Shhhhh-owtime!

Two sad pieces of news relevant to this blog started off this shortened week. First, the announcement that San Francisco Film Society executive director Graham Leggat is stepping down for health reasons, after five years of wonderful service to the city's extended film community. He strengthened the city's foremost film exhibition organization in immeasurable ways at a moment when leadership like his was sorely needed, but I also appreciated his rare candor as a contributor to the programming team for the annual San Francisco International Film Festival. He wasn't afraid to publicly admit his favorite film in the festival, even if it was a potentially alienating one to the casual observer. (In 2006 he cited Tsai Ming-Liang's The Wayward Cloud, and this year his pick was Lech Majewski's The Mill and the Cross). Leah Garchik has a good article that details his reasons for departure, and shows us that Leggat's courage is in no way limited to his approach to film programming.

Another sad, if very much predicted, news item was the Red Vic's official announcement that it will definitely be closing July 25th after thirty-one years of operation on Haight Street. This is the first time I've closed one of the parentheses on my "Frisco Cinemas" sidebar list. I recently went through my records to figure that I've seen at least 75 screenings there in the past decade and a half (or so). It sounds like a lot, but right now I'm also thinking of all the films I never got around to seeing when they (in some cases quite frequently) played there. Who's going to bring around prints of Foxy Brown or The Good Old Naughty Days or The Holy Mountain or Stop Making Sense (which I must miss when it plays July 15-16) once the venue is shut? Reminiscences are popping up all over the web, but perhaps the most pointed and poignant is Peter Hartlaub's. Cheryl Eddy's interview with Claudia Lehan is the best article I've seen on the details behind the closure.

I don't want to dwell on negative news though. The reason I won't be able to catch Stop Making Sense at the Red Vic next week is that I'll be celebrating the cinema of the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s and even early 1930s with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival from Thursday night until Sunday night. The festival's own blog has been gearing up for the event for weeks now with its remarkably informative series Film Preservation Fridays. Today's entry is an interview with two of the archivists instrumental in bringing festival opener Upstream to light after decades when even the most knowledgeable John Ford scholars assumed it lost. A must-read.

The San Francisco Public Library is also preparing for the event by spreading an exhibition about silent film in several locations on the fourth and sixth floors of the Main Library. Thomas Gladysz has curated one section of the exhibit, "Reading The Stars", focusing on books about filmmaking and famous filmmakers, and on movie tie-ins, all published during the silent era! Another section, curated by Rory J. O'Connor, looks at silent-era filmmaking in San Francisco and elsewhere around Frisco Bay. A third, on the sixth floor, is devoted to silent-era movie palaces. The library will be hosting two events around the exhibition, which will remain up until August 28th. This Sunday at 2PM the library will host a projected video screening of Son of the Sheik starring Rudolph Valentino. Valentino expert Donna Hill will be on hand to introduce the screening and sign copies of her breathtakingly beautiful book of rare Valentino photographs. Then, on August 7th, Diana Serra Carey, who performed in 1920s films as "Baby Peggy", will talk about her life in Hollywood and screen an as-yet-unnamed short film. Both events are free to the public, as is the exhibition.

I was recruited to get involved in this exhibit in a very small way: by providing a piece of text talking about this year's Silent Film Festival for one of the display cases. Librarian Gretchen Good, who organized the exhibition along with the SFPL exhibitions staff (including Maureen Russell) said it would be fine to publish the text on my blog as well, so here it is, though I couldn't resist jazzing it up with some hyperlinks:

Every summer for the past fifteen years, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has taken over the Castro Theatre for a weekend of great movies, live music, and the conviviality of silent film fans. The 16th annual festival, held July 14-17, 2011, is their biggest event yet. Thirteen feature films made on four different continents will screen, along with two programs of shorts (one devoted to Walt Disney's first films, one to the earliest special effects films), two free programs of film archivists presenting their latest restorations and unearthings from the vaults, and much more.

Marlene Dietrich, Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer, John Gilbert, Janet Gaynor, George O'Brien, Louise Dressler, Pina Menichelli and Douglas Fairbanks are some of the stars featured in this year's festival films. Well-known classics like F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born, But..., and Victor Sjöström's He Who Gets Slapped screen along with recently rediscovered films like Allan Dwan's Mr. Fix-It and John Ford's Upstream. Seven musical ensembles and soloists rotate in performing live musical scores to each film, and gather Saturday, July 16th on a panel discussion to talk about the role of music in the silent film world.

Every year the festival gives an award to an organization or individual for "distinguished contributions to the preservation and restoration of world film heritage." This year's award is presented to the UCLA Film & Television Archive at a screening of The Goose Woman. American Sign Language interpreters are on hand for the festival's special-guest introductions and panels. Film lovers travel from far and wide to attend the festival, but the screenings are just as fun for people who have never seen a silent movie before.

Hope to see you at the festival next week!

