The Jazz Singer: The Movie Heard 'Round the World

The great thing about DVD is that it has given the major studios the opportunity to finally do right by the classics in their archives. For the first six or seven years of the format’s existence, the studios were, for the most part, content to simply reissue their back catalogues in cheap editions, often without any attempt to remaster the image.

But over the past few years, as box-office receipts have declined, studio bosses finally seem to be coming around to the reality that if these films are going to survive and be seen, they will be seen in the home, and thus it pays to provide definitive editions that will endure.

Thus Warner Bros. has just released a lavish boxed-set edition of the film that put the studio on the map back in 1927. The Jazz Singer almost single-handedly ended the silent era and launched Hollywood on whole new trajectory.

D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation ushered the art form into its maturity in 1915, kicking off the first great era of motion picture innovation and achievement; The Jazz Singer brought the great cinematic decade of the 1920s to a close, halting the entire medium in its tracks for a couple of years as filmmakers struggled to harness and master the new sound technology.

One of the unfortunate aspects of these two cinematic milestones is that they are both marred by racism, a fact that greatly obscures their legacies. In 1999 the Directors Guild of America changed the name of its highest award, which since 1953 had been named for Griffith, in light of the stereotypes perpetuated in his most famous film. And The Jazz Singer, though widely known by name, is rarely seen today.

The fact is, The Jazz Singer isn’t that good a film anyway. Important, yes, and largely misunderstood, but not good. It’s really a silent film, with just a handful of sound sequences, most consisting of the ever-energetic Al Jolson singing and sweating and dancing, often in blackface. The combination of silence and sound proves an awkward hybrid at best.

The legend says that it was Jolson’s singing that drove a stake into the heart of silent film, but the truth is both more subtle and more interesting. Audiences had experienced sound pictures before, usually in the form of musical interludes, but these were of such crude quality that the innovation didn’t stick; the clumsiness of the available technologies only intruded on the dream-like quality of silent film. What startled audiences of The Jazz Singer and got them hooked on sound was a few improvised minutes of dialogue. Jolson, seated at the piano, finishes a song, turns to his mother and engages in some insignificant patter. The off-hand nature of the exchange gave the illusion that the audience was eavesdropping on a real-life moment, and it was that sense of intimacy and verisimilitude that truly launched the sound era.

Sound had been a huge gamble for Warner Bros. At the time, the studio was at the bottom of the heap and desperate to climb to the top. So they took a chance on sound and came up with the hit they so desperately needed. Their success sent them to the forefront of the industry, with all the other studios playing catch-up. The new medium brought with it a host of technical problems—satirized with great accuracy in Singin’ in the Rain (1950)—leading to a period of static, stage-bound films with little artistic merit. As stated in The Dawn of Sound: How Movies Learned to Talk, an excellent documentary included in the set, it seemed that audiences preferred mediocre sound films to great silent films.

The new three-disc set includes a wealth of material placing the film in its proper historical context, including commentary by film historians Ron Hutchinson and Vince Giordano; short films of Jolson from the era; The Dawn of Sound, which provides a great overview of the advent of synchronized sound, the impact of The Jazz Singer, and the demise of the silent film; and a full disc of Vitaphone sound shorts, films of Vaudeville acts of the 1920s. These films may be quaint, static and strange by modern standards, but they provide a valuable and rare historical record of the sort of entertainment that movies replaced, and to which The Jazz Singer pays tribute.

Intolerance: Early Cinema's Grandest Spectacle

Though he is often credited with more than he contributed, D.W. Griffith is undoubtedly the first of the great cinematic artists. He did not create the tools of the trade, nor invent its techniques, but he imbued them with meaning, gave significance and weight to them, and thus established the grammar of motion pictures.

He did not invent the close-up, but he was the first to exploit its dramatic and emotional potential; he did not invent cross-cutting between different lines of action, but he further developed the technique and used it to devastating effect. In short, he took the technological novelty of the moving picture and transformed it into an art form; he elevated what was considered the lowliest of entertainments into the most powerful artistic medium of the 20th century.

Griffith, after honing his skills with hundreds of one- and two-reel films for the Biograph company, electrified the world with The Birth of a Nation (1915), and followed it with a film that is still one of the most grandiose cinematic undertakings of all time, Intolerance (1916). This three-hour epic, told in four interwoven but separate episodes, gets a rare theatrical screening at the Castro Theater at 2 p.m. Saturday as part of the San Francisco Silent Festival’s annual winter program, along with a series of early Vitaphone sound films of vaudeville acts, and Flesh and the Devil (1926), the first pairing of silent-era superstars Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. Scores for the two feature films will be provided by Wurlitzer maestro Dennis James, one of the foremost practitioners of silent film accompaniment.

