World leaders have spent the past two years appalled by how, after eight years of hard work by the Obama administration designed to bring the world back from the brink of another Great Depression and rebuild trust in the United States through sincere diplomatic outreach, all of those efforts are being trampled and destroyed by Donald Trump and his cohort of bullies, grifters, and thugs.
While spectators gasp with a newfound sense of shock and awe at the wanton destruction being inflicted by America's 45th President, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival did a stellar job of demonstrating how today's digital technology can restore the integrity of films that were believed to be lost forever (or whose chemical degradation of the original nitrate film stock had been so thoroughly damaging that there seemed to be no hope of their ever being viewed again).
There are many reasons why this particular festival (along with the one-day mini-festivals it presents during the year) has become one of my favorite cultural attractions. Not only do I enjoy the creativity displayed by early 20th century filmmakers (who were basically inventing the techniques that we now take for granted), there is a curious authenticity in many of the faces onscreen. How so? Long before people became obsessed with cosmetic surgery, silent films featured great character actors whose memorable faces managed to impress audiences without ever having been subjected to a nose job.
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| A screening of Harold Lloyd's The Freshman at the Castro Theatre accompanied by the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra during the 2017 San Francisco Silent Film Festival (Photo by: Pamela Gentile) |
Those who have had the pleasure of reading Aaron Lansky's superb book (Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books) will recall the thrill of its final chapters, in which a new technology (digital scanning) helped Lansky to not only restore an invaluable collection of Yiddish music and literature that had been destroyed by the Nazis during World War II, but to restock the lost collections of Eastern European libraries.
Lansky's early adoption of digital scanning was a stepping stone to the growth of Google Books and the work it has done with more than 40 Library Partners around the world to digitize their collections and make them available to the public over the Internet. Many museums and photographic archives (ranging from the Museum of the City of New York to the British Museum) have taken similar steps to make their collections more accessible to the world at large.
In its own way, the growth of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival rests on a solid foundation of artistic collaboration. In the following video, Board President Rob Byrne describes how he became interested in film restoration, what the process involves, and how his two years living in Amsterdam helped him build a network of film historians dedicated to the preservation of works from the silent film era.
In addition to SFSFF's recent collaboration with the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra, each year's festival includes several programs ("Amazing Tales From The Archives," "The State of Preservation," "Serge Bromberg Presents") dedicated to historical topics during which experts discuss films they have helped to restore and demonstrate some of the technical tricks used in film restoration.
At the 2018 SFSFF, various experts from international film archives discussed how the Internet has helped to facilitate searches for missing reels of films that might be held by museums or private collectors as well as pooling efforts to raise funds and assemble teams to work on the digital restoration of long-lost films. Serge Bromberg (the founder of Lobster Films) had the audience in stitches as he narrated silent experiments in stereoscopic 3-D by George Méliès in the earliest years of the 20th century.
Over the years, SFSFF has built strong relationships with individual musicians (Stephen Horne, Donald Sosin, Guenther Buchwald, Frank Bockius, Sascha Jacobsen) as well as several chamber groups (the Matti Bye Ensemble, Alloy Orchestra) who accompany its screenings. One of the festival's stalwart attractions has been the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra which, under the direction of Rodney Sauer, has been especially adept at playing earworms which can guide audiences through screenings that have a strong identification to a particular historical era.
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Although the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra accompanied four films during this year's festival, two were of special interest for their historic importance. Digitally restored by the Museum of Modern Art, Rosita was the first film that German director Ernst Lubitsch made in America. A star vehicle for Mary Pickford, the action is set in Seville where a lecherous, sadistic King (Holbrook Blinn) is attracted to a street singer who has been making waves with a song that mocks his hypocrisy.As part of the King's efforts to conquer Rosita, he dooms her newly-beloved Don Diego to death. Opera fans will quickly recognize the use of a faked death scene before a firing squad as the dramatic engine that drives Act III in Tosca (Puccini's opera which received its world premiere from the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on January 14, 1900). However, Rosita’s operatic roots go back much further than that. Although Pickford very much wanted to have Lubitsch direct her in a silent version of Faust, her mother discouraged the actress from taking on a role in which she got pregnant out of wedlock and killed the baby. The reasoning was simple: Such a role would be box office poison and shatter Pickford's reputation as "America's Sweetheart."
In searching for a different role which could show her artistic growth into "mature" roles, Pickford settled on the French libretto for an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1838 novel, Ruy Blas which had been used by Jules Massenet for his first full-length opera. Don César de Bazan premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on November 30, 1872, but received only 13 performances. As noted in its description on Wikipedia:
“After the fire at the Salle Favart when the parts were lost, Massenet constructed a new version from the vocal score. This was performed in Geneva in 1888, then Antwerp, Brussels, the French provinces, and the Gaîté-Lyrique in 1912, and The Hague in 1925.”The only highlight from Don César de Bazan to enter the concert repertoire was the Sevillana written for a coloratura soprano (the great Australian soprano Nellie Melba sang the aria during her series of farewell concerts in 1926). The following recording by soprano Amelita Galli-Curci was released on September 13, 1923.