SFSFF Weekend Wrap

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival facilitated four tremendous days of cinephilia. So many rare opportunities to see films from the early part of the previous century (and even one from 1898) presented with live musical accompaniment with a knowledgeable and appreciative audience, and to talk to musicians, scholars, offspring of key players in silent filmmaking, and enthusiastic fans, made for a truly overstuffed weekend. I saw every "full-length" film shown, and most of the short films and public presentations as well. Some highlight memories of many from the past weekend:

1. Walking down Castro Street after Sunday's screening of The Shakedown, I saw the familiar face of Leonard Maltin approaching. I had to stop him to quickly thank him for his introduction to the film. In the course of interviewing its director William Wyler's three daughters, Catherine, Judy and Melanie, he spoke of Wyler's second film made outside the Western genre as a good, but not great picture. Watching it, I found the Shakedown to be more than just a terrific entertainment and a showcase for Wyler's developing skills as an inventive filmmaker. In the way it depicts con artists on the show-biz boxing circuit, it's a deeply meaningful look at the way acting a persona can envelop a performer's personal life and self-identity. The resonances of leading man James Murray (also of the Crowd) and his sad biography surely added to this deep feeling. On the other hand, his co-star Barbara Kent is one of the few silent-era players still living today.

I told Mr. Maltin how much I'd appreciated his approach to introducing the film: keeping audience expectations modest, so that we could in a sense "discover" the film's virtues for ourselves. This as opposed to the approach of praising a film to the skies to an audience just before we're about to see it, which seems unnecessary as we're not going to be buying any more tickets to it at that moment, and it may inflate expectations to the point where the film, no matter how good it is, can't measure up. Maltin's smiling response: "It's probably never played so well in its history." Surely a tribute to the receptive festival audience, and perhaps even more to Donald Sosin's virtuosic jazz piano accompaniment (Sosin really outdid himself with his three accompaniments this year, and the Shakedown was his best performance of the three, I felt.) But most of all to the nature of the Silent Film Festival, which is able to create almost utopian presentations of the films selected, by aligning all the right factors: venue, audience, accompaniment, and best available film print.

2. Saturday's presentation Variations On A Theme: Musicians on the Craft of Composing and Performing for Silent Films was not organized quite how I expected, and I'm not sure how the hour would have gone over for an individual ticket buyer, but for those of us with festival passes, it was certainly well worth staying in our seats for. We even got to witness a bit of friendly but sharp disagreement between the panelists! Classical musician/writer/radio host Chloe Veltman seemed natural and confident as moderator, even if a few of her questions to the gathered accompanists betrayed some inexperience with watching silent films with live music (though at least she'd seen the festival screening of The Cook, Pass The Gravy and Big Business that morning). But the best part of the presentation was when the musicians took a couple of questions from the audience. Audience q-and-a is always a crap shoot but in this case the questions elicited responses that got close to the heart of some very real philosophical differences between the panel members.

Authenticity is perhaps the key issue at stake in the variety of approaches taken by different accompanists. Pianist Stephen Horne (or should I say multi-instrumentalist Stephen Horne, as he sometimes plays flute or squeezebox with one hand while the other dances upon the ivories,) spoke up for an approach that privileges an authenticity to the scene and its emotional resonance. By contrast, both Rodney Sauer of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and theatre organist Dennis James argued for an authenticity to music that audiences of the silent era might have been likely to hear when attending a film. Interestingly, these two, whose approaches might appear at first glance to be the most closely aligned amidst the group, engaged in the most contentious exchange of the panel. James argued for fidelity to the original sheet music commissioned by the director or producer of the film, whenever possible. Sauer countered that such cue sheets or scores were often abandoned or otherwise ignored by accompanists after an initial premiere performance or engagement in large cities, which is why his group favors compilations from the repertoire of compositions that would have been familiar to a typical salon orchestra of the 1920s. What became evident is that each accompanist does a certain amount of research into conventions of the time when producing a score, but that none of them are absolute purists in their approach. Even James will make certain allowances for the modern audience in defiance of the instructions of silent-era film music decision-makers. He'll ignore a cue sheet's suggestion of (for example) Rossini's William Tell Overture, because ever since the popularity of The Lone Ranger on radio and television, that theme takes audiences out of the moment. So don't expect to hear that familiar theme when Dennis James plays the Davies Symphony Hall organ to back John Barrymore in the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde this October 31st.

3. One moment that felt particularly gratifying to this blogger was the unveiling, during the second of two sets of presentations by members of the film archiving community, of a newly-preserved print of a 1912 one-reeler called The Better Man. The film is notable as a rare positive portrayal of a Mexican character in a Western, and features some notably effective camerawork, particularly an unexpected long tilt up a cliffside, revealing just how far one character has just fallen. Apparently the first new print struck from the trove of American films recently discovered in a Wellington, New Zealand film archive, The Better Man is also one of three two films whose preservation was funded through the efforts of the For The Love Of Film blog-a-thon organized by the incomparable Self-Styled Siren and Marilyn Ferdinand this past February. Whether or not even one person donated to the blog-a-thon fund after reading my own written contribution to that online event, I felt a little pride just from my connection to a community that made seeing this film possible.

