07.05.08
Posted in Cinema, Silent Films, Cinema History, Sci-Fi and Horror Flix, 16mm Film at 11:50 pm by Spencer
Silent and sci-fi film nerds the world over are all atwitter with the astonishing and happy news that a 16mm print of Fritz Lang’s original edit of Metropolis (1927) has been found in Argentina, containing all but one scene lost to date.
In 2002, an exhaustive restoration of the classic film was released theatrically and, later, to DVD. But even that version was still missing shots and entire scenes. Such missing segments were denoted by black footage with titles describing what was missing, based on research that included the original script, period censorship papers, and other documents. At the time it was universally believed that this was as good as it would ever get, and those of us privileged enough to catch a theatrical screening (as I did at The Varsity in Seattle) rejoiced.
Now we’re dancing in the streets, because one of the most celebrated silent film epics will finally be able to be seen in almost exactly the form its director intended…something no one ever thought possible.
According to late-breaking reports, a version of the film including this newly-recovered footage will be released by Kino Video on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2009, although it is not yet resolutely confirmed at this very early date whether the recovered footage will be fully integrated into the film as opposed to offered as extras.
To keep up with late-breaking developments and discussion by the world’s preeminent film scholars, I recommend keeping an eye on the email list of AMIA (the Association of Moving Image Archivists). The discussion already available includes first-hand accounts from the archivist who made the discovery.
Following below are a couple relevant posts to that list, and the entire text of the July 2, 2008 article from Die Zeit, the German newspaper that broke the news.
From AMIA-L:
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2008 07:11:11 +0200
Sender: Association of Moving Image Archivists
From: Martin Koerber
Subject: Re: [AMIA-L] Is this news about METROPOLIS real or a hoax?
Dear all,
I was just about to put this link into a message, when Tom beat me to it.
Paula Felix-Didier of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires indeed came to Berlin last week to show us what she found, and it is the real thing, no hoax this time. The material is terribly banged up, being a 16 mm dupe negative made from a no longer extant nitrate print, which was duplicated some decades ago after many years of heavy use. Nevertheless one can now see the director’s cut of Metropolis, 80 years after we all believed the original version was destroyed. Contrary to our thinking, obviously at least one print of the original cut made it into distribution, albeit in Argentina.
Only one of the missing scenes (the monk in the cathedral) remains missing, because it happened to be at a reel end that got badly torn. The rest is there.
The images you will find at the links Tom gave will show you some scenes, and also expose the amount of damage. They look indeed a little worse than the real thing, as they are frame grabs from a DVD transfer of the dupe.
About 10 pages of information and frame enlargements from many more missing sequences are in the printed edition of DIE ZEIT, which is coming out today. I guess you can find this at the news stands in most countries in Europe, don’t know about the international edition overseas. Flip through it before you buy it, the articles about Metropolis are in the somewhat glossy “Zeit Magazin Leben” which comes with the paper. It will surely become a collector’s item.
Kudos to Paula Felix-Didiér and her initiative to unearth the material and share the information.
A lot of thinking is now necessary to find ways to incorporate this material into the existing restoration, released on DVD by Transit Film and Kino International, among others. It has titles and black leader where the missing parts once were so in principle one could just insert whatever is new at those inserts. The good news is that Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung intends to do just that once access to the material has been granted.
The critical edition of Metropolis on DVD, which Enno Patalas derived from the 2001 restoration in order to create a “full” version of Metropolis has even more information about the missing scenes, and has the option to fill the missing scenes with not only black leader, but information from the script and other sources. When ran in synch with the material found in Buenos Aires, it is amazing to see how everything falls into place now.
The critical edition can be found here: http://www.filminstitut.udk-berlin.de/MKF/html/pages/filme/metropolis.html
Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 08:03:33 -0300
Sender: Association of Moving Image Archivists
From: Paula Felix-Didier
Subject: METROPOLIS, the Buenos Aires affair.
Hello everybody this is just a follow up on the Metropolis find. Most of what you probably want to know is already in Martin’s post. I can tell you a little bit more about how I suspected that the print I had was more than the usual American version.
I’m the Director of the Museo del Cine de Buenos Aires, and I’m also a film historian, and a graduate from the NYU moving image preservation program. It was indeed a great moment when we pulled out the print we held in the archive and we could see a few images we’ve never seen before. This 16mm dupe neg was sitting in the Museum vault since 1992. When I was appointed director of the museum this past January, I immediately went to check the reels because I had -ticking in my mind- a story that Fernando Pena, (historian, film collector, curator and more, who also happens to be my ex-husband) told me a few years ago: a projectionist told him that he would never forget the stupid Metropolis print that made him hold it with his finger throughout the 2 hour screening. Of course, the 2 hour thing tipped him off. So we really couldn’t wait to get hold of that print and make sure. It was only a matter of finding the cans and pulling out the reels and watch them against the light to realize that at least some of the missing scenes were there. I immediately made a transfer to dvcam and we screened it one morning to finally confirm that it was all there (I know, Martin, I know… the priest reading the Bible is still missing, but we can’t really complain, can we?)
