a trouble-making independent supported by the studio system, made Anatomy of a Murder (1959), with a Duke Ellington score, Saul Bass titles (great poster!), and a cast of big name actors. The New Yorker published Lillian Ross's long and memorable profile of Preminger in 1966, when he was suing distributor Columbia Pictures and Screen Gems for -- get this -- cutting up his 160-minute movie so that commercials could be inserted during television broadcasts of Anatomy of a Murder! Much lower down the fiscal chain of command comes Monte Hellman's low-budget ($800,000) road movie cum cult picture, Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). Our leading men? James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson! -- who don't play music, sing, or score the film! Shot on stretches of Route 66, from California to Tennessee, it works on a time-capsule level as well. 
AND it's about to be released on BluRay by Criterion.  See also "Ten (sixteen, actually) Reasons I Love Two-Lane Blacktop," by Richard Linklater, another 2012 Registry honoree.


The 15 other films are a great gumbo.

Of the silent-era picks, the entry listed as The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Title [sic] Fight (1897) is by far the oldest. I don't know how the stray word Title got into the Library of Congress press release. But there it is. And so more than 2,000 websites have already repeated this little error. The Veriscope Company's moving-picture recording of the heavyweight prizefight between Jame J. Corbett and challenger Robert Fitzsimmons is not exactly an unknown film in histories in cinema -- where it is conventionally known as The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight everywhere from Wikipedia to the Internet Movie Database. Actually, there was no official title for the work, so far as I know. No copyright record exists (although the Veriscope Company claimed to have filed for copyright. And there was likely no on-screen title printed into the celluloid in 1897. Newspaper ads used varying descriptive titles.

Thanks: Daniel Dempsey.

In terms of preserving the Veriscope film, the BFI's National Film and Television Archive and the Museum of Modern Art have preserved copies on 35mm, but neither is anywhere close to complete. Fight film collectors Jim Jacobs and William Cayton's salvaged the knockout portion of the recording from a brittle print in their Big Fights, Inc. collection (sold to ESPN/ABC).

Other fragments of The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight exist elsewhere. Just this year I received a note from someone who found his father owned a six-frame clipping of an original print.

As you can see from this scan the collector sent, the image was of an unconventional dimension. The film stock was 63mm wide (rather than 35mm) and the wider aspect ratio about 1.66:1 (rather than 1.33:1). All told, Enoch Rector's ability to capture the entire event -- 14 three-minute rounds with one-minute breaks, plus action before and after the bout -- on his unique format was unprecedented. Three cameras were said to have exposed some 10,000 feet of film. The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight was the only film made using this technology. The investors made a fortune on the roadshow exhibition and left the show business.

There's more about this in my book Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (2008). Corbett-Fitz gets its own chapter.

Grant Lobban (www.in70mm.com)
offers this detail:    

In 1983 the National Film Archive undertook the task of copying the original 63mm footage onto 35mm film. Using some material available from their archives together with extra reels provided by Jim Jacobs.... [The NFA] rephotographed the positive print cartoon style using a light box and register pins. Each frame being advanced by hand. The final 35mm print was of the masked frame type with an aspect ratio of about l,66:1 with the normal space being provided for a future sound track. . . [T]he fight film had also been copied by Karl Malkames Inc. in New York. In this case the printing was done using a special variable-pitch printer movement designed by Karl Malkames A.S.C. The final copy negative had a larger image extending the full width between the perforations.

The other silent movies on the 2012 Registry are from 1914: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Maurice Tourneur's The Wishing Ring. This version of the Harriet Beecher Stowe story was no doubt selected to stand on the Registry for the many film adaptations of what was 19th-century America's most popular theatrical production. Sam Lucas, who plays Uncle Tom, was the first African American actor to perform the role on film, and had been the first on stage as well. This arguably also made him the first black actor to play the lead role in a feature film. I've not seen The Wishing Ring, but it's an idyll of old England filmed in Fort Lee, New Jersey, by a newly arrived (and talented) French director.

Both 1914 films came from the new producer-distributor World Film Corp., co-founded by William A. Brady. Brady also headed Shubert Pictures, which produced The Wishing Ring. I doubt the coincidence was noted before both were selected to the Registry. (Or is this a Brady conspiracy? For Mr. Brady was the showman who managed the ring/stage/screen career of Gentleman Jim Corbett, making him a principal in the production of The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight  too!) Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised to find William Aloysius Brady's fingerprints all over early cinema history. He was, after all, president of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry from 1916 to 1921. In other words, Brady was the immediate predecessor of Will Hays, tsar of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (1922-1945).


