City Lights: Chaplin Asserts the Art of Silence

The San Francisco Symphony is taking a lighter turn for the Thanksgiving holiday, presenting guest conductor David Robertson leading the orchestra in a performance of Charlie Chaplin’s score to his 1931 film City Lights.

Robertson has a reputation for eclecticism, bringing a diverse range of interests to his position as conductor of the St. Louis Symphony. His talent and varied interests have been credited for the revitalization of the orchestra after a troubled few years that featured a brush with bankruptcy and dissolution, the untimely death of conductor Hans Von and a labor dispute that resulted in a work stoppage in 2005.

Robertson, a relatively young conductor at the age of 47, is proving to be something of a hot commodity, a much sought-after guest conductor who has brought his expansive repertoire—from the great international masters to the lowly slapstick comedians of early Hollywood—to a series of concerts around the country.

Charlie Chaplin is not often thought of as a music man, but Robertson has long been a champion of the comedian’s musical talents, conducting the St. Louis Symphony in presentations of several of Chaplin’s scores, including The Idle Class, City Lights and The Kid. As in the case of the San Francisco concerts, the scores are usually performed as accompaniment to the films themselves. In St. Louis, they’ve even sold popcorn in the lobby.

City Lights is perhaps Chaplin’s best feature film, with one of the most moving and poignant closing shots ever filmed. But what gets lost in the haze of hagiography is that City Lights was a daring and controversial project. The movies had begun to talk, quickly banishing the silent filmmakers to the ash heap of cultural irrelevance. Many filmmakers made the shift to sound willingly, eager to explore the possibilities of what was essentially a new art form. Others, like Chaplin, went begrudgingly.

But his was a unique case. As an independent producer, he had no studio bosses to force the change upon him. And as one of the most successful and beloved of screen icons, he had the clout and the means to stand his ground and produce whatever sort of picture he wanted. So he opted to remain silent.

This was not simply a case of stubbornness however, nor of vanity, though Chaplin possessed no shortage of either. Rather, this was a case of retaining the integrity of the character he had nurtured for more than 15 years, the beloved Tramp who had made him famous the world over. For the Tramp was an inherently silent character, and one that had international appeal; to give him a voice—and, perhaps most damaging, a particular language—would limit his archetypal quality.

“A good silent picture had universal appeal both to the intellectual and the rank and file,” Chaplin wrote in his autobiography. “Now it was all to be lost.”

So Chaplin set out to prove that silence was an art form rather than an outdated commodity, and he succeeded beyond all expectations. But still there is more to the story, more to the range and depth of Chaplin’s accomplishment. The advent of sound meant that for the first time Chaplin could have absolute control over the scoring of his film. In the silent era, films were often sent to theaters along with complete scores, or at least cue sheets so that each theater’s house musicians could accompany the film with appropriate music. Chaplin had always been involved in compiling these cue sheets, but the nature of the operation limited his influence. The new technology allowed Chaplin to compose his own score and oversee its recording, thus filling the only remaining gap in his auteurist resume.

The music, however, may not be quite what you’d expect from silent comedy. It has none of the clichéd bumps and whistles that pedestrian musicians so often use to accompany visual comedy. Again from Chaplin’s autobiography:

I tried to compose elegant and romantic music to frame my comedies in contrast to the tramp character, for elegant music gave my comedies an emotional dimension. Musical arrangers rarely understood this. They wanted the music to be funny. But I would explain that I wanted no competition, I wanted the music to be a counterpoint of grace and charm, to express sentiment, without which, as Hazlitt says, a work of art is incomplete.

Chaplin scored all of his future films as well, and even went back and composed and recorded scores for many of his earlier films. And, as per his estate, the films must be screened with those scores. Thus modern audiences who wish to see Chaplin on the big screen are often cheated of one of the essential pleasures of silent film: live musical accompaniment.

David Robertson and the San Francisco Symphony however are correcting that flaw and providing just such an opportunity.

City Lights

Guest conductor David Robertson will lead the San Francisco Symphony in a performance of Charlie Chaplin’s score for his 1931 classic City Lights at 8 p.m. Nov. 22, 24 and 25. The performance will accompany a screening of the film. The concert will be preceded by an onstage conversation between Robertson and San Francisco Silent Film Festival Artistic Director Stephen Salmons at 7 p.m. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. (415) 864-6000. www.sfsymphony.org.

The Great Chase: Buster Keaton's The General

In 1998, amid an orgy of end-of-the-millenium top 100 lists, the American Film Institute released its list of the 100 best American films, a list that included three Charlie Chaplin movies but inexplicably no Buster Keaton films, despite the fact that several of his works, most notably The General (1926), rank among the silent era’s best and frequently hover near the top of many critics’ lists of the best films ever made.

But this has been Keaton’s lot in life, both during his career and since his death: to toil away in the shadow of the most famous comedian who ever lived. Though a late-career rediscovery of his work saw Keaton hailed as a cinematic genius, even Chaplin’s superior as a director, Keaton still retains his underdog status.

Pacific Film Archive will show The General and One Week (1921), Keaton’s first independent film, as the first installments in a new series: “Movie Matinees For All Ages.” The series debuts at 2 p.m. Saturday with Keaton and will be followed over the next couple of Saturdays with the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers (1932) and Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939).