In truth, everyone who buys a ticket to a Silent Film Festival program can feel pride that they help to support not only the presentation of, but also the preservation of silent films. The festival organizes its own annual fellowship through the L. Jeffrey Selznick school at Eastman House, and unless I misinterpreted what I heard announced from the Castro stage, this year's fellowship recipient will prepare the Douglas Fairbanks feature Mr. Fix-It for preservation, and presentation at the 2011 SFSFF. It's never too early to begin anticipating next year's program, and given that Allan Dwan directed Fairbanks in arguably his two best costume pageant films of the 1920's (Robin Hood and the Iron Mask), I'm excited to see this little-seen Dwan-directed film from Fairbanks's 1910s filmography.

According to the festival's own blog, another title already announced for the 2011 festival is Fritz Lang's second-most-famous science-fiction epic Woman In the Moon. I must have been in the popcorn line or something during this announcement, because I certainly would have remembered had I heard such an ingenious plan. I did hear Anita Monga announce that another Lunar silent, a Trip to the Moon would be forthcoming at the next festival. By then, a hand-colored version of the film will have been subject to a new restoration, and will be exhibited in a 35mm print that shall surely put to shame all of the Georges Méliès films that played from digital projections prior to festival features this year.

Other announcements made from the Castro stage over the weekend:

If you enjoyed The Iron Horse, you'll want to know that another John Ford film, this time a comedy from his F.W. Murnau-influenced phase, will have its "repremiere" at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on September 1st. Normally I wouldn't mention screenings happening all the way at the Southern end of the state, but since Upstream is one of the films being repatriated from New Zealand along with the Better Man, and because John Ford fans are hoping this screening is a success and leads to more around the country (including, hopefully, here on Frisco Bay) it seems worth noting.

Closer to home, Susan Oxtoby of the Pacific Film Archive announced, as part of her introductory remarks on Man With A Movie Camera at the festival, that the PFA is planning a Dziga Vertov retrospective for that venue, most likely for September-October of 2011. The Alloy Orchestra seems too large and loud a group to fit into the Berkeley venue to provide a reprise of the frantic scoring we heard Sunday afternoon, so my imagination is running wild trying to think of how Vertov's 1929 masterpiece might be accompanied musically there; I've regrettably missed several chances to hear what Judith Rosenberg does with Man With A Movie Camera (though I got a sampling when she performed to a DVD snippet at the SFSFF's press conference back in May), but I'm also very curious about Dennis James's score for the film, last performed here almost fifteen years ago. And then there is recent rumor of a "definitive" soundtrack recording on the horizon. If anticipating screenings more than a year in advance is too exhausting, Frisco Bay Vertov fans will surely be interested in the work of filmmakers his theories inspired, some of whom are sure to be a part of the PFA's focus on Frisco Bay's avant-garde filmmaking history this fall in celebration of the long-awaited release of the Radical Light book. Another filmmaker influenced by Vertov, Jean-Luc Godard, will have his first feature film on local screens for a week starting tomorrow. I've had a chance to see this new Rialto print of Godard's Breathless, with its new and improved subtitle translation unavailable on DVD, and it's certainly the upcoming week's cinematic must-see. Rod Armstrong of the San Francisco Film Society will introduce tomorrow night's screenings at the Embarcadero Center Cinema.

More random notes on the 2010 Silent Film Festival and upcoming related screenings:

The San Francisco Film Museum has posted the photos taken of SFSFF attendees disguised as the Maria Robot from Metropolis this weekend, so take a gander. For those who were shut out of Friday night's screening, the Castro will hold digital screenings of the restoration, albeit without live musical accompaniment, on August 13-15. Also part of the Castro's upcoming August calendar will be a screening of Fritz Lang's most well-known Hollywood film, the Big Heat, on August 30. The Jewish Film Festival is the next organization to bring a silent film with live accompaniment to the Castro, with this Monday's presentation of the 1922 film Hungry Hearts.

I always know I'll see some of my favorite local bloggers at the Silent Film Festival. Michael Guillén, Lincoln Specter, Jay Blodgett, Jason Wiener and shahn, who surely exaggerates when calling me a "local sensation". Then again, I am quoted on my experience watching Häxan by Jeremy Mathews in his article for Moving Pictures Magazine, and a conversation with Adam Hartzell is described in his piece for GreenCine Daily. I guess it's in the nature of being something of a blogosphere gadfly, but I'm a little embarrassed to find my name singled out in so many blog write-ups on the SFSFF when so many of my writers' group colleagues produced superior work on much more difficult subjects. For example, David Kiehn's essay on the Iron Horse is filled with drama and quotes from personal accounts, and avoids at least one oft-repeated but easily debunked myth about the film's masterful final scene. Megan Pugh's essay on the Flying Ace and Monica Nolan's on L'Heureuse Mort must surely be among the most substantial pieces written in English on these two previously-obscure films. I could go on and on. At some point all the essays should be available to read in the Silent Film Festival's website archive.

It was nice to be able to build upon the research I did for the festival for last December's Winter Event when writing an article recently published in the Australian journal Senses of Cinema on West of Zanzibar and its director Tod Browning. Please let me know what you think of the article if you get a chance to read it, either at the e-mail address found on my profile page, or in a comment below. I also recommend highly that anyone who saw Diary of a Lost Girl last Saturday (or, anyone who didn't!) take the time to read a truly remarkable essay on the iconic status of Louise Brooks, published in the same issue. The twenty-fifth anniversary of her death arrives this August 8th.

