2012 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival returns this week with an eclectic and compelling program of movies from the medium's first golden era. From blockbusters to romance, from comedy to melodrama, from cartoons to documentaries, the festival, as it does every year, showcases the breadth and depth of film's first few decades.

Below are just a few of the festival’s highlights, followed by the complete schedule.

The 17th annual festival opens Thursday night with Wings, the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Directed by William Wellman, the plot concerns a love triangle set against the backdrop of the Great War. For the most part, the film hews to the standard romance-and-drama plotline, but it also features some astonishing scenes of World War I dogfights. No blue screens here: Wellman puts his camera in the planes and sends them hurdling, tumbling and diving through the skies to breathtaking effect. Wings features the “It” girl, Clara Bow, along with Gary Cooper and Charles “Buddy” Rogers. William Wellman, Jr. will introduce the film.

South

The festival reconvenes Friday morning for its annual Amazing Tales From the Archives program, a free-admission event that spotlights the important work of film preservation. The day continues with a program of foreign films and one rarely seen gem: Mantrap is another Clara Bow vehicle, this one based on a book by one of the decade's foremost American novelists, Sinclair Lewis.

Saturday morning cartoons start at 10 a.m. with a program of Felix the Cat cartoons. Later in the day the festival presents two of its best attractions: South is the story of Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated Antarctic expedition. His ship, the Endurance, was crushed in the ice pack, leaving Shackleton and his crew stranded a thousand miles from civilization. Shackleton and a skeleton crew crossed hundreds of miles of raging sea in small open boats and traversed towering glaciers in order to find someone to help him rescue his men. Frank Hurley was the expedition's photographer, and he created South from his photographs and motion-picture images of the voyage.

Saturday night features an encore showing of Pandora's Box, which anchored the festival a few years back. Louise Brooks is at her most alluring in G.W. Pabst's German classic.

Pandora's Box

Sunday begins with The Mark of Zorro, the first of Douglas Fairbanks' series of swashbucklers. To this point, Fairbanks had played a dapper young man bounding with the can-do spirit of the era in a series of light comedies. With Zorro, he shifted to period dramedy, forging adventurous drama-comedy hybrids that showcased his irrepressible energy and athleticism. Fairbanks served as the model for last year's hit film The Artist. In fact, in the scene where that film's main character sits alone and watches his own movies, he was actually watching footage from The Mark of Zorro.

Next comes one of the true masterpieces of silent cinema, Josef von Sternberg's shadowy tale of love and violence, The Docks of New York. Sternbreg’s trademark photographic brilliance is on display from the opening shots: Take a look at the expressionist lighting as men shovel coal into a ship's furnace, the bright fire rendering the surrounding darkness all the darker and starkly illuminating the men’s faces, lending the distinct impression that they are serving penance in hell.

Docks of New York

The program concludes Sunday night with festival favorite Buster Keaton in the final great comedy of his career. The Cameraman was Buster's first film after his producer sold his contract to MGM. Keaton went from the casual, comfortable confines of his own independent studio to the biggest and most factory-like of Hollywood studios. MGM was an assembly line — writers wrote the films, directors made them, and actors performed in them. The studio was only interested in Keaton as an actor, not as an actor-writer-director-stuntman.

They saddled Keaton with a subplot- and dialogue-laden film, but when the project ran into difficulty, Keaton seized the opportunity to prove himself to his new employers. He stripped the film of its extraneous subplots and added his own brand of humor and sight gags, as well his trademark athleticism and stunt work. The result was another in a decade-long string of classic Keaton comedies. In fact, MGM used The Cameraman as a training film for its comedians for years afterward, even wearing the print out from so much usage — indeed, several minutes of footage are still missing from the film for this reason. But MGM conveniently overlooked Keaton's contribution to the film, choosing instead to believe that the result proved that Keaton needed a tight leash, needed to be handed his material and ordered to stick to the script. This was effectively the end of Buster Keaton; having lost his career autonomy, his wife, and his children, he slipped further into alcoholism and indifference, sleepwalking his way through a series of inane MGM comedies before ultimately getting fired by the studio.

The complete schedule is below. For more information and to order tickets, see silentfilm.org.

Thursday, July 12

The Cameraman

7 p.m.: Wings (USA, 1927, 141 minutes)

Cast: Clara Bow, Richard Arlen, Buddy Rogers, Gary Cooper. Directed by William Wellman.

Accompanied by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra with Foley sound effects by Ben Burtt. Introduced by William Wellman, Jr.

$20.

