With one cinephilic foot placed squarely in the San Francisco Bay Area and the other in Boise, Idaho, I'm feeling somewhat of a conduit today whereby the movies themselves—not geographical locations—prove where I truly am. As has probably always been the case and certainly continues through today, audiences worldwide constitute a broadened albeit dispersed community united in spectatorial delight. In this, there is no difference in desire; a desire that spans across the past century. There's no requirement to be roped into the regional when the global is at hand.
Filmbud Brian Darr's well-researched piece for Fandor (parts one and two) on Georges Méliès seems a perfect introduction to an upcoming event at Boise's The Flicks, which programmer Carole Skinner mentioned to me when we conversed last week. The Idaho Film Foundation (IFF) is hosting a Méliès Celebration, Sunday, March 4, 2012 from 3:00-5:00PM.
First up is A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902). This hand-painted color version of Méliès's legendary film, unseen for 109 years until its new restoration, will be followed by the documentary, The Extraordinary Voyage (Le voyage extraordinaire, 2011), directed by Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange and featuring Costa Gravas, Michel Gondry, Martin Scorsese, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Michel Hazanavicius. The magical Georges Méliès—celebrated in Martin Scorsese's Academy Award®-winning film Hugo (2011)—was the creator of one of cinema's most enduring images. This fascinating documentary charts the film's voyage across the century and into the next millennium, from 1902 to the astonishing rediscovery of a nitrate print in color in 1993 to the premiere of the new restoration on the opening night of the Cannes Film Festival in 2011.
Interviews with some of contemporary cinema's most imaginative filmmakers attest to Méliès' enduring significance. The film will be introduced by Boise State University Assistant Professor of Modern Languages, Dr. Mariah Devereux Herbeck, who will lead a discussion and Q&A after the film. Tickets are $12 general admission and $9 for students in advance and at the door.
As interstitial coincidences go, perusing my in-flight magazine on my way to San Francisco I discovered a short write-up on the restoration of A Trip to the Moon. Two foundations spent a decade restoring the print, and then enlisted French electronic music pioneers Air (whose first album was entitled Moon Safari) to provide an original score. Air enjoyed the gig so much that they built a whole album from it, which they recently released along with the DVD of Méliès masterpiece. More on Air's involvement can be found at Fact, as well as an in-depth interview at The Guardian.
Kudos to the Idaho Film Foundation, Carole Skinner and The Flicks for offering Boiseans a rare in-cinema opportunity to experience these films, and to Brian Darr and Fandor for the historical context and the opportunity to stream A Trip to the Moon and many other Méliès titles. If not a Fandor member (what's keeping you?), the original B&W version of A Trip to the Moon with the Erich Wolfgang Korngold & Laurence Rosenthal score can be seen on YouTube.
It's time to make noise about San Francisco's upcoming Silent Film Festival (SFSFF), launching at the Castro Theatre this Thursday July 15 with John Ford's The Iron Horse (1924) and continuing through the weekend with 11 classics, more shorts, more amazing tales from the archives, and an on-stage panel Variations on a Theme: Musicians on the Craft of Composing and Performing for Silent Film.
The heralds have been busy. At Hell on Frisco Bay, Brian Darr has enunciated summer's silence with a detailed entry that includes one-of-three posters designed by David O'Daniel specifically for SFSFF. Whereas at SIFFBlog, David Jeffers has posted anticipatory reviews of The Flying Ace (1926), The Shakedown (1929), L'Heureuse Mort (1924), Big Business (1929), The Cook (1918), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), Rotaie (1929) and Metropolis (1927).
Speaking of Metropolis, tickets for this highly-anticipated event have gone on rush. I had the great fortune to attend the North American premiere of Fritz Lang's recently-restored classic at the first-ever Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival in Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, California. Introduced by TCM's Daytime Host Robert Osborne, my experience of the screening of Metropolis was enhanced by an erudite essay "Metropolis Resurrected" in the festival's souvenir program written by Bret Wood.
As indicated at his website, Bret Wood is the writer/director of the feature film Psychopathia Sexualis (2006). His first feature was the documentary Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films (2003), which was acclaimed as "unnerving and much fun" (The New York Times) and "endlessly fascinating" (Los Angeles Times). Filmmaker Magazine called it "A Lynchian view of the nightmarish underbelly of middle America." His previous documentaries include Kingdom of Shadows (1998, narrated by Rod Steiger). He has written several books on film, including Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film (co-written with his wife, art/film critic Felicia Feaster). Wood's film-related essays have appeared in Sight and Sound, Film Comment, Positif and other publications. He also works as an editor, graphic artist and producer of classic films on DVD. He is currently developing his award-winning screenplay The Seventh Daughter.