The General is essentially one big chase sequence, brilliantly constructed and expanded to feature length. The story, based on a true incident from the Civil War, concerns a Southern train stolen by Northern soldiers, who spirit the engine back into Northern territory, burning bridges and destroying telegraph wires as they go. Buster, as Johnnie Grey, is the General’s engineer, and sets out to recapture his beloved locomotive. Along the way, Keaton stages a series of beautifully choreographed and increasingly dangerous stunts until he arrives in enemy territory, rescues his train—and, almost by accident, his girl—and then heads back to Southern territory while hounded by Northern soldiers. Thus the chase folds back on itself, like an arc that delivers Keaton back where he began—the “Keaton Curve,” as critic Walter Kerr put it—with gags and stunts from the first half now expanded upon in the second.

The General and Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) are unique among screen comedies in that they combine two seemingly incongruous genres: the comedy and the epic. Such a pairing had never been attempted before, as the grand scale of the epic seemed at odds with the smaller, more personal nature of character-based comedy. But whereas Chaplin’s film only contained a few outdoor shots in the early scenes before retreating to the comfort of studio sets, Keaton preferred to shoot on location; few of his comedies take place in studio sets. And though location shooting and period costumes were nothing new in Keaton’s work, The General dwarfs his previous efforts in scale and detail. Many critics consider it the most convincing celluloid recreation of the Civil War, the imagery recalling Matthew Brady’s photographs from the period.

Keaton instructed his crew to make it “so authentic it hurts” and carefully replicated the trains, uniforms, styles and terrain of the era. There were no special effects; Keaton’s desire for authenticity extended to every shot, culminating in the dramatic scene in which a train crashes through a burning bridge as scores of Northern soldiers pour over the hillside to converge on the Southern army’s front lines.

Critical reception was mixed. Some thought it a solid picture while others considered it Keaton’s weakest effort, taking offense at the notion of making light of the Civil War. Ultimately the considerable expense of the production caused Joseph Schenk, Keaton’s producer, to intervene with the usually autonomous director-star, requiring that his next feature be decidedly less extravagant. Keaton dutifully followed up with College (1927), one of his most restrained efforts, before embarking on the more elaborate Steamboat Bill, Jr (1928). It was while making Steamboat that Keaton learned that Schenk had sold his contract to MGM, bringing an end to Keaton’s independent career.

Under MGM, Keaton struggled to keep control over his work but quickly became subsumed by the studio system after his first feature, The Cameraman (1928). Thus Keaton, like Erich von Stroheim before him and Orson Welles after him, became something of a victim of his own success as the expense of and lack of contemporary public appreciation for his greatest achievement ultimately undermined his career.

PFA’s screening of The General will be preceded by One Week, the first two-reeler Keaton released as an independent artist after his apprenticeship with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. One Week was hailed as the year’s best comedy upon its release, establishing Keaton as one of cinema’s most innovative artists. The film is an excellent introduction to Keaton’s work as it features many of the characteristics that would become his hallmarks: a fascination with machinery, a semi-surrealist perspective, trains, and of course, the Keaton Curve, as the efforts of Buster and his bride to construct a pre-fabricated house eventually leave them homeless once again.

The Chaplin Mutuals: Evolution of an Artist

Even today, 30 years after his death and nearly 100 years since he first stepped before a motion picture camera, Charlie Chaplin is still one of the most recognizable people in the world. The dandified Tramp, with his brush mustache, ill-fitting clothes, wicker cane and derby hat, is an iconic figure, but one whose familiarity has to some extent undermined his art. Chaplin today has become something of a two-dimensional figure, a static icon that means little to those born in the decades since his heyday; he exists as a fully formed entity, a known quantity, and is therefore just as easily ignored, an image from the past that no longer requires our attention. 

A new four-disc 90th anniversary edition DVD set of the 12 films Chaplin made for the Mutual Film Corporation has recently been released by Image Entertainment, featuring new restorations, complete with previously missing footage, and brand new scores by Carl Davis. Image released these films on DVD about 10 years ago, but this new set, in addition to superior image quality, has many other features that distinguish it, the best of which is the arrangement of the films in chronological order, providing the viewer with a glimpse of the arc of Chaplin’s art at a crucial stage in his development. 

The image of the Tramp is so ingrained in our consciousness that it is hard to imagine that he had to be invented, and that film comedy itself had to be invented. But that’s essentially what Chaplin did, and he did it, for the most part, single-handedly. He took the crude, knockabout, ensemble comedy of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios and zeroed in on character and personality, forging a strong individual identity as well as a unique bond with his audience. 

Once Chaplin broke away from Keystone he went to work for the Essanay company here in the East Bay. (The studio, in what was once known as Niles, near Fremont, is now a museum that offers screenings of silent films every Saturday night.) He made 14 short films for Essanay, firmly establishing himself as the most popular performer in the movies. 

But it is in the next group of films, made for the Mutual Corporation, where Chaplin finally realized his potential. The Mutual films represent the first blossoming of his comic genius. He was already enormously famous, the first international superstar, and his comic exploits had made him something of a populist hero. But it is the Mutual series that truly endeared him to his fans, for it is in these 12 two-reelers that he delved deeper into the nature of the tramp character: his fastidious habits, his contempt for authority, his longing for beauty and love, his artistic temperment. 