Griffith sustained his grasp on motion picture dominance with a few more large-scale classics: Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921), and a string of smaller, more intimate tales such as the often overlooked True Heart Susie (1919). But though he led the charge, his brigades soon overtook him. His influence waned as his innovations unleashed a tide of experimentation and artistry that quickly subsumed him, leaving his work appearing quaint and outdated long before his productivity subsided.

In the 1920s, this still young medium was just beginning to reach its peak. The ‘20s would become the first Golden Age of the movies before silent pictures were abruptly killed off by the advent of synchronized sound technology. Cinema was getting more and more sophisticated. The camera was beginning to move with increasing grace and fluidity; editing was fast becoming an art form unto itself; acting styles were growing more restrained and naturalistic; and the avant-garde was rapidly expanding the boundaries of the medium.

Griffith, meanwhile, was a product of the Reconstruction-era South. His attitudes and world view had been shaped by the myths and legends of the Confederacy. In Griffith’s films, the antebellum South is the apotheosis of civilization, women are saintly madonna figures or conniving vamps, and African Americans are wayward children at best, devilish defilers of white womanhood at worst. His most effective work pits pastoral elegance against the dark tide of “progress”: bucolic village life threatened by the moral degradation of the city; old social orders undermined by the rise of an underclass. He may never have filmed a woman tied to the railroad tracks, but that sort of melodrama was his forte: the virtuous damsel in distress, rescued at the last minute from the heaving iron monster of industrial progress.

It’s no wonder then that this artist of 19th century values should quickly find himself lost amid the moral ambiguity, metropolitan glamor and sexual liberation of Jazz Age America. For how could Griffith's pastoral romances compete with the bold gothic horror of Nosferatu? With the stonefaced absurdity of the universe of Buster Keaton? With the mechanized terror of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis? This was a brave new world of motion picture artistry so confident in its talent and so optimistic about its future that it simply hadn’t the time or inclination to honor its past. And Griffith had quickly come to represent the past.

But for a few bright years, Griffith was not just at the center of the industry, he was the industry. And his artistic powers and immense popularity granted him the clout to dictate his own terms, to abandon the sure-fire box-office draw of the short-form melodrama and embark on grandiose projects with commensurate budgets.

While racking up unprecedented box office receipts, The Birth of a Nation elicited storms of protests for its racist portrayal of African Americans. Griffith, stung by these criticisms, decided to fight back by decrying the cruelty of calls for censorship of his film. As Richard Schickel states in D.W. Griffith: An American Life, “Griffith never once...saw any reason to recant anything he had said in Birth... . No, far from being an apology, Intolerance...is a direct and bold assault on his critics and their ‘intolerance’ of his right to say what he wanted to say.”

The film originated even before Birth of a Nation, as a simpler film called The Mother and the Law. But after the phenomenal success of Birth, Griffith knew he couldn’t return to small-scale filmmaking, that he had to uphold his reputation for spectacle. After seeing Cabiria, a feature-length Italian film with huge sets and dynamic camerawork, Griffith began to expand his tale, adding other episodes. And while visiting San Francisco to research prison conditions at the city jail and at San Quentin for his film’s modern story line, Griffith found inspiration for the Babylonian sequence in the architectural wonders of the San Francisco Exhibition of 1915. He had not only found a project to combat his critics, he had discovered a way to compete with the Italian epics. He hired the San Francisco workers to construct monumental sets on a size and scale previously unseen in the small village of Hollywood.

It is these sets from the Babylonian sequence that would provide the film with its iconic image: Griffith and cameraman G.W. Bitzer mounted the camera on an elevator that dollied forth along tracks, the platform lowering as it pushed forward, producing a slow, sweeping zoom that captures the vastness of the set while gracefully pulling in tighter on the spectacle and human drama contained within.

Yet what he was up to was still a mystery to his colleagues. There was no script; it was all in his head. The project was growing ever larger as he worked. The final film contains four episodes: the death of Christ; the fall of Babylon; the massacre of the Huguenots, and a contemporary drama that questions the morality of the death penalty. The four stories are told concurrently, melding together in the end for a dizzying 30-minute sequence in which Griffith crosscuts rapidly between them. And it is here that the Southern gentleman brings his passion for melodrama together with the cutting-edge sensibilities of the avant-garde in the creation of his boldest achievement.

Intolerance screens at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Castro Theater as part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s winter program. Vitaphone sound shorts (1926-1930) screen at 11 a.m. Flesh and the Devil (1926) screens at 8 p.m. www.silentfilm.org. 429 Castro Street, San Francisco. (415) 621-6120.

The Talkies Learn to Move: Pabst's Threepenny Opera

When Bertolt Brecht and G.W. Pabst decided to collaborate in bringing the former's Threepenny Opera to the screen, both men were at the peak of their careers. But the collaboration would be anything but smooth. Indeed it was fraught with conflict, as so many Brecht projects were.

