Eight days in Bologna

www.cinetecadibologna.it

An outline of the Bologna festival of archive and restored films, Il Cinema Ritrovato, has been published. Promising “the most memorable eight days of 2008″, the festival takes place in Bologna, Italy, and runs Saturday 28 June to Saturday 5 July.

Bologna always offers a rich mix of films from past decades, both silent and sound, and the great pleasure of attending is being taken from, say, a programe of short films from the 1900s to Cinemascope features of the 1950s, back to 1930s musicals and on to silent features. Its wise eclectism is matched by an eye for the timely and the unusual, and it is deservedly recognised as being among the world’s leading festivals of archive film.

This year there are a number of silent strands, as described on the festival site:

The silent section opens with a series dedicated to films made exactly 100 years ago, curated by Mariann Lewinsky. 1908 will offer a panorama of fascinating themes, national productions, technological attractions (also with sound!), visions of the world and breaking news (from the London Olympic Games to the Messina earthquake) and cultural superproductions like Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei and L’assassinat du Duc de Guise, presented with Camille Saint-Saëns’ original music, during the final evening on Saturday July 5th, dedicated to the avant-gardes.

Emilio Ghione (1872-1930) is the silent star of our 2008 program. The creator of Za la mort and I topi grigi (1918, this year’s morning serial) was a hugely popular actor and director in his day. He was at home in almost every genre, yet he retained an original touch, creating heroes and anti-heroes that were strictly his own with decadent, Gothic elements combining cartoon-like directness and ironic, unexplained elements, as if he was moving through mystical imprints.

Gosfilmofond will have its 60th anniversary at the same time as Russian Cinema celebrates its 100th anniversary. It is thus apt to celebrate the life and work of Lev Kuleshov, one of the fathers of Soviet Cinema and its first great theoretician. Yet his work is little known with the exception of the captivating fun piece The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) or perhaps By the Law (1926), a harsh adaptation of Jack London. Thus our season will come as a big surprise to many, the testimony of a nuanced, intelligent director inventing a language that reflected everyday life along with the passion and history of the Soviet Union of his time as well as international realities. There are famous titles that most of us know only from books - The Death Ray (1925), The Gay Canary (1929) - and highlights like Gorizont (1932) or The Great Consoler (1933), and even later evidence that Kuleshov (and his actress wife Khokhlova) never lost enthusiasm and creativity.

With the section Irresistible forces: Comic Actresses and Suffragettes (1910-1915), Il Cinema Ritrovato will proceed with the exploration of the origin of comic cinema, this year through a feminine eye. Those are the years of the Suffragettes, characterized by women’s fight for their fundamental rights, as witnessed by the collection of actualities and newsreels preserved by the British Film Institute/National Archive. In this context, characters like Rosalie, Cunegonde, Lea, Gigetta and the wild sisters Tilly and Sally have an explosive and freedom-breaking impact.

While last year’s Chapliniana still echoes in our minds, this year we will launch an annual “Chaplin’s filiation” program with a series of films devoted to Monta Bell, Chaplin’s assistant on A Woman of Paris (1924) and a wonderful director in his own right, as our selection - Lady of the Night (1925), Pretty Ladies (1925), Upstage (1926) - proves beyond question. At the crossroad of a Sternberg retrospective, we will dedicate a dossier to The Seagull/Woman of the Sea (1926), one of the most famous “lost films” of all time. The film was shot by Sternberg and produced by Chaplin who did not like it and eventually refused to release it. Its intriguing story will be traced with images and rare documents gathered from many sources.

Other strands include Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, Warner films of the 1930s, films based on the work of Giovanni Guareschi (creator of Don Camillo), Cold War films on the atomic bomb, and a Cinemascope selection.

There are full details on the festival, its venues, booking etc., plus details of the Film Restoration Summer School on the site (in Italian and English). But look out also for the Archive section, which has PDFs on all past Il Cinema Ritrovatos, 1986-2007, plus an Excel spreadsheet listing every film title featured at the festival over those years - a really useful resource (just a shame the spreadsheet doesn’t include the name of the archive which supplied each print - for that you will have to cross-check via the individual programmes).