With films such as Easy Street and The Immigrant, Chaplin depicted the poverty and strife of his childhood while taking his first steps toward a more rounded cinematic ouvre with forays into social commentary. 

Later, of course, Chaplin would more completely incorporate drama and commentary into his work, drawing complaints from fans and critics alike that Chaplin was abandoning his comedic roots in the pretentious pursuit of Art. But in the Mutual films, the Tramp retains the rambunctious, anarchic, irrepressible humor that Chaplin’s detractors found lacking in his later, more sentimental work.

The series begins with films that are not much different from his Essanay work and steadily progresses from there, with increasing complexity, finely tuned comedic timing, and brilliantly choreographed action sequences. In One A.M., Chaplin performs a solo tour de force, the film’s 20 minutes entirely devoted to a drunk man’s efforts to get home and into bed; in The Rink, Chaplin demonstrates his remarkable physical agility, tangling with his rival in an elaborate rollerskating sequence; and in The Immigrant, Chaplin makes one his first overtly political statements, as a boatload of immigrants gazes in awe at the Statue of Liberty before being roughly herded behind a restraining rope. So much for liberty.

Too often forgotten in appreciations of Chaplin is the fact that he was not just a great comedian, but a great actor. In Easy Street he summons both drama and comedy—an innovation at the time—in the depiction of an unflinching portrait of poverty, crime and drug use while never compromising his comedic instincts. And again in The Immigrant, Chaplin creates one of his best depictions of the rapture of love, with the Tramp and the girl (Edna Purviance) finding the silver lining by getting married during a rainstorm. 

With these early masterpieces, Chaplin set the standard for the comedians who would follow in his wake: Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon. Arguably some would surpass him, in inventiveness, in direction, staging and camerawork, even in pure laughter. But no one ever came close to matching his enormous talent, his instinctive sense of pathos, or the unique and affectionate bond between the performer and his audience.

Some say the Mutuals are his best period; certainly he was never again so free from self-consciousness, so anarchic and inventive. But a sound argument can be made that the Mutual period represents the artist’s adolescense, with his full artistic maturity expressed most clearly in his features of the '20s and early '30s: The Kid, The Gold Rush, The Circus and City Lights. 

But though those later films are more fulfilling and emotional, it is the casual, careless fun of the Mutuals that lends them to repeated viewings, that entices us to immerse ourselves again and again in the madcap adventures of a newly famous, newly wealthy 27-year-old comedian who had suddenly found himself on top of the world.

The set also includes two documentaries. The Gentlemen Tramp (1975) is a fuzzy, hagiographic film by Richard Patterson that is more content to deify the man than understand him, and Chaplin’s Goliath (1996), an appreciation of the all-too-brief career of Eric Campbell, the huge Scottish actor who played the heavy in most of Chaplin’s Essanay and Mutual films until his life was cut short by a car accident. Also included are essays by Chaplin historians and a gallery of rare still photographs of Chaplin at work on the Mutual films.

THE CHAPLIN MUTUAL COMEDIES (1916-17).

$59.99. Image Entertainment. www.image-entertainment.com.

The Pleasures of Pulp: Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse

Fritz Lang is best known today for Metropolis, the 1927 science fiction classic. The film has been tremendously popular throughout the decades, and the fact that much of the film has been lost, cut by censors and misguided studios, has only added to its allure.

But the unfortunate result is that a misconception has developed over the years, leaving many modern viewers with the notion that Metropolis represents not only the best of Lang, but the best of silent cinema.

As fine an achievement as Metropolis is, it is by no means the best film of its time. Not even close. Influential, yes. Enjoyable, yes. Well made, yes. But for the most part it is influential primarily in its own genre.

Lang was hardly devoted to science fiction. In fact, he was primarily interested in realism; he wanted to tell stories rooted in the realities of Germany life. But Metropolis does contain many typical Lang characteristics: It is full of the sort of grand production values and plots that Lang could indulge in when backed by Ufa, the powerful and financially flush German studio that produced most of Lang’s early films.

Lang made several long, somewhat overblown films for Ufa in the 1920s, including Die Nibelungen (1924), Spies (1928) and Woman in the Moon (1929), all of which have been previously released on DVD by Kino in excellent editions based on restored prints. But the best film he made in the silent era precedes all of these.

Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) catches Lang before his visions became quite so grandiose. It is pure Lang in so many ways: a pulpy, somewhat lowbrow story; a lengthy running time; an obsession with grand, symmetric imagery. Kino has just released the film in a newly restored version on DVD, tracking down more previously missing footage to make this the most complete version yet. The visual quality is spectacular, and the scoring is also excellent. And Kino has placed the two parts on two separate discs, reinforcing a detail that has been glossed over in some presentations: Dr. Mabuse is actually two films, released separately over a short period of time—the original Kill Bill.

The only drawback is that the set contains no extra features. The previous DVD incarnation, released by Image Entertainment, boasted an excellent commentary track with historical background and insightful criticism. For those interested in delving deeper into this classic, that edition is still indispensable.

The opening scenes of Mabuse quickly and brilliantly set the tone, establishing Mabuse’s master-of-disguise persona before diving immediately into intrigue with a sequence in which a government document is stolen and used by Mabuse to manipulate the stock market. It is a complex bit of choreography that features great use of Lang’s favored symmetric compositions, the most striking image being a trestle bridge that crosses the screen, framing beneath it a road on which a speeding automobile hurdles toward the camera, contrasting the horizontal rush of the train with the rapidly approaching vertical movement of the car.