The film has just been released on DVD by Criterion in a two-disc edition that features a beautiful transfer of the German film along with a host of features, including commentary by film scholars David Bathrick and Eric Rentschler, the French version of the film, and a documentary and essay on the adaptation from stage to screen.

Brecht drafted the original screenplay, but delivered something far different than he was asked for. Rather than simply bringing the original play to the screen, he drastically altered it, adding and removing scenes, rearranging the structure, and greatly altering the content and focus of the tale.

Brecht had already clashed with composer Kurt Weill over the play itself, each man claiming credit for the production's success. Now he clashed with Pabst, who took Brecht's script and bent it to his own aims. But as Bathrick and Rentschler point out in the disc's commentary track, the two men may not have been so far apart as they claimed. Each was perhaps reluctant to credit the other with the film's better qualities and reserved the right to scapegoat the other should the critics be unkind.

Shortchanged by the film, however, is Kurt Weill, for few of his compositions made it onto the screen.

The final product, though it may bear relatively little resemblance to the stage production, is an excellent film and a milestone of early sound cinema. Pabst often replaces scenes of dialogue with imagery, with long gazes, with near-silent shots in which the actors convey the plot without words. 

And at a time when the camera had been rendered almost stagnant by cumbersome sound equipment, Pabst's camera roams through the sets with fluidity and ease. If the camerawork at times seem similar to Fritz Lang's M, released that same year, there is good reason: Both films were shot by legendary cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner.

There are other similarities between the two films. Both examine the criminal underworld, and do so with a blend of humor, intrigue and distaste. And both feature wonderfully sustained sequences of cat-and-mouse amid the squalid streets. One image in Threepenny Opera is especially striking: One of Mack the Knife's henchmen has stolen an armchair and is running through the streets with police in pursuit. He crosses a courtyard, invisible beneath the chair, looking like an ant carrying its booty back to the nest. He scurries across the courtyard and out of view, only to appear again with the police right behind him, firing bullets into the upholstery.

In America, the reaction to synchronized sound technology had been extreme. The first couple of years worth of American sound films were filled with wall-to-wall talk; the audience was rarely given a break from the endless chatter of showgirls and dandy men about town. It seemed everyone was a wit, armed with a ready punchline for every situation. In Germany, by contrast, sound was being used more judiciously and with greater sophistication. Filmmakers like Pabst and Lang did not give up the virtues of the more image-focused cinema of silent pictures. Rather than treating sound as an end in itself, they used it as a means to an end, as another tool in the creation of compelling cinema. Sound was used as atmosphere, or fused into the story as a plot point, and often employed in one sequence merely to draw greater attention to the silence of another sequence.

The result is a film of richness and depth, with sound and image combining in the creation of a sharply rendered underworld. The words of Brecht, the music of Weill, the images of Pabst and Wagner — a fruitful collaboration of some of Germany's greatest talents.

Threepenny Opera. $39.95. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com.

True Heart Susie: The Softer Side of Griffith

D.W. Griffith is known these days primarily for his large-scale epics Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). And while these films contributed greatly to the history and art of motion pictures, they do not fully convey the range and power of Griffith's talent, nor are they his most enjoyable films.

Some of his most satisfying work was done a much smaller scale. Some of the short films he made for the Biograph company prior to Birth of a Nation are among his best work, like tales in miniature told with deft skill and economy. And some of his less grandiose features are more heartfelt, more sincere, and far less bombastic than the epic crowd-pleasers on which his reputation rests today.

True Heart Susie (1919) is one of a series of films Griffith referred to as his "short story" pictures. It is a small, gentle film, one of the director's pastoral romances in which he celebrates with warmth and nostalgia the sort of rural village life in which he was raised. The film has just been released on DVD by Image Entertainment in an excellent transfer produced by David Shepard.

Lillian Gish plays a country lass, a plain girl in love with the boy (Robert Harron) across the way. When his father denies him the chance to go to college, Susie quietly sells her cow and a few other belongings to anonymously pay the boy's tuition. But when he returns from college to become the village teacher, he is seduced by and marries another girl in the village, a wild one of questionable sincerity. 

The plot becomes a bit contrived from there, as Griffith does everything he can to ensure that, through no fault of the boy or Susie, the vampish wife is taken ill and dies as two secrets come to light: the wife had concealed transgressions against the husband, and Susie was in fact the boy's true benefactor. Thus Griffith's 19th century morals are conveniently kept intact as he reunites his two saintly characters while focusing all blame on the vamp.

But this is in part what makes the film so engaging. It's a simple tale, with simple plot points and simple emotions. And Lillian Gish handles the role beautifully. For viewers not familiar with Gish, the performance may seem a bit odd, for Gish is in a sense playing with her own screen image, gently chiding the simple girlish role she has been given on the one hand, yet delivering wonderfully understated emotions scenes on the other. 

While epic dramas full of action and showmanship may have satisfied Griffith's ego, it is the smaller films like True Heart Susie that reveal the true soul of the director—his warmth, his sentimentality, his reverence or a 19th century vision of female purity, and his passion for the everyday drama of everyday life. 

