November 4-10, 2004

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

More Treasures from American Film Archives (Sun., Nov. 7, 14 and 21, 10 p.m., Turner Classic Movies; also $79.95 DVD) Just because a movie is forgotten doesn't mean it's forgettable. With 110 years' worth for historians to keep track of, a few are bound to slip through the cracks, and they're not always the ones you'd like to be rid of. Nearly 10 hours of miscellaneous gems snatched from the brink of extinction, the glorious three-DVD box set More Treasures from American Film Archives: 1894-1931—which will screen over the next three Sundays on Turner Classic Movies—ends with a sobering reminder: a collection of trailers for movies that, so far as anyone knows, no longer exist.

As much as 80 percent of American film from the pre-sound era is gone for good, and while film restorers are never content unless there's a good print in the vault, the best know that a film is only truly preserved when people can see it. Like its equally glorious predecessor, More Treasures is the film-history equivalent of Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket, an all-access pass to the moviegoing past.

It's not that every one of More Treasures' 50 films is a lost masterpiece. There's a documentary on light-bulb manufacturing from 1920, a handful of shaky cartoons and 90 seconds of Gus Visser and His Singing Duck. But, combined with extensive annotation and audio commentaries, each one opens a window into the past. (The commentaries will be included on the elusive SAP channel for the TCM broadcast.)

1912's Children Who Labor and 1926's The Passaic Textile Strike ("The Prologue") reflect the concern over child labor and the birth of trade unionism, as well as an era when progressive politics were more openly expressed, on film and elsewhere. Alice Guy Blaché's TB tearjerker Falling Leaves (1912) may be unremarkable, but her history is anything but; a former Gaumont secretary, she is credited as the cinema's first female director, and certainly its most prolific, with nearly a thousand films to her name. A handful of well-chosen "actualities" show the streets of turn-of-the-century New York, including the groups of men who gathered at the base of the Flatiron Building to watch the wind blow up women's skirts, while Robert Florey's Skyscraper Symphony (1929) and Jay Leyda's A Bronx Morning (1931) exemplify the poetic documentary of the city symphony.

Elsewhere, the poetry seems to be accidental, thought no less enrapturing. Filmed by D.W. Griffith camera-man Billy Bitzer, the overhead dolly shot of an assembly line in Panoramic View, Aisle B (1904) may have been designed to show off the interior of a Pittsburgh factory, but the celestial perspective on industrial labor is mesmerizing. (You wonder whether it inspired the similar shot in Godard's Weekend.) For some reason, I'm fascinated not by the titular animal of Bucking Broncho (1894), but the fat man just outside the fence, waving his hat in frenzied ardor. His polar opposite is the woman in the 1897 commercial for Admiral cigarettes, who bursts out of an oversized pack and strews cancer sticks with the enthusiasm of a greasy spoon waitress at the end of a 12-hour shift.

Then there's the surreal anarchy of Charley Bowers' There It Is (1928), a madcap two-reeler that tickled André Breton's funny bone, and the astonishing The Invaders (1912), a Western which gives equal time to cowboys and Indians. And, all the way at the top, Ernst Lubitsch's masterpiece Lady Windermere's Fan (1925), which has the surprising effect of making Oscar Wilde's words seem superfluous. Jettisoning Wilde's aphorisms, Lubitsch directs his actors with vernacular wit, using long shots to isolate his characters in their plush surroundings and point-of-view angles to underline the extent to which his high-society characters are always under a social microscope (literally, in a sequence where the scandalous Mrs. Erlynne becomes the focus of prying binoculars at a racetrack). Elegant without being sentimental, wry without being cynical, it's a perfect balancing act. But what of Lubitsch's The Patriot, nominated for five Oscars in 1930? A three-minute trailer, collected here, survives, but a complete print has not been seen since the 1940s. For every treasure found, many more are lost forever, and still others await rediscovery. How long until Even More Treasures?

Misc. Picks Manthia Diawara affectionately turns the tables on ciné-anthropologist Jean Rouch in Rouch in Reverse, while Dominique Loreau mingles fact and fiction in Divine Carcasse, as the ongoing African Film Series addresses the continent's troubled relationship to anthropological study (Sun., Nov. 7, 2:30 p.m., Philadelphia Museum of Art).

The Two Tars Tent of the Sons of the Desert reprise their popular Laurel and Hardy program at Phoenixville's Colonial Theatre, this time pairing the feature Way Out West with the gleefully destructive short Towed in a Hole (Sun., Nov. 7, 2 p.m.).

Devoted to the avant-garde filmmaker and photographer, "Gloria! The Legacy of Hollis Frampton," a free two-day Princeton conference, includes screenings of the seven-part Hapax Legomena (Fri., Nov. 5, 1:30 p.m.) and the shorts Gloria and Less (Sat., Nov. 6, 4:30 p.m.) as well as panel discussions and presentations. More information at www.princeton.edu/~visarts/Conferencemainpage.htm.

More on the festival of pain next week, but Cassavetes fans will be even more downcast than usual if they miss Shadows (Wed., Nov. 10, 7 p.m.), which kicks off International House's five-day retrospective.

Sundance Channel and the Independent Film Channel offer head-to-head music programming Saturday night: IFC trots out a VH1-style Spinal Tap tribute (10:30 p.m.) along with the thing itself; Sundance premieres Dig! (9 p.m.), the Dandy Warhols/Brian Jonestown Massacre documentary which proves that drug use, arrogance and unstable personalities are no more an guarantee of rock 'n' roll success than they are obstacles to it.

(sam@citypaper.net)