Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been slowly sampling one of the most entertaining–and important–DVD releases of the year, the National Film Preservation Foundation‘s More Treasures From the American Film Archives box set of (mostly) silent films from 1894 to 1931. (A previous collection was released in 2000.) It’s 50 films totaling over nine hours of material spread out over three discs, and each film contains a very informative, multi-screen essay, a new score, and typically an audio commentary by one of the 17 participating critics, historians, and preservationists.

While a number of silent features retain their popularity today, a Chaplin here or a Keaton there, the history of American cinema previous to sound (and previous to television) was startling in its diversity and experimentation, and the NFPF has taken great pains to reflect those qualities in its new collection. Filmmaking was initially based in New York and included nickelodeon reels, experiments in sound and color, animation, actualities (later called documentaries), industrial films, public service announcements, advertisements (often projected on the outside of downtown buildings), newsreels, movies for amusement rides, flip-card “mutoscope” attractions, and political films. All of these and more have been included in this collection and browsing through it has delivered one unexpected and delightful joy after another.

Historic art always offers insight into a previous age, but movies in particular seem to suspend time and offer glimpses of the past with immediacy and clarity. It is shocking to learn, then, that 80% of all the Hollywood features produced in the ’20s no longer survive; only 10% remain from the ’10s. The figures for non-Hollywood American films are even worse, although exact statistics are impossible to calculate because so many films were being made for a variety of venues and audiences. This DVD collection ends poignantly with a series of trailers (so called because they followed the features) for films which have simply vanished from the earth.

Part of the reason film as an art form has had such difficulty surviving even one century is its long identification with immediate profits and its economic depreciation after initial exhibitions, as well as its material fragility. Movies scratch and tear, fade and rot; they are not immortal. Prior to 1950, the film base was highly flammable and many films were actively melted down in order to extract their silver content.

The NFPF has culled this release from the main repositories of historic films in the US: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the George Eastman House, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Here are some highlights:

ïErnst Lubitsch’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, a film that transforms the playwright’s witty repartee into a refined visual satire on the upper class with its use of carefully framed compositions, expert timing, and a perfect illustration of the flawed points of view of its central characters. Lubitsch was one of Hollywood’s first German emigrÈs and this film, along with several others, helped turn Hollywood into a respected entertainment behemoth.

ïThe Suburbanite (1904), another extremely accomplished satire made 20 years before Lubitsch’s masterpiece. Its subject is the newly-forming middle class families moving to New Jersey on account of the growing railroad commute. A horse-and-buggy “moving van” arrives at a house and proceeds to destroy every piece of furniture the workers attempt to carry into the new home, resulting in a series of problems that culminate in the house cook having a nervous breakdown and being arrested. Its sarcasm and narrative is perfectly wrought, astonishingly so for such an early picture.

ïD.W. Griffith’s The Country Doctor (1909) illustrates his mastery of the new visual concept of crosscutting as well as his attention to working class life (despite his deserved reputation as a racist) when a doctor must decide between attending a neighbor’s sick child or his own.

ïEarly Advertising Films offers a fascinating look at early corporate ads, including those for Edison’s Admiral Cigarettes, an electric refrigerator (ice boxes were still in wide use in ’26), and Edison’s phonograph (which was conceived as a business tool for accurate secretarial dictation).

ïRennard Strickland’s (professor of law and history at the University of Oregon) commentary on Thomas Ince’s early Western feature, The Invaders (1912), which accurately describes the relationship between American Indians and the US government in the early 20th century and suggests that warfare between them was as recent to Ince’s viewers as the Vietnam war is to today’s.

ïAshley Miller’s 1912 film, Children Who Labor; a radical filmmaker (he later turned down the lucrative offer to direct the sequel to Birth of a Nation on account of his opposition to the rightwing source novel) whose film illustrates the travails of American child labor (more than 18% of kids 10-14 were employed by the factories) and creates a moving melodrama about social reform.

ïThere It Is, Charley Bowers’ absurd combination of stop motion, live action, and animation to depict a house haunted by a mysterious mustached man who defies gravity and lays playful siege to frightened inhabitants before a member of Scotland Yard and his sidekick (a flea in a matchbox) arrive to wreak further havoc. It’s endlessly inventive and impressively surreal.

ïJay Leyda’s A Bronx Morning (1931), an avant-garde montage of daily life in New York, highly influenced by the work of the Soviet formalists.