The sequence ends with the final result of the theft: a decimated stock exchange, empty except for the ominous superimposed face of the supercriminal Mabuse.

Lang was bold and brash with his scope and subject matter—even more so with his own public persona—but despite these few examples, he was rarely daring in a technical sense. His camera rarely moves, his shots are rarely dynamic; indeed, they contain little of the style and flourish typical of German films of the period. Instead he holds the camera still, creating mostly static compositions, relying on character and context to hold the viewer’s attention. The idea was that surprising angles and compositions were too easily undermined by their overuse. Therefore a more restrained style would increase the impact of more experimental shots. However, when the actors are weak, the weakness of the technique reveals itself, especially when Lang chose to employ another of his vacuous paramours. But with Rudolf Klein-Rogge in the title role, Lang had found his true muse, an actor who could hold the camera’s attention.

Those static, symmetric shots have their own power, but Lang overuses them. In fact, it can come as something of a relief when he veers from them, for then the film develops a more dynamic energy. Shots of the Excelsior Hotel, for instance, are photographed dead-on from the outside, the revolving door and sign center screen. Likewise the Andalusian nightclub. Until, that is, the maitre d’ takes Inspector Van Wenk out the back door to lead him to the illicit gambling den. Here Lang, just for a moment, embraces the Expressionist aesthetic of the era with an excellent composition: straight ahead, a balcony runs across the top of the screen, with a dark, shadowy staircase running down the right side of the frame. In the foreground, a decaying archway and pillars with peeling paint frame the scene as the two men traverse the frame from left to right, through the archway, behind the pillar, up the stairs and through a doorway. It is simple but immensely effective, taking what could have been a perfunctory moment and transforming it into something much more dramatically compelling.

And this is where Lang truly excels: In taking relatively mundane, pulpish subject matter and elevating it to the point of artful melodrama. When he takes things too seriously he fails. Die Niebelungen collapses under the weight of its own gravity; Metropolis, which for the most part consists of fun, melodramatic silliness, is diminished by its trite, tacked-on message (“The mediator between Head and Hands must be the HEART!”). With Spies, Lang returned to the Mabuse mold, with Klein-Rogge again playing a criminal mastermind, but the film is somewhat less successful than the Mabuse films.

Mabuse is pure schlock, but it is schlock of a high order. It was meant to reflect the tawdry side of the waning days of the Weimar Republic, but that intellectual aspect is hardly necessary to enjoy the movie. Indeed, it seems more like an after-the-fact rationalization for a wild, silly tale. In fact, the film really has more of the feel of a serial, and this may in fact be the best way to enjoy it, watching just a couple of acts at a time, as each act without fail ends with a cliffhanger.

Eventually Lang would find himself on a tighter leash. Without Ufa’s backing—lost in part due to Metropolis’ extravagant budget—Lang was no longer able to indulge his every whim. The result were films in which he displayed remarkable economy and ingenuity, overcoming small budgets and limited resources with innovation and improvisation. The first of these, M (1931), Lang’s first sound film, is his best work. And this was followed by another Mabuse film, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932). Both films catch Lang at his peak, with taught, economical visual storytelling combined with innovative use of sound. Lang counterpointed his sound effects with sequences of absolute silence, evincing a confidence and sophistication rare in the early sound era. These two films have none of Lang’s heavy-handed, plodding story development and few of his mind-numbing symmetric compositions, but instead transform their minimal resources into movies of maximum effect. Both have been previously released in excellent DVD editions by the Criterion Collection.

Asphalt, Warning Shadows: Classics of German Expressionism Restored

Film was the dominant art form of the 1920s, an international cultural phenomenon which, in the days before sound, was considered a universal language. 

No one seemed to have more fun with the form and its potential than the Germans, who exploited every camera angle, every trick of light, every effect—technical, psychological and otherwise—that the medium had to offer.

Two rare German silents have been released by Kino that illustrate the point beautifully. Asphalt and Warning Shadows, masterpieces of Expressionism, take vastly different approaches to the form while reveling in its indulgences.

If, as Godard said, the history of cinema is men photographing women, these two films fit the mold. Both feature luminous beauties in the lead roles, with the men around them driven nearly to ruin by desire and lust. 

Asphalt starts with a cinematic bang, with a rush of images merging and hurdling by in a stunning montage of the throbbing city, the hustle and bustle, the energy and the vice. Then, about 20 minutes in, it takes a step toward melodrama, but beautifully constructed and artful melodrama, with every furtive glance, every emotion, every moment drawn out for maximum effect. The plot is remarkably simple, and could be explained in 10 seconds. But it is not the story that matters so much as the manner in which it is conveyed. Director Joe May constructs the film like a master musician playing just a few notes but playing them with such virtuosity that a few notes are all that are needed. 

Warning Shadows is slightly less accessible but no less remarkable in its achievement. It is a purely visual film, with no intertitles to convey plot or dialogue—beyond the opening credits, that is, which feature each actor appearing on a proscenium, each introduced along with his shadow, for shadows prove to be characters as much as the people who cast them. 

