You’ve got to wonder whether the end of the film freak has arrived.
Going back into Europe, I found that movie enthusiast material businesses I’d been dealing with all my adult life had gone away - London’s Cinema Book Shop or Librarie Atmosphere in Paris, in the manner of Sydney’s shorter lived Cinestore.
Paris is still Film Central, with five Cinematheque auditoria turning over what appears to be the best selection of movies in the world. However seven years ago, the last time I wrote about this, I said that it wasn’t a city that had Cinematheques but a city that was a cinematheque - little WW1 era cinemas on the Peripherique, that ran battered copies of last season’s hits (I particularly miss Le Mambo, where they would roll down an interval curtain with decals for local merchants, like the ones you see in Naughty Nineties movies), double features of Mario Bava Westerns and Paul Naschy horrors, 8mm. 3D under a fast food joint. Fading palaces in the vice area showed Argentinian Cinema Novo films with Norma Bengell, which they wanted us to believe were erotic, and a gay theatre offered Cottafavi muscle men efforts. All this has vanished.
“Serious” films are still being shown. They’re usually first runs of foreign language festival hits, but sometimes nostalgia creeps round the edges. Latin Quarter Cinema Desperado (you’ve got to love people who name their movie house that) did a crime series that included Albert Préjean in the war time Maigret film Cecile est morte and the once banned Vie de Plaisir. They looked like sharp original copies, with wear and low contrast forties grading. No one mentioned inflammable Nitrate stock. The program promised Raimu in Inconus dans la maison too but, when the curtains opened, it was the Belmondo colour re-make. How we all laughed!
Cinema Bis – Walamir Daninsky in action
Paris film activity has physically contracted. Now if you are set up near Chatelet, you can walk to all most of the interesting screenings - except maybe for Cinematheque Francaise at Bercy, a Metro Ride away.
Municipal culture still occasionally surfaces, like those old Theatre Est Parisian showings. Suburban Montreuil identifies with the district’s silent movie past - Meliés and the Russian expat. Albatross group - and I rolled out to a one-off screening of René Clair’s elusive Les Deux Timides in their neighbourhood multiplex, a nice copy running at the right speed and with a good score by pianist Jacques Cambra. A modest attendance included at least one other person still clutching the program after the show, on the late Metro back to the centre.
The musical accompaniment industry is good news bad news. It was quite interesting to see Philip Glass making the ringing score for Koyanisquatsi with only five associates. That one had no dialogue however. Pop music over The Wizard of Oz less likely. Balance has shifted to where the movies become light show for the music. Instrumentalist’s work lights are often distractingly brighter than the screen and the promotion is pitched at their followings. The London NFT audiences became indignant when the musicians began to appear in front of the screen. The Lincoln Centre Jannings-Murnau Faust is pretty scary, providing songs over the songs in the film - with different lyrics to the ones appearing on the screen intertitles. That’s brain scrambling.
Even at Italy’s week long Pordenone Giornate del Cinema Muto, the epicentre of film freaking, you can see the activity shrinking - no more memorabilia market or a second cinema running 16mm. Their magazine Griffithiana has gone. The hospitality is less lavish. The organisers have laudably kept their money in the central activity, showing the best copies of usually unfamiliar silent films, under ideal conditions. This year’s run of the Joe May Asphalt, with Gabriel Thibodeau’s piano score outclassing full orchestra accompaniments, remains one of the most impressive screenings I’ve attended. However the habit of leaving black frames between the ten minute reels, presumably to stop losses in the joining process, was particularly irritating, when it came in the middle of Betty Aman’s great final close up.
Now people might say that, rather than going away, the activity has been diverted on to the electronic super highway. Film makers like Uwe Boll, Takashi Miiki or Tyler Perry, who have no significant Festival, TV or Theatrical profile outside their original markets, circulate on DVD. It’s my dream to host a panel discussion with the three of them.
Particularly over the last five years, the suddenly lucrative disc market and the demands of Turner classic movies, have produced an immense quantity of material, which we didn’t think we’d ever see and even more that we didn’t know existed.
You would expect a sudden flowering of enthusiast DVD shops and second hand dealers but this does not appear to have happened. A few stores that do specialise tend to go for top end copies of Renoir - Judy Garland - Fellini - dead black jazz musicians. Demands for Jean de Limur or Tomo Uchida or Fernando de Fuentes may stir the more diligent counter clerks to fire up their computers and sometimes locate distant, pricey copies but they know that stocking those would only tie up shelf space.
Let’s however mention Blow Up Video, in the shadow of the Turin Mole Antoneliana, who point out problems. Even when the next door museum wants to get a copy of Cabiria, the centre piece of it’s exhibition space, they have to send to the ‘States for one.
The restoration industry, which had been ticking away quietly, has moved into the big time. Finding twenty five missing minutes of Metopolis (which has replaced Napoléon as the most restored movie) made news broadcasts all round the world. Even coverage of the Bercy exhibition devoted to it was syndicated via 20 Heures.
Some of the new copies are remarkable. Outfits like Holland’s Haghefilm have raised the bar in film copying. Turner’s showing of the silent Lewis Milestone The Racket looks as if it was made off the original negative. However we can’t help noticing that the new, extended Metropolis is still monochrome. The only attempt to bring back the original tinting was in the 1984 wrong speed, captions-as-subtitles 75 min. Giorgio Moroder version.