In the next posting, we'll take up the un-Hollywood additions to the National Film Registry:

• Kodachrome Color Motion Picture Tests (1922)
• The Middleton Family at the New York World’s Fair (1939) Prelingeriana
• The Kidnappers Foil  (1930s-1950s) an amazing legacy of itinerant productions
• Parable (1964) religious allegory made for the World's Fair
• They Call It Pro Football (1967) from NFL Films, whose founder died this year
• The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973, Ivan Dixon) wow!
• Hours for Jerome: Parts 1 and 2 (1980-82) by maestro Nathaniel Dorsky
• Samsara: Death and Rebirth in Cambodia (1990) Ellen Bruno's thesis documentary
• Slacker (1991) Richard Linklater's low-low-budget indie that sparked a scene
• One Survivor Remembers (1995) Oscar-winning documentary by Kary Antholis
• The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) finally. . .

For now we can end with a tease:

Earlier this year, Mark Quigley (UCLA) and videographer Farzad Nikbakht recorded an interview with Rolf Forsberg, the veteran filmmaker responsible for the controversial but acclaimed Parable.

Paul Strand, newsreel stringer

Postscript to the OFS blog's May 31 posting about the film Boxing Form (1924) and the 1923 Dempsey-Firpo fight pictures.

Walking Off the Big Apple (friend of the show) reported (off-line) that one of the cinematographers filming the Dempsey-Firpo fight at the Polo Grounds in New York was acclaimed photographer Paul Strand. (Source: the Aperture monograph Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs, 1976.)

In 1923, when the fight took place, Strand had already made his innovative experimental film Manhatta (1921, with Charles Sheeler). For more than a decade, Strand the still photographer /artist helped pay his bills by shooting newsfilm for several of the major newsreel services. (Manhatta, once the most rented film in the Museum of Modern Art's circulating collection, will presently be restored by MoMANY. Maybe then we'll have a better idea of its running time; I've read scholarly essays and reference books listing its duration variously as 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11 minutes. Don't believe everything you read in the newspaper.)

I've not been able to determine which company promoter Tex Rickard hired to film the Dempsey-Firpo fight. The movie that was released (mostly in violation of federal law) extended the 4-minute bout into nearly 10 minutes by showing preliminary training scenes and slow-motion replays. It also included a brief shot of the movie camera stand.

One of the YouTube versions of the 1923 fight, posted by elgrandecaudillo, contains this shot (as well as newly added Korean subtitles). Tough to spot Paul Strand among the 6 or 7 cameramen seen in this low-low resolution rendition of what was once a 35mm nitrate film. (That's assuming of course that this cutaway shot is from that event and not a stock footage insert -- as they so often are in these things.) There were also other cameras and operators placed closer to the ring during the bout.

I also recently learned that the animator Quirino Cristiani, who made the world's first feature-length animated films, in Argentina, also made an animated version of the famous fight in 1923, simply titled Firpo-Dempsey. Presumably lost, the movie would have been in the mode of an animated newsfilm, a hybrid form rarely discussed. A prior example of this was the lost Der Große Boxkampf Dempsey – Carpentier (Germany, 1921) done by animator Leopold Blonder and released commercially by Arnold Fanck’s Berg- und Sportfilm GmbH.

Come to think of it, the maker of the actual documentary -- The World's Heavyweight Championship Contest Between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier (1921) -- was Fred Quimby. And he went on to a long career as executive producer of MGM cartoons.



(The Academy gave 8 Oscars to a guy whose best work was the "Tom & Jerry" series??)

a Pathex 9.5 mm fight picture

Upon seeing a copy of Fight Pictures, several people have asked "What's that image on the cover?" Good question. Certainly it is the most obscure illustration of the 50+ I gave the publisher's design team. But they made the right call by putting frames from the Pathex 9.5mm film Boxing Form (1924) on the cover. Talk about an orphan . . .

First, the odd gauge Nine Five has survival and preservation issues that surpass many others. The films came in 20-meter (ca. 65') cartridges or "bobbins," rather than conventional reels. Titles and intertitles were printed on a single frame, which the Pathe Baby or Pathex projector would hold for viewers to read. Copying such prints without reprinting the flash frame several times leads to a film or video in which every intertitle is on screen just long enough to be detectable. Certainly not long enough to read.

Near the end of my research for Fight Pictures, I came across an account of a young flapper/journalist/ countess watching the 1927 Dempsey-Tunney fight on a Pathe home movie projector (just a couple weeks after the big fight). Before closing the book on boxing films as theatrical fare, surely I needed to account for the show-at-homes. Was this unusual to see a topical boxing match at home on film in the 1920s? My search lead me to Pathex, the brand name that the French manufacturer Pathe used for its marketing of 9.5mm film in the U.S.