Friday, July 13

10:30 a.m.: Amazing Tales from the Archives: Into the Digital Frontier

Presentations by Andrea Kalas, Vice President of Archives at Paramount Pictures and Grover Crisp, Senior Vice President of Film Restoration and Digital Mastering at Sony Pictures. Accompanied by Stephen Horne on the grand piano. Free admission.

1 p.m.: Little Toys (China, 1933, 110 minutes)

Cast: Ruan Lingyu, Li Lili. Directed by Sun Yu.

Accompanied by Donald Sosin on the grand piano. $15.

4 p.m.: The Loves of Pharaoh (Germany, 1922, 100 minutes)

Cast: Emil Jannings, Dagny Servaes, Paul Biensfeldt, Friedrich Kühne. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Accompanied by Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer. $15.

7 p.m.: Mantrap (USA, 1926, 71 minutes)

Cast: Clara Bow, Ernest Torrence, Percy Marmont, Eugene Pallette. Directed by Victor Fleming.

Accompanied by Stephen Horne on the grand piano.

$15.

9:15 p.m.: The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna (Germany, 1929, 115 minutes)
Cast: Brigitte Helm, Francis Lederer, Warwick Ward, Lya Jan. Directed by Hanns Schwarz.

Accompanied by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Live English translation read by Frank Buxton.

$15.

Saturday, July 14

10 a.m.: Felix the Cat cartoons (USA, 1925–1929, 70 minutes)

Created by Otto Mesmer and Pat Sullivan. Accompanied by Donald Sosin and Toychestra.

$15.

12 p.m.: The Spanish Dancer (USA, 1923, 105 minutes)

Cast: Pola Negri, Antonio Moreno, Wallace Beery, Kathlyn Williams, Adolphe Menjou. Directed by Herbert Brenon.

Accompanied by Donald Sosin, keyboard, with Jim Washburn and Greg Smith, guitar.

$15.

2:30 p.m.: The Canadian (USA, 1926, 88 minutes)

Cast: Thomas Meighan, Mona Palma, Wyndham Standing, Dale Fuller. Directed by William Beaudine. Accompanied by Stephen Horne on the grand piano.

$15.

5 p.m.: South (United Kingdom, 1919, 72 minutes)

Directed by Frank Hurley.

Accompanied by Stephen Horne on the grand piano, with live narration by Paul McGann.

$15.

7 p.m.: Pandora's Box (Germany, 1929, 143 minutes)

Cast: Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer, Carl Gotz. Directed by G.W. Pabst.

Accompanied by the Matti Bye Ensemble.

$20.

10 p.m.: The Overcoat (USSR 1926, 71 minutes)

Cast: Andrei Kostrichkin, Antonina Yeremeyeva, Sergei Gerasimov. Directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg.

Accompanied by the Alloy Orchestra.

$15.

Sunday, July 15

10 a.m.: The Mark of Zorro (USA, 1920, 90 minutes)

Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Marguerite De La Motte, Noah Beery. Directed by Fred Niblo.

Accompanied by Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer.

$15.

12 p.m.: The Docks of New York (USA, 1928, 76 minutes)

Cast: George Bancroft, Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova, Clyde Cook. Directed by Josef von Sternberg.

Accompanied by Donald Sosin on the grand piano.

$15.

2 p.m.: Erotikon (Sweden, 1920, 106 minutes)

Cast: Anders de Wahl, Tora Teje, Lars Hanson, Karin Molande. Directed by Mauritz Stiller.

Accompanied by the Matti Bye Ensemble.

$15.

4:30 p.m.: Stella Dallas (USA, 1925, 120 minutes)

Cast: Ronald Colman, Belle Bennett, Alice Joyce, Jean Hersholt. Directed by Henry King.

Accompanied by Stephen Horne on the grand piano.

$15.

7:30 p.m.: The Cameraman (USA, 1928, 76 minutes)

Cast: Buster Keaton, Marceline Day, Harold Goodwin. Directed by Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton.

Accompanied by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

Preceded by A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès, with live narration by Paul McGann.

$20.

San Francisco Silent Film Festival Screens Rare Gems, Timeless Classics

This year's San Francisco Silent Film Festival starts off with a premiere of sorts. Last year a stash of rare American silent films, many long though lost, were repatriated back to the United States for restoration and preservation. Upstream, one of the gems of the collection and the first to be restored, will screen Thursday, July 14, as the opening film of the annual festival that takes over the Castro Theater through Sunday night.