Retour de flamme

This short piece on the remarkable Lobster Films of Paris is doing the rounds. Here it is (taken from www.france24.com):

Frenchman Serge Bromberg, saviour of more than 100,000 reels of old films, this week marked the 15th anniversary of a world-touring show with a difference - where he accompanies rescued silent movies on the piano.

A twice yearly Paris event, Retour de Flamme (Return of the Flame) has played New York’s MoMA and travels to India next February before going to Italy and the US for shows in San Francisco and New York.

“I like to say I ‘restore’ the spectator,” he said in an interview. “I bring old movies up-to-date with a presentation and a specially-written musical score, to bring the films alive.

Bromberg’s company Lobster Films, set up two decades ago with fellow film addict Eric Lange, has saved from destruction movies dating as far back as 1895, including film’s first movie with sound - Charlie Chaplin’s first 1914 movie “Twenty Minutes of Love” - and the first movies shot in Palestine (1897) as well as the only Marx Brothers shot in colour.

In the first 50 years of cinema, films were recorded on nitrate stocks, which is inflammable and decays. As no-one had thought at the time of preserving film, much of movie history was lost.

“I pick up films all year, with 99 percent unviewable but there’s always one which is extraordinary and which I want to share,” said the 46-year-old film buff.

On DVD now is 1912 footage of the Titanic before it went down, and a 1931 burlesque titled Stolen Jools, featuring Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

“Fifty percent of the films shot before World War II have been lost,” he added.

Among recently saved treasures are 15 hours of rushes from a 1964 drama featuring the late Romy Schneider and directed by Henri-George Clouzot. The film was never completed and the rushes had been kept at home by Clouzot’s widow Ines.

Another of his 2007 finds is “Bardelys the magnificent” (1926) by King Vidor, starring John Gilbert.

So it’s true, Bardelys the Magnificent has been found, and of course it would be Lobster who found it. All power to them, and three cheers to all film archivists able to accompany their restorations of silent films on the piano. It ought to be a compulsory part of the job.

Nosferatu trailer

Eureka Video has released a YouTube trailer for its forthcoming DVD release of Nosferatu. The two-disc set comes with commentary track by Brad Stevens and R. Dixon Smith, and an hour-long German documentary on the film by Luciano Berriatúa. It’s a F.W. Murnau-Stiftung restoration complete with Hans Erdmann’s original score, performed by the Radio Symphony Orchestra Saarbrücken conducted by Berndt Heller. There’s also a 96-page booklet with articles by David Skal, Thomas Elsaesser, Gilberto Perez and Enno Patalas (former director of the Münchner Stadtmuseum/Filmmuseum, where he was responsible for the restoration of many German classics, including Nosferatu). The Region 2 DVD is released on 19 November. Kino Video will be releasing the Region 1 version in the USA. The trailer looks fantastic - we are starting to get spoiled with deluxe DVD presentations of silent classics.

Update: Do take a look at the Kino Video entry for the film, which includes a Flash video on the digital restoration of the film, one of the DVD extras.

Journal of Film Preservation

Journal of Film Preservation, from www.fiafnet.org

FIAF, the International Federation of Film Archives, “brings together institutions dedicated to rescuing films both as cultural heritage and as historical documents”. You can find details of the 120 or so institutions from sixty-five countries which belong to FIAF on its multilingual site, as well as standards documentation, news, projects and information on FIAF’s various specialised commissions.

The site also has details of FIAF publications, which include its Journal of Film Preservation. The journal covers theoretical and technical aspects of moving image archival activities, with plenty of information on silent film, which has always been a favoured area of the national film archives. It’s a very good publication, which is not much known about outside the film archiving profession. The journal is published twice a year, and one year after publication is made freely available on the FIAF site.

