A Flicker Alley release from Lobster Films and Blackhawk Films, with 54 rare and restored short films from the nitrate era organized into thematic groups -- films we've been trying for years to find an excuse to share with fellow enthuiasts.
There's a descriptive summary of the collection here:
http://www.flickeralley.com/fa_sftf_02.html
And here's a detailed descriptive list of what is actually included, in my opinion fascinating; but be warned, it is quite lengthy:
NEW BEGINNINGS
For many, cinema began on December 28, 1895 with the first public projection of short films like Exiting the Factory, Arrival of a Train and The Card Party by Louis and Auguste Lumière. But these iconic films also exist in alternative versions, sometimes with each frame of the print colored by hand!
Card Party was found in a French cheese store in the mid 1980s, along with five other “vues” in color. Lobster Films purchased the original Lumiere-perforation negatives of Workers Leaving the Peugeot Factory and fifty other titles at an auction in Lyon for about fifty U.S. dollars. They were wrapped up in old paper, which turned out to be an original poster of Watering the Gardner, perhaps the very first poster in the history of moving pictures!
Carnivals were popular amusements in the late 19th century, and featured rides, x-rays, games of skill, wild animals, strong men, contortionists, and even tent-show cinemas. Midway freak shows – giants, dwarfs, bearded women – were especially potent public attractions.
Movies carried these exhibits to audiences unable to witness them in real life. Filmed about 1900, here is the famous man-torso, Nikolai Kobelkoff, born in Siberia (1851) and a performer beginning in 1874; followed by Mme. Ondine, performing the famous serpentine dance originated by Loïe Fuller – in a Lion’s cage!
None of us had heard of Kobelkoff until a TV producer doing a program on freaks mentioned the name and asked whether we could find film of him. We believed none existed, and could not – but only a month later, on a little roll of film found in an antique shop in the south of France, we saw “Kobelk” written in ink. It had 1897 perforations, and was the camera negative of this very early film!
Probably the first color and sound film, the duel scene from Cyrano de Bergerac was filmed by Clement-Maurice with Coquelin Ainé for the Phono-Cinema-Theatre at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, The sound was prerecorded on a wax cylinder and synchronization depended upon the projectionist’s skill.
This film was preserved from the original 35mm hand-colored print shown in 1900, and we express appreciation to the Gaumont-Pathé archive. The perforation system is unique (one perf on the frame line in the center of the film) but Joao de Olivera, who owns Prestech Laboratory in London, scanned every frame of the film, one by one, in 2K, for the best possible resolution. The original sound comes from three sources: an incomplete 35mm nitrate print of a compilation film, 40 Years of Cinema, and two discs held in private collections, one of them an incomplete dub of an original cylinder which has since been lost.
By 1907, sound experimenter Georges Mendel had devised a system to assure synchronization by mechanically interlocking phonograph and projector. Again, the film was shot to playback, but amplification of the acoustic recording remained a significant limitation. Here, M. Noté of the Paris Opera sings La Marseillaise in 1908.
Lobster acquired this as an unidentified film from a private collector. We never knew what it was until one day a friend realized the man was actually singing the French national anthem. As Mendel was using commercial records to which the artists mouthed lyrics, and there were few recordings of La Marseillaise at that time, we simply tried the film against an original record we found – and it matched! The phonograph catalogue identified M. Noté.
MAGICAL MOVIES
French stage magician and illusionist Georges Méliès began filmmaking in 1896. He worked in many genres, but is especially remembered for short trick films such as this one from 1901, Excelsior! Prince of Magicians. Méliès wrote, designed and directed his films and often (as here) performed the principal part; he was undoubtedly the most accomplished filmmaker in the world in 1901.
This beautiful print was in a large trunk full of turn-of–the century films purchased by Lobster from an antique dealer. The huge collection included 30 Méliès films, 17 of them (including this one) not known to exist anywhere else. The entire collection was printed to 35mm negative at Haghefilm, Netherlands. Music by Rodney Sauer and the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.
The Talion Punishment was made in 1906 by Gaston Velle, a specialist in fantasy films. Producer Pathé Frères introduced stencil-color in 1904. Stencils were hand-cut for every frame of each color. Black-and-white prints were laid out on long tables and colors were applied one at a time with a process similar to silk screening. Here, maidens dressed as butterflies retaliate against a busy lepidopterist.