Collections and archives have been ransacked. Near the entire history of some national cinemas have appeared - the films of China and Mexico as examples. Twenty years ago, when Derek Elley did his season on the Shanghai films of the thirties, he had to go to Peking to make a selection from the only known copies, on thirty five millimetre.A couple of years back, it was possible to buy most of them in your local Asian grocer for a few dollars each. I now have a hundred stacked up against the wall. This is good news - bad news.
One of my Shanghai films drifts out of focus for a couple of minutes, presumably while a disinterested operator, videoing it off a wall, had a smoke. Another has a reel joined in left to right. I had to watch it reflected off the chrome surface toaster to read the captions. How’s that for a mental picture?
Particularly disturbing is the fate of colour film. The Technicolor process appears to be a victim. The Warners 75th Anniversary print of Dirty Harry looked pretty much as it did in 1971 Eastmancolor but the Errol Flynn The Adventures of Robin Hood, with it’s green shadows and lack of detail in the dark areas was worse than the VHS copy. The current copy of Naked Spur is yellow and An American in Paris now has a cool tint (not unlike the otherwise admirable new copy of Mr. Cory used in the touring Blake Edwards retrospective) and the lettering on the title cards is blue. Working from now quite distant memory, I recall it as having been scarlet.
The interesting thing there is that, when we get into the ballet, the American in Paris copy comes good. John Alton, who filmed that section, was still around when they did all this, as testified by the accompanying documentary. You’ve got to wonder whether he intervened.
Watching often dodgy copies on your lounge room flat screen is never going to be a fair swap for a theatrical showing, with in the presence of an informed audience. Their reactions are a key element and some even get to mill around after and exchange insights. Coming from a country, where the bureaucrats responsible torpedoed the Australian National Film Theater thirty years ago, you face culture shock at still finding these showings in Europe.
The documentation, represented by the old photo-copy fanzines, does not appear to have been replaced by bloggers. Take the abrupt re-appearance of films by director Alan Crosland, which place him as one of the big achievers of film history. Where’s the monograph? Pretty much all the journalistic comment is not devoted to the sudden rush of unfamiliar material but to championing individual titles from the writer’s youth or deploring the fact that they have vanished. Institutions, who have the resources to do so, are not attempting to document this situation, so let me offer a couple of pieces of anecdotal evidence.
The Fritz-Lang-Zanuck-Zane Grey Western Union, is a title which I’ve enjoyed longer than I’ve been shaving. Until recently, my observation that it was more rewarding than many better known Lang films was considered risible by those who had the words “film noir” stencilled across their Fritz Lang synapses. The first time I saw the film, it was in an original 35mm. Nitrate Technicolor print, which the exchange continued circulating in Saturday morning shows.
Then, in the seventies, Zanuck had been impressed with Henri Langlois and offered him projection copies of any ten films from the Fox library. (it would be interesting to know what the other nine were) The screening of that print, at the then still new Trocadero Cinematheque, was a European first for decades. I got the last seat in the house and sat down to be faced with an Eastmancolor copy with sixties grading, which didn’t altogether reproduce the original tones but what the heck - big screen, 35 mm. colour and a rapt audience.Comes the big action scene and the rail workers are riding to rescue Randolph Scott from the Indians. I felt thumping and glanced round. There was this long haired French girl, totally in the moment, banging on the back of my seat in time with the Alfred Newman knock-off score. I though. “I’m leaving this and going back to Australia. I must be mad!”
Next time I see Western Union it’s on commercial TV, still colour, still great but no way comparable. Then the gone pink 16mm. copy in the Australian National Collection gets a run - forget that! Last week one of the surviving film societies puts on a DVD, four foot wide. It’s still recognisably Western Union but it’s fuzzy blue.
They simulate this in Play It As it Lays, where the film Adam Roarke’s movie director character made, keeps on appearing in progressively degraded form.
Let’s look at another case history - Autant-Lara’s 1947 Le Diable au corps, which does not appear to have had real English language distribution.
In the sixties, it came back to the Paris Studio Panasse, with its frieze of favourite directors lettered onto the auditorium wall. Those low-life Frogs ran it in wide screen, with heads cut off, and - of course - no sub-titles. I’m rocked by that one too and determine to see it properly. Then the BBC puts it on and I tune in. The thing proves to be their totally unwatchable dubbed version, which the director worked on himself - to his shame. I give it ten minutes. Twenty years later, I finagle a pirate VHS copy. It’s the right shape and it’s in the original language but it looks like it was filmed in the worst Atlantic fog in memory and - of course - it has no sub-titles. A few more years and I find a DVD and drop it in the machine with trembling fingers. Right film but - wait for it - it proves to be another unwatchable old dubbing, by Herman Weinberg this time, with that fog not altogether abated.
However, this year I discover that every FNAC has the new DVD in it’s stock and this is sharp, the right shape and has impeccable titles in English. It’s a bit dark but nobody’s perfect.
I have yet to find any serious English language documentation on this virtual first release.
Win some - lose some.
So what does this prove? Woody Allen tells us “Nostalgia is denial” and equates it with Joan Crawford cut out books and cap pistols. The decline of signal is not a new topic in the art world. Paintings fade, crack and get lost. Even sculpture, the most durable art form, is smashed or eroded. Printed word, re-imagined with every reading, loses it’s impact as the environment in which it was produced vanishes into distorted memories and research libraries.
You can ignore all this, say stuff happens and go off and watch the latest Harry Potter in 3D, knowing it will never look as good again. However if we are letting go of the movies, which were the dominant form of the Twentieth Century and haven’t gone away yet, at least I’d like to see that fact discussed & documented.