So there are currently twenty issues of the journal, from 1995 onwards, which can be downloaded from the site in PDF format. Here’s a guide to some of the articles worth looking out for:

• No. 52 (Apr 1996) - Brian Taves on the work on undersea cinematography pioneer James Ernest Williamson, who made Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1916
• No. 53 (Nov 1996) - Luke McKernan (yours truly) on programming a season of Victorian cinema (i.e. film to 1901) at the National Film Theatre
• No. 54 (Apr 1997) - Richard Brown on the copyright records for early British films found in the then Public Record Office (now The National Archives)
• No. 60/61 (Jul 2000) - Alfonso del Amo on the history of celluloid
• No. 62 (Apr 2001) - Brian Taves on Michael (Jules) Verne, who both wrote novels in his famous father’s name, and then proceeded to film them
• No. 64 (Apr 2002) - Sarah Ziebell Mann on the creation of the Treasures from the Film Archives database of early silent short fiction films around the world
• No. 65 (Dec 2002) - Yoshiro Irie on the question of film speeds of Japanese silent films
• No. 69 (May 2005) - Thomas C. Christensen on efforts to recover and restore the films of Asta Nielsen
• No. 70 (Nov 2005) - Tiago Baptista on restoring the early surgical films of Eugène-Louis Doyen
• No. 72 (Nov 2006) - Steven Higgins on avant garde cinema of the 1920s and 1930s

And much, much more. A fair bit of it is rather more technical than the general reader requires, but most articles combine the practical with the historical in engrossing fashion, and the illustrations are excellent (and rare). The Bioscope will be following up some of the themes above in future posts.

Treasures III

The National Film Preservation Fund has announced the third in its Treasures series of rare silent and early sound films from American archives. The four-DVD set will be published in October by Image Entertainment. For number three in this stunning series, the theme is social issues. Here’s the press release:

Cecil B. De Mille’s sensational reformatory exposé, The Godless Girl; Redskin in two-color Technicolor; Lois Weber’s anti-abortion drama Where Are My Children?; The Soul of Youth by William Desmond Taylor; and dozens of rare newsreels, cartoons, serials, documentaries, and charitable appeals are showcased in the National Film Preservation Foundation upcoming four-DVD box set, Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934. Slated for release by Image Entertainment on October 16, Treasures III (retail price $89.99) introduces to DVD 48 films from the decades when virtually no issue was too controversial to bring to the screen.

“In film’s first decades, activists from every political stripe used movies to advance their agenda,” said Martin Scorsese, who serves on the NFPF Board of Directors. “These films are an important and fascinating glimpse of history. They changed America and still inspire today.”

Prohibition, birth control, unions, TB, atheism, the vote for women, worker safety, organized crime, loan sharking, race relations, juvenile justice, homelessness, police corruption, immigration—these issues and more are brought to life in the new 12-1/4 hour set. In addition to the four features, the line up includes the first Mafia movie, a 1913 traffic safety film, management’s version of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, temperance and suffragette spoofs, A Call for Help from Sing Sing!, an action-packed Hazards of Helen episode, a patriotic “striptease” cartoon for war bonds, the earliest surviving union film, and a medley of prohibition newsreels kicked off by Capital Stirred by Biggest Hooch Raid.

The motion pictures are drawn from the preservation work of the nation’s foremost early film archives: George Eastman House, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Archives, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. None of the works has been available before in high-quality video.

Treasures III is playable worldwide and has many special features for DVD audiences:

• Newly recorded music contributed by more than 65 musicians and composers
• Audio commentary by 20 experts
• 200-page illustrated book with essays about the films and music
• More than 600 interactive screens
• 4 postcards from the films

The third in the award-winning Treasures series, the new set reunites the curatorial and technical team from the NFPF’s earlier DVD anthologies. The project is made possible through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. Net proceeds will support further film preservation. A four-page brochure with the full contents list can be downloaded from the NFPF Web site: www.filmpreservation.org/T3_brochure.pdf.