Bret Wood has generously granted permission to replicate his TCM souvenir catalog essay on Metropolis on The Evening Class as a gift to the San Franciscan audience about to share this thrilling experience. My thanks to him and Turner Classic Movies.
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Seldom has the rediscovery of a cache of lost footage ignited widespread curiosity as did the announcement, in July 2008, that an essentially complete copy of Fritz Lang's Metropolis had been found.
When it was first screened in Berlin on January 10, 1927, the sci-fi epic ran an estimated 153 minutes. After its premiere engagement, in an effort to maximize the film's commercial potential, the film's distributors (Ufa in Germany, Paramount in the U.S.) drastically shortened Metropolis. By the time it debuted in the States, the film ran approximately 90 minutes (exact running times are difficult to determine because silent films were not always projected at a standardized speed).
Even in its truncated form, Metropolis went on to become one of the cornerstones of fantastic cinema. Testament to its enduring popularity, the film has undergone numerous restorations in the intervening decades. In 1984, it was reissued with additional footage, color tints, and a pop rock score (but with many of its intertitles removed) by music producer Giorgio Moroder. A more archival restoration was completed in 1987, under the direction of Enno Patalas and the Munich Film Archive, in which missing scenes were represented with title cards and still photographs. More recently, the 2001 restoration—supervised by Martin Koerber, under the auspices of the Murnau Foundation—combined footage from four archives and ran a triumphant 124 minutes. It was widely believed that this would be the most complete version of Lang's film that contemporary audiences could ever hope to see.
Then in the summer of 2008, the curator of the Buenos Aires Museo del Cine discovered a 16mm dupe negative that was considerably longer than any existing print. It included not merely a few additional snippets, but 25 minutes of "lost" footage, about a fifth of the film, that had not been seen since its Berlin debut.
The discovery of such a significant amount of material called for yet another restoration.
Spearheading the project was the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung (hereafter referred to as the Murnau Foundation). Established in 1966, the Murnau Foundation's goal is the preservation and continued circulation of a large portion of Germany's film heritage. Ranging from early cinema to the 1960s, the collection of more than 6,000 films (silents, talkies, and shorts) includes works by Murnau, Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Douglas Sirk.
Film restorer for the Murnau Foundation, Anke Wilkening coordinated the endeavor.
"We discussed the new approach with experts and German archive partners to establish a team for the 2010 restoration," Wilkening explains. "The project consisted of two main tasks: the reconstruction of the original cut and the digital restoration of the heavily-damaged images from the Argentinean source."
Returning to Metropolis was Koerber, Film Department Curator of the Deutsche Kinemathek, who had supervised the 2001 restoration. "Three people worked on what we call 'edition'—meaning sorting out the material and determining the order of shots, making aesthetic and technical decisions, etc.: Anke Wilkening, Frank Strobel, and myself," says Koerber.
As word spread of the discovery of the Buenos Aires negative, nervous aficianados worried that archival politics might hinder the integration of the rediscovered footage into Metropolis. Koerber explains this was never the case. "They were always willing to cooperate. In fact, they offered the material once they identified what it was."
Once obtained by the Murnau Foundation, the 16mm negative was digitally scanned in 2K by the Arri Group in Munich.
The condition of the 16mm negative posed a major technical challenge to the team. The image was streaked with scratches and plagued by flickering brightness. "It had all been printed from the 35mm nitrate print, which means they have become part of the picture," says Wilkening. The source 35mm element was later destroyed (probably due to the flammability and chemical instability of the nitrocellulose film stock).
An unfortunate lesson was thus learned from the restoration. "Don't throw your originals away even if you think you preserved them, and even if they are in bad shape," Koerber says. "If we could have had access to the 35mm nitrate print that was destroyed after being reprinted for safety onto 16mm dupe negative some 30 years ago, we would have been able to make a much better copy today."
Fortunately, advances in digital technology allowed the team to at least diminish some of the printed-in wear. "If we would have had the Argentinean material for the 2001 restoration, it would have hardly been possible to work on the severe damage," Wilkening says. In 2010, however, "it was possible to reduce the scratches prominent all over the image and almost eliminate the flicker that was caused by oil on the surface of the original print—without aggressively manipulating the image."