The disc comes with a bonus feature, Hoodoo Ann (1916), a Griffith-supervised light comedy which he wrote under a pseudonym. 

True Heart Susie. $24.99. Image Entertainment. www.image-entertainment.com.

Chaplin at First National: The Kid, The Pilgrim

Our image of Charlie Chaplin is a simple one: a daft little man in baggy clothes, with bowler hat and wicker cane. He’s just a comedian—a silly clown.

But embodied in that simple outline is an extraordinarily complex figure, both on and behind the screen. Charlie is a tramp, yet with a refined air; he’s a prickly loner who shuns societal norms, yet who longs for love and acceptance. And Chaplin the man bore his own set of contradictions: the Brit who came to embody American comedy; a hero to the masses and a darling of the intellectual set; a lowly comedian who strove for artistic heights; a man who lived for the adulation of the crowd while simultaneously professing to be terrified of his audience.

Pacific Film Archive is presenting a broad overview of the mercurial comedian’s work through Dec. 19. The retrospective covers all of Chaplin’s feature-length work and a handful of his earlier short films. A few will be presented as part of PFA’s “Matinees For All Ages” series of Saturday afternoon screenings, which come complete with free Fenton’s ice cream in the courtyard after the show.

The series begins at 2 p.m. Sunday with one of the comedian’s greatest achievements. The Kid (1921) was his first foray into feature-length filmmaking and a breakthrough work in its blending of slapstick and sentiment, a mixture that would become Chaplin’s signature. The 60-minute film will screen along with a shorter comedy, The Pilgrim (1923).

In the 1910s, screen comedians generally made short films, known as “two-reelers,” a reel running roughly 10 minutes. These were the hors d’oeuvres of the cinema experience, shown along with newsreels and cartoons before the feature. Most two-reelers consisted of knockabout slapstick and it was thought that such antics could not be sustained over the course of a full-length feature. Chaplin, however, from the beginning of his solo career in 1914, had set a new standard for slapstick, slowing the pace and establishing character, not roughhouse, as the primary source of comedy. By the time he made The Kid, his Little Tramp character was beloved the world over for his anarchic antics and impish temperament.

Chaplin had started his film career with Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio before setting out on his own under the auspices of Essanay Studios here in the East Bay. After 14 films with Essanay, Chaplin negotiated a more lucrative and artistically independent contract with Mutual, where he made a dozen two-reelers that firmly established his reputation as the prevailing comedian of his day. This was his most concentrated and fruitful period, with each of the 12 films building on the achievements of its predecessor.

When Chaplin left Mutual for First National, he didn’t do it for the money, nor for creative control, for he had plenty of both. What he sought was time; his new contract would relieve him of the pressure of turning out films on a predetermined schedule. He would finally have room to breathe.

Enter Jackie Coogan. Chaplin had seen the 4-year-old boy performing with his father in a music hall and immediately signed the child for his next film. In Coogan Chaplin found his first and only true co-star, the only performer with whom he would share the screen as an equal. Coogan gave one of the screen’s truly great child performances and immediately established himself as a star.

When Chaplin outlined the film’s plot and revealed to a colleague his plan to bring drama to low comedy, he was told it couldn’t be done, that each form required purity, and as a consequence at least one half of his story was bound to suffer.

The Kid begins with the Tramp wandering alone through back alleys where he stumbles upon an abandoned baby and reluctantly adopts the child as his own. Here, for the first time, the Tramp seems to live a truly normal domestic existence as he raises Jackie until authorities come calling a few years later, taking the child from him by force. Again, Chaplin presents us with the Tramp as the perennial outsider, in the world but never part of it. In the end Charlie seems to gain entry into civilized society, but the image is somewhat incongruous as Chaplin intentionally leaves the conclusion ambiguous.

With The Kid, Chaplin raised the emotional level to a new high, introducing true drama to his work. In the process he delved further into his own memories of childhood in an orphanage in the slums of England. The result was a deepening of the character of the Tramp in a film many critics consider his most successful creation—a near-perfect blending of pathos and humor. All of his films, Chaplin later noted, received mixed reviews, except for The Kid—for decades it was his one unanimously proclaimed triumph.

Chaplin would of course go on to even more ambitious work. His later work would include three more masterpieces (The Gold Rush, The Circus, City Lights), two solid but flawed films (Modern Times, The Great Dictator), and two decent late-career films (Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight). But The Kid holds a special spot in the Chaplin canon, for it represents the first full flowering of a mature artist.

Chaplin’s remaining films for First National during this period are something of a mixed bag, ranging from ambitious satiric slapstick (Shoulder Arms, The Pilgrim, A Dog’s Life) to simple two-reelers in the vein of his earlier work (Payday, A Day’s Pleasure), and one failure (Sunnyside). He was gradually lengthening his films, venturing into more complex comedic territory, but The Kid took so much of his time that he was obliged to crank out a few simpler films to satisfy distributors and theater owners.