The Film Preservation Mob

The past week's big event in the blogosphere has been For The Love of Film: the Film Preservation Blog-A-Thon. It's not been "just" another Blog-a-thon devoted to a single film, filmmaker, genre or film subject, but a celebration of archivists and historians who have kept our cinema heritage alive and in many cases brought it into the light after long periods of darkness. The genius of the two co-hosts, Farran Nehme, a.k.a. the Self-Styled Siren and Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy On Films, has been to turn hordes of opinionated chroniclers into crowdsourced fundraisers for the National Film Preservation Foundation, whose offices are located here in Frisco, right on Market Street. Please donate to this terrific cause. If you're unsure of its worthiness, then reading the great number of arguments in favor found at one of the Blog-a-thon hubs ought to set you straight. To sweeten the deal, four random donors will be awarded one of the DVD sets the NFPF has produced in the past few years; I've delved into both collections myself and would love to have either in my personal library as reference copies for dozens of films that I've had the pleasure of watching in cinemas (such as The Godless Girl and Hamfat Asar), and/or that I hope to view in that manner one day (such as Redskin and Fake Fruit Factory).

I find that a common misconception among the general public regarding film preservation is that transferring the information in a film print to a digital storage device such as a DVD is the same thing as preserving it. It's a tough myth to shatter in a world where computers are supposed to solve all our problems. My fellow San Francisco Silent Film Festival researcher Rob Byrne (who you can follow on twitter) wrote in a 2008 essay on film preservation called Amazing Tales From The Archives (one can read the full text here):

A properly stored film printed on modern stock can last 100 years and more, while retaining far higher fidelity than a digitized copy. In contrast, over the past 20 years video formats have changed multiple times, leaving behind obsolete equipment and inaccessible media. So while digital reproduction is an obvious choice for home viewing and posibly for public exhibition, it is not the solution for preservation.

You may have read, elsewhere in the blog-a-thon, or somewhere else entirely, that the last step in the preservation process is presentation. Which is to say that the effort that goes into finding elements, researching proper technical specifications, and making photochemical or digital "fixes" to the materials at hand (if it's not too far decayed, that is) is not spent simply for a restored film to sit pristine in a vault somewhere, but to be accessible to future audiences. Whether that means striking exhibition prints for festivals, museums and archives, and the remaining repertory theatres to show, or simply making a DVD available, it's an integral piece of film preservation even if it's not equivalent to it. Interestingly, a film called Cry Danger has closed the circuit, making presentation the first step in preservation as well as the last.

At Noir City 8, last month's festival of film noir here at Frisco's jewel of a presentation venue, the Castro Theatre, the audience was reminded in very palpable ways of the relationship between archives and the ideal presentation of both the "classics" and of little-known gems. The first Saturday night's double bill of films written by William Bowers and directed by Robert Parrish could be exhibit 'A'. The first film was the dark and witty Cry Danger, a film which had shown in 16mm prints at previous Noir City festivals, but which was finally given the full restoration treatment, paid for by the proceeds from last year's Noir City. Festival director Eddie Muller goes into detail on this in his own contribution to this week's blog-a-thon. The audience loved seeing the film in its 35mm glory, and hearing Muller pry stories about the making of the film from Richard Erdman after the screening. And when the festival was over and the votes were tallied from the festival passholders to bestow this year's noir lineup with Noir City's own "Roscoe Awards", Cry Danger did pretty well, picking up nominations for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor (Erdman).

Cry Danger's double-bill-mate, the Mob, didn't fare so well in the "Roscoes" to my disappointment and surprise. I thought Broderick Crawford gave one of the festival's most memorable and well-judged performances as a New York City cop forced to go undercover as a transplant from New Orleans, going so far as to quaff the (according to Bowers' script, at any rate) Big Easy barstool signature, white wine and beer, in order to get inside the crooked crevices of the longshoreman milieu controlled by Ernest Borgnine's gang- or is it Borgnine's gang after all? Muller announced before the film unspooled (boasting that more tickets had been sold to that show than to Avatar in Frisco that evening- and this was when the James Cameron film was still weeks away from losing its #1 slot on the national box-office charts) that the 35mm print of the Mob was shipped fresh from the lab. It looked it. The deep deep blackness of the screen contrasted with the bright white lights shining through the emulsion with as much clarity as I've ever seen in a black-and-white film print. It must have augmented the experience that I was sitting in the balcony just under the projector, which traced the motion of a vehicle's headlamps from the back of the giant theatre to the screen in front of us with distinct beams stretching over my head. It was an unexpected 3-D effect without the need for special glasses or a $4 surcharge!

