This is why we do what we do (save orphan films)

Over at the Center for Home Movies, Dwight Swanson is reporting that the Hartford Courant is reporting that after Robbins Barstow's amateur film Disneyland Dream (1956) was named to the National Film Registry, Dr. B got an e-mail from someone who is as certain as one can be that he can be glimpsed on-camera in the film.

At age eleven I worked at Disneyland. I sold guidebooks at the park from 1956 to about 1958. I am as positive as one can be that I appear about 20:20 into your film, low in the frame, dressed in a top hat, vest, and striped pink shirt, moving from left to right, holding a guidebook out for sale.

So writes Steve Martin 

(the actor/comedian/banjoplayer/writer/art collector/wild-and-crazy-guy; not the guy who made the 1994 documentary Theramin: An Electronic Odyssey).

I like the cinematic specificity with which Mr. Martin describes the film. He cares.

Here's a low-fi blow-up of a frame from Disneyland Dream.
You be the judge.




P.S. Did you know . . .that the University of Texas at Austin's Humanities Research Center is the repository for the Steve Martin Collection? He's from Waco, TX, you see. Nice to think of Steve Martin's ephemera right there alongside those of David O. Selznick, Gloria Swanson, James Joyce . . . not to mention the world's oldest photograph (by Niépce).

Film posters for lost films

Apropos yesterday's posting about the National Film Registry, here's some recent "news" about a title -- Jeffries-Johnson World’s Championship Boxing Contest -- added to the Registry in 2005.

* * *

An NYU Cinema Studies grad student, June Tan, took some snapshots of items now on exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. "Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture" includes this extraordinary movie poster.

This color lithographic poster is one meter tall. It was made by the Adolph Friedlander Lithography Company, a Hamburg printer that the National Portrait Gallery says was "known for its circus advertising."

Although the research in Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (U of Cal Press, 2008) was fairly exhaustive from the U.S. end of things, an artifact like this opens up new questions about this most notorious of fight films. What was the "Union" A.G. in Frankfurt? As for Monopol, early leader in feature-length film distribution, was this fight picture not against the grain of the company's otherwise artistically ambitious, European preferences for "features"? How widely was the film seen across Europe? with what reception?

There is no definitive version of this film record of the heavyweight championship in which champion Jack Johnson knocked out the "white hope" Jim Jeffries. The German poster refers to the film as Championship-Match Johnson-Jeffries. The production received U.S. copyright under the title Jeffries-Johnson World's Championship Boxing Contest, Held at Reno, Nevada, July 4, 1910 (© December 7, 1910). The "J. & J. Co." held the rights. This entity was set up to take in the profits, which were split among the boxers, managers, and picture people.

When state and municipal censorship prevented many screenings of the Johnson-Jeffries Fight (as it was more commonly known), the usual means of distribution via the Motion Picture Patents Company's General Film Co. did not suffice. Because of its contraband status and the enormous audience demand for the film worldwide, the footage of the much hyped match was copied, cut, recut, imitated, duped, and retitled in many forms.

Lewis Hine photo, New York nickelodeon, Aug. 1910

The German exhibition of the film no doubt meant that some new intertitles were added to Monopol prints, a practice that would have been repeated in each marketplace where English would not suffice. There are records of the Johnson-Jeffries Fight being shown in India, South Africa, Japan, Argentina, Cuba, China, and elsewhere.

Alternate cuts of the film were also made according to varying local standards about race. On other occasions, abbreviated editions of the movie were made. The fight, after all, went on for 15 rounds (about an hour of screen time, not counting the preliminary footage).

When the fight picture was commercially re-released in 1922 (by parties unknown), ads noted:

By a new process of enlargement, the first time used in motion picture photography, the action is brought up far closer than ever before in any fight film. Enables you to see every move made and every blow struck for the entire 15 full rounds.

ad in the Chicago Defender, January 21, 1922.

In fact, the dozen or so Vitagraph cinematographers who cranked out the footage in 1910 framed the ring at a great distance. Certainly the movie spectator's view of the boxing was less than ideal. So apparently some enterprising person or group had the entire film optically printed with tighter framing on the action. Quite a length to go to for a twelve-year-old topical film, demonstrating the high degree of interest there was in Johnson's fight against Jeffries.

And we must not forget that before the authentic recording was released, competing films were rushed to market: Impersonation of the Johnson-Jeffries Fight (Toledo Film Exchange), Jeffries-Johnson Fight (another reenactment, Empire Film Co.), and the "no fake" fake Johnson-Jeffries (Sports Picture Co., below) among them.

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Documentation of the 6th Orphan Film Symposium will be online at the end of 2008. The Orphans 7 banners will start to unfurl in early 2009.

A reminder that the 2010 symposium will be:

• April 7th through April 10th
• Wednesday night through Saturday night
• at the Library of Congress NAVCC
• in Culpeper [single p, sounds like pepper], Virginia
• organized by New York University
• Tisch School of the Arts
• Department of Cinema Studies
• Moving Image Archiving & Preservation program

&

• will focus its wide-angle lens on transnational and global issues and how these relate to all manner of neglected moving images.

Proposals for presentations are now being accepted.


The orphanista ways will be maintained:

• a full and constant lineup of screenings, talks, and performances;
• a convivial atmosphere sustained with food, drink, music, and refectory-style learning;
• cool T-shirts and other swag;
• camaraderie spun from the admixture of scholars, archivists, filmmakers and media artists, technologists, curators, preservationists, conservators, educators, students, entrepreneurs, vanguardist digitizers, collectors and cataloguers, librarians, museologists, filmographers, researchers, producers, distributors, documentarians, programmers, critics, fans, writers, visionaries and luddites, autodidacts, savants, professionals and amateurs, and media archaeologists -- all of whom share a passion for saving, screening, and studying orphan films.

post script to the Flaherty award ceremony

BlogHer Pamela Cohn (Still In Motion) reports on the Flaherty-Leo-Hammer-Filmakers-Samu-Helen Hill event at the Thalia Theater in New York.