The story concerns a woman and her husband. They are hosting a dinner party of her suitors. A traveling entertainer crashes the party and proceeds to put on a show of shadow puppetry, a show that plumbs the depths of each character’s consciousness. The shadows take on the semblance of reality, acting out a passion play that, in the best Expressionist fashion, gives shape to the tensions and desires in the minds of the party’s hosts and their guests. The husband, overcome with jealous rage, seeks revenge on his flirtatious wife and her ardent suitors, while her beauty and careless allure lead the men to destroy first her and then each other. 

The film was photographed by Fritz Arno Wagner, the famed cinematographer who also shot F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Fritz Lang’s M.

Expressionism can be an acquired taste, but it holds many of the same pleasures as American film noir: the overwrought emotion, the heightened reality, the dark shadows and shady characters. And these two films play up those qualities, creating strange, twisted, fever-pitched realities. It is an art that celebrates its own artifice.

Winsor McCay and the Birth of Animation

Despite his claims to the contrary, Winsor McCay did not invent the animated cartoon. But the legendary cartoonist did play a pioneering role, helping to advance, shape and define the nascent art form.

This Saturday Pacific Film Archive will present several films by McCay as part of a presentation by another accomplished cartoonist, John Canemaker.

Canemaker has many achievements to his credit, the latest among them being the Academy Award he won last year for his short film The Moon and the Son. The film depicted an imaginary conversation between Canemaker and his deceased father and featured the voices of John Turturro and Eli Wallach.

Canemaker will be present for a screening of his own films as part of a program entitled “John Canemaker: Marching to a Different Toon” at 5 p.m. Saturday and will follow at 7:30 p.m. with a presentation and discussion of the McCay films.

The presentation on McCay is based on Canemaker’s own biography of the great cartoonist, Winsor McCay: His Life and Art. The book was first published in 1987 but has been newly revised and expanded in a beautiful new edition that presents excellent reproductions of McCay’s artwork along with insightful and scholarly analysis. It is the only comprehensive biography of McCay and will surely play a crucial role in helping to better establish his legacy in print and animated cartooning.

McCay’s range and talent is difficult to comprehend today. He was an extremely prolific artist, creating a number of popular comic strips as well as illustrations, editorial cartoons and animated cartoons, working on many of them simultaneously. The work for which he is most renowned focused on dreams and fantasy and included his most famous and beloved creation, Little Nemo in Slumberland, widely considered one of the greatest comic strips of all time.

Another of his unique, though lesser known, strips is Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. Like Nemo, it relies on a predictable pattern in the creation of a most unpredictable strip. Each week the strip depicted a harrowing nightmare consisting of often surreal and hallucinatory imagery, and each week the strip concluded in precisely the same way: The protagonist would wake up in bed, realize it was just a dream, and exclaim that never again would he eat so much rarebit for dinner.

McCay used the same basic structure for Little Nemo, with the young boy always waking up or falling out of bed in the strip’s final panel, a device later used to great effect by another comic strip artist, Bill Watterson, whose Calvin and Hobbes often featured the wild adventures that take place inside the mind of a highly imaginative 6-year-old boy.

Little Nemo in Slumberland ran as a full page every Sunday at a time when a newspaper page was nearly twice the size of today’s broadsheet pages. The comic strip was a relatively new medium when Nemo debuted in 1905, just 10 years old and still struggling to find its niche. McCay’s superior draftsmanship, wide-ranging imagination and bold use of color took the form to new heights.

Brilliant as his imagination and artwork were, McCay was not without his shortcomings. He never seemed to master dialogue or narrative thrust. His dialogue is trite and redundant, and often crammed into awkward and at times barely legible word balloons. Of course, the word balloon itself was a recent invention, and it took time for artists to learn to incorporate them gracefully into their compositions. But McCay never seemed to fully grasp the concept; in fact, Nemo, even in its second incarnation in the 1920s, still evinced this anomalous flaw.

McCay later turned his attention to animation, and once again, he played a major role in the development of a new art form, using his bold imagination, unparalleled drawing skills and showman’s flair in advancing the new medium. McCay employed wonderfully sophisticated effects and charming characters in his animated work, even taking his films on the road in vaudeville.

“Where McCay differed from his predecessors,” Canemaker writes, “was in his ability to animate his drawings with no sacrifice of linear detail; the fluid motion, naturalistic timing, feeling of weight, and, eventually, the attempts to inject individualistic personality traits into his characters were new qualities that McCay first brought to the animated film medium.”

McCay developed techniques that would later become commonplace and, in stark contrast to other, more secretive artists of the day, refused to patent those techniques, believing that the art form stood a better chance of progressing if artists shared their knowledge.

Saturday’s screening will include four of McCay’s 10 animated films. His first film was Little Nemo, in which Nemo, Flip and the Imp go through a series of fun-house mirror style transformations. At the time, audiences were skeptical and often didn’t believe that the film was hand-drawn.

“It was pronounced very lifelike,” McCay wrote in a 1927 essay, “but my audience declared that it was not a drawing, but that the pictures were photographs of real children.”

So, in his next film, McCay drew something a little more difficult. How a Mosquito Operates, a somewhat twisted presentation that would fit right in today in Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Animation Festival, features a disturbingly oversized mosquito plunging his proboscis again and again into the face of a sleeping man, eventually becoming so bloated with blood that he explodes. Again, the cartoonist encountered skepticism.

