Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

Not many people would go to Syracuse, N.Y, in the dead of winter, but for cinephiles who love old movies, Cinefest is the place to be.

Leonard Maltin has been a regular for years, as have David Sheppard (Blackhawk Films) and numerous film archivists. Cinefest is a convention of film collectors, which includes a market for film memorabilia and 16mm film screenings at a local hotel from 9 AM to 12:30 AM, as well as 35mm screenings in a local cinema. Almost none of the films are available on television or video.

Some of the highlights of this year’s program included: THE VALIANT (1929), starring Paul Muni, directed by William K. Howard. A very sweet little melodrama by Frank Borzage, LIFE'S HARMONY (1916), which is one of his earliest films, but instantly recognizable as a Borzage in its focus on family life. CONRAD IN QUEST OF HIS YOUTH (1920), directed by William DeMille. Less well-known that his younger brother, Cecil, William's films have always struck me as very quiet, understated narratives (unlike Cecil), and this film was no exception. With virtually no plot, the film follows a war vet trying to recapture memories of his youth.

HUMAN HEARTS (1922), a typical rural melodrama from Universal, was directed by King Baggot. The story of a “bad” city girl vamp and honest country blacksmith was predictable, but the acting was good. A TALE OF TWO WORLDS (1921), starring Wallace Beery as a Chinese heavy in yellow face, featured Leatrice Joy in a Chinatown tale of miscegenation, with lots of racial stereotypes, of course. LITTLE CHURCH AROUND THE CORNER (1923, WB), about a mining town clergyman who mediates between capital (Hobart Bosworth) and labor. I wouldn't be surprised if Thea von Harbou saw the film before writing METROPOLIS. AREN”T PARENTS PEOPLE? (1925), a comedy of “remarriage” as Gerald Mast has called similar films from the 1930s, directed by Mal  St. Clair, starred the wonderfully droll Adolphe Menjou

A "fake" Republic serial, CAPTAIN CELLULOID VS. THE FILM PIRATES (1962-68), shot on weekends with non-synch sound by a group of amateurs, including the late William K. Everson. LIFE RETURNS (1934): directed by Eugene Frenke, the film was a very weird but interesting hybrid, which took as its starting point a medical documentary about the first experiments to resuscitate a dog that was clinically dead, then created a feature length narrative around it about a father who neglects his son. A very early talkie from Tiffany Studios, PEACOCK ALLEY (1930), starring Mae Murray in one of her last films. No longer the dynamo of THE MERRY WIDOW, she’s a bit over-the-hill and having problems talking and acting at the same time. By the end of day two, I’d seen 15 features, 1/2 a serial and a couple of shorts, none made after 1950.

The 35mm program on Saturday in Rome at the Capitol Theatre, built in 1928, began with THE GRASP OF GREED (1916). The continuity, unfortunately, was somewhat confused, because of major decomposition, but the film did feature Lon Chaney in a very early bit part, doing a jig. EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE (1927, Allan Dwan), starring George O’Brien, was a lively melodrama that shuttles between New York’s Jewish and poor lower East Side and the rich, WASP West Side. The story involves an inter-ethnic romance, but the ladies in the audience couldn’t get over how much beefcake O’Brien sported here, coming as it did shortly after his nude photos were published.

PLEASURE BEFORE BUSINESS was a Columbia feature, starring Max Davidson, one of the great under-rated comedians in one of his few features; another Jewish-themed film. Next was THE IRON MULE, a screamingly funny comedy short of the first railroad, starring Al St. John and featuring an uncredited Buster Keaton as an Indian chief. Finally, ROARING RAILS (1924) was an independent modern western, starring Harry Carey who brings a French orphan back to America after World War II. Carey who of course had been a big star a decade earlier in John Ford westerns, demonstrates why his star career was coming to a halt.

