Orphaned films collections

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EARLY FILM 'TREASURES'
Mick LaSalle
Sunday, September 5, 2004
On Tuesday, the National Film Preservation Foundation will release an amazing three-DVD collection of 50 rare films from American film archives. Some are features, some are shorts and some are fragments. None of the films have ever been available on home video. Few have ever been seen outside a library or archive. Some have barely been seen by anyone for 100 years.
The set is called "More Treasures From American Film Archives, 1894-1931, " and the word "treasures" is no exaggeration. This is a generous 9 1/2 hours of rare and wonderful films, meticulously transferred to DVD. The silent films are given tasteful and inspired musical accompaniment. Most of the films come with a scholarly commentary. A 186-page booklet of program notes comes with the set, the text of which is also included on the DVDs, in case you need to refer to it.
This is a collection one could get lost in for days and savor for years. The set retails at $79.95, but the last time I checked Amazon. com, it was going for considerably less and, in any case, it's not a bad deal. Just the feature films might go for almost that much, if sold separately: Thomas Ince's 1912 Western, "The Invaders" (41 minutes); "Gretchen the Greenhorn" (1916), which played several years ago at the Silent Film Festival; the Rin-Tin-Tin movie "Clash of the Wolves" (1925); and Ernst Lubitsch's "Lady Windermere's Fan" (1925). But here you get 46 movies in addition to that -- in fact more, because many of the shorter films are bundled together.
I particularly enjoyed the "actualities," which is what they used to call nonfiction films that do nothing but capture a slice of life. "What Happened on 23rd Street" (1901) shows people walking by in the New York of 103 years ago. "At the Foot of the Flatiron Building" (1903) is a street-life scene of people holding onto their hats on a windy day -- and they all wore hats. "New York City Ghetto Fishmarket" is just a slow pan of a fish market in a Jewish neighborhood, filmed on the morning of May 1, 1903. It's impossible to take in all the details in just one viewing. The temptation is to keep playing each film over and over.
But there's so much more to see. For example, the De Forest Phonofilms from 1923 and 1924. These are crisply made sound films, created years before sound was adopted by Hollywood. Broadway comedian Eddie Cantor tells jokes and sings for seven minutes -- seven minutes 80 years ago -- and he's still funny. Then President Calvin Coolidge is shown outside the White House making a four-minute speech about the need to cut taxes. To hear Coolidge is to hear an old, high-flown tradition of oratory that would soon vanish with radio and the naturalistic style of Franklin Roosevelt. Mussolini appears in a silent newsreel (1926), and George Bernard Shaw, twinkly and hale at 72, talks for five minutes straight in a sound newsreel from 1928. Thomas Edison is shown in his laboratory. The legendary sharpshooter Annie Oakley is the subject of a very brief film from 1894. She is shown shooting at clay pigeons -- and missing! Joseph Jefferson, an actor who achieved renown playing Rip Van Winkle onstage for decades, appears in excerpts from his stage performance, filmed in 1896. It's a glimpse of what American theater was like more than 100 years ago.
The practice of products being advertised in movie theaters, seemingly a modern annoyance, apparently has a historic pedigree. The set includes advertising shorts for a number of products from 1897 to 1926. Industrial films, originally meant to instruct workers or promote a company's name in the business world, today reveal the working conditions of 100 years ago. The set includes a six-minute short called "Westinghouse Works" (1904), which is a tour through the company's Pittsburgh factory.
Most people know that the majority of silent features have been lost to neglect and nitrate degeneration. But few people are aware that there are trailers that still exist for these lost films. The set includes six of these trailers, including ones for "The Great Gatsby" (1926), with Warner Baxter; "The American Venus" (1926), with Esther Ralston; and "The Patriot" (1928), a Lubitsch film starring Emil Jannings. As the scholars point out, film history is often merely the history of the movies that can be seen. But "The Patriot" has the look of a film that may have been important. We'll never know. Narrative dramatic films are featured, including a 1909 D.W. Griffith film, "The Country Doctor," which stars a very young Mary Pickford and Florence Lawrence, the American cinema's first movie star. Director Alice Guy Blache is represented by a subtle and sweet short, "Falling Leaves" (1912), about a little girl whose sister is suffering from consumption. The film is extraordinary for the effect the director is able to get with a relatively static camera. The compositions are beautiful, and always full of depth and interest.
I've used up almost all my space and have only scratched the surface. I haven't mentioned the first experiments in color photography (as early as 1916), the earliest Martha Graham dance ever captured on film (1926), Zora Neale Hurston's footage of the rural South in 1928, Jay Leyda's slice of New York life in "A Bronx Morning" (1931) or sound pioneer Theodore Case's film of the vaudeville act "Gus Visser and His Singing Duck" (1925). What also can't quite be conveyed is the effect of seeing all this humanity and self-assertion, human striving and artistry, captured on film. It's extraordinary. It's not a time machine, but it's as close as we can get.
E-mail Chronicle Movie Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle. com.

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Topic - Orphaned films collections - LWR 19:36:50 09/08/04 (0)

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