Other Noir City screenings that week highlighted other connections between preservation and presentation. According to the Czar of Noir, the rarely-seen Robert Siodmak film Deported was screened as much as a way of checking the quality of the only known print, as for its entertainment or historical value. "Bad Girls Night" was an excuse for Muller to briefly interview Grover Crisp of Sony Pictures on how he got into archiving, and what it's like to be involved with keeping the legacy of one of the classic Hollywood studios (in this case Columbia) alive in the modern era. The audience was treated to two delerious programmers featuring Cleo Moore; I think I'm one of the few in the house that liked the low-budget One Girl's Confession by Hugo Haas more than Women's Prison, which had a great cast including Ida Lupino but less authorial style than the Haas picture. Both films have in the weeks since the festival been released on a pair of two-disc DVD sets along with favorites from Noir City festivals past (Night Editor, the Glass Wall) and hopefully future (Two of a Kind?)

Another particularly intriguing restoration angle was provided by the Noir City Sentinal Annual #2, a collection of articles and images bound in a handsome volume and available at the festival as well as online. I had to buy myself a copy, not only for the multiple articles on the great director André de Toth, whose Pitfall and Slattery's Hurricane were highlights of my festival week (though the latter film doesn't really gel its spectacular scenes together into something unified, for reasons well-explained in one of the aforementioned articles), but also for Eddie Muller's interview with Paula Felix-Didier and Fernando Peña, the Argentinean film historians who were instrumental in bringing the near-complete cut of Fritz Lang's Metropolis into the global view. His interview illuminates aspects of this "amazing tale from the archives" that I have not seen stressed in media reports on this watershed restoration elsewhere. And I'm thrilled that the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has announced its plan to bring the "new" Metropolis to the Castro Theatre this coming July, with the Alloy Orchestra providing a musical score updating the version that launched the ensemble's silent film-scoring career in 1991.

One of the most refreshing aspects of Noir City is its complete lack of corporate sponsorship- although the festival partners with other non-profit groups like the fledgling San Francisco Film Museum, which set up camp on the mezzanine one evening to take mug shots (including mine!) of the masses. It's a festival that survives, nay thrives on the support of its donors, its volunteers, its connections in the preservation community, and of course on its loyal audiences. Restoring Cry Danger was just the beginning- actually it wasn't the beginning, as funds from Noir City helped restore the print of the Prowler that will be playing the Joseph Losey series that's a centerpiece of the March-April Pacific Film Archive calendar. But as long as audiences support this festival and its satellites around the country (currently in Seattle) it will continue its preservation mission one film at a time. Next up for the Cry Danger treatment, according to Eddie Muller's closing-night sign off? Too Late For Tears.

Marin and Beyond

If you're not reading the GreenCine Daily website with the frequency prescribed by its title, you may not have noticed that the site published my interview with Lance Hammer, the director behind one of 2008's most assured and affecting debuts, Ballast. It was published a little more than a week ago, and already the pointer post has dropped off the main page (a tribute to the Daily editor David Hudson's unflagging prolificacy). I would have mentioned it here at Hell on Frisco Bay earlier, but I wanted to be able to name the Frisco Bay venues where the film will be showing starting the Friday. I've now learned that Ballast will open here in Frisco proper at the Sundance Kabuki, where a filmmaker q-and-a is expected to take place opening weekend. In the East Bay, the venue is Berkeley's Elmwood, and in the North Bay, it's the Rafael Film Center. Hammer is self-distributing his film, so a ticket purchase to Ballast at any of these venues might be seen as a vote for greater filmmaker (as opposed to distribution company) autonomy when it comes to controlling the release of their films.

Speaking of the Rafael Film Center, it recently released its calendar of film programs for the next few months. Just coming off its stint as a venue for the 31st Mill Valley Film Festival, the restored San Rafael theatre is the North Bay location to see a lot of the season's most exciting commercially-released films, new and old. There are a number of exclusive screenings that should tempt potential bridge-crossers to come to Marin county for a night at the movies as well.

First, let me talk about the latter category. If you missed last Friday's in-person tribute to Harriet Andersson hosted at the Rafael by the MVFF, you might want to note that she's still in town, and will be on hand for a screening of Ingmar Bergman's Sawdust and Tinsel tonight. The screening is part of an eclectic set of Bergman's theatrical and television works, some of which are making their Frisco Bay premieres at the Rafael this week. There are a few selections repeated from recent Bergman retros around Frisco Bay, such as Cries and Whispers, perhaps Andersson's most powerful performance, which plays October 16-17. But there are also genuine rarities such as the Blessed Ones and the Best Intentions. The full five-and-a-half hour television version of Bergman's crowning achievement Fanny and Alexander will make its West Coast theatrical premiere in a HD presentation on October 19-23.

From October 29-November 2 the Rafael will host a series entitled Irving Thalberg's MGM, showing three films the mogul made at the most "star-studded" studio in the early 1930s. On the 29th, Red Dust pairs Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in the steaming jungles of colonial-era Vietnam. On the 30th it's Ernst Lubitsch's slice of perfection the Merry Widow. And Private Lives, a vehicle for Thalberg's wife Norma Shearer that I have not seen, rounds out the trio on November 2. Another short series is a four-film, seven-day (Dec. 5-11) stint of Janus Films' touring Essential Art House collection of landmark foreign classics that stopped by the Castro last year and the Pacific Film Archive the year before. (Which reminds me to mention that, according to the Janus website, the PFA has booked Masaki Kobayashi's trilogy, the Human Condition for February 15th.)