Kioriki, Japanese Acrobats was made for Pathé Frères in 1907 by Segundo de Chomon, pioneer of Spanish cinema and master of special effects. Only a fragment of this film survived in stencil color. The negative was in the collection of the Cinémathèque Française, but had never been printed because of its strange format with one perforation per frame. Lobster made a new black-and-white fine grain from the original negative in 2000; with the fragment as palette, Helène Bromberg then hand-colored the new copy frame by frame, using the techniques of the late 19th century.
Georges Méliès’ best-known film, A Trip to the Moon, is inspired by Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” and H. G. Wells’ “First Men on the Moon.” In 1908, Segundo de Chomon made An Excursion to the Moon, an imitation of Méliès’ work, which is preserved with the original Pathé Frères stencil color. Chomon was originally hired to prepare Spanish titles for Pathé films sold in Spain. Proving adept at every possible camera trick, he was brought by Charles Pathé to his studio at Vincennes, near Paris, to make trick films in imitation of Méliès. Music by Frederick Hodges.
Historian Donald Crafton credits this 1911 Pathé Frères film The Automatic Moving Company to Romeo Bosetti; it too is an imitation of an earlier work, Émile Cohl’s Mobilier fidèle, made in 1910 for Pathé’s rival, Gaumont. However, Cohl also worked for Pathé in 1911 and the two artists sometimes collaborated. Regardless of authorship, it’s brilliant; only the scale of the straw reveals it to have been achieved in miniature.
David Shepard was a high school friend of John Doublier whose grandfather, Francis Doublier, was one of the original Lumière Cinematographe operators sent to America in 1896. M. Doublier stayed behind to manage a film printing and processing laboratory in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and in 1957, gave David the original copies of this film and of Fantasmagorie, also on this DVD. Music by Eric Beheim.
SEEING THE WORLD
These long-forgotten images of The Seine Flood, which devastated Paris in late January, 1910, were miraculously found only recently. They allow us to understand the magnitude of the catastrophe that immobilized the city for several weeks, leaving over 150,000 disaster victims in its wake. The film was produced by the Eclipse Company (1907-1920); only about 100 reels survive from its production of 1,600 films. It was found at a flea market in Portobello Road, London, in 1986. Music by Eric Beheim.
In 1915 the Reno Commercial Club offered a trophy for the first car to travel a new route from San Francisco to Reno. This may sound easy, but much of the way across the Sierras involved slowly winching and pushing the 1915 Buick through snow and ice along an unplowed, steep, narrow, ill-defined road. In fact, you may wonder that these men attempted such a feat for a mere trophy! The film was copied by Blackhawk in 1968 from an original nitrate print loaned by an elderly and secretive private collector. Music by Eric Beheim.
To popularize the idea of automobile travel, Ford Motor Company produced Ford Educational Weekly, a film magazine distributed free to theaters. One 1916 series featured “Visits to American Cities.” In this episode, Los Angeles is featured at the very beginning of the boom created by oil, movies and aircraft. On the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary in 1953, Ford donated its film library to the National Archives and Records Service; this copy derives from a fine grain master printed from the Archive’s preservation negative. Music by Frederick Hodges.
Montmartre’s Kids, also from 1916, was filmed on the Parisian hill, which with its height, light and cheap rents, was home to such artists as Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Braque, even Picasso. Another figure of the period, Francis Poulbot, created the archetypal street urchin in his drawings of Montmartre kids. His favorite theme is the effect of the war on these children who, in the absence of Germans, attack a concierge! The previous owner of this original print was a hairdresser and florist in a small village in France, and when there was a funeral he would not only shave the corpse but also provide fresh flowers for the grave!
Germany was forbidden to build dirigibles after World War I, but the Zeppelin Company was allowed to make one for the U.S. Navy as partial war reparation. Filled with hydrogen and manned by a German crew, the ZR-3, later renamed Los Angeles, flew 5,000 miles in 82.5 hours to Lakehurst, New Jersey in October, 1924. During its life, it logged 4,398 hours and 331 successful flights. Still in good flying condition, the Los Angeles was decommissioned and scrapped in October 1939, after the longest career of any rigid airship.! This lovely film was copied by Blackhawk from an original nitrate print, but not previously re-released in any format. Music by Eric Beheim.
