Dateline: Bay Area, Calif.
Nancy Goldman gave Mike Mashon and me a friendly tour of Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley. (More photos forthcoming.)
Meanwhile, off to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Day 2. Last night's opening was magnificent, with Pat Doyen's restoration of Broncho Billy's Adventure (1911) and Leonard Maltin and Suzanne Lloyd introducing Harold Lloyd's masterpiece The Kid Brother (1927). My first time seeing these. Lloyd's stock up just went up again. Amazing, crowd-pleasing comedy. All at the fabulous Castro Theatre. With a packed mezzanine of post-picture partiers and a kazoo band.
This morning: "Amazing Tales from the [George Eastman House] Archives," underwritten by the good folk of Haghefilm (friend of the show).
Jul 12, 2008
SFSFF, NFPF & PFA
Jul 9, 2008
UCLA Extension course titled "Orphan Films"
A UCLA Extension course titled "Orphan Films" will be held at the Directors Guild Theater, 7950 Sunset Blvd., on eight consecutive Wednesdays. Members of the L.A. Film Critics Assn. will host the class. The "orphan films," dropped by studios and distributors for various reasons, will be discussed.*
Wow! This sounds great. A whole course, at UCLA no less, on orphan films. Surely these are the salad days for motion picture orphans.
Except . . . (here's the punchline): the above announcement is from 1979!
Reading closer, the details are a little less resonant with the 21st-century conception of what an orphan film is. The term has long been an industry epithet for commercial movies that get made but not distributed. In fact, the item in the L.A. Times went on to say that orphans were "films which never found their audience." A much less dramatic conception of orphanhood than "never before seen" or "abandoned by its owner."
Reading closer still, the works that UCLA and the L.A. Film Critics actually screened are 1970s auteur films that did (eventually) get distributed and now border on the classic or cult.
The 8 narrative feature films in the 8-week extension course were:
Loving (1970, Columbia Pictures), USC film school grad Irvin Kershner's comic drama starring George Segal and Eva Marie Saint. One of cinematographer Gordon Willis's first films. Robert Ebert, in October 1970, wrote that Loving "was released last March in New York, received a reasonably warm critical reception and then disappeared all summer into some kind of distributorial limbo, turning up finally this week in neighborhood theaters. Somehow it deserved more attention than that."
Payday (1973) directed by Daryl Duke, a veteran TV director, 
and starring the great Rip Torn as a cynical country singer. Shot in Selma, Alabama. Distributed by Cinerama Releasing Corp.; put out by Warner Home Video in 1999; DVD, 2008.
The Silent Partner (1979, Carolco), also directed by Daryl Duke; screenplay by Curtis Hanson. Elliot Gould and Christopher Plummer star in this suspense/heist picture. Lions Gate DVD, 2007.
Night Moves (1975, Warner Bros.) Arthur Penn directed Gene Hackman in this detective thriller. Early in their TV show run Siskel & Ebert championed it as a neglected gem.
Citizens Band (1977, Paramount) aka Handle with Care, Jonathan Demme's cult satire starring Paul LeMat.
The White Dawn (1974, Paramount) Philip Kaufman directed Timothy Bottoms, Louis Gossett Jr., and Warren Oates in this drama about shipwrecked whalers rescued by Inuits.
Smile (1975, United Artists) a Michael Ritchie comedy.
Thieves Like Us (1974, United Artists) Vintage Robert Altman. MGM Home Entertainment DVD, 2007
--------------------------
* "'Orphan Films' Course to Screen Eight Neglected Works at Guild," Los Angeles Times, Nov. 23, 1979; "Belson, Tewkesbury, Bick, Duke to Discuss Their 'Orphan Films,'" Los Angeles Times, Jan. 16, 1980.
Jul 7, 2008
Fight Pics and Orphans at the SF Silent Film Festival
our orphan hero, Ed,
in The Soul of Youth (1920)
aka The Boy.
Thanks to the good people (Stacey Wisnia) at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival there will be a Fight Pictures book-signing on Saturday, July 12th, at the Castro Theatre. The SFSFF is hosting several authors with books on silent cinema, including Leonard Maltin, Guy Maddin, and Suzanne Lloyd (granddaughter of Harold). Fight Pictures is paired with Richard J. Meyer’s book about China's biggest silent screen star, Ruan Ling-Yu: The Goddess of Shanghai.