The Rafael will have three November one-off events with guest speakers: a November 15 screening of Wall-E accompanied by a presentation from sound designer Ben Burtt. Burtt, visual effects whiz Craig Barron and silent film historian John Bengstom will take a look at Charlie Chaplin's silent-sound hybrid Modern Times November 20th, and Christopher Plummer will be on hand for a showing of Man in the Chair November 29th. Perhaps even more eye-catching, at least to my baby blues, is the December 4th return of the now-traditional "the Films of..." series highlighting films made exactly 100 years ago, in this case the Films of 1908. It will include early efforts from Max Linder and D.W. Griffith, as well as J. Stuart Blackton's famous "trick" film the Thieving Hand, all accompanied by Michael Mortilla at the piano. Back then they were just films, but today motion pictures of the Thieving Hand's length are considered shorts, and the Rafael will also be presenting an exclusive selection of some of Sundance 2008's better efforts. I've seen three of them, which range from good (Dennis) to excellent (Yours Truly and my olympic summer, which both also show up on the new SF Cinematheque calendar on November 6th.)

There's three more Rafael bookings I'd like to highlight, but these are not Marin-exclusive screenings. Each is booked to play for at least a week at the Rafael, but also at other Frisco Bay theatres on the same dates. In reverse chronological order, I'll start with Lola Montès, opening November 19 at the Rafael, the Elmwood, and the glorious Castro Theatre. This is a picture that I've only seen on video, where one barely gets the sense of its grandeur and scope. I can't wait to see it on a screen big enough to do justice to director Max Ophuls' vision and to the larger-than-life life of its subject played by Martine Carol, Lola Montez (who counted Frisco Bay as one of her realms of conquest).

Momma's Man opens October 24 at the Rafael, the Camera 12 in San Jose, and the Clay. One of the very best new films I've seen all year, this is the third feature directed by Azazel Jacobs, son of avant-garde film legend Ken Jacobs. He cast his father and his real-life mother Flo Jacobs as the parents of the lead character Mikey, a new parent who cocoons in his childhood loft rather than face his responsibilities as husband and father. As strange and alienating as his behavior may seem, the relationship between Mikey and his parents feels so natural that I really felt I started to understand what might lead a grown man to act in such a way, and what might or might not be able to lead him back out of the vicious circle he's drawn around himself. At one point he asks, "is this an intervention?" as if he hopes the answer will be yes, but knowing deep down that his parents' personalities preclude them from giving him that kind of a wake-up call. For me, the final shot packed a powerful dose of emotion that was unexpected given the detached, almost casual style that the rest of the film uses to present, but not underline in a heavy-handed way, the heartache of the situation.

Finally, Ashes of Time Redux opens October 17 at the Rafael, the Camera 12, the Shattuck in Berkeley and the Lumiere. I've considered the original arthouse wuxia to be among director Wong Kar-Wai's most interesting films since watching a scratchy print at the 4-Star several years ago, but I've never gotten around to revisiting it. I had no idea that the screening would be the last chance I'd get to see the intact film. According to articles like this one, this Redux version is not a new "director's cut" like so many reissues these days, but rather an attempt to preserve film elements that were not only at risk but in fact already becoming unwatchable due to poor archival practices in the Hong Kong film industry. It's great to see Ashes of Time's images (shot by Christopher Doyle, of course) back up on cinema screens, in such vivid colors. But I must confess that some of the attempts to patch over preservation problems are very distracting, particularly the new musical score with its too-prominent cello parts. (Yo-Yo Ma is great, but is not the solution to every musical problem.) The cast is packed with the greats of what many consider to be the peak period of Hong Kong cinema, but there's something bittersweet about seeing them (especially the late Leslie Cheung) digitally-spruced-up for a release like this: one can't help but wonder how many other films from the years before the handover are left to decompose because nobody who cares enough has the clout to save them.

The Universal Fire

"Nothing has ever been preserved – at best, it is being preserved."
--Ray Edmundson, UNESCO's Audiovisual Archiving: Philosophy and Principles, 2004.

You probably heard about the fire that broke out at Universal Studios at the end of last month. You may have heard that several firefighters suffered "minor injuries" while extinguishing the blaze, but otherwise no-one was hurt, thankfully. You may also have heard the initial reports that the fire destroyed a video libary. You may have breathed a sigh of relief when learning that it was not an archive containing the only copies of the materials in Universal's film library.

Indeed, it appears that the negatives of Universal's film holdings are safe, stored in a location far from the site of the conflagration. Presumably in a vault better protected from the possibility of fire damage coming from a source outside the building. Unfortunately, a great many archival film prints, including a sizable proportion of those prints sent by the studio to repertory theatres, cinematheques and film festivals all over the world for public exhibition, were consumed in the fire. They may have been "duplicates" of the original negatives, but that doesn't mean they won't be missed.