Understandably, at first nobody believed me. This had happened before. People thinking they had what it turned out to be yet another butchered version. So only after I showed it to Martin Koerber, Enno Patalas, Reiner Rotha and the Murnau Stiftung people, and they were able to see it with their own eyes, the news could be confirmed.
There is more to this story but I won’t bore you with the details.. I also want to make very clear that I haven’t shown the complete film to anybody but the aformentioned people and I’m not planning on doing so since the Murnau Stiftung holds the rights for the film. The press got only a few seconds and some frame captures.
–
Saludos cordiales
Paula Felix-Didier
Directora
Museo del Cine “Pablo D. Hicken”
Buenos Aires - Argentina
From Die Zeit:
Key scenes rediscovered
Key scenes from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” have been rediscovered
July 2, 2008
Last Tuesday Paula Félix-Didier travelled on a secret mission to Berlin in order to meet with three film experts and editors from ZEITmagazin. The museum director from Buenos Aires had something special in her luggage: a copy of a long version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, including scenes believed lost for almost 80 years. After examining the film the three experts are certain: The find from Buenos Aires is a real treasure, a worldwide sensation. Metropolis, the most important silent film in German history, can from this day on be considered to have been rediscovered.
Fritz Lang presented the original version of Metropolis in Berlin in January 1927. The film is set in the futuristic city of Metropolis, ruled by Joh Fredersen, whose workers live underground. His son falls in love with a young woman from the worker’s underworld – the conflict takes its course. At the time it was the most expensive German film ever made. It was intended to be a major offensive against Hollywood. However the film flopped with critics and audiences alike. Representatives of the American firm Paramount considerably shortened and re-edited the film. They oversimplified the plot, even cutting key scenes. The original version could only be seen in Berlin until May 1927 — from then on it was considered to have been lost forever. Those recently viewing a restored version of the film first read the following insert: “More than a quarter of the film is believed to be lost forever.”
ZEITmagazin has now reconstructed the story of how the film nevertheless managed to survive. Adolfo Z. Wilson, a man from Buenos Aires and head of the Terra film distribution company, arranged for a copy of the long version of “Metropolis” to be sent to Argentina in 1928 to show it in cinemas there. Shortly afterwards a film critic called Manuel Peña Rodríguez came into possession of the reels and added them to his private collection. In the 1960s Peña Rodríguez sold the film reels to Argentina’s National Art Fund — clearly nobody had yet realised the value of the reels. A copy of these reels passed into the collection of the Museo del Cine (Cinema Museum) in Buenos Aires in 1992, the curatorship of which was taken over by Paula Félix-Didier in January this year. Her ex-husband, director of the film department of the Museum of Latin American Art, first entertained the decisive suspicion: He had heard from the manager of a cinema club, who years before had been surprised by how long a screening of this film had taken. Together, Paula Félix-Didier and her ex-husband took a look at the film in her archive — and discovered the missing scenes.
Paula Félix-Didier remembered having dinner with the German journalist Karen Naundorf and confided the secret to her. Félix-Didier wanted the news to be announced in Germany where Fritz Lang had worked — and she hoped that it would attract a greater level of attention in Germany than in Argentina. The author Karen Naundorf has worked for DIE ZEIT for five years — and let the editorial office of ZEITmagazin in on her knowledge.
Among the footage that has now been discovered, according to the unanimous opinion of the three experts that ZEITmagazin asked to appraise the pictures, there are several scenes which are essential in order to understand the film: The role played by the actor Fritz Rasp in the film for instance, can finally be understood. Other scenes, such as for instance the saving of the children from the worker’s underworld, are considerably more dramatic. In brief: “Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s most famous film, can be seen through new eyes.”, as stated by Rainer Rother, Director of the Deutsche Kinemathek Museum and head of the series of retrospectives at the Berlinale.
Helmut Possmann, director of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation, the holder of the rights to “Metropolis”, said to ZEITmagazin: “The material believed to be lost leads to a new understanding of the Fritz Lang masterpiece.” The Murnau Foundation now sees itself as “responsible, along with the archive in Buenos Aires and our partners for making the material available to the public.”
The rediscovered material is in need of restoration after 80 years; the pictures are scratched, but clearly recognizable. Martin Koerber, the restorer of the hitherto longest known version of “Metropolis”, who also examined the footage, said to ZEITmagazin: “No matter how bad the condition of the material may be, the original intention of the film, including all of its minor characters and subplots, is now once again tangible for the normal viewer. The rhythm of the film has been restored.”
And perhaps the scratches, which will probably remain even after restoration, will have an added advantage: The cinemagoer will be reminded of what an exciting history this great film has had.