This event is, I’m told, the first interaction between the Silent Film Festival and the notable Press across the Bay. With its great list of silent film books, UCP would be an apt annual fit for the SFSFF. This 13th festival runs July 11-13 at the Castro Theatre, with a well programmed lineup of features and shorts – and live musical accompaniment.
The truism “silent films were never silent” is of course correct – except for the peculiar genre of fight pictures. These virtually never had musical accompaniment. Instead of music, fight pictures had screen-side announcers telling spectators what to watch for – the knockout “solar-plexus punch” in Veriscope’s Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897), the questionable performance of the old master Joe Gans (“was he taking a dive, ladies and gentlemen?”) as filmed by Selig Polyscope in the McGovern-Gans Fight Pictures (1900), or the Australian constabulary stopping the Gaumont cameras as Jack Johnson’s finished off Tommy Burns in 1908.
San Francisco plays a large role in Fight Pictures. The city was home to William A. Brady, the film and theater impresario who also managed two heavyweight title holders, Gentleman Jim Corbett (of S.F.) and Jim Jeffries. When New York booted out prizefighting in 1900, boxing flourished in the Bay Area for a decade.
Also central to the story of Fight Pictures are the Miles brothers, whose film distribution firm was large enough to challenge the largest motion picture companies of the early 1900s. That was until the 1906 earthquake and fires devastated their vaults, theater, and headquarters. Nevertheless, between 1901 (when Edison cameras filmed Jeffreys [sic] and Ruhlin Sparring Contest at San Francisco, Cal.) and 1908 (when Selig recorded the third title bout between Battling Nelson and Joe Gans, in Youknowwhere, Cal.) the Miles brothers were the only camera crew to shoot any prizefight in the United States. The genre was their own -- until the United States outlawed the interstate trafficking in fight films in 1912.
Fight Pictures
book-signing begins
after the 11:40 am screening of
The Soul of Youth (1920, William Desmond Taylor) A humanistic portrait of society's unloved orphans and unlawful urchins, combined with the story of a power struggle between a reformer and a corrupt politician. (80 mins.) Preceded by an animated comedy, The Old Family Toothbrush (1925), which, unlikely as it may seem, is a boxing film!
SOME SHORT FIGHT PICTURES VIEWABLE ONLINE:
The first fight picture: a staged sparring match.
Leonard-Cushing Fight (Edison, June 1894)
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/edmp.4026
The biggest event of Edison’s kinetoscope era. Heavyweight champion and matinee idol Jim Corbett is paid to spar before the camera.
Corbett and Courtney before the Kinetograph
(Edison, Sept. 1894)
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/edmp.4022
A Miles Bros. film, showing a spectacular first-round knockout.
International Contest for the Heavyweight Championship--Squires vs. Burns, Ocean View, Cal., July 4th, 1907
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/awal.2979
The dramatic conclusion of
World Championship, Jack Johnson vs. Stanley Ketchell [i.e., Ketchel] (1909)
Filmed by the Kalem Co. for promoter Jim Coffroth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78msYCUaQuE&feature=related
Correspondence welcome: Dan.Streible@NYU.edu
More about Fight Pictures at
the Orphan Film Symposium blog
http://orphanfilmsymposium.blogspot.com/2008/04/fight-pictures.html
Luke McKernan’s blog The Bioscope
http://bioscopic.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/seconds-out/
Leonard Maltin’s Movie Crazy, summer book recommendations
http://www.leonardmaltin.com/booksurvey.htm
Jul 6, 2008
George R. Willeman Presents . . .
George Willeman (r) explains it to Rob Silberman at Orphans 5 (University of South Carolina, 2006).
George Willeman loves being the Nitrate Vault Leader (great job title, eh) at the Library of Congress, Division of Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound (Moving Image Section), National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Packard Campus, Culpeper, Virginia, USA. He has been called "the antithesis of a stereotypical government worker" and proves it by co-hosting a radio show, Filmically Perfect, with the Coen brothers' storyboard artist.