“My audiences were pleased,” McCay wrote, “but declared the mosquito was operated by wires to get the effect before the camera.”

So McCay decided to create a character that could not be photographed: Gertie the Dinosaur. Gertie was a popular creation and McCay proceeded to take her on the road in vaudeville with a clever act that consisted of McCay standing beside the screen and commanding Gertie as though she were a trained elephant. He would toss her a pumpkin, crack a trainer’s whip, and even step into the frame himself, disappearing behind the screen and reappearing onscreen as an animated figure riding on the dinosaur’s back, a moment later satirized by Buster Keaton in his first feature film, The Three Ages.

McCay’s next project was his most ambitious. The Sinking of the Lusitania took two years to produce and consisted of nearly 25,000 drawings. It marked the first time McCay used the technique of drawing on transparent cels on separate backgrounds, a technique that not only saved time and work, but also contributed greatly to the film’s dynamics. For the first time, McCay’s animated work took on a more cinematic quality, using dramatic angles to further enhance the action.

Great as his films are and important as his contribution may be, McCay’s defects again hindered his progress. Animated cartoons would soon develop plot and narrative, and, eventually, sound, but without McCay’s help. He played a significant role in nurturing animated film into its adolescence, but it would take other talents to bring it to maturity.

Electric Edwardians and Beyond the Rocks: Lost Treasures Recovered and Restored

To be a silent movie fan is to know the excitement of discovery tinged with despair. It is estimated that more than 80 percent of all films from the silent era are lost, either destroyed by Hollywood studios during the transition to talkies or simply lost to the ravages of time. Original negatives and nitrate prints eventually succumb to chemical decomposition, disintegrating into piles of dust. And what has been lost is not limited to Hollywood movies; documentaries, social films, political films, home movies—a vast trove of footage documenting our social history has simply vanished.

The pain of the loss is often compounded by the fact that sometimes a tiny fragment of a film survives, a shred of footage just long enough to hint at the treasures that have disappeared. Sometimes a single reel of a six-reel feature; sometimes a trailer or even just a fragment of a trailer; sometimes still photos, either from the set or from a publicity campaign; and sometimes just a press release or a review, or maybe just an entry in a studio logbook. 

But now and then a discovery is made and a film is miraculously found again, having been mislabeled in a studio vault, in the archives of a private collector, or tucked away in some musty basement or in the dark corner of a forgotten storage closet. These are hardly optimal conditions for the storage of such fragile cultural documents; nitrate requires strict climate control in order to ensure its preservation. But sometimes a miracle occurs and a long-forgotten movie survives in remarkable condition.

And so it is with two new DVD releases from Milestone Film and Video: Beyond the Rocks and Electric Edwardians. 

Beyond the Rocks is one of the most sought-after of lost silent-era movies, not so much because of its quality as the simple fact that it featured two of the biggest stars of the day: Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino. It was rare for two such prominent actors to appear in the same film; the logic at the time was that either one could draw a huge audience, so why waste the money on two astronomical salaries when just one would suffice?

A minute-long fragment survived to taunt historians for nearly eight decades, with hope of its recovery fading with each passing year. And then one day it appeared.

An eccentric Dutch collector passed away in 2000, and among the assorted artifacts he kept in several storage facilities were dozens of rusted film canisters. The films were donated to the Netherlands Film Museum, and there archivists began sorting through the cans to see what they contained. Eventually a reel of Beyond the Rocks was discovered, and, some time later, another reel, until, in 2004, the complete movie was finally pieced together.

The film was restored and released in 2005, making its way from Holland to New York, to Los Angeles, and finally, in November, to the Castro Theater, where it was screened as a special presentation of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. (The festival runs today through Sunday at the Castro and was previewed in this space last Tuesday). 

The movie is, for the most part, a light and silly entertainment, a nonsensical Hollywood blockbuster that places its glamorous stars in a series of melodramatic situations in exotic locales. The screenplay is the work of Elinor Glyn, a popular novelist of the day. It was Glyn who wrote the book It and, in a brilliant cross-marketing campaign, proclaimed starlet Clara Bow the embodiment of the sexual allure referred to as “It,” sending both Bow and the ensuing movie into the box office stratosphere.

Though the discovery and restoration of Beyond the Rocks is good news, its significance pales in comparison to the recent discovery of the work of Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, released under the title Electric Edwardians. 

Mitchell and Kenyon were filmmakers in early 20th century Britain, contracted by traveling showmen to film everyday folks in small towns and cities in anticipation of a fair or circus coming to town. Advertisements would be posted informing the locals that, for just a few pence, they could come to the fair and see themselves and their friends and neighbors on the screen. 

To Mitchell and Kenyon, and to their employers, these were throwaway films. They were simply part of a marketing gimmick, a way to lure paying customers. But a few years ago, several drums filled with film canisters were discovered in a basement due for demolition, and in those cans were the original negatives of several dozen Mitchell and Kenyon films. 

One commentator on the DVD describes the films as containing “infinite surprises in a finite space.” It is an apt description, for these films are not polished productions, but are simply snapshots of an era, with the camera merely catching a glimpse of the passing parade of everyday life. A fictional character only exists insofar as he is on the screen; he ceases to exist once he moves beyond the frame. But the Mitchell and Kenyon films feature real people; they are not posing for posterity, they are simply going about their lives, and those lives do not end once they pass through and beyond the frame. Watching these films is like cupping your hands in a rushing stream and capturing just a small sample, just a fleeting glimpse, of the life rushing by. 