Here are some additional stills from the Argentine footage, as posted to Ain’t It Cool News:
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06.27.08
Posted in Cinema, Events at 3:02 pm by Spencer
Well, Hal Ashby won’t be there in person, mostly ’cause he died in 1988. But comedian Bobcat Goldthwait will be introducing Hal Ashby’s fine directorial debut, The Landlord (1970), on Tuesday, July 1, 2008 at the Northwest Film Forum. This will be preceded by a reception with Bobcat at the Grey Gallery right around the corner. More details about the special event are available on the NWFF web site.
Advance tickets only, at a special price (proceeds benefit the non-profit NWFF), available online via BrownPaperTickets.com.
The special event kicks-off Hal Ashby’s Commingling Seventies, a fantastic series of screenings of the director’s work from the 1970s, every one of them briliant and a classic. It’s pretty amazing to see the line up and realize he made them one after the other, all in the space of just nine years — a stunning run of artistry that anyone would envy. The screenings (all on 35mm) are on Tuesdays and Wednesdays only, through July and late August. Don’t miss a single one. Series passes are available.
The Landlord (1970) — Tues. 7/1 and Wed. 7/2
Harold and Maude (1971) — Tues. 7/8 and Wed. 7/9
The Last Detail (1973) — Tues. 7/15 and Wed. 7/16; the novel’s author, Darryl Ponicsan, will introduce the 7:30 screening on 7/15
Shampoo (1975) — Tues. 7/29 and Wed. 7/30
Bound for Glory (1976) — Tues. 8/5 and Wed. 8/6
Coming Home (1978) — Tues. 8/12 and Wed. 8/13
Being There (1979) — Tues. 8/19 and Wed. 8/20
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06.06.08
Posted in Cinema, Music, Events, Cinema History, 16mm Film at 11:12 pm by Spencer
Film collector extraordinaire and Washington expat Dennis Nyback is back in town with a mind-boggling series of programs devoted to music films, playing for the next week at the Grand Illusion Cinema (at the corner of 50th and University Way).
Many of the programs are one-show-only, so pay attention and carpe diem. Here’s the details courtesy of the Grand Illusion’s mailing list (which you should subscribe to via the web site, all the way at the bottom of the homepage):
On Friday, June 6th is ZERO TO MTV is a series of three minute musical shorts from 1914-1984 Contrary to popular belief, the three minute film short was not invented by MTV. Conversely, the very first sound films made were three minute music shorts. This program starts with an Edison test film made in 1914. It continues through the twenties with test films made by Lee DeForest, Fox-Case and Movietone. The thirties portion features Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and others. The forties feature shorts made by the Soundies company. In the fifties there are Snader Telescriptions. In the sixties Scopitones appeared. The program will end with 35mm shorts featuring Kiss, Motley Crue, Deep People and others. Friday June 6th at 7pm & 9pm
On Saturday, June 7th is THE HIGH LONESOME SOUND, a program of musical films by John Cohen, who traveled to the backwoods and hinterlands of America filming musicians. This program features his films THE HIGH LONESOME SOUND and MUSICAL HOLDOUTS. Musicians include Roscoe Holcomb, Bill Monroe and many others. See notes at http://www.johncohenworks.com/films/filmslist.html#4 Saturday June 7th at 7pm ONLY
Also on Saturday, June 7th is CHARLIE IS MY DARLING. This is a great and one of kind look at the Rolling Stones filmed during their tour of Ireland in 1965. It never had a wide release. The last time it was shown in Seattle was at the Pike Street Cinema in 1993. The short with it will be a production film on the making of the Beatles’ YELLOW SUBMARINE. Saturday June 7th at 9pm ONLY
On Sunday, June 8th is HILLBILLIES IN HOLLYWOOD. A fabulous bunch of Hillbilly, Cowboy, Hawaiian, Rockabilly, and other acts. Expect to have a foot stomping, Wa-Hooing great time! Sunday June 8th at 7pm ONLY
Also on Sunday June 8th is BOOGIE WOOGIE BOOGIE WOOGIE BOGGIE WOOGIE. There was a big Boogie Woogie craze in the 1940s. This program is made up filmed performers and cartoons. The performers include Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson in the great BOOGIE WOOGIE DREAM. It also features Lena Horne and Teddy Wilson. Maurice Rocco does Rumboogie. Ray Bradley with Freddy Slack does Boardwalk Boogie. Sunday June 8th at 9pm ONLY
On Monday, June 9th is JAZZ IN THE 1920’s. This program features two awesome films made by the enigmatic Dudley Murphy in 1929. You should look him up. They are BLACK AND TAN with Duke Ellington and ST. LOUIS BLUES with Bessie Smith. Also: Eddie Peabody and His College Chums (1928) with Hal Kemp’s band, Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet. Monday June 9th at 7pm ONLY
Also on Monday, June 9th is HARLEM IN THE THIRTIES. Several of these films are suppressed due to racial content. This a very rare chance to see the greatness in them. Included performers will be Cab Calloway , Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters (in the film BUBBLING OVER), The Mills Blue Rhythm Band, and others. Monday June 9th at 9pm ONLY