In the Land of Giants and Pygmies, a diary of Aurelio Rossi’s 1925 trek into the immense Belgian Congo, preserves a long-gone Colonial-era wonder at natural resources, “primitive” tribes, customs and costumes in Europe’s vast African possessions, with the implied benefit civilizing influence from home could bring the “dark continent.” This edition was restored from two stencil-colored 35mm prints. A few shots come from a print in the René Charles Collection (now in the collection of the region of Charente) but most of it was copied from a vintage safety film print found at a camera store in Lyon. The English titles are translations, re-created in the original typography.
These two-color Technicolor fashion shots were coped from nitrate film many years ago, without the benefit of later techniques that minimize blemishes. Even heavily abraded, they’re of interest as a portrait of couture in 1927, as a document of color cinematography when the process was still novel, and because many of the models were successful Hollywood actresses. The film was found and copied by Murray Glass, one of the best American friends of early cinema. Music by Frederick Hodges.
On May 20-21, 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh flew alone, non-stop, in a single-engine plane without parachute or radio, from New York to Paris and by this feat became perhaps the greatest hero of the decade. Fox Movietone’s sound film record of Lindbergh’s take-off was the first popular sensation of sound film; it was soon augmented by coverage of his welcome in Washington on June 11th. The original negative was found in 1973 by Blackhawk, misfiled in a vault at the old Fox studios on Tenth Avenue in New York City. With permission from 20th Century-Fox, we donated the negative to the National Archives after printing the 35mm fine grain master used for this transfer.
The Fireman of the Folies Bergère is strangely undocumented, but was probably made to promote Josephine Baker’s wild revue “Vents de Folies” in 1927-1928 at Paris’ celebrated music hall, after her 1925 triumph in the Negro revue at the Theâtre des Champs-Elyseés. The Folies emphasized fine costumes, dancers, stage effects -– and naked women. “Ah, the naked women,” said manager Paul Derval, if I ever tried to get rid of them, I might as well close the place down.”
This film was restored from two very incomplete prints, found ten years apart. It took more time to identify the film, make heads and tails of the many bits and pieces, and match the two elements, than to find the film. This version is still slightly incomplete; the first title was added for clarity, but it isn’t genuine.
After the success of Walter Ruttman’s city symphony Berlin, produced by Fox in 1927, the studio launched a series of short subjects with location shooting by Fox Movietone news crews, depicting days in the life of various cities, with music and sound effects. Welcome to New York’s Coney Island in 1932! Reproduced by Blackhawk from an original nitrate print; the music, uncredited, is by Louis de Francesco.
DVD 2 – PROGRAM 2
LAUGHING LIKE WE USED TO
Silent films owe a great deal to the vaudeville tradition; its short, unrelated stage acts were not only a nearly inexhaustible source for early film content, but also a programming model for nickelodeon theaters. The Dancing Pig was a mind-boggling music hall routine filmed several times for different companies – here, for Pathé Frères in 1907. Reproduced in 1988 from an original nitrate print in the collection of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Music by Frederick Hodges.
The Monkey Race (1909), Italian-made, is typical of hundreds of chase films produced in America, France and Italy between about 1904 and 1910, mostly for fairgrounds and vaudeville. They greatly influenced Mack Sennett’s Keystone and other comedies, until Charlie Chaplin asked “must every film end with a chase? “ Ringling Bros. circus featured a Polish monkey-impersonator well into the 1960s!
The mad collector who owned this film hoarded nitrate in his apartment, in a fifteen-story building. He showed them to his friends with high-heat arc lamps! By buying his films we probably saved him and his neighbors from incineration! Music by Eric Beheim.
Arriving dinner guests find somewhat improbably that the hostess has forgotten the bread; a quick visit to the bakery motivates this accumulation of comic incident, a variation on the chase film formula. I Fetch the Bread was filmed in the empty streets of Paris by Pathé Frères in 1907.