The faces are both mysterious and familiar: workers, athletes, children and adults. We see children who will one day become parents and then grandparents and great-grandparents, who will one day be remembered only as faded, foreign photographs in a dusty, dog-eared album; we see men flooding out of factories; we see merchants sweeping the sidewalk; we see regiments of uniformed young boys marching in parades, boys who, in just a few short years, will likely be sent to the battlefields of the Great War. Thousands of faces pass before us, anonymous lives lived and forgotten. But here in the films of Mitchell and Kenyon they live and breathe; they smile, wave, grimace, and walk on by, some curious, some indifferent, some silly, some sober.

All of these films have their particular charms, from the hundreds of faces pouring out of a factory, to the faces of curious children gaping or grinning at the sight of the camera, to the pensive faces of spectators at a soccer match, to the quaint entertainments of long-forgotten performers. But among the most fascinating films are the ones shot from streetcars, with Mitchell and Kenyon and their camera passing unnoticed through cities and towns, capturing footage of quiet, everyday moments: a man walking alone along the sidewalk; women stopping to chat on a street corner; horse-drawn carriages navigating traffic at an intersection. 

Eighty-five minutes worth can be a lot for one sitting, but select one among the several categories of films and give it your full attention. It’s a rewarding time capsule; the flood of images, accompanied by poignant scores by In the Nursery, provide a genuinely moving experience.

2006 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

No one quite knew what to make of the new invention at first. The ability to capture motion on film, while a scientific breakthrough, didn’t seem to portend much for the future. Most deemed it a novelty, a toy which would quickly lose its appeal.

Few could have imagined in 1894 that these flickering images, first seen through an eyepiece at five cents a pop and later projected on a sheet tacked to a wall, would not only become a new art form, but the art form of the new century.

The next few decades saw the nascent medium grow at a rapid rate, in length, in maturity and in significance, expanding from 20-second clips to three-hour epics; from brief celluloid documents of real world events—called “actualities”—to feature-length documentaries; from amateurish filmed stage productions to feature-length narrative movies, rich in character and emotion; from sophomoric roughhouse comedy to the full-fledged visual humor of the great comedians, sophisticated in their use of the new cinematic language.

By 1927, the language of film as a visual medium was nearly complete and was just reaching its peak. The moving camera had been perfected; the potential of montage had been deeply explored; the power and emotion of the close-up had been exploited; acting techniques had evolved to suit the medium. A vast array of genres had been firmly established: the western, horror, drama, comedy, slapstick and farce, melodrama and satire, adaptations and original works, special effects, documentaries, instructional films, political films, avante garde experiments and mainstream entertainments. The breadth and depth of what was arguably the most universal of art forms was staggering.

But just as technology had made it all possible, so technology would tear it all down. With the advent of reliable sound technology and the dawn of the talking picture in 1927, 30 years worth of the medium’s range and diversity was almost instantly demoted to the status of a genre. No longer were they called “moving pictures”—now they were “silent.” From the lowest and crudest pieces of hackwork to the towering artistic masterpieces of the era, all were now thrown together in a single category, the name of which took on a pejorative quality. Films that had entertained, inspired and enriched viewers for three decades were now considered outdated, quaint, laughable, behind the times.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is an attempt to remedy that situation, to clear away the myths and misconceptions with quality prints presented at proper projection speeds and accompanied by live music. In other words, silent films as they were meant to be seen. Now in its 11th year, the festival runs Friday, July 14 through Sunday, July 16 at the Castro Theater.

Some of the those misconceptions stem from the moniker itself, for silent films were never silent; they were always shown with live musical accompaniment. The largest theaters featured full orchestras, mid-sized theaters featured Wurlitzer organs, and the smallest theaters employed a piano player. The musicians either improvised on the spot or performed a written score, often of their own composition or sometimes provided by the film’s producers.

Another misconception is that silent films were of poor visual quality, with high-contrast images of muddled blacks and grays, and always featured ham-fisted, overly dramatic acting and silly figures running about at abnormal speeds. The speed problem is simple: Silent films were shot at roughly 16 frames per second, as opposed to sound films, which are shot at 24 frames per second. Since the advent of sound, silent films have too often been mistakenly projected at sound speed, leading viewers to believe that they were manic and absurd. And most of the prints available over the years have been low-quality 16-millimeter transfers from the original 35-millimeter format, causing a loss of visual detail that was compounded by the deterioration of old nitrate prints.

If you’ve never seen a big-screen presentation of silent film, there is no better place to start than the Silent Film Festival. While there are several venues in the Bay Area which provide excellent presentations of silent films throughout the year, with excellent prints and live music, the festival goes a step further, providing historical context with informative on-stage interviews and panel discussions, trailers and outtakes and historical short subjects. Many of this year’s programs feature archival footage of the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, and even a “neo-silent” newsreel of this year’s centennial commemoration of the quake at Lotta’s Fountain, shot with an authentic hand-cranked silent-era camera.