Thanks to archivist Bill O'Farrell's tips and Jerry Wagner's great www.pathex.com, I found an early Pathex release in its 1925 catalog entitled Boxing Form. What was it? Listed as E-3 (the 'E' list being sport subjects), the blurb on the item was rather vague in describing the content.

Northeast Historic Film had an unpreserved copy. Kindly, Rob Nanovich made a scan from a strip of the film. Then a second high-resolution scan, for publication in the book.



(Charles Gilbert Collection, Northeast Historic Film).



The film turned out to feature Gene Tunney (not yet champion) and Jim Corbett (star of the 1894 Edison kinetoscope and the first filmed prizefight in 1897). But that's all I could discern from the scan. The book went to press a year ago.


PLAY VIDEO HERE.
Boxing Form (1924),
with the flash-frame intertitles "stretch printed" using iMovie.


Now, however, NHF has gotten the movielet transferred to video. Seeing the choppy series of short scenes -- Corbett and Tunney spar, re-create famous punches in boxing history, sometimes in slow-motion; Jack Dempsey trains with lightweights; Tunney trains -- it's clear that this 3-minute novelty was a cut-down of a longer film. The opening credits tell us that it was a Grantland Rice 'Sportlight' film called On Guard. I've discovered nothing about this longer short film, but popular sports writer Rice's syndicated Sportlight newspaper column led to a deal with Pathe Exchange, Inc. to 'brand' a series of sports films. These were widely distributed theatrically in the 20s. And their reduction prints on 9.5mm made it to Pathex catalogs fairly rapidly after the 35mm first release.

Pathe's attempt to market 9.5mm film in the U.S. lasted about a decade after being introduced for Christmas 1922. Few American households adopted it, particularly after Kodak launched its 8mm format in 1932. At most, a few hundred copies of Boxing Form went out to homes with Pathex projectors.

Among those viewers and collectors who still care about boxing, films of celebrated prizefighters are highly sought after. There's not a big wow factor in this little movie, but seeing Messrs. Dempsey, Tunney and Corbett in these obscure settings will pique the fight film fans' interest. I find the super-slo-mo footage matching the 19th-century champion Corbett with the up-and-coming Tunney odd. By choosing to film the men sparring on a New York rooftop in the open air, the 1924 filmmaker (credited as John L. Hawkinson, about whom I've found nothing but a couple of society notices from the 1930s) was replicating the way such things were done in 1895.


Be sure to check out this odd slow-motion sequence referencing the wild Jack Dempsey - Luis Firpo title fight of 1923.











Presumably, Corbett had this moment in mind.









from Chicago Tribune, Sept. 15.




Not quite like the famous George Bellows painting, depicting a later moment in the fight.











Dempsey and Firpo (1924).

In turn, the Bellows image had an interesting afterlife, as described by the Web exhibition American Treasures of the Library of Congress:

On September 14, 1923, boxers Jack Dempsey and Luis Firpo fought at the Polo Grounds in New York. American artist George Bellows captures the moment Firpo sent his opponent over the ropes and into the press box below. The image quickly became an American classic. During Word War II, the U.S. Armed Forces commissioned a photographic facsimile of the print for distribution to soldiers in camps and hospitals.

Bellows has included his self-portrait in the lower left corner of the print.

[The use of the Bellows print as U.S. morale-boosting is interesting, perhaps ironic, because it is the American Dempsey who is getting knocked out of the ring and the Argentinian -- which is not to say protofascist -- Firpo who is displaying might. Or perhaps Uncle Sam was thinking a new generation of American troops would associate Jack Dempsey with the (unfair) tag of slacker/draft-dodger he got right after WWI.]

This news photo seems to indicate that Bellows' perspective, framed 90 degrees away, was a fairly accurate representation.

Fight Pictures

a fight picture of 1907

"The Orphan Film Movement has expanded and transformed the way we approach film and media studies. It has reaffirmed the radically democratic and egalitarian side of our field, generating new energy and a revitalized philosophy at a moment when film studies was becoming more integrated into academia and in danger of falling prey to elitist tendencies. If this book had a gestation period of fourteen years, it was because its author was on a mission of the utmost urgency. Fight Pictures has certainly become a richer, more thorough book over these intervening years. Bearing the insights of the orphan film movement as much as the older 'early cinema' paradigm, Fight Pictures is the result of some twenty years of intellectual ferment."
-- Charles Musser, from the foreword to the book Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (Univ. of California Press, 2008)