Film preservation does not begin and end with the safeguarding of original materials. It's part of a cycle that includes the presentation of films to the public, preferably in a manner as close as possible to that which filmmakers intended their work to be seen. At the beginning of this article I quoted a document considered to be something of a mission statement for film archivists. Here's another pertinent quote from that document:

Preservation is necessary to ensure permanent accessibility; yet preservation is not an end in itself. Without the objective of access it has no point.

With that in mind another quote, from Universal President Ron Meyer, that "Nothing is lost forever" may at first glance seem like a minimization of the damage. If a vital link in the preservation chain for undervalued masterpieces like 1937's Make Way For Tomorrow (one rumored destroyed print) and 1971's Taking Off (another rumor) has been severed, can these films truly be considered "preserved"? Since these particular titles have never been commercially available on home video, only those who remember seeing them projected in 35mm in a cinema (or perhaps shown on a stray television broadcast,) will ever really know what has been lost. (Thankfully, another so-called "filthy five" treasure from the studio's early-seventies "Youth Division", the Last Movie, was screened in Frisco in a great print from the Academy Archive on June 4th.)

For the time being, I'm optimistically hoping that Meyer's quote is not a belittling of the damage to the audience's connection to our collective aesthetic and cultural history, but an indication of intention to restore the damage and make the destroyed films available for circulation as soon as possible. It's possible for Universal to strike new 35mm prints of lost titles, at what the New York Times is reporting as approximately $5,000 a pop. The question is, how much effort in this direction will be made in 2008, as the number of 35mm film projectors in commercial operation around the world is starting to decline? As Lincoln Spector has succintly put it, "economic realities control what does and does not get replaced."

I suspect it will take some time for Universal to complete its inventory of what precisely was lost and what survives in a condition to be screened. (Some titles rumored to be damaged or unavailable may simply be lost in the chaos of the rescue- we can hope, at any rate.) In the meantime, at least one Frisco Bay screening has been severely affected: last Thursday's presentation of King Kong Escapes at the monthly Thrillville event at the Cerrito Speakeasy Theatre was facilitated by DVD. On October 23, Thrillville was set to play a double bill of Curse of the Werewolf and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, both titles currently in Universal's holdings. While Curse of the Werewolf has been removed from the program, the exhibition print of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was thankfully not in the vault during the fire, and will be shown that evening. Another Universal horror classic, Creature From the Black Lagoon, was also spared from the flames and will play the Cerrito (in 3-D) on an unspecified date in late October.

Other Frisco venues are affected as well. Michael Guillén, while reporting the 35mm prints to be shown at the Frameline festival that opens at the Castro this Thursday, noted that the Wachowskis' lesbian thriller Bound, scheduled as part of a tribute to departing programmer Michael Lumpkin, was among the titles affected by the fire, and may indeed be projected digitally at the Castro next Tuesday if a new print is not able to be struck in time.

Luckily, other previously-announced Castro bookings are not affected. The Silent Film Festival presentation of the Man Who Laughs, which in 1928 was Universal's attempt to recreate the gothic horror success of the Phantom of the Opera and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, is safe. As the festival's artistic director Stephen Salmons notes near the beginning of a recent podcast interview, a beautiful print is held by the Library of Congress and is the one that will play July 12th. The print of Jaws set to play the Castro July 19th was not harmed. I'm told that nothing on the current or upcoming Pacific Film Archive calendar was affected by the fire, either.

I'm not sure about the Stanford Theatre, which has many Universal titles programmed on its current summer calendar, particularly its Jimmy Stewart centennial selections. Last week I CalTrained down to Palo Alto to see my two favorites of the Anthony Mann westerns starring Stewart, Bend of the River and the Far Country. I had never seen either on the big screen before, and I found it a magnificent double-bill. The Academy-ratio compositions are ideal for the films' isolating mountain settings, and for Mann's (and screenwriter Borden Chase's) illustrations of the short-sightedness of unfettered capitalism. Seeing the pair one after another helped me better recognize each film's distinctive qualities as well. And they were shown on fine if not perfect 35mm prints. Perhaps these were spared from the fire, or perhaps they were sourced from a private collector, or even quickly restruck in time for the screenings. If anyone has the influence and the deep pockets to make sure the show will go on it's surely David Packard, and I'm reminded again of just how lucky I am to live within a reasonable distance of this one-of-a-kind theatre. However, I've since heard that the weekend's screenings of Universal's Charade at the venue featured a subpar print, and it has me wondering about the Stanford program guide's promise of "an original Technicolor print with original magnetic stereophonic sound" for its June 26-27 screening of another Mann-Stewart collaboration the Glenn Miller Story. Another such collaboration, the Naked Spur, recently was shown on DVD at UCLA, presumably because of the fire. Will a new print be struck, or another print source located in time for its Stanford booking August 7-8?

Striking new 35mm prints can be costly, but so can be screening from non-studio prints. As I understand it, even when a venue is able to locate an alternate source to project from, whether a DVD or a collector's print, it's required to pay the rightsholder for the privilege of showing their intellectual property, on top of whatever fees a collector may charge for the loan of their alternate print. As a result, I have a feeling that many programmers around the country are going to shy away from placing fire-affected Universal titles on upcoming schedules, when possible. Unless, of course, the studio itself agrees to front the cost of replacing their prints. Again, we can hope.