But in his job at the LOC MBRS NAVCC, Geo. W does the people's business: saving films, often in the nick of time. In 2006, the NYU Tamiment Library found the missing reel of the legendary Passaic Textile Strike (1926) in its newly-acquired archive of the Communist Party USA. It was George who was entrusted to salvage the gooey nitrate. Earlier this year, he showed some still highlights at Orphans 6.
This week Mr. Willeman reports finding one of Melton Barker's "Kidnappers Foil" movies from the 1930s. If you haven't seen one of these babies, they are recommended Orphans viewing. Itinerant filmmaker travels America for twenty years shooting short scripted movies "starring" local, amateur casts -- mostly kids. Hundreds of filmed variations of the same script. The definitive source for background on all this is, of course, MeltonBarker.com. If that's not enough detail for you, contact the Barker fan/scholar/obsessive Caroline Frick at the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI). Or archivist Dwight Swanson of the Center for Home Movies.
The lone Kidnappers Foil print was part of a recent LOC acquisition. As George report (on Orphans' Facebook)
We acquired a very large collection of nitrate from a collector in Tennessee and this was in a can marked "nitrate clip!" This has been one of the most amazing collections of recent years--many pre WWI reels and many unique films--lotsa Orphans, too!There may be a million orphans in the naked city, and apparently a million more in Tennesse (ask the founders of the Tennesse Archive of Moving Image and Sound, aka TAMIS).
----------------
Next time: TAMI vs. TAMIS -- heavyweight title fight, live, from the Bud Walton Arena in Fayetteville, Arkansas!
Jul 4, 2008
The Metropolis of Buenos Aires
"Perhaps the most famous and influential of all silent films, Metropolis had for 75 years been seen only in shortened or truncated versions. Now [2002], restored in Germany with state-of-the-art digital technology, under the supervision of the Murnau Foundation, and with the original 1927 orchestral score by Gottfried Huppertz added, Metropolis can be appreciated in its full glory."
-- Kino Video synopsis, DVD of the restored authorized edition
frame grab from the rediscovered footage
© Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung; Bildbearbeitung: Dennis Neuschäfer-Rube
Film-finder PAULA at Orphans 5 in Columbia, SC, with Kara Van Malssen (l) and Bill Brand (r). -->
Time to re-write history again.
Or at least to re-restore one of cinema's milestone productions.
Paula Félix-Didier, director of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires (and a MIAP graduate, PhD candidate, and presenter at the previous two Orphan Film Symposiums), has found the most complete cut to date of Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis [!!!].
The news story, first reported in the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit, is all over the Web now. [I heard about it simultaneously from MIAP alumus Jeff Martin (Hirschhorn Museum) and U of SC Film Studies alumni James Smith (The Nickelodeon Theatre) and Woody Jones (USC); all Orphans vets, needless to say.]
The 25-page spread in Die Zeit's magazine is only partly available online, as "Die Neuentdeckung von 'Metropolis.' " Here's the short, English version: "Key scenes rediscovered," © ZEITmagazin 2.7.2008
153 min
147 min (2001 restored version)
210 min (premiere cut)
80 min (Giorgio Moroder version)
93 min (re-release version) | USA
114 min (25 fps) (1927 cut version) | USA
123 min (2002 Murnau Foundation 75th aniversary restored version)
118 min (DVD edition) | USA:117 min
So surprising was this re-discovery, some professional moving image archivists thought the news headline might have been a hoax. But this report from Martin Koerber, who did the "definitive" Metropolis restoration, attests to its veracity and to the significance of the print found in Buenos Aires.
from the Association of Moving Image Archivists listserv
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2008
From: Martin Koerber <makoerber@WEB.DE>
Subject: Re: Is this news about METROPOLIS real or a hoax?
Dear all,
Paula Félix-Didier of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires indeed came to Berlin last week to show us what she found, and it is the real thing, no hoax this time. The material is terribly banged up, being a 16 mm dupe negative made from a no longer extant nitrate print, which was duplicated some decades ago after many years of heavy use.
Nevertheless one can now see the director's cut of Metropolis, 80 years after we all believed the original version was destroyed. Contrary to our thinking, obviously at least one print of the original cut made it into distribution, albeit in Argentina.
Only one of the missing scenes (the monk in the cathedral) remains missing, because it happened to be at a reel end that got badly torn.