The Pilgrim is one of the better films from this era. It is essentially a classic Chaplin two-reeler expanded to four reels. Chaplin sets up the situation with superb efficiency. Within two minutes we have the basic outline: Escaped convict Charlie has traded his prison clothes for the unattended frock of a bathing priest. When Chaplin, in the minister’s clothing, arrives at the train station he finds himself in a series of hilariously unnecessary chases before boarding a train and stumbling into a fortuitous situation when he arrives in a Texas town and is mistaken for the long-awaited new preacher.

Chaplin peppers the action with numerous sight gags that recall the convict’s unruly past. When he stands at the ticket window at the train station, he reflexively grasps the bars as though it were a cell. Out of habit, he crawls underneath the train as a stowaway before a conductor takes his ticket and guides him to a proper seat. When expected to deliver a sermon while masquerading as the Reverend Pim, he takes a drink from a glass of water and props his elbow on the podium while his foot reveals the character’s predilection for the wild life by searching habitually and in vain for a bar on which to rest.

Though The Pilgrim doesn’t aim for the sort of emotional depth of The Kid, Chaplin again manages to straddle two worlds. His Tramp is both criminal and hero, a troubled outsider who strives for respectability—at least when respectability comes in the guise of alluring leading lady Edna Purviance. In the end he is released along the Mexican border by a benevolent sheriff, yet as he stands on Mexican soil and casts his arms wide in celebration of his freedom, a pack of desperadoes leaps from the underbrush and begins firing guns at one another—hardly a hospitable environment in which to start anew. Thus the Tramp flees by running gingerly along the border, one foot in each country, as always a citizen of the world, but without a home of his own.

Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934

We tend to think that once something is committed to film we have it forever. The act of recording seems by its very nature permanent, and often we forget that the very materials used to record are nearly as transient as the images they capture. For the reality is that film is a tenuous medium at best, given to disintegration and, in the case of nitrate films, spontaneous combustion. And this is compounded by the fact that cinema itself was for decades considered merely a novelty, an ephemeral entertainment of virtually no great cultural or historical value.

In fact, it is estimated that 90 percent of all films made during the silent era (1895-1929) and 50 percent of all films made before 1950 are lost, disintegrated over time, neglected or willfully destroyed to extract their nitrate content, or simply mislabeled and forgotten, awaiting discovery on some dusty shelf.

The National Film Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization created by Congress in 1997, has helped save more than 1,000 films over the past decade. Most of these films are not commercially viable; the audiences they draw at film festivals are not nearly large enough to cover the costs of their preservation and distribution, and there’s little financial incentive for commercial companies to release them on DVD.

So the foundation, through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, stepped into the void and began releasing many of these rare cultural artifacts on DVD. The award-winning Treasures From American Film Archives series has consistently been one of the best reviewed discs every year in which a collection has been released. The first set featured a sampling of rare films spanning the history and range of the medium; the second focused on the silent era.

This year the foundation has released Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934, another beautifully produced collection of 48 educational films, commercial features, cartoons, newsreels and propaganda films. The four discs each have a theme: urban life, women and women’s suffrage, labor and capital, immigration and patriotism. The set includes four feature films, an illustrated book with notes for all the films, and commentaries and original musical accompaniment for each. And all proceeds support further film preservation.

Viewing these films is like traveling back in time. It’s a uniquely compelling experience to see documentary footage of everyday life 100 years ago, to see everyday people going about their everyday lives—not posed in static photographs, but walking, talking and laughing. And the more formally staged films say just as much if not more about who these people were, about how they thought and behaved, and how they sought to influence and persuade one another. And though the differences between their time and ours are legion, at times the real surprise is how much has remained the same.

100% American (1918, 14 minutes) features the screen’s first genuine star, Mary Pickford, in a film designed to encourage citizens to buy war bonds. The idea of movie stardom and the harnessing of that influence for commercial and political means was new at the time, and there was no more popular figure in motion pictures than “America’s Sweetheart.”

In the opening scene Pickford is shamed by a man on the street selling bonds. “Our boys are sacrificing their life-blood,” he cries, “What sacrifice have you made?” An alien thought in our time, when the popularity of war is maintained only by keeping it at arms’ length. We then watch as our plucky heroine struggles to overcome the myriad temptations of daily life—fancy new dresses, ice cream sundaes, public transportation—in an effort to save her pennies and donate them to the cause. Nevermind that Pickford wasn’t actually a citizen; in her native country the film was retitled 100% Canadian.