ïEdwin S. Porter’s famed Life of an American Fireman (1903), which gives the lie to the oft-repeated claim that his film established the principles of editing (it’s filmed largely in master shots) but nevertheless impressively assembles a narrative from a combination of interior and exterior shots and a visual connection of incidents.

ïDave Fleischer’s (the brother of Max) Inklings, animated drawings that begin with a caricature and morph into opposite extremes, skinny people into fat people, children into adults.

ïBlack anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s 16mm Fieldwork Footage, containing her documentary footage of black culture in the south of Florida, recording children’s games, life at a logging camp, and perhaps most amazingly, Cudjo Lewis, who was believed to have been the only surviving ex-slave who had been brought to America on a slave ship. Her footage is sensitive and beautifully captured, and became foundational research for her subsequent novels and folk tales.

These pieces only skim the surface of an amazingly rich collection of films.

Last week, It’s All True (1993), a documentary about Orson Welles’ “failed” 1942 documentary of the same name, was released on DVD. On the heels of filming his second feature, The Magnificent Ambersons, 26-year-old Welles was asked by the State Department to film a Technicolor documentary in South America in the hopes of strengthening international relations and deflecting potential Nazi influence in the Southern Hemisphere. (“It was never meant to be a commercial venture,” Welles’ co-producer Richard Wilson states, “more a cultural exchange.”) Welles’ studio, RKO, promised to send him editing equipment so he could finish Ambersons in Rio de Janeiro, but that film became one of the most famous lost films in history when RKO simply decided to re-edit the picture in his absence, re-shoot key scenes, and destroy the original negative. Welles’ documentary didn’t fare any better–when RKO underwent studio reorganization, replacing its president, the new regime cancelled his budget midway through the shoot. (In the newer film’s prologue, Welles recounts the story to the camera and wryly notes, “That sort of thing happens with South American governments but it also happens with film studios.”)

Wilson, along with Welles scholars Bill Krohn and Myron Meisel, were the key creative forces behind It’s All True, making their documentary from Welles’ footage that was discovered in Paramount’s vaults in the early ’90s. (One is always amazed to hear of such finds, as it further solidifies the image of film studio archives as dark, dank dungeons of forgotten art rather than the organized, creative holdings they should be.) They have supplemented the footage with interviews with production survivors and their relatives, as well as snippets of Welles himself.

Welles planned to make three short films in total, My Friend Bonito in Mexico (actually directed by Norman Foster), and The Story of Samba and Four Men On a Raft in Rio. The latter was nearly completed by Welles, re-creating a dramatic, 1,650-mile sea voyage by poor fisherman making a political protest to the government of Brazil demanding economic justice. Krohn, Meisel, and Wilson assemble Welles’ silent footage into a cohesive piece, augmenting it with ambient sound effects and music.

And what footage it is. Replete with Welles’ trademark low angles and deep-focus compositions, but set in beautiful exterior locations rather than studio sets, the film at once seems like a visually dynamic conflation of a Robert J. Flaherty film (the father of the documentary genre actually contributed the story for My Friend Bonito) and a proto-neorealist fable comprised of photogenic locals and working class heroics.

Welles is so often described as a “genius” that it’s easy to forget the propensity he had for unabashed eye candy: a montage of workmen sawing and hammering rafts together on a windy beach shaded by swaying palms; sailboats clustered on glittering waves; a stream of mourners crossing the horizon in a funeral procession; and the weary and beautiful faces of Brazil’s villagers, many of whom had never seen a movie before–all shot in high-contrast, carefully-framed black-and-white.

“The Blessing of the Animals” segment of the Mexican chapter, which was purportedly personally overseen by Welles, is almost absurdly rousing in its depiction of villagers rounding up sheep, cows, chickens, and various fauna to the sounds of a ringing church bell and the ritualistic pronouncements of the village priest. As sheep leap through the air and the high camera angles cause the streams of people and animals to resemble the comprehensive sweep of a Brueghel painting, Jorge Arriaga’s quasi-Western-themed music gracefully underscores the visual excitement.

But Four Men on a Raft is the high point of It’s All True, incorporating some of the most beautiful seaside imagery since Murnau’s Tabu with sensitive and well-mixed sound effects and a score that oscillates between samba-inspired rhythms and lyrical orchestral arrangements. A wordless film enveloped in sound, the filmmakers’ breath new life into Welles’ almost-lost compositions; it’s a deeply felt and deeply appreciated preservation–and expansion–of film history.