The rest is there.
The images you will find at http://www.zeit.de/online/2008
Flip through it before you buy it, the articles about Metropolis are in the somewhat glossy "Zeit Magazin Leben" which comes with the paper. It will surely become a collector's item.
Kudos to Paula Félix-Didier and her initiative to unearth the material and share the information. A lot of thinking is now necessary to find ways to incorporate this material into the existing restoration, released on DVD by Transit Film and Kino International, among others. It has titles and black leader where the missing parts once were so in principle one could just insert whatever is new at those inserts. The good news is that Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau
When run in synch with the material found in Buenos Aires, it is amazing to see how everything falls into place now. The critical edition can be found here: http://www.filminstitut.udk
Martin Koerber
Leiter der Abteilung Film - Curator Film Deutsche Kinemathek -
Museum fFCr Film und Fernsehen www.deutsche-kinemathek
Incidentally, Metropolis was only one of several unique prints found in the collection that came into the Museo del Cine. Paula writes that she also found and identified a presumed-lost W. S. Hart movie, a presumed-lost Pearl White serial episode, and three missing Argentine movies -- among other things.
My great hope is that the film word, FIAF members, national heritage bodies, and others will not take this extraordinary find for granted. The Museo de Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken (its full and proper name) in Buenos Aires is the de facto national film archive, and deserves to have its funding and resources elevated. As the finds of this week demonstrate, it's not just one national cinema or patrimony that benefits from the support of institutions such as el Museo.
Jun 30, 2008
De V De
* Steve Franco at VideoPost Dallas supervised a new HD transfer from the original 35mm dupe neg (Mary Lampson recently told me it was the best element to use.)
* DuArt is remastering the sound.
* Arthouse will release Painters Painting on DVD in the fall.
* All of de's films are transfered from the best source available to High Def masters.
* The current DVD releases are standard def., but when Blu-ray costs come down, de's films will be released on Blu-ray.
* In the King of Prussia is next in line to be transfered to HD.
* Re: Painters out-takes. On the CD-ROM, I published transcripts of complete interviews and they are indeed incredible. Love to do a deluxe edition with out-takes. If you know any patrons of the arts - send 'em my way!
Painters Fading...
Painters Fading
I met a lot of nice colors.
-- Robert Rauschenberg,
on studying with Josef Albers
Color fading is one of the most heartbreaking signs of the impermanence of the motion picture medium. Few things are sadder than a once-glorious color film turned monochromatic pink or red.
-- Stephen Prince, Film Quarterly (Spring 1999), book review of James M. Reilly's Storage Guide for Color Photographic Materials
Yesterday, at the Harvard Film Archive, I saw a screening of the documentary Painters Painting (1972), part of HFA's Emile de Antonio's America series. The 16mm print came from the Museum of Modern Art’s circulating collection. Apparently MoMA’s 35mm print is not circulating, because of its faded colors. If the 16mm copy is any indication, the 35 must be quite faded indeed. And color fading is a wee bit important for a film showing off hundreds of painted canvases. The interviews, roughly half of Painters Painting, were shot and released in black-and-white. While color fading might not seem like a problem for b&w, in fact this monochromatic footage was a faded-rose-and-white. (HFA dutifully advised moviegoers of the problem. But they all chose to stay and they all stayed to the end.)
Of course restoration of this film is not MoMA’s responsibility. It only purchased copies for the museum’s collection. The originals/masters are elsewhere. No doubt at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, where “de” left his things – lots of things. The collection description says they have “Negatives, outs and trims” for Painters and other films. Perhaps there are also prints at the George Eastman House, where de left copies of his films (in case of nuclear attack on Madison, Wisconsin – no lie). Or perhaps the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where the film was shot, had the foresight to buy a print and to keep it in cold storage. Or maybe New Yorker Films has material from its role as the original distributor of 16/35 prints in the 1970s. There might even be a print of Painters Painting at the National Archives, since the U.S. Information Agency circulated the film overseas for several years. (A delicious contradiction: a U.S. government agency distributing the Marxist filmmaker’s work worldwide as a celebration of American exceptionalism, while the executive branch was surveilling and harassing him because of his political activities.)