Tuesday, June 10th features RADIO DAYS 1929-1944. All shorts featuring radio stations and people at home listening to radios. Included will be THE BLACK NETWORK (Nicholas Brothers), CAP’N HENRY’S SHOWBOAT (Annette Hanshaw), Cab Calloway (HI DE HO), RADIO SALUTES (Ruth Etting), Rudy Vallee, Kate Smith, and others. Tuesday June 10th at 7pm ONLY
Tuesday, June 10th also features VAUDEVILLE DELUXE. This program is highly recommended by Travis Stewart who wrote “NO APPLAUSE, JUST THROW MONEY”. I screened it for him in NY. It features vaudeville performers, both black and white, from 1928 (Gus Visser, the Man With the Duck) to 1937. You get to see W.C. Fields juggle, Roy Smeck play the uke, rope skippers, singers, Chaz Chase eating everything, and finally, Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers with Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart. Tuesday June 10th at 9pm ONLY
Wednesday, June 11th is THE SOUND OF JAZZ (plus some Bebop). In 1957 CBS brought together the greatest assemblage of jazz talent ever brought together for a one hour live broadcast. The kinescope of it provided much of the footage in A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM. Here it is seen in full, including original commercials. Thelonious Monk, Billie Holliday, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, many more. Also on the program will be JAZZ DANCE (1954), Booker Little with Max Roach (1962) and more. Wednesday June 11th at 7pm ONLY
Wednesday, June 11th also has SOUNDIE PANORAMA. A lot of greatness and also some musical atrocities. Soundie films were shown in jukebox-like devices called a Mills Pan-O-Ram. Wednesday June 11th at 9pm ONLY
And finally, Thursday, June 12th is the infamous SCOPITONE A GO-GO. A hit in New York at the Cinema Village. The show that started the Scopitone buying craze. Eddie Vedder came to the Scopitone shows at the Pike Street Cinema and bought his own Scopitone machine. Thursday June 12th at 7pm & 9pm
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05.16.08
Posted in Cinema, Events, Silent Films, Cinema History, Sci-Fi and Horror Flix, 16mm Film at 11:14 pm by Spencer
Last night’s Sprocket Society show at the Northwest Film Forum — Georges Méliès: Impossible Voyager — went really well, and we packed the house. Thanks to everyone who came (especially the young ‘uns). I hope you had as much fun as I did.
Unfortunately it was so well attended, we ran out of program booklets (sorry again, folks). So for those of who missed out, or are just interested passers-by, you can download a PDF of the full program notes (1.9mb) here or at the Sprocket Society site.
Thanks again to Climax Golden Twins for contributing their excellent live mix of 78s, to Dave Shepard at Film Preservation Associates for permission to read his translation of Méliès’ original narration for The Impossible Voyage, and to Mike Whybark for the loan of his vintage tux and tails.
Oh, one note of clarification in case anyone was wondering. One of the local papers said we were to play a recording of Méliès himself reading the narration. While this would have been wonderful, it was not the case and I’m not quite sure how the misunderstanding came about since it was not in the press release. I guess I wasn’t quite emphatic enough about the live performance aspect. Ah well.
To the best of my knowledge, there are no recordings of Méliès reading or performing any of his many narrations for his films. In the case of The Impossible Voyage in particular, Dave Shepard worked with a number of scholars from around the world to assemble and translate the narration from surviving texts. (I made a few minor edits of my own to smooth some phrasings.) When I spoke (briefly) with Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films about this general topic while at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival last summer, he made no mention of any such recordings of Méliès but did say that the Cinémathèque Française had apparently published some as a book or booklet some years past.
Much more than this I don’t know. So I reckon I should poke around and see what I can learn about it, wot?
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05.08.08
Posted in Cinema, Events, Silent Films, Cinema History, Sci-Fi and Horror Flix, Seattle Stuff, 16mm Film at 12:52 am by Spencer
Announcing a very special event co-presented by The Sprocket Society and the Northwest Film Forum
GEORGES MÉLIÈS: IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGER
Special effects epics from 1901-1912
Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 8:00 PM — One show only!
At the Northwest Film Forum — 1515 12th Avenue (on Capital Hill at Pike)
(206) 329-2629
$8.50 general admission / $5 NWFF members / $6 kids under 12 & seniors
Advance tickets available online via BrownPaperTickets.com
A special celebration of the mad filmic genius of Georges Méliès, the father of special effects, featuring rare 16mm film prints of his greatest sci-fi, fantasy and adventure epics…all presented with unusual musical accompaniment!
INCLUDING!
A rare presentation of The Impossible Voyage (1904) with a live performance of the original narration penned by Méliès himself plus music provided by Climax Golden Twins playing 78 rpm records on actual Victrolas, right there in the theater!
PLUS!