In other films it’s apparent that some things haven’t changed over the years. Listen to Some Words of Wisdom (1930, 2 minutes) gives us Mr. Courage and Mr. Fear, chatting amiably over dinner at a restaurant. The Great Depression has Mr. Fear worried about his finances, even though he has just received a raise, and thus he orders a simple meal of crackers and milk. Mr. Courage intervenes, advising Mr. Fear that it is his patriotic duty to spend his money to help jump-start the economy.

While there are many films in the collection that represent progressive causes, then as now film production was an expensive enterprise, so it is no surprise that so many of these films represent moneyed interests. Two cartoons illustrate the point. The first, The United Snakes of America (1917, 80 seconds) is essentially a newspaper political cartoon, brought to life by stop-motion animation as the drawing is inked in, first the faces and bodies of Uncle Sam flanked by an army man and a navy man. The film essentially creates a punchline by presenting the most crucial elements last, as snakes with labels such as “pro-German press” and “peace activists” come into view, attacking Uncle Sam and revealing that the cartoon is in fact a swipe at all those perceived as undermining the war effort. As far as editorial cartooning goes, this is not the least bit unusual. But to whom does this statement of opinion belong? An independent cartoonist? A media corporation—Hearst, perhaps, or Pulitzer? In the final seconds a hand comes into view to proudly sketch in the credit line and reveal the source: the Ford Motor Company.

Uncle Sam and the Bolsheviki-I.W.W. Rat (1919, 40 seconds) is another animated political cartoon in which Uncle Sam protects the gross domestic product from the evil claws of the International Workers of the World, represented by a rat that crawls out of the woodwork to feast on the harvest. The patriotic Uncle Sam, tellingly hiding behind a wall of sacks labeled “American Institutions,” takes a shovel to the head of the dreaded Bolshevik-loving rodent and crushes it. Again, praise be to the Ford Motor Company.

The status quo is again represented in a few films about the women’s suffrage movement. The Strong Arm Squad of the Future (1912, 60 seconds) is a short animated film that satirizes the movement by caricaturing women in roles of power as manly, brutish, and, most damningly, unappealing to men. More objective in its perspective is On to Washington (1913, 80 seconds), a news film that contains footage of the suffragette march on Capitol Hill. In a more commercial vein is The Hazards of Helen: Episode 13, one installment in a long-running serial in which the heroine battles not only villainous robbers, but the evils of workplace discrimination.

This is just a small sample; Treasures III is far too varied to adequately express here. Suffice it to say that this is not just a collection for history buffs or cinephiles; the films contained here offer both entertainment and enlightenment, and more than a little astonishment.

Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934. $89.99. www.filmpreservation.org.

Battleship Potemkin and the Art of Montage

Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein's dramatization of an event from the Russian Revolution, is one of the touchstones of cinema. It caused a sensation when it was released in 1925 and remains one of the most influential films of the silent era. Its methods, bold and unconventional in their time, transformed cinematic technique. Kino International has recently released the film in what may prove to be a definitively restored edition, a two-disc set that includes both English and Russian versions of the film.

The film is primarily influential due to what became known as "montage." Though the word really just translates as "editing" or "putting together," it has come to mean several different kinds of editing: rapid rhythmic cutting; spatial and temporally jarring cutting; or the accumulation of images in the creation of either an emotional effect or an intellectual idea. Perhaps the simplest definition is the juxtaposition of independent and often disparate images in the creation of meaning. Eisenstein himself described it as independent shots placed not one after the other, but on top of one another, like layers of meaning and emotion.

The most famous example is the Odessa Steps sequence, a heart-pounding scene in which soldiers march methodically down what appears to be, due to Eisenstein's editing, an enormously long staircase, slaughtering a throng of people who rush to escape the gunfire. Eisenstein never fully orients the viewer to the landscape. Instead he provides a continuous rush of imagery: closeups of the dead and the dying; shots of crowds fleeing; stampeding feet; and, most famously, a baby carriage tumbling down the staircase, set in motion by the falling body of a murdered mother. Through the rapid juxtaposition of disparate shots, Eisenstein simulates the terror and bloodshed of the event, the disoriented space, the rush of motion, and the drawn-out feeling of time expanding, as though the horror will never end.

There are simpler examples of montage as well. Early in the film, when the crew on the battleship feels the first stirrings of revolution, a sailor smashes a plate on the edge of a table. Eisenstein, through montage, imbues this moment with greater import and force by rapidly cutting in several views of this gesture. In quick succession we see the plate smashed in closeup and in medium shot, along with closeups of the soldier's face and arm. Essentially we see the action repeated, the plate smashed several times, but all this action flashes by in a second. It seems very simple, but Eisenstein was touching on something profound here, using the unique properties of the cinema in the creation of a powerfully expressive technique. With a few clever edits, he transformed a gesture of frustration into a battle cry, the first act of mutiny. The smashed plate heard round the world.