After the ceremony, Barbara Hammer introduced me to filmmaker-media-artist-curator-professor Caroline Koebel. Caroline said she had first met Helen Hill during the early 1990s, when Helen first came to New Orleans -- and that she was the best person she ever met.

The Flaherty gives animation award to Helen Hill

The force-for-good now simply called "The Flaherty" (the nonprofit organization that puts on the annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar), bestows two honors each year, the Leo Award and the Samu Award. The former, named for Leo Dratfield (the influential nontheatrical film distributor who ran Contemporary Films), is given for long-time achievement in independent film and video. The latter is given to an animator whose work conveys “a universal message illuminating our sense of world community.” It’s hard to think of an artist more deserving of this award than Helen Hill.

Charles Samu helped bring attention to independent animators in many places, especially via the World Festival of Animated Film in Zagreb. Although Helen’s filmmaking thrived in many ways, no international spotlight shone on her or her work until her passing. Leo Dratfield and Charles Samu are also obscure figures in the public sphere because they both put their energies into the invisible sector of filmdom – distribution. No work gets to an audience but by distribution. And so it remains quite wondrous and inspiring that the work of Helen Hill has now come to us despite the fact that she never distributed her films, at least not in any conventional sense. She did show at festivals, but more often took prints and projectors to alternative sites of exhibition, including her own home.

Moreover, Helen’s films embody the Samu Award’s aspiration to an art of universality and to work that generates a sense of community. Her films are animated by love of all kinds – romantic, spiritual, filial, maternal, familial. She lived the life of a utopian anarchist, a citizen of the world, residing in the creolized port of New Orleans, the bohemian town of Halifax, the worldly world of Los Angeles, the creative community of Boston, while remaining a creature of Carolina. All of these inflect her enchanted cinematic world, a House of Sweet Magic, but one that also knows about the darknesses of life, and death.

On Monday, November 24, at 7:30 pm, the Flaherty will celebrate its awardees at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater (at Peter Norton Symphony Space in New York). Helen Hill’s masterpiece, Mouseholes (1998),


Miššje luknje (Slovenija festival)


will screen as part of the Samu Award presentation. Two Leo Awards follow. Fellow orphanista Barbara Hammer is being recognized for excellence in filmmaking throughout her career; Filmakers Library gets the second Leo for its forty years of work in the “invisible sector” of indy film and video distribution.

The force-for-good called simply "The Flaherty" (the nonprofit organization that puts on the annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar), gives two


http://www.flahertyseminar.org/rffs_leo_2008.asp

For Excellence in Exhibition, Distribution or Programming: Filmakers Library.

For Excellence in Filmmaking: Barbara Hammer.

We will also be presenting the Samu Award to the late animator Helen Hill, whose films convey a universal message illuminating our growing sense of world community.

The 2008 LEO AWARDS will be presented on Monday, November 24, 7:30 pm at the Peter Norton Symphony Space in New York City. The celebration will include presentation of the awards, as well as, clips from the Filmakers Library collection, a short film by Helen Hill, and Barbara Hammers' films, Sanctos and Vital Signs.

Home Movie Boxing Day

Well, the day after the big holiday is called Boxing Day, eh.

At yesterday's Anthology Film Archives screening of home movies, one Super 8 film made an emotional impact that even surpassed the story of boxer Jose Torres' wedding film turning up in 2006. This year, a married couple and their adult daughter brought a single reel of Super 8, which they told us the daughter found in her grandmother's house in Spain. They had been unable to view the footage, so they brought it for us to watch with them.

They told us that the box holding the film indicated that it might be something from grandfather's poultry business back in Spain. Instead, what it turned out to be was a film that none of them had seen -- or even knew existed. Which shock, joy, and tears they realized that what we were watching was film of their own wedding.

The bride and groom had come to the U.S. to study. One day before he entered Duke University law school, the groom was joined by the bride and their immediate family members, who traveled from Spain for the wedding. Seventeen people gathered in a Catholic church in Durham, North Carolina in 1967. After the watching the whole film the family concluded it must have been the brother-in-law who shot it. No one knew what had happened to it all these years.

As often happens at these home movie affairs, moments of serendipity followed. We learned that the couple had celebrated their 41st wedding anniversity that very week. And that she had become a United States citizen 24 hours before HMD. A good week.

The New York Home Movie Day began this year with a film shot in Nigeria. A man, originally from Gary, Indiana, brought a reel of 16mm film his father took when visiting Nigeria in the 1960s. The moviemaker was a Baptist minister whose church had a mission relationship with a Nigerian church. While we listened to the son narrate what parts of the film he could, he took out his cell phone and called his 86-year-old mother while the film was still running. We had the privilege of hearing their sweet dialog about the trip 40+ years ago and what daddy (who passed away 32 years ago) had done in Nigeria. The footage ended with a kind of portrait of the new church he built in Gary.

I also like very much a 50+ year-old black-and-white birthday party film. Shot in 16mm, it showed "Pinky's 3rd Birthday," which took place in a large family home in Buenos Aires. Young Pinky and her party guests were being entertained by trained dogs and a ventriloquist, as well as the hired cinematographer.

Save that one.