Six more great films, all presented with non-traditional musical recordings including free jazz by the Hal Russell NRG Ensemble, the Master Musicians of Jajouka, The Residents (in a special remix by Scott Colburn), demented Dada scat-jazz by Fred Lane, and more! Featuring…
- A Trip to the Moon (1901) — rare extended version!
- The Kingdom of the Fairies (1903) — rare “complete” version!
- The Palace of Arabian Nights (1905) — stunning acrobatic sets!
- Paris to Monte Carlo (1905) — with hand-colored scenes!
- The Merry Frolics of Satan (1906) — beautifully tinted!
- Conquest of the Pole (1912) — his last masterpiece in a (kinda) rare French version!
Learn more and see a bunch of photos, including rare behind-the-scenes shots and production drawings, at the Sprocket Society web site. You can also download the official press release (PDF, 112kb).
Hope to see you there… A splendid time is guaranteed for all!
(Poster design by Brian Alter.)
(This program is not affiliated with Flicker Alley, though I encourage you to check out their new Méliès DVD box set!)
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04.20.08
Posted in Cinema, DVDs at 5:10 pm by Spencer
Having been laid low for a full week by an ass-kicker case of the flu, I’ve had a lot of time to watch a lot of DVDs (or at least half-watch them while struggling to maintain consciousness). Now more-or-less ambulatory again (most of the time), I’ve been catching up on things…including some DVD news. (Forgive any incoherence, since I’m still recuperating.)
Criterion (as usual) gives me several new causes for celebration. Foremost, they’ve announced their upcoming 2-disc edition of Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), roughly coincidental with European releases by MK2 in France and Eureka in Britain (part of their excellent “Masters of Cinema” series), though the latter seems to just get postponed over and over again.
Unjustly dismissed as a sub-standard aberration by fans and scholars of the great Carl Dreyer’s work, Vampyr is one of the most hauntingly dreamlike horror films ever made. It also has a fascinating production history, one which contributed to its long lingering in a purgatory of mangled, poor-quality prints that have provided only a hint of the subtle shades of grey and the even subtler use of sound (far ahead of its contemporary works).
Criterion is releasing the landmark 1998 restoration by Martin Koerber Cineteca di Bologna — long awaited on home video (especially after the offensively shitty worthless piece of crap Image released on DVD a few years ago). Well worth a read is Koerber’s article, “Some notes on the restoration of Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932)”. (Also worthwhile, if you can find a copy, is David Rudkin’s 2005 monograph published by the British Film Institute.)
This DVD presents the film pillar-boxed in its original 1:19 aspect ratio (a very short-lived format during the earliest days of sound in Europe). The French MK2 version is inexplicably mastered at 1:33 (resulting in slight cropping of the frame) and considerably darker than the Criterion version (obscuring much of the predominant light-grey details). You can see side-by-side stills at this French web site.
Criterion’s extras will include something they’re billing as an “all-new English-text version of the film.” This is a little confusing since there was an English language version produced originally (along with German and French ones), but which is not known to survive in any form except possibly as unidentified fragments cut into versions released in later decades. A separate line in the DVD’s specs call out “new and improved English subtitles”, so this “English-text version” thing apparently means something else. Guess we’ll find out this summer. Other extras include a 1978 audio recording of Dreyer lecturing on filmmaking, and what sounds like a substantial book that boasts various essays and even the original screenplay.
Hopefully this new DVD will permit a proper reevaluation of this neglected gem of a film, but for those us who already know better it’s a cause for great celebration. While you wait for July to roll around, savor this reproduction of the original Danish program book.
And speaking of neglected gems, I exclaimed aloud when I discovered that in June Criterion will be releasing a newly restored version of Anthony Mann’s The Furies (1950), a noir western re-visioning of a Greek tragedy with Oscar-nominated cinematography by Victor Milner, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Huston in his last role. I’ve been wanting to see this for years, but so far as I can tell it was never even released on VHS.
Anthony Mann is one of my favorite directors, having first been hipped to him by A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. (A fine series I suggest watching with paper and pen at hand so as to jot down titles to hunt down.) Mentored as an AD by no less than Preston Sturges, Mann was a hard working studio director who made some of the very best noir and western films of the ’40s and ’50s, but was much more than just a good genre man. His films tended to have an unusual psychological complexity for their time, coupled with a sure-footed storytelling economy and a great eye (augmented by such camera talents as the great John Alton and the aforementioned Mr. Milner).
Mann’s westerns caused me to reevaluate and finally appreciate that entire genre — not only his justly lauded dark wonders with Jimmy Stewart, but especially his last western: Man of the West (1958), an especially twisted quiet masterpiece (unforgivably unavailable on US DVD) starring Gary Cooper in his last performance that remains one of my all-time favorite westerns ever. [Update: Turns out MGM is releasing Man of the West on DVD on May 15, just a couple weeks away. Hooray!] Following that, Mann went on to direct a social satire (God’s Little Acre), a couple epics (El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire), a war flick (Heroes of Telemark) and a Cold War spy thriller (Dandy in Aspic), but perhaps because of the shifting nature of film production in the ’60s, none of these had the same masterful touch of his dozens of earlier works.