Upstream is an early film by John Ford, one of the towering figures of cinema, American or otherwise. Made while the director was working for Fox, Ford admitted to having been captivated at the time by the work of F.W. Murnau, who had made a name for himself as one of Germany’s top directors with work as disparate as the horror masterpiece Nosferatu, the expressionist classic The Last Laugh, and a cinematic reworking of Faust. Hollywood was eager to recruit top European talent in those days and Murnau was a high-profile catch for Fox. Here, Ford was able to observe Murnau's methods firsthand, and though he wouldn't incorporate much of what he learned from Murnau until later films, Upstream, a melodrama that centers on a backstage love triangle among Vaudevillians, was produced during this period.

The festival will screen Ford's film along with Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the masterpiece with which Murnau brought Germanic technique and a palpable European sensibility to American filmmaking. Sunrise is celebrated for its roaming camerawork, its evocative set design, its emotional range and fable-like qualities. The plot concerns a young country couple whose happy home is threatened when the husband is tempted by a footloose city flapper. Murnau sets up dichotomies that are almost allegorical: between city and country, love and lust, virtue and temptation. It is melodrama raised to the level of poetry, a fable of love, devotion and redemption.

Murnau’s camera is almost constantly on the move, tracking characters along village paths, through marshlands at dusk, along the busy streets of a bustling city. Sunrise is a whirlwind of motion and emotion, from tense moments wandering in darkness, to a sun-kissed stroll that leaves the couple bewildered in the midst of a traffic jam, to the kaleidoscopic revelry of a nightclub sequence.

Saturday's highlight is Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born But..., one of the great Japanese director's early films, and one of his most beloved. Rather rather than employing his camera in bravura displays of pyrotechnic virtuosity, Ozu used it to simply observe his characters, to linger on their faces, on their homes, on their possessions—to look into the souls of everyday people under everyday circumstances. Ozu was both a naturalist and a rigorous formalist, a director who sought to capture life as it is lived, but within a framework of rigidly defined restrictions. He limited the camera’s range of motion and the angles from which it could gaze; he limited his editing to simple, direct cuts—no dissolves or fades; and dialogue was conveyed in simple master shots followed by alternating close-ups. This artistic code focused the viewer's attention on content over form, allowing character to reveal itself, allowing dialogue to breathe, and allowing revelatory spaces to open up between words and gestures and characters. Thus relationships and motivations and plot points gradually take shape before the viewer’s eyes. “Rather than tell a superficial story,” Ozu said, “I wanted to go deeper, to show ... the ever-changing uncertainties of life. So instead of constantly pushing dramatic action to the fore, I left empty spaces, so viewers could have a pleasant aftertaste to savor.”

Long before Ozu refined this method and distilled it into the austere approach of his later, more famous movies, he made many lighter films—comedies, melodramas, even Hollywood-inspired gangster films. One of the best of his early films, I Was Born But... displays the director's remarkable ability to blend comedy with poignant drama. The film examines the difficulties both of children growing up and of their parents in handling them. A man’s young sons brawl with the local kids in their new neighborhood to assert their dominance, and once they do they exercise their power without restraint. Later their father falls from his figurative pedestal as they witness him kowtowing to his boss, the father of one their schoolyard underlings. What follows is both a loss of innocence and a tough lesson in parenting, as the father tries to express the realities of adulthood, and the boys learn that there are other ways to get along than by thundering in the brush and pounding one’s chest like a baboon.

Evident in these early films are some of the techniques that Ozu would employ throughout his career: the floor-height vantage points that place his camera at eye level as his characters sit on the traditional tatami; and the alternating dialogue shots in which each character looks directly at the camera, placing the viewer right in the middle of the exchange, allowing stronger identification with each character, with each argument and with each perspective.

And herein lies much of the appeal of Ozu’s films: His calm, gently unfolding dramas give us time to not only get to know his characters, but also to deeply care about them—to enjoy their humor, to admire their strength and to forgive their transgressions—so that, when a film ends, there is often a feeling of regret that these characters are gone from our lives. “Every time I watch an Ozu film,” says actor Eijiro Tong, “I start to feel very sentimental as the end of the film nears. As I think back over the story, it’s like a flood of old memories washing over me, one after another.”

Also screening Friday are William Desmond Taylor's 1920 adaptation of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn; Il Fuoco, an Italian femme fatale drama; The Great White Silence, a 1924 documentary about a British expedition to the Arctic; and the first of two editions of the festival's popular series, "Amazing Tales From the Archives," in which preservationists screen surviving fragments and trailers from lost films or excerpts from in-progress restorations.

