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.

Noir News is...

Greetings from Noir City! First of all: make sure you read Max Goldberg's latest essay inspired by the festival and its newsman theme, found here. It's far more insightful than anything I've ever written about noir myself, that's for sure. Also of related interest are Brecht Andercsh's comments on being "festive at a festival".

Wednesday's San Francisco Film Society co-presentation night at Noir City 7 went pretty much as I expected. Film Society creative director Miguel Pendas came on stage before the film screenings and talked about the grant money the SFFS is planning to distribute to Frisco Bay filmmakers, and spoke of upcoming events of interest to an audience hungry for the cinema of yesteryear. Then Noir City's own Eddie Muller joined him on stage to talk about an in-the-works series of international noir titles, commenting that it's possible to "end up face-down in the gutter anywhere in the world." No details on series dates or titles were revealed, but Pendas spoke of scouting a large-scale series of Japanese noir at last year's San Sebastian International Film Festival, while for his part Muller recounted a recent trip to Buenos Aires to meet the archivists who made last summer's announcement of rediscovered footage lost from Fritz Lang's sci-fi parable Metropolis. While in Argentina, Muller was able to open the lid on a trove of early films made by the great noir cinematographer John Alton in the 1930s, when he was working in that country's film industry. I wonder how long it takes to get a film subtitled in English when it's never been exported before? Would an earmarked donation to the Film Noir Foundation help speed the process along?

The print of Lang's newspaper/crime drama While the City Sleeps was not, as I had predicted after checking various on-line sources, screened in a "Superscope" aspect ratio. However, the compositions didn't look the least bit cropped or awkward, and a bit of poking around the internet reveals that Lang did not intend the film to be shown widescreen. It was great to see such a terrific cast including Dana Andrews, Vincent Price, Thomas Mitchell (last seen in Alias Nick Beal Monday night), George Sanders and Ida Lupino, in action, and the newsroom setting of the film couldn't be more appropriate to the theme of this year's festival. By 1956 a rather late entry in the noir cycle, While the City Sleeps is less concerned with the psychic turmoil of the insane "Lipstick murderer" than it is in the reaction of the larger society to his crimes. Andrews' protagonist is in many ways a mirror to the murderer (played by John Barrymore, Jr.) even if he seems outwardly untortured, even by his own temptation to infidelity which is portrayed as a natural male weakness at worst. I'm eager to see the other Lang/Andrews collaboration Beyond a Reasonable Doubt when it plays on Saturday.

Before introducing the co-feature Shakedown, Muller plugged two more film events on the coming calendar. First, on February 14th, is the Silent Film Festival's winter event, the centerpiece of which is the "proto-noir" Sunrise, which he called his favorite silent film of all time. I'm with him, which is why I was so pleased to be able to research the production and reception of the F.W. Murnau-directed film for the festival, as I prepared an essay for the program guide and a slideshow on the first Academy Awards ceremony that will show before the film unspools to Dennis James's musical accompaniment that evening.

Muller also pointed out a double-bill put together by the Film on Film Foundation on March 8th at the Pacific Film Archive: the Bigamist and Outrage, both noirs starring and directed by Ida Lupino, neither of which I've seen before. You can bet I'll be there. This bill is not the only noir coming to the PFA in the next several weeks, though. A series entitled One-Two Punch: Pulp Writers on Film runs Feb. 13-21 and includes adaptations of the writing of Cornell Woolrich, Frederic Brown, Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford, tackled by noir and neo-noir directors like Robert Siodmak and George Armitage.

Shakedown was terrific, incidentally. It was great to see Frisco circa 1950 in the outdoor shots and through the picture windows of the apartments. But the story, in which Howard Duff's ambition as a photojournalist takes him into the lap of dangerous gangsters with his camera as his only protection, charts one of those grippingly doomed trajectories that pulls me in deeply enough that "spot-the-location" games quickly become unnecessary. What I found most fascinating about Shakedown, in the end, was the fact that just as location shooting, perhaps influenced by Italian Neo-Realism, was inflecting noir with a blurring of the boundary between captured documentary and staged fiction, here was this film whose protagonist blurs the boundary between capturing and staging a photograph, and must deal with the consequences.