Meanwhile, Mann’s Fall of the Roman Empire is also coming out soon as a limited edition DVD, courtesy of the Weinsteins’ “Miriam Collection.”
And since I’m already serving as unofficial PR hack for Criterion’s genre film releases, definitely keep an eye out for what promises to be a spectacular version of Alexander Korda’s great fantasy epic, The Thief of Bagdad (1940). The film has been restored to its original Technicolor grandeur (which is considerable!), and the copious extras include commentary tracks by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
And hey, as long as we’re talking genre films I gotta let you know that Classic Media will be releasing Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975 JP, 1978 US) on April 29. A couple months ago it was included as part of their big box set, but this stand-alone will complete Classic Media’s series of “deluxe” release of the seven original-series Godzilla titles they have the US rights to. (Okay, All Monsters Attack, aka Godzilla on Monster Island Godzilla’s Revenge, is also coming out but who gives a crap — insipid even by Godzilla standards, it’s total garbage made almost entirely of clips from the earlier films.)
Terror of Mechagodzilla was the last hurrah for the original series. Considerably better than the films that preceded it (the idiotic Gigan [aka Godzilla on Monster Island] and underwhelming if action-packed Megalon films), it was the last of the series to be directed by Ishiro Honda (returning after a long hiatus in greener pastures)…and the last Godzilla film to be made until 1984. Long unavailable except in the craptacular pan-and-scan Scimitar edition, this disc has a widescreen transfer of the original Japanese version (boobies!) with subtitles, plus the dubbed US version, as well as a few marginal extras.
Copies can be had at the usual online retailers, via the official GodzillaOnDVD.com site, or most likely at Scarecrow Video here in Seattle.
According to that there official site, Classic Media does plan to follow up with releases of non-Godzilla Toho monster classics, Rodan and War of the Gargantuas, both of which are among the better kaiju flicks that have yet to get a proper home video release.
…Oookay…I’ve been staring slack-jawed at the screen for about 5 minutes. Clearly it’s nap time again.
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04.06.08
Posted in Cinema, Music, Events, Experimental Film, Seattle Stuff, 16mm Film at 6:43 pm by Spencer
This coming Sunday at the Rendezvous, the Sprocket Society presents a special event featuring original works by Los Angeles filmmaker and noted restorationist ROSS LIPMAN, plus live music by Seattle’s own RUBY THICKET and THE PHILISTINE LIBERATION ORCHESTRA.
Sunday, April 13, 2008 at 7:00 PM
The JewelBox Theater at the Rendezvous
2322 2nd Avenue, Seattle (in Belltown)
$5 suggested donation
More info at the Sprocket Society web site.
KEEP WARM, BURN BRITAIN! is Ross Lipman’s personal memoir of the London anarchist squatters movement during the 1980s. A work-in-progress, Ross will present it as a Magic Lantern slide show with live narration plus recorded music by legendary street performer Thoth (who was the subject of a 2002 Oscar-winning documentary short).
Lipman is internationally known for his film/video and performance work, as well his writings and restorations of independent cinema. His 16mm and 35mm experimental films have screened throughout the world at venues such as London International Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives (NYC), the Los Angeles Film Forum, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Sixpackfilm/Top-Kino (Vienna), AMIA (Austin, Minneapolis), Chinese Taipei Film Archive (Taiwan), and many others. This is his Seattle debut.
Lipman is also one of the world’s leading figures in the restoration of independent cinema. Working at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, he has restored films by John Cassavetes, Kenneth Anger, John Sayles, Emile de Antonio, and others. In 2007, the National Society of Film Critics gave Lipman their Film Heritage Award “for the restoration of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and other independent films.”
Also on the program are several of Ross’ earlier experimental shorts and and documentaries:
10-17-88 (1989, 16mm)
An optically printed collage of found and archival footage, with audio collage by John (Ruby Thicket) Shaw.
AFTERNOON IN BOTTLE VILLAGE (2007, DV)
A requiem for Grandma Prisbrey’s famous cathedral of light, built entirely of glass bottles, pencils, and industrial detritus. With a score improvised on a broken piano by Jodie Baltazar (aka Monotrona).
THE GIFT: MICHAEL BARRISH SCREEN TEST (1997, Super-8)
A screen test for a film that was never made, a feature-length narrative about the unbridgeable gap and connection between a father and son.
PLUS!
Live music by RUBY THICKET
Featuring John Shaw (vocals, guitar, bass, harmonica), Mac McClure (bowed saw and vocals), Bob Barraza (drums, shakuhachi flute, ukulele, and vocals), Jillian Graham (vocals and rhythm guitar), and Jim Graham (bass). Download sample MP3s from their CD You Never Know What You’ll See.