This year’s festival could be rightly called the Year of the Woman, for most of its marquee evening presentations are starring vehicles for some of the silent era’s finest actresses. The festival kicks off with Seventh Heaven, starring Janet Gaynor in a performance which earned her the Best Actress Oscar at the first Academy Awards. Gaynor plays a street waife who falls in love with a sewer worker, played by Charles Farrell, only to see World War I intervene. The film was directed by Frank Borzage. (Borzage and Gaynor will each be the subject of retrospectives at Pacific Film Archive starting July 21.)

Saturday’s lineup features Mary Pickford in Sparrows. Pickford was the most successful and powerful woman in Hollywood in her time, one of the few stars with enough clout to eventually assume creative control of her films, selecting her material as well as her directors. Her films are not often seen these days, rarely showing up on television or at revival theaters. Sparrows represents a darker side of the Pickford cannon, depicting an orphanage where the kids are used as slave labor.

Saturday night will see a screening of Pandora’s Box, a German film directed by G.W. Pabst and starring the iconic American actress Louise Brooks. Brooks was not a great success in American films and she eventually made her way to Germany where she made three films in an effort to resuscitate her career. It is those films upon which her reputation rests today. Returning to America, she found herself blacklisted and never again had much success.

But later her talent for self-promotion, including at least one romantic relationship with a film historian, led to rekindled interest in her career and helped to retroactively establish Brooks as a great and important figure of the silent era. Her credentials as a great actress may be debatable, but her charisma, beauty and sexual appeal are undeniable, and Pandora’s Box presents her in her signature role as a seductive and dangerous woman who brings ruin to those she encounters.

The final show on Sunday night will put the spotlight on another great, if underappreciated, actress of the 1920s, the gifted comedienne Marion Davies. Davies, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, was quite successful and well loved by movie audiences. Hearst, however, wanted to see her play more dignified roles, roles more suitable for the mistress of a great newspaper baron. He poured money into countless lavish costume dramas—clumsy, bloated productions that did nothing for her career—and relentlessly promoted them in his newspapers. Much of this was later satirized in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, which helped to unjustly tar Davies’ reputation, rendering her as a mere pawn of Hearst, a no-talent chorus girl riding the great man’s coattails.

The Silent Film Festival will right this wrong with a screening of director King Vidor’s Show People, a light comedy that clearly demonstrates Davies’ charm and talents and features a number of silent-era stars in cameo roles as themselves.

There’s far more on display at the festival, however, and often it is the lesser known films that provide the event’s most fascinating moments.

• Bucking Broadway (1917) is one of only two surviving silent westerns directed by John Ford and stars the great western star Harey Carey. The film will be preceded by an onstage interview with Harey Carey, Jr.
• Au Bonheur Des Dames (1930) is an adaptation of an Emile Zola novel, about a young girl who takes a job in a vast Paris department store.
  
• “Amazing Tales From the Archives” is a free presentation detailing the hard work, passion and luck that goes into the discovery, preservation and presentation of cinema’s early works.
  
• Three of Laurel and Hardy’s silent two-reelers will be screened Sunday. Today the duo is probably better known for their sound work, but these short subjects demonstrate the pitch-perfect timing of their comic pantomime at its peak.
  
• The Girl With the Hatbox (1927) is a slapstick comedy from Russia that was deemed subversive by Soviet censors.
  
• The Unholy Three (1925), by Freaks director Tod Browning, is the story of a ventriloquist, played by Lon Chaney, who heads up a madcap scam to rob the rich in a wild, strange pulp story which gave Chaney an opportunity to poke fun at his horror film persona.
  

11TH ANNUAL SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL

www.silentfilm.org

Festival box office: 833 Market Street, San Francisco, Suite 812. (925) 866-9530.

8 p.m. Friday, July 14. $17.

Seventh Heaven (1927). Music by Clark Wilson (Wurlitzer organ).

A Trip Down Market Street (April 14, 1906). Narrated by Rick Laubscher. Music by Michael Mortilla (piano).

11 a.m. Saturday, July 15. $13.

Bucking Broadway (1917). 

San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (April 18, 1906). Music by Michael Mortilla (piano)

1:40 p.m. Saturday, July 15. $13.

Au Bonheur Des Dames (1930). Music by the Hot Club of San Francisco.

4:20 p.m. Saturday, July 15. $13.

Sparrows (1926). Music by Michael Mortilla (piano).

8:20 p.m. Saturday, July 15. $15.

Pandora’s Box (1929). Music by Clark Wilson (Wurlitzer organ).

11 a.m. Sunday, July 16. Free.

“Amazing Tales From the Archives,” a demonstration of film restoration processes. Music by Michael Mortilla (piano).

12:30 p.m. Sunday, July 16. $13.

Laurel and Hardy (three short films: The Finishing Touch (1928), Liberty (1929), Wrong Again (1929). 

Scenes in San Francisco (May 9, 1906). Music by Michael Mortilla (piano).

2:40 p.m. Sunday, July 16. $13.

The Girl With the Hatbox (1927). Music by the Balka Ensemble.

5 p.m. Sunday, July 16. $13.

The Unholy Three (1925).

Mabel and Fatty Viewing the World’s Fair at San Francisco (1915).

Music by Jon Mirsalis (piano).

8 p.m. Sunday, July 16. $15.

Show People (1928).

Triumph Over Disaster (a 2006 “neo-silent”newsreel of the 1906 Earthquake Centennial

Commemoration at Lotta’s Fountain).

Music by Dennis James (Wurlitzer organ).