A Painters Painting DVD is due out in September 2008. Its producers no doubt know where all the prints and elements are and which are in best condition. If ever a film cried out for high-quality color reproduction, this is it. It was only ten years ago that Mystic Fire Video issued a VHS version, sold as Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene, 1940-1970. And in 1996, de Antonio protégé Ron
Mann released his Voyager CD-ROM version of Painters Painting. Sadly -- but not surprisingly – the once-beautiful disk won’t play on my computer anymore. It was designed at the time of Mac OS 7 (first introduced in 1991). Ditto for those marvelous Our Secret Century CD-ROMs that Rick Prelinger produced with Voyager in the 1990s.
Ron Mann is also responsible for the 4-DVD boxed set Emile De Antonio: Films of the Radical Saint (HomeVision-Image Entertainment; street date, July 8, 2008). 
The saint subtitle is unsuitably hagiographic for the devilish de, but it's good to see In the Year of the Pig (1968), Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971), Underground (1976), and Mr. Hoover & I (1989) being released. The VHS versions that MPI Home Video released in the 1990s were underwhelming. MPI retitled the works, and, in some, intercut late ‘80s video footage of de Antonio talking about the film you are watching.
And what of Rush to Judgment, the Warren Report rebuttal that de Antonio made with attorney/author Mark Lane in 1966? Last year I saw (fifth hand) an e-mail from Mark Lane asking where he could get a “master print” of Rush and its outtakes [er, rushes] so as to digitize and put it (sell it?) on the web. He authored the RTJ best-selling book (actually ghost-written by Ben Sonnenberg Jr.), but one wonders what rights Lane holds on the film, which is copyrighted in the name of Judgment Films Corp. In any case, no plans for a DVD release. Ditto for In the King of Prussia (1982), the no-nukes activist video made with the Berrigan brothers and the rest of the Plowshares 8, plus Martin Sheen.
Now that de Antonio’s Point of Order (1963) and In the Year of the Pig have been restored by Ross Lipman and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, perhaps Painters Painting can be next in line. If these other prints and negs have fading problems too, maybe Wisconsin can work with the Warhol Foundation, UCLA, and others to restore the film.
Or will films be consigned to high-definition video versions by then? Come to think of it, these new DVD releases are not HD.
Watching aged and well-worn 16mm prints can have its pleasures, once one accepts the fact that it’s not gonna look/sound like what it might have been. For the Painters Painting print, the wear worked well visually, in an almost perverse way. Those vertical scratch lines that run down the images of so many 16mm prints were in abundance. However, since the first reel was devoted to painter Barnett Newman talking about his striped canvases (“it’s not a stripe, it’s a zip”; “it’s not a stripe, it’s a streak of light”), it was almost like someone had given Barney the print and asked him to do his thing to it. Kinda like Robert Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning drawing. Also, near the heads and tails of reels, some conspicuous spotting was visible. Blue polka dots. Kinda like Larry Poons (who’s also in the film) was given the print after Newman and asked to do his thing to it too. I once saw this “effect” on a classroom print of Night and Fog (1955), and it added something positive to the aesthetic of the film, which opens with decaying prison camps, failing memories, fog.
Ironically, the least faded shot in Painters Painting was in the end-credit sequence, in which we see cinematographer Ed Emshwiller filming the crowds at the Met’s New York Painting and Sculpture, 1940-1970 exhibition.
Dreaming of a glorious restoration.
And let’s see the outtakes while we’re at it. I can’t imagine that there is not an audience eager to see unedited sequences of Andy Warhol talking in his contrarian fashion about his work (“Brigid does all my paintings”). Or the excellent interview with Louise Nevelson that was completely cut from the film. Or the sight and sound of curator Henry Geldzahler talking in that cavernous echo-chamber that is the Met.
Ron Mann at Sphinx Productions in Toronto handles licensing rights to most of the Emile de Antonio films. Video copies can be purchased there too.
p.s.
Emile de Antonio and Mitch Tuchman's book Painters Painting: A Candid History of the Modern Art Scene, 1940-1970 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984) can be found, used, at prices ranging from $8 to $75.
Henry Geldzahler's exhibition catalog, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970 (E. P. Dutton, 1969) is available second-hand, priced between $4 and $85.
www.abe.com