Program 1: The City Reformed

The Black Hand (1906, 11 min.)
Earliest surviving Mafia film.
How They Rob Men in Chicago (1900, 25 sec.)
Police corruption Chicago-style.
The Voice of the Violin (1909, 16 min.)
A terrorist plot is foiled by the power of music.
The Usurer’s Grip (1912, 15 min.)
Melodrama arguing for consumer credit co-operatives.
From the Submerged (1912, 11 min.)
Drama about homelessness and “slumming parties”
Hope—A Red Cross Seal Story (1912, 14 min.)
A small town mobilizes to fight TB
The Cost of Carelessness (1913, 13 min.)
Traffic safety film for Brooklyn school children.
Lights and Shadows in a City of a Million (1920, 7 min.)
Charitable plea for the Detroit Community Fund.
6,000,000 American Children…Are Not in School (1922, 2 min.)
Newsreel story inspired by census data.
The Soul of Youth (1920, 80 min.), with excerpts from Saved by the Juvenile Court (1913, 4 min.)
William Desmond Taylor’s feature about an orphan reclaimed through the juvenile court of Judge Ben Lindsey with excerpts from the political campaign film Saved by the Juvenile Court (1913. 4 min.)
A Call for Help from Sing Sing! (1934, 3 min.)
Warden Lawes speaks out for wayward teens.

Program 2: New Women

The Kansas Saloon Smashers (1901, 1 min.)
Carrie Nation swings her axe.
Why Mr. Nation Wants a Divorce (1901, 2 min.)
Role-reversal temperance spoof.
Trial Marriages (1907, 12 min.)
Male fantasy inspired by a feminist’s proposal.
Manhattan Trade School for Girls (1911, 16 min.)
Profile of the celebrated progressive school for impoverished girls.
The Strong Arm Squad of the Future (ca. 1912, 1 min.)
Anti-suffragette cartoon.
A Lively Affair (ca. 1912, 7 min.)
Comedy with poker-playing women and child-rearing men.
A Suffragette in Spite of Himself (1912, 8 min.)
Boys’ prank results in an unwitting crusader.
On to Washington (1913, 80 sec.)
News coverage of the historic suffragette march.
Hazards of Helen: Episode 13 (1915, 13 min.)
Helen thwarts robbers and overcomes workplace discrimination.
Where Are My Children? (1916, 65 min.)
Provocative anti-abortion drama by Lois Weber.
The Courage of the Commonplace (1913, 13 min.)
A young farm woman dreams of a better life.
Poor Mrs. Jones! (1926, 46 min.)
Why wives should stay on the farm.
Offers Herself as Bride for $10,000 (1931, 2 min.)
Novel approach to surviving the Depression.

Program 3: Toil and Tyranny

Uncle Sam and the Bolsheviki-I.W.W. Rat (ca. 1919, 40 sec.)
Anti-union cartoon from the Ford Motor Company.
The Crime of Carelessness (1912, 14 min.)
Management’s version of the Triangle Factory fire.
Who Pays?, Episode 12 (1915, 35 min.)
A lumberyard strike brings deadly consequences.
Surviving reel from Labor’s Reward (1925, 13 min.)
The American Federation of Labor’s argument for “buying union.”
Listen to Some Words of Wisdom (1930, 2 min.)
Why personal thrift feeds the Depression.
The Godless Girl (1928, 128 min.)
Cecil B. DeMille’s sensational exposé of juvenile reformatories.

Program 4: Americans in the Making

Emigrants Landing at Ellis Island (1903, 2 min.)
Actuality footage from July 9, 1903.
An American in the Making (1913, 15 min)
U.S. Steel film promoting immigration and industrial safety.
Ramona: A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian (1910, 16 min.)
Helen Hunt Jackson’s classic about racial conflict in early California, retold by D.W. Griffith and starring Mary Pickford.
Redskin (1929, 82 min.)
Racial tolerance epic, shot in 2-color Technicolor at Acoma Pueblo and Canyon de Chelly.
The United Snakes of America (ca. 1917, 80 sec.)
World War I cartoon assailing homefront dissenters.
Uncle Sam Donates for Liberty Bonds (1918, 75 sec.)
Patriotic “striptease” cartoon.
100% American (1918, 14 min.)
Mary Pickford buys war bonds and supports the troops.
Bud’s Recruit (1918, 26 min.)
Brothers learn to serve their country in King Vidor’s earliest surviving film.
The Reawakening (1919, 10 min.)
Documentary about helping disabled veterans to build new lives.
Eight Prohibition Newsreels (1923-33, 13 min.)
From Capital Stirred by Biggest Hooch Raid to Repeal Brings Wet Flood!