Finally, you may be aware that Universal is the rightsholder to many great Paramount titles, from Hitchcock to Preston Sturges, to the Marx Brothers to Josef Von Sternberg's Marlene Dietrich films. Many of these Paramount holdings are rumored to be among those lost. But, to end this article on an up note, it appears that the great Paramount musical directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Maurice Chevalier, Love Me Tonight was saved. Why? Because it had been shipped to a repertory venue (Chicago's Music Box) eager to present it to a sure-to-be-delighted audience. Just another reason to support your local cinematheque.

Saturday Nitrates

NOTE: THIS ENTRY HAS BEEN SALVAGED FROM THIS SITE AND REPOSTED UNEDITED ON 10/18/2008. SOME INFORMATION MAY BE OUTDATED, AND OUTGOING LINKS HAVE NOT BEEN INSPECTED FOR REPUBLICATION. COMMENTS CAN BE FOUND HERE.

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The other day a fellow cinephile asked me if I'd seen Good Night, and Good Luck or Capote yet. My answer was no, that these days I'm generally not drawn to seeing films that seem to me (perhaps I'm being short-sighted) to be made for DVD or cable TV as much as they're made for theatrical release, no matter how good they're reported to be. I'm much more likely to put a priority on seeing something purely cinematic like The Weeping Meadow, especially since I've never seen a Theo Angelopoulos film in a cinema before. His previous film, the Cannes Palme d'Or-winning Eternity and a Day was theatrically released while I was living abroad in a city where prints of his films probably have never played, and Ulysses' Gaze before my cinematic interests included 3-hour art films by Greek auteurs. I won't pretend that I understood the significance of everything I saw in The Weeping Meadow, but I can assure you that my eyes popped over and over. This epic, which Angelopoulos intends to follow with two sequels, is undeniably composed for large screen theatrical viewing, not for even the most audacious of home systems. His long shots need to overpower the viewer with their complexity and their size. His long takes cannot be interrupted by the distractions of the home environment. A pause button would kill this film, and its incredible debut performance by Alexandra Aidini. Perhaps that makes it somehow too fragile to be of much use in the current aesthetic climate, but as long as there's a place like the Balboa taking the risk of showing such a film (if only for four days; The Weeping Meadow ends this Monday Oct. 31!) I'm going to be there.

The same reasoning draws me to as many revived classic films as I can fit into my viewing schedule. Films made in the era before anyone thought seriously of reducing and broadcasting them to mass audiences can feel like revelations when returned to their natural setting. Such was the case of Singin' in the Rain, which I saw at Palo Alto's Stanford Theatre last weekend. I'd only ever seen it on a television set before, and though I liked it, to be honest I'd never quite grasped why it could be so highly esteemed as to earn a place on so many notable top 10 lists; why it had become perhaps the quintessential Hollywood musical. No wonder; in a way I'd never really seen it! It wasn't just that the vastness of the screen helped me to see details like the broken hairs on Donald O'Connor's bow by the end of "Fit as a Fiddle", or the wrinkle in Cyd Charisse's panty hose when she appears in the "Broadway Melody" sequence. It was that the deep blacks, bright whites and vivid candy store colors emphasized the story's fantastic elements and made me more easily forgive the anti-historical, pro-talkie mythologizing. I was able to dream along with the film.

I don't think I'd ever seen any Technicolor print so rich in color and clarity. So when I noticed that the Stanford's printed calendar boasted that every Saturday would feature a screening of "a beautiful original print (usually nitrate from the UCLA film archive)" I had to wonder if I had just seen a nitrate print! I was familiar with Paolo Cherchi Usai's term "epiphany of nitrate", meaning the moment a cinephile may have when viewing cellulose nitrate (the Stanford being one of the few places in the world insured to run the obsolete material through its projectors for the general public) when the palpable difference between it and safety stock is understood, and all but assumed that my experience with this Singin' in the Rain print must have been mine!

But subsequent research showed me to be wrong. I found sources saying that the original nitrate print of Singin' in the Rain had been lost forever, and others implying that Singin' in the Rain was not quite old enough to have been distributed on nitrate prints, the format having been retired in 1951. In any case, a call to the Stanford Theatre's box office confirmed that the Saturday nitrate screenings will always be for the films being shown at 7:30 PM. I had seen nitrate after all; the other half of the double bill. It was a nicely-colored, but horribly scratched (the worst I've seen at the Stanford) and badly spliced print of the airheaded Don Ameche/Betty Grable musical Moon Over Miami. Nothing jawdropping. No epiphany, nitrate or not.

But I'm going back. According to the person I spoke to on the box office phone number, they'll be showing at least six more nitrate prints over the next few months, including Seven Days to Noon (tonight), Stormy Weather (Nov. 5), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Black Narcissus (Nov. 12, and specifically promised to be "gorgeous" in the program guide), Down Argentine Way (Dec. 3), Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait (Dec. 10) and Cover Girl (Dec. 17). I know you can't expect to force an epiphany, but I'm going to see if I can't try anyway. And who knows, maybe there will be some incredible safety stock restorations as second features?