And the sultry cacophony of THE PHILISTINE LIBERATION ORCHESTRA
Lounge and show standards crooned (or c-ruined?) over free improvised accompaniment. Featuring the velvet pipes of John Shaw backed by composer Bill Potter on guitar-synth, the lovely and talented David Milford on fiddle, members of Ruby Thicket, and other surprise guests. The set list includes songs associated with Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Kate Smith, Robert Goulet, Man of La Mancha, and Woody Guthrie.
Hope to see you there!
PS — Ross Lipman will be presenting at the Pop Conference at EMP this Friday, April 11. He will give his lecture “Mingus, Cassavetes, and the Politics of Improv”, using film clips, texts, and still photographs to examine the complex and explosive collaboration of John Cassavetes and Charles Mingus for the film Shadows (1959) at a pivotal moment in the history of independent cinema, jazz, and race relations. More info is online at the Pop Conference web site.
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03.30.08
Posted in Cinema, Silent Films, DVDs, Cinema History, Sci-Fi and Horror Flix at 7:53 pm by Spencer
Flicker Alley has just released Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913), a monumental five DVD box set that gathers 173 of the puckish master’s 500-plus films, from his very first to his very last — dang near every one known to survive today. In all, more than 13 hours of beautiful pioneering cinema.
Needless to say, I consider this a must-have for all cinephiles, and especially for sci-fi and fantasy fans; every bit as important as the massive Edison box set released a couple years ago. I recommend ordering directly from Flicker Alley (scroll down for the commerce buttons) — shipping is included in the price, there’s no sales tax, and the money will go directly to the folks responsible with no cut plucked by a middleman. (And anyway, Amazon isn’t offering its customary discount.)
By the way: we at The Sprocket Society are presenting an upcoming screening of Melies’ greatest epics with film prints accompanied by unconventional musical selections, and even the original live narration for one of the films. Georges Melies: Impossible Voyager shows on Thurs. May 15 at 8 PM at the Northwest Film Forum. (The screening is not affiliated with Flicker Alley, and the timing is purely coincidental, albeit fortuitous — I’d heard this set was in the works but had no idea when it would be released.)
Producing the set are Eric Lange of Lobster Films in France and David Shepard of Film Preservation Associates (FPA). You could not have asked for better stewards of such a project: FPA owns the old Blackhawk Films catalog, which released many Melies films to the pre-VHS home film market on Super 8 and 16mm. It’s pretty much thanks to Blackhawk that you and I have been able to see any of this stuff for the last 30 or 40 years. And Lobster is justly lauded for their preservation work in general, and is more’s to the point is responsible for the recovery in recent years not only of hitherto lost Melies films, but treasures such as elongated and long-lost hand-colored prints of well-known classics like A Trip to the Moon and Conquest of the Pole.
The collection was compiled from archives in eight countries (among them the Academy Archives, the British Film Institute, and various private collections) and includes many spectacular new restorations, some reportedly newly pieced together from fragmentary prints for this project. The set includes examples not only of Méliès’ countless trick films and fantasy spectaculars, but also his actualities, recreations of historic events (foreshadowing future newsreels), and even some of his erotic films (or at least erotic for the time). Also included, since it’s pretty much required of such a thing, is Georges Franju’s loving 1953 tribute, Le Grand Méliès, starring André Méliès as his father. A booklet is also included, with writings by the great animator Norman McLaren and scholar John Frazer, author of the excellent (and best) Melies study, Artificially Arranged Scenes (1979) — which is sadly long out of print and, worse, rare as hen’s teeth.
An especially wonderful aspect of this set is the fact that thirteen of the films are presented with English renditions of Melies’ original narrations, which he usually performed personally. (This is particularly welcome for some films which otherwise make little or no sense, such as The Good Sheperdess And The Evil Princess from 1908.) These narrative texts have been the Grail for Melies fans and scholars — their inclusion here is a major contribution to cinema history in itself.
Here in Seattle, Scarecrow Video already has a copy for rent (though you’ll have to wait until I return it in a few days). Today, I’m a kid in a candy store and my dream has come true. “Thanks, Santa!! Now about that lottery thing I keep mentioning…”
Some Early Reviews
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02.28.08
Posted in Cinema, Events, Sci-Fi and Horror Flix, Early Sound Cinema, 16mm Film at 11:17 pm by Spencer
This Tuesday night, March 4, at 8 PM the Northwest Film Forum and The Sprocket Society join forces to bring an ultra-rare screening of The Mysterious Island (1929), the nearly-lost science fiction epic from the dawn of the sound era. Also playing is a rare early sound cartoon by the Fleischer brothers, Noah’s Lark, released the same year. The screening is part of NWFF’s quarterly Search and Rescue series, devoted to showing rare film prints from educational and private archives. The prints come from my personal collection, and I will be introducing the screening.