Potemkin would be subject to far more cutting over the years. It would seem that every nation in which it appeared found it necessary to cut away at the film, diluting its revolutionary power and even shaping it to fit other ideologies. Thus the film, though it has been widely viewed and always appreciated, has rarely, if ever, been seen in anything resembling its original form since its 1925 premiere in Moscow. The Kino release does not claim to represent the film in its original state, but it is thought that this is as close as we're likely to get.

Extra features include a 42-minute documentary on the making and restoration of the film, English and original Russian versions, and a photo gallery.

Battleship Potemkin (1925). Directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein. 69 minutes. $29.95. Kino International. www.kino.com.

2007 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

In today’s fully wired world of digital video and handheld viewing devices, it may be difficult to fathom a time when the moving picture was itself a revolutionary technology. In the first few decades of the 20th century, as the new medium was developed and perfected, it brought with it a radical cultural shift, bringing images from all over the world to neighborhood theaters.

The cinema essentially held a monopoly on mass entertainment, for this was before television brought the moving image into the home, and even before radio, which first brought the immediacy of live news and entertainment into the living room in the 1930s.

It was likewise before commercial aviation, a time when travel was more daunting, more arduous, and less accessible to the working class. Thus cinema provided a unique and engaging portal to the world for many who might not otherwise venture beyond regional borders.

The 12th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, running this weekend at the Castro Theater, is a portal of its own, taking audiences back to a time when film was establishing itself as the dominant art form of the new century. The festival’s mission is to showcase the art of silent film as it was meant to be seen, with quality prints presented at proper projection speeds and accompanied by period-appropriate live music.

In those early years, cinema, despite the tiredness of the cliché, was a new and universal language. Photography in newspapers and magazines could provide a glimpse of other cultures and other lives, but moving pictures, captured in faraway lands and projected on a screen, brought vivid images of a life beyond: clouds of dust kicked up by wagon trains moving west; waves unfolding on distant shores; the gleam of moonlight on cobblestones in a European village; the very ways in which people moved and lived throughout the world. It was a time when cinema was simpler in means yet just as rich in content, relying almost exclusively on image and motion to convey plot and import.

It was the lack of dialogue in fact which lent the movies much of their universal appeal, establishing film as a visual language that would be undermined once the images began to talk. For along with the advent of synchronized sound came the cultural barrier of language, a gap bridged only by such awkward translation devices such as dubbing, the falsity of which created a visual-verbal dissonance, and subtitling, which detracted from cinema’s impact by drawing the eye away from the image. Silent film instead relied on intertitles, an imperfect device to be sure, but one which at least had the virtue of separating the printed words from the image, leaving the visuals untouched and undiluted. And translation was simply a matter of replacing the title cards as a film crossed international borders.

This year’s festival presents something of the international appeal and range of silent-era cinema by bringing together an eclectic selection of films. The festival kicks off Friday with a mainstream American studio production, The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg. This is Germany by way of MGM, with big Hollywood stars Norma Shearer and Ramon Novarro directed with continental flare by the great Ernst Lubitsch.

Continuing with the international theme, Saturday will feature an afternoon screening of Maciste, an Italian classic that the festival’s programmers—Executive Director Stacey Wisnia and Artistic Director Steve Salmons—came across at the Pordenone Silent Festival in Italy. This was the first in a series of Maciste films starring Barolomeo Pagan as a heroic strong man rescuing damsels in distress. Sunday’s screenings include “Retour De Flamme” (“Saved From the Flames”), a program of early rarities by French cinema pioneers, presented, with his own piano accompaniment, by Parisian film collector Serge Bromberg, and The Cottage on Dartmoor, a British “psycho-noir” by director Anthony Asquith.

Another aspect of the Silent Film Festival’s mission is to educate its audience about the preservation and restoration of our rapidly disappearing cinematic heritage. Thus for the second year the festival is hosting “Amazing Tales from the Archives,” a free Sunday morning presentation on the effort to preserve that history. The program is the brainchild of Wisnia, who, despite the skepticism of her colleagues, thought last year’s presentation might draw a decent crowd. All were surprised when the turnout nearly filled the Castro’s main floor. This year’s program will focus on “peripheral” films—trailers, newsreels and shorts—and on obsolete formats, such as 28-millimeter, a format originally sold for use in homes and schools. Many 28mm films shorts will be screened throughout the festival, including travelogues, educational films and short comedies, even one of Harold Lloyd’s rarely screened “Lonesome Luke” films.