Under Wilkening and Koerber's supervision, the visual cleanup was performed by Alpha-Omega Digital GmbH, utilizing digital restoration software of their own development.
At one time, purists objected to the use of digital technology in the restoration of film. But it has become an indispensible tool for preservationists. "[Digital technology] has made things possible we could only dream of a decade or two ago," Koerber says. "Digital techniques allow more precise interventions than ever before. And it is still evolving—we are only at the beginning."
"The work on the restoration teaches us once more that no restoration is ever definitive," says Wilkering. "Even if we are allowed for the first time to come as close to the first release as ever before, the new version will still remain an approach. The rediscovered sections, which change the film's composition, will at the same time always be recognizable through their damages as those parts that had been lost for 80 years."
Viewing Metropolis today, the Argentine footage is clearly identifiable because so much of the damage remains. The unintended benefit is that it provides convenient earmarks to the recently reintegrated scenes.
Other changes are not so noticeable. Because the Buenos Aires negative provided a definite blueprint to the cutting of Metropolis—which in the past had been a matter of conjecture—the order of some of the existing shots has been altered in the 2010 edition, bringing Metropolis several steps closer to its original form.
It is important to note that the "new" shots are not merely extensions of previously existing scenes. In some cases, they comprise whole subplots that were lopped off in their entirety.
"It restores the original editing," Koerber says, "restoring the balance between the characters and subplots that remained and those that were excised."
"Thanks to the Argentine find, the film's structure changes thoroughly," explains Wilkening, "especially the three male supporting characters—Josaphat, Georgy, and "der Schmale" (the Thin One)—who had been diminished to mere extras due to the elimination of two large scenes."
"Parallel editing becomes now a major player in Metropolis," Wilkening says. "The new version represents a Fritz Lang film where we can observe the tension between the preferred subject, the male melodrama, and the bombastic dimensions of the Ufa production."
The 2010 restoration took about one year, from conception to completion, and was performed at the cost of 600,000€ (approx. $840,000). But Wilkening is quick to point out that it is but the latest chapter in an ongoing saga, and pays tribute to the other preservationists who have so vigorously championed the film. "Metropolis is the prototype of an archive film. Decades of research for the lost scenes and various attempts to reconstruct the first release version have produced a large pool of knowledge of this film."
Asked how the Metropolis restoration compared to other projects in which the Deutsche Kinemathek participated, Koerber replies, "No comparison. Metropolis is more complex in many ways. On the other hand, it is also more rewarding, as the [availability of source material]—film material as well as secondary sources—is exceptionally good."
Currently, Wilkening is finishing a restoration of Lang's Die Nibelungen saga, and is optimistic about future projects. "Like everybody we would be keen to find the lost films of Murnau and Lang." But she adds, "I would be happy to turn from the holy grails to some films which are existing in the vaults of the archives, but are forgotten and hardly considered for restoration as they are not part of the canon."
On behalf of the Deutsche Kinemathek, Koerber says, "We were happy to be a partner with the Murnau-Stiftung and provide all the necessary expertise as well as the documents from our collection (script, music, etc.). I hope this successful cooperation will be a model for future projects."
"The project was a very good experience regarding team work," Wilkening says. "The collaboration of the different individuals with different backgrounds—historians, musicians and technicians—was exceptionally fruitful."
Now that Metropolis is—at least for now—behind them, preservationists resume their watch for new opportunities, and forgotten cans of film that might offer other cinema treasures a second life.
07/14/10 UPDATE: At the Film on Film Foundation's blog, Carl Martin takes the digital restoration of Metropolis to task: "We have here the worst possible scenario from a purist preservationist perspective: a poorly duped 16mm copy of footage from a heavily scratched and oil-mottled print (since destroyed), worked over digitally and projected digitally to boot." Despite my assurance that my experience of the digital restoration and its Alloy Orchestra score was a memorable evening of cinema, Martin refuses to attend on principle. "Digital prints are like step children to you?" I queried. "Like step children with missing chromosomes," he responded wryly.
At SIFFblog, David Jeffers has put up his final two anticipatory reviews: Iron Horse (1924) and The Strong Man (1926).
Cross-published on Twitch.
Introducing the opening night film of the 14th edition of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Jeffrey Vance—author of Douglas Fairbanks (University of California Press, 2008)—offered: "Judging by this enormous turnout tonight, I'm inclined to think that talking films are just a passing fad."