Saturday evening showcases two of the brightest stars of the era, Douglas Fairbanks and Marlene Dietrich. The Woman Men Yearn For shows Dietrich a few years before Joseph Von Sternberg transformed her into an almost otherworldly figure of mystery and beauty, and Mr. Fix-It shows Fairbanks at his charming, comedic best.

There were many stars in the silent era, but few could rival Douglas Fairbanks. The actor made a name for himself between 1916 and 1920 with a string of breezy, acrobatic comedies. His ebullience and his prodigious athletic abilities were on display in a series of brisk films produced at a brisk pace—four or five a year, sometimes more—in which genial, dapper Doug took on the world with gusto and a good-natured smile. He was the can-do, all-American boy, a variation on the same theme adopted by Harold Lloyd in his own screen comedies.

Around 1920, Fairbanks would take a new tack as his ambition swelled. As a co-founder of United Artists (along with three other powerful Hollywood figures: Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Fairbanks' wife, Mary Pickford), Fairbanks would gain complete control over his work and would introduce a new genre to the medium by combining comedy with costume drama. He ditched the modern clothes for period attire, donning the garb of musketeers and pirates. Abandoning the casual spontaneity of his rapid-fire comedies, he followed instead in Griffith’s footsteps, producing fewer films—just one or two a year—with better production values, more complex plots, more costumes, more sets, more drama. Fairbanks had found a new formula, and he would stick with it for the better part of a decade, enjoying much commercial success.

Saturday's screenings also feature a morning presentation of Disney Laugh-O-Grams; The Blizzard, a romantic melodrama by Swedish director Mauritz Stiller; Clarence Brown's The Goose Woman; and "Variations on a Theme," a session in which the festival's musicians discuss and demonstrate the principles and challenges of silent film accompaniment. The panel, moderated by Jill Tracy, includes the Matti Bye Ensemble, the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, the Alloy Orchestra, Giovanni Spinelli, Stephen Horne, Donald Sosin, and Wurlizter maestro Dennis James.

Sandwiched between Sunday morning's installment of "Amazing Tales From the Archives" and a "Wild and Weird," a program of off-kilter short films, is Shoes, by Lois Weber, the most important female director of the era. Weber enjoyed a tremendous degree of artistic control over her films, which always managed to be entertaining while taking on some of the most challenging social issues of the day, from abortion and birth control to capital punishment, labor and prostitution. Later in the day, The Nail in the Boot, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, who would go on to make such cinematic treasures as The Cranes Are Flying and the monumental I Am Cuba, promises to be another excellent screening.

The festival concludes with He Who Gets Slapped, a confluence of four prominet talents. Lon Chaney was the premiere character of the day, the creator of myriad deformed and deranged figures; John Gilbert was on the rise as one of Hollywood's romantic leading men; Norma Shearer too was on the rise, a budding star who would go on to make some of the most sophisticated dramas of the Pre-code era; and Victor Sjöström (billed as Seastrom in America), the pioneering Swedish director who rivaled Griffith in his influence in shaping the nascent medium of cinema into an international art form.

For tickets, the complete schedule, and more, see www.silentfilm.org.

Fairbanks, Gish Headline 2009 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, now in its 14th year, screens a wide range of films each July at the Castro Theater, touching on various genres and styles from cinema’s nearly 30-year silent era. The festival starts Friday with a showing of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Gaucho (1927) and continues through the weekend with a program of a dozen screenings.

There were many stars in the silent era, but few could rival Douglas Fairbanks. Along with Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, Fairbanks was at the pinnacle, one of the most beloved performers in the nascent medium.

Fairbanks made a name for himself between 1916 and 1920 with a string of breezy, acrobatic comedies. His ebullience, prodigious athletic abilities and considerable charm were on display in a series of brisk films produced at a brisk pace—four or five a year, sometimes more—in which genial, dapper Doug took on the world with gusto and a good-natured smile. He was the can-do, all-American boy, a variation on the same theme adopted by Harold Lloyd in his own screen comedies.

His first movie roles were under the direction of D.W. Griffith, the foremost filmmaker of his day. But there wasn’t much room for Fairbanks’ acrobatic and comedic talents in Griffith’s vision of cinema, so he soon set out on his own. In just a few short years he found himself at the top, one of the most universally admired screen actors.

And when he fell in love with and eventually married Mary Pickford, the first true movie star, and still, at that time, the biggest, they became the world’s first superstar couple, the pair for whom the term “Hollywood royalty” was coined.

It was around this time, 1920, that Fairbanks took a new tack. His ambition swelled with the creation of United Artists, an independent company he co-founded with Pickford, Griffith and Chaplin, that would give the artists greater control over the creation and distribution of their work.