One of the blessings of MOMA's restored print is how it allows viewers to clearly see the detail in the costumes Mitchell Leisen designed for the film's aristocracy. Pickford's street singer may start out in rags, but once she has been moved to a cottage on the palace grounds, she is dressed as elegantly as the Queen (Irene Rich). Whether one looks at her bejeweled gowns or the fine intricate work on some of the King's costumes, the craft is stunning.
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| Mary Pickford visits with her "family" in a scene from 1923's Rosita |
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| Mary Pickford visits with her "family" in a scene from 1923's Rosita |
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| Mary Pickford visits with her family in a scene from 1923's Rosita |
The more Rosita resists the King's advances, the more eager he becomes to conquer her. Not only does Holbrook Blinn's monarch have about as much physical appeal as Donald Trump, his Queen has a few tricks up her sleeve which save the dashingly handsome Don Diego (George Walsh) from being assassinated while chastening her philandering husband. Walsh's romantic hero offers an example of the curious style of facial makeup worn by many men during the silent film era.
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| George Walsh is the chivalrous Don Diego in 1923's Rosita |
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| Holbrook Blinn and Mary Pickford in a scene from 1923's Rosita |
For reasons that were never completely understood, Pickford grew to intensely dislike her performance as Rosita and was surprisingly uninterested in preserving the film as part of her legacy. However, there is much to admire in this newly restored print, including the amusing cameo appearances by such talented character actors as Mathilde Comont (Rosita's mother), George Periolat (Rosita's father), and Snitz Edwards as Rosita's jailer. The following video contains the popular song that was written as a promotional tool for the film.
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Mention the Weimar era and many people think of Berliners swept up in a wave of Sally Bowles-style "divine decadence." For some Germans, the 1920s were a time when those who had survived World War I were able to rebuild their lives, thrill to the magic of cinema, and enjoy a thriving nightlife.In the summer of 1929, four young filmmakers (Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann, and Billy Wilder) collaborated on a low-budget film which attempted to capture a moment in time. Shot over the course of several Sundays, People on Sunday combined a documentarian's view of life in Berlin with mini-fictions built around a handful of characters (what Oscar Wilde might have called "men and women of no importance").
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| A scene from 1930's People on Sunday |
The fictional roles were taken by five amateur actors (Erwin Splettstößer, Brigitte Borchert, Wolfgang von Waltershausen, Christina "Christl" Ehlers, and Annie Schreyer) who belonged to an artists' collective that wrote and produced People on Sunday on a minuscule budget. In the film, they are initially shown performing their regular jobs. However, the film’s opening titles state that, by its release date (February 4, 1930), these people had all returned to their day jobs.
People on Sunday begins and ends at the train station for Berlin’s Bahnhof Zoo. Among its locations are Nikolassee and Wansee, with sequences that include a picnic, a boat ride, and lots of good-natured flirting (a stark contrast to the more experimental films being made in Berlin at the time). As Susan Gerhard notes in her program essay for the festival:
“On first glance, People on Sunday may not look like a product of its day. It has no imposing set design, no breaking of the fourth wall, no saucy cabaret. It pays some attention to architecture, but not the vanguard kind, and critical theory is out while everyday details are in. Today, People on Sunday looks like a precious pair of earrings salvaged from piles of volcanic ash in Pompeii, or a vial of perfume lifted from the RMS Titanic -- a living artifact whose reflections might tell us something important about precipitous times.”
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| A scene from 1930's People on Sunday |
“It was the summer of 1929 when People on Sunday was shot (its Berlin was, as Curt Siodmark describes, in a kind of terminal bloom). Looking back on that moment we know it was fateful (coming as it did on the eve of the Great Depression and the subsequent ascendance of Nazi Party rule). But in its moment, the film took the brash and optimistic vantage points of youth. People on Sunday doesn't show us an impending apocalypse or hints of disaster -- though there does seem to be a military parading in the background of at least one scene. What it projects are chic urbanites in full-fledged flirtations, pouty boyfriends with beer hall manners. It sees paddle boats and tourist snack shops, portable phonographs and breakable hearts.”
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| A scene from 1930's People on Sunday |
One could easily point to People on Sunday as a sleeper hit of 2018's SFSFF for its ability to travel back in time and capture the essence of a bustling German metropolis and the charm of its inhabitants just a few months before the stock market crash on Wall Street triggered the Great Depression and the resulting international economic crisis helped to lay the groundwork for Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Watching it today (from the perspective of Trump's version of America) seems dangerously prophetic.
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| A scene from 1930's People on Sunday |
It’s interesting to note that when the EYE Film Institute released an updated DVD of People on Sunday in 2005, it commissioned a new score from Elena Kats-Chernin which was used by the British Film Institute as the accompaniment for their DVD. However, in 2011, when the Criterion Collection released its edition of the film in the United States on Blu-ray and DVD, their version featured music by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra (Kats-Chernin’s score is available as an alternate).
The following YouTube video of People on Sunday features the Kats-Chernin score although, in all honesty, the performance by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra during the festival's screening did such an exquisite job of bringing the film to life that I can't recommend it highly enough.
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