Though Wisnia and Salmons’ tastes may skew toward the lesser-known films from the era, they make an effort to fill a range of genres, from comedy to drama, from blockbuster studio productions to quieter, more experimental work, from star-studded large-scale productions to forgotten gems by actors and directors nearly lost to film history. Other films on the menu include:

• Valley of the Giants, a drama set amid the towering redwoods of the Sierra Nevada, featuring nearly forgotten actor Milton Sills.
• Beggars of Life, a follow-up to last year’s screening of Pandora’s Box, featuring the legendary flapper-vixen Louise Brooks. This time Brooks takes a radically different role, spending most of the film attired in men’s clothes in a story of hobos riding the rails in Depression-era America.
• The Godless Girl, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, one of the greatest showmen to take up film. His films were spectacles, full of melodrama and hysteria, and, more often than not, a steady stream of vice, usually denounced toward the end of the film to accommodate censors.
• Miss Lulu Brett, by William DeMille, a successful Broadway playwright and accomplished film director whose work was often overshadowed by that of his younger, brasher, more ostentatious brother. Miss Lulu Brett is considered his best film, based a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Zona Gale. William takes a quieter, humbler approach than his more famous brother, telling a tale of a small-town girl stuck as a servant in her sister’s household while looking for a path toward a happier and more meaningful life.
• Camille, a distinctive and innovative Warner Bros. production starring Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino.
• And every festival includes at least one program focusing on the silent era’s comic masters. This year spotlights producer Hal Roach, screening four short comedies from Roach Studio stalwarts like Charley Chase and the Our Gang ragamuffins.
  

SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL

Friday, July 13 through Sunday, July 15 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. (925) 275-9005. www.silentfilm.org.

Lady Windermere's Fan: The Lubitsch Touch

Silent film star Mary Pickford famously described director Ernst Lubitsch as a “director of doors,” a man more at home working with the choreography of entrances and exits than with actors and emotions. This acerbic remark, uttered in the awake of an ill-fated collaboration with the director on Rosita, his first American production, has a grain of truth but should be taken with a grain of salt as well.

Pickford was one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood and not inclined to accept a secondary role in a film’s creation. But Lubitsch’s films were not so much vehicles for stars so much as they were vehicles for Lubitsch, for his subtle and distinctive wit, both with images and later with dialogue.

A viewing of Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925) shows the truth behind both sides of the argument. The film shows tonight at Pacific Film Archive as part of a month-long career-spanning retrospective of the director’s work entitled “The Lubitsch Touch.” The series runs through Feb. 16 and tracks the legendary director’s career from his early German silent films to his much-celebrated American comedies of the sound era.

Lady Windermere’s Fan is an adaptation of an Oscar Wilde play that brazenly tosses out the words of Wilde in favor of sly visual humor and cues, replacing Wilde’s verbal wit with Lubitsch’s visual wit. The actors do good work, but clearly the director is in control, for the performances are not inspired but are instead matched meticulously to the staging and camerawork. There’s very little dialogue; most of the information is imparted to us simply through facial expressions, mannerisms and editing.

Many stars appeared in Lubitsch’s films, but Lubitsch himself was the true star of his productions, a noted auteur who guided the performances of his actors down to the smallest detail. Like Chaplin, he acted out each role and instructed his actors to mimic him, and, as with Chaplin again, this at times led to rather stilted performances. The actors were not permitted much leeway in plying their trade. However, the fact that the technique so often found such great results was a testament to Lubitsch’s unique talents.

One scene in particular illustrates Pickford’s dissent perfectly: Lubistch, in order to quickly and comically expresses the increasing intimacy between a couple, gives us two scenes of the suitor approaching the front door of his lady’s apartment. A close-up shows just his hand as he starts to ring the doorbell, things twice, hesitates, pulls out a pocket mirror, replaces it, then rings the bell and politely offers his coat and hat to the maid while waiting to be introduced. A second scene, taking place some weeks later, shows the hand again ringing the bell, this time with no hesitation. The man then walks brusquely through the door and past the maid, hanging his hat and coat without her help before bursting into the lady’s rooms unannounced. All necessary information is conveyed through intertitles, camerawork and editing. The acting is almost superfluous; it’s Lubitsch’s performance through and through.

His technique is not exactly subtle; in fact, Lubitsch’s presence can almost always be felt in his films, and this is a mixed blessing. Just as it is difficult to read Wilde without marveling at his wit, one cannot view a Lubitsch film without being made acutely conscious of the wit and style of the director. At its best it is a seductive technique, one that draws the viewer into an alliance with the director, making one feel as if one is in on the joke, sharing in the sense of superiority toward the objects of that wit; but at times it has a tendency to drain a film of drama and impact, maintaining a cynical distance from characters who are reduced to mere pawns in the director’s cinematic game.

The result is that Lubitsch’s films, though often just as entertaining today as they were in their time, are less art than entertainment, fun for their two-hour span but with little impact beyond the moment the theater lights come up. The “Lubitsch touch,” though deft, is a light touch, one that only lingers playfully amid the more complex, underlying themes of the story, rarely delving deeply into character, motivation or import. He won’t change your life but for two hours he’ll take you for a fun and stylish ride.

Other films in the series include Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, Angel, Heaven Can Wait, Trouble in Paradise, The Marriage Circle, Rosita, The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant. The series runs through Feb. 16. $4-8. 2575 Bancrot Way. 642-5249. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.