One of the great pleasures of Douglas Fairbanks' career, Vance specified, were the action-adventure films of the 1920s; one of his finest being The Gaucho. "It's also one of the most unusual of his features," Vance qualified. "It's dark in tone and it leaps frequently from comedy to tragedy to self-parody. Like the other great Fairbanks films, it has spectacular opportunities for him to showcase his wonderful athletic prowess and it also contains superb production values." Characterizing The Gaucho as "a near masterwork", Vance claimed it's a pity that the film is rarely revived because—of all of Fairbanks' films—it may resonate best with 21st Century audiences because the character Fairbanks plays is dark and ironic and his mesmerizing leading lady—Lupe Vélez—is no damsel in distress but "in every respect the equal of Fairbanks' gaucho." Indeed, one contemporary review dubbed her "the female Fairbanks."
Fairbanks realized from the start that a deft touch was essential to leaven the film and to prevent it from becoming too dark. He, therefore, made an unexpected but true decision: he hired a top comedy director F. Richard Jones to direct the film. The production is beautifully designed by Carl Oscar Borg and photographed by Tony Gaudio, in whose cinematography the influence of German cinema is evident.
The Gaucho was also something of a family affair. Douglas Fairbanks's wife Mary Pickford, unbilled, plays the Virgin Mary and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. wrote some of the intertitles.
The film is likewise filled with brilliant stunts—Fairbanks' work with the bolas is particularly impressive—and it contains wonderful cinematic illusion through the usage of hanging miniatures and models. Further: "The carnal combativeness between Fairbanks and Vélez was a fresh approach to Hollywood lovemaking." Yet despite all these attributes, critical reaction to The Gaucho was decidedly mixed. The consensus among film historians is that—in the later period, when audiences were no longer confused by the sudden switches of mood and the leaps from comedy to tragedy—The Gaucho would have been a bigger hit.
The Museum of Modern Art not only kindly made the new print of The Gaucho but helped publish Vance's volume on Fairbanks, which had been commissioned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Vance—along with Tony Maietta who helped author the volume—have had the pleasure of introducing the new MOMA print to audiences in both New York and Los Angeles, and now in San Francisco at their favorite venue for silent films, The Castro Theatre.
Maietta spoke next. He noted that The Gaucho was originally tinted and contained sequences in two-color Technicolor of Mary Pickford as the Madonna. Though the new MOMA print has not yet had the tinting or two-color Technicolor restored, Maietta offered six minutes of Technicolor outtakes of Mary Pickford as the Madonna, preserved by George Eastman House, which he felt would help provide a better idea of how color truly impacted The Gaucho when it was first shown. Maietta remarked that 2009 marks the 100 year anniversary of Mary Pickford's career, which began in 1909 with Her First Biscuits.
Fairbanks' previous film The Black Pirate had likewise been filmed in two-color Technicolor, a technology which suggested that you were seeing the entire spectrum of color when—in reality—you were only seeing red and green. Technicolor was in its infancy in 1926 and—though Fairbanks was hesitant to undertake the enormous expense of testing the evolving technology throughout his entire feature—he did recognize that Technicolor would lend the gravitas he desired for the religious mysticism of the scenes with the Virgin Mary. Fairbanks also knew that his wife Mary Pickford photographed beautifully in Technicolor (there are surviving tests of Pickford filmed during production of The Black Pirate).
To create the special effect of the celestial glow around the Virgin Mary, Pickford stood on a pedestal backed against a plank trailing her silhouette. Two bands of leather bristling with a multitude of thin sticks of pliable metal were then rotated behind her and hit with intense floodlights such that—when the metal sticks passed at a rapid pace around her silhouette—they produced a celestial glow.
Casting his wife as the Virgin Mary appears to have been somewhat of a whim on Douglas Fairbanks' part. Obviously, he knew his audiences would enjoy it, and Pickford was quite pleased as well; but, there were a few other speculative reasons about why he might have cast his wife as the Madonna. It was widely rumored that Fairbanks was having a brief affair with his leading lady Lupe Vélez during production. It's also speculated that this was a retaliatory gesture on his part as Fairbanks had witnessed the on-stage chemistry between Pickford and Buddy Rogers on the set of the romantic comedy My Best Girl. Apparently, Fairbanks casting Pickford as the Virgin Mary was not only to re-establish his dominance, but seemed an obvious casting choice to counter his having an affair with the "Mexican Spitfire." "You draw your own conclusions," Maietta encouraged.