As extra temptation, libations will be served after the films and if you’re a member of NWFF (and you should be), admission is free.
The Mysterious Island is one of the great rarities of early science fiction film. For decades, serious fans have suffered taunting glimpses by way of jaw-dropping stills published in fan magazines like the late, great Famous Monsters of Filmland. These tantalizing images evinced art direction and effects so wondrous for their time that one nearly ached to see it. Well, now you can be one of the lucky few to see the whole shebang.
No sci-fi film fan should miss this show.
The 1929 version of The Mysterious Island was never released to home video, has never restored by the studio, and only a single reel of its original tinted and Technicolor glory is known survive (in the UCLA film archives, where it languishes in their fire-proof nitrate film vaults, not far from possibly the only surviving set of its Vitaphone discs). Today, only a small handful of black-and-white prints are known to survive, probably only on 16mm and mainly in the hands of private collectors. Every couple years or so, TCM airs it for a single showing at inconvenient times, like Sunday at 11:30 PM. Bootleg copies of these cablecasts now circulate on BitTorrent and DVD-Rs from grey-market video dealers…but it is almost never actually projected in anything resembling a theater.
The Mysterious Island was intended to be MGM’s high-budget answer to First National’s hit The Lost World (1925) and UFA’s Metropolis (1926). It was originally budgeted at a million dollars, shot in the early two-strip Technicolor process that debuted with Douglas Fairbanks’ The Black Pirate (1925), and was to feature extended sequences of cutting-edge undersea cinematography by J. Ernest Williamson, who provided such astonishing work for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1919). But the production was seemingly cursed — churning through countless rewrites that led it ever further from its source material, three different directors, and no less than three hurricanes that thoroughly destroyed the expensive underwater sets in the Bahamas. As it limped to completion, the advent of sound changed everything and necessitated a cast change and still more rewrites and reshooting.
It finally premiered as a part-talkie in October 1929 — three years late, a reported $3 million over budget (what is it with the threes?), and minus much of Williamson’s artistry — just a few weeks before the stock market crash that precipitated the Great Depression. Despite positive reviews in the popular and industry press (including the NY Times and Variety), The Mysterious Island bombed at the box office and earned back only a tiny fraction of its production costs. The whole affair was so notorious that no major studio would touch science fiction again for years and film itself, in a kind of punishment, vanished into the vaults to rot.
As a result, film fans and scholars were largely denied the opportunity to see The Mysterious Island. 16mm prints were reportedly struck sometime during the 1950s for TV distribution; tonight’s print is said to have been struck ca. 1977, but almost certainly came from the same master elements used 30 years earlier.
In recent years, the 1929 Mysterious Island has garnered a reputation as MST3K fodder but, while hardly the acme of filmmaking art and suffering from a somewhat tortured plot betraying its tenure in rewrite hell, the film is much better than the wags would have it. It is elevated by no small measure by the still-amazing art direction of Cedric Gibbons (who later helped realize the classic The Wizard of Oz), which reaches its peak in the final reels of the film. Picture if you will: retro-futurist brass diving suits like something out of Alien, armies of diminutive mer-men looking like undersea Martians, giant sea monster, and other visual wonderments hard to describe.
The accompanying cartoon, Noah’s Lark, was released by competing studio Paramount the very same month. It is the first Paramount “Talkartoon” ever released by the Fleischer brothers, but it is hardly their first foray into sound animation. Indeed, by that late date they were already veterans in the emergent technology. Beginning in 1924 (three years before The Jazz Singer), the already-successful Fleischers produced more than 30 sound animated shorts for Lee DeForests’ Phonofilm company. Most of those were sing-along films that originated the famous “bouncing ball.” Noah’s Lark followed the Fleischer tradition of unscripted visual improvisation, with animation by Al Eugster.
This is a screening not to be missed by fans of science fiction, and/or early sound film.
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02.26.08
Posted in News of the World, Friends and Family, Chicago, Malachi Ritscher, 1954-2006, Online Video at 9:28 pm by Spencer
On January 13, 2008, Al Jazeera’s english-language station aired a story about my late friend Malachi Ritscher. As I posted here about at the time, he died on the morning November 3, 2006 when he set himself on fire next to the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago, before a statue named “The Flame of the Millennium”. He left a handmade sign that read “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” On his web site, before he killed himself, he posted last testaments that said he was immolating himself to protest the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Except for a handful of fleeting stories, US press coverage was essentially non-existent. Coverage in Europe was slightly more extensive, but equally fleeting. Malachi videotaped his self immolation but his family, understandably, has not released the tape and they have stated they never will. Further information about Malachi’s suicide and its impact can be found at the link above.
The Al Jazeera story was aired as part of their series People and Power, described as an investigative program “which looks at the use and abuse of power.” This particular episode was titled “The North Front Line.”
Streaming video of the segment has been posted on YouTube. I am also posting it here. Many thanks to Eric Leonardson for bringing this to my attention.
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