March 5, 2003

Nitrate In the Closet, Vinegar on the Floor

Heritage.

It’s a simple word and, when applied to motion pictures, conjure up indelible images from a little more than a century of the seventh art. We all have an emotional visual memory bank culled from dark days in cinemas or can drop into a video store and rent a Chuck Workman visual collage to prod it.

We’ve been reminded that half the movies made prior to 1950 have been lost and the percentage escalates radically when one reels back to the silent era. But this is and isn’t a column about film preservation.

The people and companies that made movies in its pioneering era largely considered the product fungible. The advent of sound, by their logic, rendered silent films obsolete; their worth reduced to the threads of precious silver in the stock and the remaining bulk suitable for landfill. Based on much of what was being produced it’s difficult to refute that assessment. Still, wouldn’t our lives be a little less rich without Chaplin, Bogart, Potemkin, Metropolis and Citizen Kane.

I presume there were people working at the studios as well as filmmakers with well-cultivated egos who collected movies from the moment they began to flicker. However, the notion or infrastructure of preservation didn’t come into being until the 1930s with people like Iris Barry at the Museum of Modern Art and Henri Langlois who would turn his cache into the Cinematheque Francais. Obviously, both were playing catch up and found themselves clashing with production companies that were leery of someone profiting from their catalogue but unwilling to invest in its upkeep.

The credo of most preservationists is “keep everything” and that manic pursuit is where I find myself parting company with them. I appreciate the notion that something of modest value can improve its status with age. However, I know the difference between a Vermeer and painting on velvet when I see it … even a really good one of the latter and a lesser work by the 17^th century Dutch artist.

About two decades ago, a “major” find of dozens of silent era movies was literally dug up under the permafrost in Dawson City in the Yukon - the last stop on a long forgotten film circuit. Some films had suffered from water damage but many were well preserved in this natural refrigeration environment and were airlifted to the Canadian Film Archive to be assessed. For a brief moment film preservation sounded like an Indiana Jones adventure with the intrepid cinema archeologist trekking through the tundra in pursuit of a vaunted artifact. There was no second act; no search for the holy grail in the South American jungles - a complete director’s cut of The Magnificent Ambersons.

Shortly after the dramatic announcement I ran into Sam Kula of the CFA and queried him about the discovery. In broad strokes, he said roughly half the films appeared to be the only existing copy. He couldn’t honestly claim that a single lost masterpiece had been unearthed but the paucity of existing films from that time gave them a historic significance beyond their intrinsic artistic merit.

The major archives in this country and internationally have stockpiles of decaying film that they do their best to keep from turning into vinegar while they await funding to preserve them on more staple film stock. These organizations lack the budgets that would adequately store their inventories or properly staff the operations with people trained to do the meticulous work of restoration. An exception is France where back in the mid-1990s the government set up a 10-year program to preserve its ‘endangered” filmed cultural heritage. They have apparently maintained the schedule.

But in Hollywood - the movie capital of the world - the major players have been indifferent to anything save their own libraries and the financial benefit to be derived from the exploitation off vintage titles on video and TV. There are some notable exceptions but most decisions address the bottom line.

While one can find a rationale, however misguided, for executives to turn their backs on films of the past, it’s a puzzler that very few writers, directors and producers have been more than token advocates for the cause. One has to assume that bygone films and filmmakers were the spur that led them to their lives in the movie industry. The truth is that it’s been three decades since the arrival of the movie brats - the new wave of film grads - that lionized John Ford, Kurosawa, Douglas Sirk, Sam Fuller and a host of others. They came on the scene as auteurism became the vogue and accepted the “film by” credit that few of their antecedents would have even considered appropriate.

The current generation of filmmakers and movie goers appear blithely unaware of the films that pre-date their birth. They may have seen a Kurosawa or Fellini, but such names as Truffaut, Ichikawa and Fassbinder ring the faintest of bells. Films made prior to 1970 are virtually all on the metaphoric endangered list which has to give even the most ardent archivist a great deal of pause.

The good news of sorts is that a small, devoted group of enthusiasts is preserving, screening and viewing movies that created the vocabulary from which all films are derived. Last week I sat down with Stas Namin, a Russian entrepreneur spearheading an exhibition of movies from his country that will unspool in Los Angeles from April 17 – 24. It’s an ambitious program of 30 fiction features dating back to the silent era and through to the present plus a handful of documentaries and several programs of animation.

Several things crossed my mind as I glanced through the program. Though I’d seen many of the entries by such greats as Eisenstein, Dovzenko, Kuleshov and Paradjenov and seminal films including The Cranes are Flying and The Ballad of a Soldier (the first foreign-language film I ever saw), these films do not get revived. Apart from trips to specialty video stores, my access to the films that shaped my persistence of vision are elusive. Last Year at Marienbad, Faces, David and Lisa, The Battle of Algiers, The Woman of the Dunes, virtually anything from the Czech new wave, The Pawnbroker, even Bergman rarely make it to the big screen. Revival houses are virtually extinct and institutional outlets often program for an audience with a short memory span. I was seized by the desire to see many films again because the opportunity to experience them in a movie theater does not come around very often.

Another personal enticement was the prospect of seeing these films with an audience that likely only knew them by reputation. I’m haunted to this day by Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent. I saw at the first or second Toronto Film Festival when it was new and have to believe it’s lost none of its potency a quarter century later. But for someone seeing it for the first time today the experience has to be different, just as my experience of seeing King Kong forty years after its premiere generated a different thrill than the one for the Depression era patron.

Namin, a former pop star in Russia, is certainly knowledgeable about the films and filmmakers but he’s also a showman. It’s obvious in conversation that he wasn’t going to cut corners in promotion or exhibition. He’s playing the hits without forgetting the B-sides including several films that I only know by reputation and even a couple of films that are wholly unrecognizable and nonetheless intriguing.

But here’s the clincher … a socko finale. It’s not written in stone, however Namin and his team (the American Film Institute and several other groups and individuals are co-sponsors) are trying to work out the logistics of staging closing night’s screening of Eistenstein’s 1945 Ivan the Terrible I & II with a live orchestra accompaniment of the Prokofiev score. The venue, the venerable Hollywood Blvd. Chinese Theater, has an orchestra pit and the Los Angeles Philharmonic is game but can it accommodate 80 pieces? If not, can the task by done with 60?

Finally, what the Russian Cinema exhibition brought home was that it wasn’t committing the usual sin - a dull and pedestrian attitude toward film heritage. Too often pictures that were originally intended to thrill and entertain have been turned into arid classroom exercises sucked dry of the very thing responsible for their enduring vitality. Why not have some fun and pull out the stops. You know, put on a show and make revisiting the past an event and not just another night at the movies.

Email Leonard Klady