All the work involved in this sequence, Maietta stressed, the casting of Pickford, the technical effort to simulate the celestial glow, the Technicolor, hasn't been seen by audiences in color since its original release. The SFSFF audience is only the second audience in the whole world to see these outtakes.
Film historian and critic Alexander Walker dismissed the cameo of Mary Pickford as the Virgin Mary in The Gaucho as being achieved with a penny sparkler burning behind her to create this celestial glow. Unfortunately, many film historians have picked up on this penny sparkler theory as fact in multiple biographies; but—as just seen—the facts are quite different. As recently as a 1996 review in The Village Voice, when The Gaucho was revived in a Douglas Fairbanks retrospective at Film Forum, Elliot Stein writes: "Roman candles are going off in her halo." Stein's review (available at Highbeam Research Library) categorized The Gaucho "pure gold" and a "revelation."
"It's his best, least hygienic film," Stein continues. "Fairbanks appears as an outlaw who frees a Lourdes-like shrine town in the Andes from the rule of a vile tyrant. The darkest of all his films, it's the only one to contain a whiff of eroticism. This gaucho is not just another adult boy scout—he's an alienated, chain-smoking, Byronic antihero. The leading lady is Lupe Vélez—the only zesty heroine of a Fairbanks film. This is the one Fairbanks picture in which you can imagine the leading couple getting it on. The art direction, glass shots, miniature work, and effects are drop-dead breathtaking. The dungeons in this film look like feature displays in Architectural Digest. The Gaucho climaxes with the best cattle stampede in movie history."
The first chapter of the Vance/Maietta volume on Fairbanks can be sampled in PDF format. Eventually, Brian Darr's informative essay for the SFSFF program will hopefully be added in its entirety to the festival's archive. Until then, I note Darr's research that Fairbanks "was moved to make the film about a healing shrine after visiting Lourdes, France, where, in 1858, St. Bernadette had reported visions of the Virgin Mary. He transposed his story to Argentina, subverting his screen persona by making his title character a bandit and an overt atheist."
Despite Vance's assertion that critical response to the film was "decidedly mixed", Darr—whose passion for animation rivals my own—writes of the film's audience reception: "The Gaucho premiered at Mann's Chinese Theatre in November 1927. It became a hit and earned twice its $700,000 production cost. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks chose the popular film to parody for the second-ever Mickey Mouse cartoon. As The Gallopin' Gaucho (1928), Mickey smokes a cigarette in the Fairbanks manner, rides a rhea bird up and down the Andes, tangos with Minnie, and throws his tail around like bolas. Disney repaid its debt to the star when the animated mouse appeared in the travelogue Around the World [in 80 minutes] with Douglas Fairbanks (1932)."
Along with what's gathered in External Reviews at IMDb, there's a page on The Gaucho at Dr. Macro's, from which I've gleaned most of the images for this entry. Thanks Dr. Macro!
Cross-published on Twitch.
With one cinephilic foot placed squarely in the San Francisco Bay Area and the other in Boise, Idaho, I'm feeling somewhat of a conduit today whereby the movies themselves—not geographical locations—prove where I truly am. As has probably always been the case and certainly continues through today, audiences worldwide constitute a broadened albeit dispersed community united in spectatorial delight. In this, there is no difference in desire; a desire that spans across the past century. There's no requirement to be roped into the regional when the global is at hand.
Filmbud Brian Darr's well-researched piece for Fandor (parts one and two) on Georges Méliès seems a perfect introduction to an upcoming event at Boise's The Flicks, which programmer Carole Skinner mentioned to me when we conversed last week. The Idaho Film Foundation (IFF) is hosting a Méliès Celebration, Sunday, March 4, 2012 from 3:00-5:00PM.
Interviews with some of contemporary cinema's most imaginative filmmakers attest to Méliès' enduring significance. The film will be introduced by Boise State University Assistant Professor of Modern Languages, Dr. Mariah Devereux Herbeck, who will lead a discussion and Q&A after the film. Tickets are $12 general admission and $9 for students in advance and at the door.
As interstitial coincidences go, perusing my in-flight magazine on my way to San Francisco I discovered a short write-up on the restoration of A Trip to the Moon. Two foundations spent a decade restoring the print, and then enlisted French electronic music pioneers Air (whose first album was entitled Moon Safari) to provide an original score. Air enjoyed the gig so much that they built a whole album from it, which they recently released along with the DVD of Méliès masterpiece. More on Air's involvement can be found at Fact, as well as an in-depth interview at The Guardian.