While the 35mm films have been preserved at film archives, such as the Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House, and Library of Congress, the 16mm program came almost exclusively from film collectors, who have made a major contribution towards saving films that otherwise don’t exist in Archives or at the studios. Increasingly, archives have been working with collectors to preserve these priceless treasures.

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

The first thing you do when you get to Pordenone, Italy, a provincial capital northeast of Venice, is walk a lot. The town is small enough to promenade around in half an hour. Invariably you meet colleagues on the street, because everyone is walking to and from various hotels. I first started going to the Giornate del cinema muto in 1988, when I was curator at George Eastman House. I mention this because I realized, how many people I know at the Festival. There are the many archivists, who show their latest preservation work or　come to look at other restorations; there are the American and European academics, who specialize in silent film historiography; and there are the cinephiles, who come faithfully every year at their own expense, just to see rare silent films. This year’s program is focused on canonical films, the French company Albatross, divas, and Sherlock Holmes. 　

The Albatross films turned out to be somewhat of a mixed bag. Albatross was founded in Paris by a bunch of Russian exiles in the very early 1920s. Unfortunately, previous festivals have shown some of the best films from the company, films by Rene Clair, L’Herbier, and the actor Moujoukine. By the mid 1920, Albatross was supporting a lot of experimental work, but the films shown so far are from the early 1920s by people like the second-tiered Viktor Tourjansky, who had an incredibly long and undistinguished career in pre-revolutionary Russia, France, Nazi Germany, and word and sandal epics in Italy in the 1950s.

In the divas program, we saw some previously lost film fragments from Asta Nielsen (Europe’s greatest film star in 1914) and Francesca Bertini, and Italian diva who started making films around 1912 and was as popular in Italy as Pickford was in America. I’ve really liked the Bertini films, especially one we saw tonight where she kills her rival in her dressing room, then proceeds on stage to die (as a title tells us, blood gushing from her mouth, due to consumption).

So far the only real masterpiece was a Soviet film from 1928, Boris Barnet’s THE HOUSE IN TRUBNOI STREET, a slapstick comedy that was a scream. I was also impressed with a German comedy from 1926, THE LITTLE GIRL FROM THE VARIETY SHOW by Hanns Schwarz, starring Ossi Oswalda, who became famous as Lubitsch’s star in a series of comedies in the late teens.

Finally, I discovered ROTAIE (RAILS) (1929), a film by Mario Camerini. The film begins with an abborted double suicide of a young couple, who then find a wallet filled with money and head by train to Monaco. Despite this seeming fantasy narrative, the film has many realistic scenes, and only a few sparse intertitles, the rest of the narrative conveyed solely in images. 　　　　

Another great feature of the Giornate is a the Collegium, which brings graduate film studies students to discuss films and discuss other issues with prominent scholars in the field. I attended a session dedicated to canon formation. Ian Christie, formerly of the BFI and Paolo Cherchi Usai, now at the Haghefilm Foundation, lead the very interesting discussion about how film canons developed, why they have changed so little over the years, and how they do change. The consensus was that even when films are rediscovered though new restorations, - as happens so often at the Giornate - it still takes a very long time for those discoveries to filter into the canon.

A second Collegium session featured a lecture by Giovanna Fosetti, the preservationist at the Amsterdam Nederlands Filmmuseum, who has just published a book on film preservation: From Grain to Pixel. The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam University Press). As mentio0ned in previous posts, the digital is completely changing the paradigm of film restoration and archiving and this book is a first attempt to get a handle on those changes.

Finally, I attended a lecture by former Eastman House students, Daniela Currò & Uli Ruedel, who discussed scientific studies they have been doing at Haghefilm on color restoration. Taking the same piece of film, a 1912 Alfred Machin film that was tinted and toned, they copied onto Kodak b& w stock, Kodak color negative, Fuji color negative, using the Desmet method of flashing, and doing what they called a digital Desmet restoration. The digital looked the absolute worst, the Desmet was the best, but not really great.

Again, we see there are limits to digital restoration technologies.