Fairbanks’ notion was to merge his acrobatic brand of comedy with costume drama. He ditched the modern clothes for period attire, donning the garb of musketeers and pirates. Abandoning the casual spontaneity of his rapid-fire comedies, he followed instead in Griffith’s footsteps, producing fewer films—just one or two a year—with greater production values, more complex plots, more costumes, more sets, more drama.

Fairbanks had found a new formula, and he would stick with it for the greater part of a decade, enjoying great commercial success.

There were naysayers, however. Some critics bemoaned the loss of brisk, breezy Doug; they complained that his films were becoming longer, slower and more ponderous, with the trademark Fairbanks action reduced to just one or two reels of a total of 10 or 12, even 14. The jaunty Fairbanks of the teens had become a stately, costumed, dramatic figure, his devil-may-care charm and athleticism only coming to the fore in the closing sequences.

Fairbanks may have felt the same way, for in 1926, he began edging back toward comedy. The Black Pirate saw him costumed and swashbuckling as usual, but the old Doug was back in action; the film did not take itself too seriously and it was full of stunts, smiles, and much broad, comic acting.

He followed with The Gaucho, a darker, more serious film, but still with much comedy and derring-do. Fairbanks shared the spotlight with Lupe Velez, making her first appearance in a feature film. And Pickford even showed up for a ghostly cameo, appearing as a vision of the Virgin Mary.

After nearly a decade as a heroic, swashbuckling figure, Fairbanks decided it was time to say goodbye. He would make just one more film along these lines, The Iron Mask, his last silent film. He and Pickford teamed up for his first talkie, The Taming of the Shrew, but his careered tapered off and he retired from the screen in 1934. He passed away a few years later, in 1939, at the age of 56.

Friday’s screening of The Gaucho will feature the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra performing their original score.

Other festival highlights

Bardeleys the Magnificent (1926) screens at noon Saturday. The film reunites director King Vidor with John Gilbert, who had starred in Vidor’s The Big Parade, the blockbuster that earned the director the clout to make a smaller, more personal film, The Crowd, which featured a strong and affecting performance by his wife, Eleanor Boardman. Bardeleys was made before the couple married, and features Boardman as Gilbert's love interest. Live music by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

Josef Von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927), one of the early gangster films, screens at 5 p.m. Saturday. The film helped cement the conventions of the genre, greatly influencing the explosion of gangster films of the 1930s. Live piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne.

Following their success with The Scarlet Letter, actress Lillian Gish again teamed with Swedish director Victor Sjostrom (“Seastrom” in America) for The Wind (1928), a stirring melodrama showing at 7:30 p.m. Saturday that plays to the strengths of each.

Gish, perhaps the silent era’s best actress, puts her pantomime skills to work in depicting a woman victimized by a tempestuous man and an even more tempestuous physical environment. Having left Virginia for the unruly Southwest, her tormented life is made manifest by the ceaseless and unyielding winds which batter her home and shift the sands of the desert landscape.

Sjostrom, in his distinguished body of work in his native land, where he established himself as a master of the medium to rank with D.W. Griffith among cinema pioneers, had emphasized the landscape, shooting on location among the stunning vistas of Scandinavia. The mountains, the sea and the skies gave context to his plots and added comment to his characters; with The Wind, he employs that sensitivity to the natural world in the creation of a punishing and relentless force that nearly pounds his heroine into submission. Live Wurlitzer accompaniment by Dennis James.

Sunday will start at 10:30 with a series of Disney shorts featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, predecessor to Mickey Mouse. Live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

Quickly shifting gears, Erotikon (1929), a sensual Czechoslovakian film, will screen at 1:30 p.m. Live accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

It may be hard to believe, but Vaudeville veteran W.C. Fields did pretty well for himself as a silent film star, before the talkies immortalized the comedian’s snide, slurring wordsmithing. So’s Your Old Man (1926) will show at 4 p.m. Sunday. Live piano accompaniment by Philip Carli.

There were two great adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. One was a 12-minute short, an avant garde American film that owed a great deal to German Expressionism; the other, a feature-length version that deviates from the original in many ways but stays true to Poe’s vision of existential and supernatural terror, will screen at 6:15 p.m. with live piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne.

The festival will close with an 8:15 p.m. showing of Lady of the Pavements (1929), D.W. Griffith’s last silent. The film stars Lupe Velez, Fairbanks’ co-star from The Gaucho, in a romantic drama that proved the great director hadn’t lost his touch. Live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

2009 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Friday, July 10 through Sunday, July 12 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. www.silentfilm.org.

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.

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.