The National Film Preservation Foundation, the nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage, is the charitable affiliate of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. Since starting operations in 1997, the NFPF has helped save more than 1,100 films at archives, libraries and museums across 41 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia.

The NFPF website has details of Treasures volumes I and II, with some video clips, and a Treasures IV on the avant garde 1945-1985 will be available next year.

Nine out of Ten

On May 21st, at the Cannes Film Festival, Martin Scorsese announced the forming of a World Cinema Foundation to restore neglected treasures of world cinema. The Foundation builds on the Film Foundation, which Scorsese established in 1990, with such luminaries as Sydney Pollack, Woody Allen, George Lucas, Clint Eastwood and Francis Ford Coppola. The Foundation has been responsible for establishing funds to save several key films, but as Scorsese pointed out: “90 percent of American silent movies have been lost, as have half of all U.S. movies made before 1950″.

It’s a startling figure - indeed higher than the usual figure of 80% of all silent films being lost that is usually quoted (the Library of Congress gives this figure for American silents). In truth, it is a very difficult figure to determine, not least with the variable quality of national filmographies, nor does the figure includes non-fiction films (as the Film Foundation site admits, “As for shorts, documentaries, newsreels, and other independently produced, ‘orphan’ films, there is simply no way of knowing how many have been lost”). But you only have to consider that less than 4% of all Japanese films made before 1945 are considered lost, and maybe 90% for silents worldwide is a fair figure.

Of course, very few have seen even a small percentage of the 10% that survives, not least because much of it has not been restored or made available to view. The profileration of silent DVDs that we’re so fortunate to have access to can blind us to the substantial number of films that we haven’t had the chance to see. There also needs to be an element of realism here. Not every silent film was a masterpiece. Every ‘lost’ silent film which gets put back on the screen seems to be hailed as being an inevitable work of art, but silent movies were much the same as movies today - a few gems, a lot of proficiency, and a large amount of dross.

But the overall lesson must be one of shame at how we can allow a medium, the original experience of which is within the memory of some still living, to be disposed of so easily. And here we are in 2007, as cavalier as ever, now failing to get to grips with the preservation of digital media. What percentage of all emails has been preserved? What will happen to the YouTube ‘archive’? Where will all these blogs be in ten years time?

Here’s a report from the International Herald Tribune. Amusingly, several news reports have misquoted Scorsese and stated that “all American films made before 1950 are gone“. One or two dozy entertainment editors out there…

William S. Hart: Star of the West

There’s a film season started at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, on the films of the great star of the silent Western, William S. Hart, whose chilly vision of the West has been compared in recent times to that of Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood. The season runs 21 April-6 May, and features Hell’s Hinges (1916), The Taking of Luke McVane (1915), The Captive God (1916), ‘Bad Buck’ of Santa Ynez (1915), The Bargain (1914, a new Library of Congress restoration), The Return of Draw Egan (1916), The Narrow Trail (1917), Branding Broadway (1918), Wagon Tracks (1919), The Toll Gate (1920), The Testing Block (1920), The Whistle (1921) and his masterpiece Tumbleweeds (1925), preceded by Hart’s spoken introduction to the 1939 re-issue.

Award for Kevin Brownlow

The San Francisco International Film Festival is to present Kevin Brownlow with the Mel Novikoff Award. The award, named after the pioneering San Francisco film exhibitor (1922–1987), is bestowed annually on an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema. The award will be presented to Brownlow on Saturday 28 April at the Castro Theatre, together with a screening of his restoration of The Man in the Iron Mask (1929 d. Allan Dwan), starring Douglas Fairbanks.

The festival website has a fine tribute to Brownlow, ‘The Silent Spokesman’, giving an overview of his achievements in the promotion of the art of silent film, written by Dennis Doros of Milestone Films.