News: New Days

(Gus Van Sant/ New York Times, 2011)

Filmmaker Gus Van Sant's latest film, Restless, deals with a young person with cancer and how it affects the lives of her friends and family. It premiered at Cannes this month. Some are saying it marks a return to minimalist yet experimental style the director has grappled with in previous films, such as Elephant and Last Days. In a broader context, it's another film on the theme of premature death; more accurately, the context surrounding a premature death, that the director has long been preoccupied by. See this brief but interesting interview in the New York Times for more information.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/gus-van-sant-on-young-love-and-young-death/?hpw

News: A Festival of Photochemicals

Claudia Cardinale in The Leopard/ Dir. Luchino Visconti, 20th Century Fox, 1963)

A.O Scott writes in 'To Save and Project' his recent article in The New York Times, that films are "..fragile things that often exist only fleetingly in their definitive state." It couldn't be stated any better. As he later notes, ninety percent of American silent films and fifty percent of American sound films made before 1950 are lost. Many films exist only fleetingly, period. But MOMA's forthcoming series screening newly preserved films, starting in November, is at least a warm embrace of a partially doomed situation. Films from all over the world, such as Luchino Visconti's The Leopard(1963), Manoel de Oliviera's Acto da Primavera and Barbara Loden's Wanda (1970) have all been given restorations for this series. Even Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum (1979)--supervised by the 71-year old director, who chose to add thirty minutes to the existing product--will be given a screening, with Schlondorff in attendance.
   This effort is either a step in the right direction--no one could fault the achievements of arduous, dogged film preservation, for films of any era-- or a half-witted attempt to cater to supposedly improve a film's "vision." It is great that some of these films are oddities, but why are they all films made after 1950? Couldn't MOMA and its preservation crew have gone the distance and dug up films from the long-ago past, simply because they must be found? In any case, getting a more diverse array of films found and cleaned up seems more important to this writer than pretensions about making the director's "intent" clearer and shinier, or adding thirty extra minutes. To read the full article, see here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/movies/15restore.html?_r=1&hpw

Silent Film comes to America

In this country, we expect that we have everything we need and then some. But one thing that we do not have enough of, to say nothing of other nations, is Silent Film. This happens to be an instance in which New Zealand has helped us out. News stories have been breaking over the past several days about a handful of lost American silents being discovered in vaults in New Zealand. The films found include a John Ford film from 1927 called Upstream, a Clara Bow picture called Maytime, a film by the early woman filmmaker Mabel Normand and series of one-reel westerns.
Just yesterday, news broke that another film called To Catch a Thief had been discovered at an antique sale in Michigan. The comedy was produced by Keystone in 1914 and features a two-minute or so appearance by none other than Charlie Chaplin. It is one of the earliest films he acted in. Here is a silent film that was here the whole time, the country just forgot about it.
These simultaneous discoveries of film's history feel like they signal something; to my mind, what they do is reinforce the fact that America shrugs off its film history until that history barges its own way in. Of the films found in New Zealand, only seventy-five were specifically selected for shipment. This appears to have to do with their cultural significance (Dave Kehr's article in the Times mentions that the Bow and Normand films are important to the history of women in cinema). We can only hope that at some point  the rest are returned, or at least duplicate prints are made.
But these discoveries bring up one more interesting aspect of silent film; many of them appear to be from the 1910's. It is common knowledge that the 1920's were the true decade of achievement for silent film. With these discoveries cropping up, perhaps we should shift our attention to the previous decade. The 1910's brought us an explosion of westerns, most of Griffith's films, the beginnings of German Expressionism, the formation of a number of studios, the founding of Hollywood, and now what is probably the earliest Charlie Chaplin picture, plus a batch of early films made by or starring women. Film Historians may have a field day, but silent film fans will have to wait for the restorations of these films to evaluate them individually. All we know for now is that, 2010, a grim year so far, has already been a far more positive year for silent film than most other years. And it may revive interest in what was happening on celluloid in its twin decade, an even century ago. As it happens, those were grim years too.

Links to the articles: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/movies/07silent.html?ref=movies
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/nation/exclusive-lost-charlie-chaplin-film-discovered-in-michigan-732037.html

Filmmaking and Corporatism

       Here is a New York Times story today that, despite it being relegated to one of the side-sections of their website, I find absolutely appalling. Michael Moore has spoke out against the court ruling in question (it's curious to me why the actual director of this documentary has not said anything, though). Whatever I think of Michael Moore-- and I take any number of issues with his approach to filmmaking and the trend it has created-- I will side with him any day on this issue. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/michael-moore-says-judges-ruling-could-have-chilling-effect-on-documentaries/?hp