Original 35mm prints of this film were found both in the USA and in France – the French copy was used for this transfer. An antique dealer who specialized in pre-1939 film memorabilia used to tease us, showing wonderful films he had found while expressing regret because he had already sold them to someone else. One day he decided to purge his “vault” of his unsold material, and offered the film prints to Lobster. In two hours we loaded a truck with all his film treasures, and much more, which he had actually never sold to anyone. Music by Eric Beheim.
Artheme Swallows His Clarinet was produced in 1912 by France’s short-lived Eclipse Company. Few Eclipse films survive; when this delightful comedy was found, the print was decomposed along the edges and the end had melted away. Ten years later, another print miraculously surfaced, free of rot but very choppy. This edition is digitally reconstructed from both, almost frame by frame. Music by Eric Beheim.
Mack Sennett produced Kid’s Auto Race (January, 1914), Charles Chaplin’s second film and the first in which he wore his signature “tramp” costume, although the “little fellow’s” character attributes had yet to appear. It’s included here because the recently-discovered nitrate negative yields a far better image than any other available in decades.
A man came to Serge Bromberg after one of his live shows, saying that his father had a lab founded by his grandfather in 1908. He showed a 50-page vault inventory; most of the negatives had been deposited in the French archives, but the most interesting titles – original export negatives of Keystone comedies -- had been sold about twenty years before. The only clue was the word “Jouet” (“toy” in English) on the list. It took five years to persuade the seller to reveal that a M. Jouet was actually a former clerk living in Caen (Normandy). Serge called every “Jouet” in the phone book, but this one was unlisted. Finally he visited him and learned that Jouet had never done anything with these wonderful negatives, and because the films were already available on VHS, he agreed to sell them all. Lobster, the British Film Institute, and the Cineteca de Bologna are restoring the surviving Chaplin Keystone films from 1914, gathering elements from around the world. But parts are still missing from some of the films. Music by Eric Beheim.
Stan Laurel was in films for a decade as actor and director before teaming with Oliver Hardy in 1927; until then, Laurel was a comedian without a character, but with a mastery of rapid-fire gags. The Pest was produced and directed in 1922 by G. M. Anderson, a film pioneer since 1903, who as “Broncho Billy’ from 1909-1916 was the first important star of westerns, which he also directed.
This 35mm print was acquired by exchange from one of the great “keepers of the frame,” The Museum of Modern Art in New York, which began collecting films in the mid-1930s. In the end, collectors and museums do the same work – they collect, preserve, and share films to keep them alive. Music by Frederick Hodges.
Ten years after Chaplin’s debut, Sennett produced Lizzies of the Field (1924). Sennett considered Del Lord, director of this manic gag fest, “the best” at the frantic, freewheeling style his studio was known for. The climactic road race was done full size as you see it – no models, cheats or short cuts.
This is one of many films which apparently survives only in 16mm or narrower gauges intended for “home movie” use – but most of the prints are copies of copies. Blackhawk was fortunate to find one of an early generation. Music by Eric Beheim.
DRAWINGS AND MODELS
Using the technique of stop-motion photography pioneered in America by J. Stuart Blackton, Emile Cohl of France drew Fantasmagorie for the Gaumont Company in 1908. Arguably the first and certainly the most sophisticated cartoon until that time, its stream-of-conscious narrative remains impressive after a century. The vintage 16mm source print acquired from Francis Doublier seems to be the sole surviving full-frame original copy of this important film, and after our transfer, Gaumont used it for a frame-by-frame scan and restoration to 35mm. Music by Frederick Hodges.
In 1919, Ko-Ko the Clown first emerged from the inkwell to grapple with his creator, Max Fleischer. Combining live action with animation, this highly imaginative series of 130 films inspired Walt Disney’s Alice comedies., among others. This film was found with the French original print of I Fetch the Bread. A silent film of 1924, Cartoon Factory is seen here in a reissue version; the added sound has been digitally restored with the latest techniques.
In the Orient (1929) preserves a performance by Tony Sarg (1880-1942), father of modern puppetry in North America. In the 1920s and 1930s, Sarg’s troupe toured with such productions as “Treasure Island” and “Alice in Wonderland;” more than three million people saw his shows at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. Sarg was also an illustrator, made silhouette films, and designed Macy’s animated Christmas window displays. This film was preserved from a 35mm silent print with a separate 16-inch Vitaphone disc for the sound.
19th century song pluggers in vaudeville theaters and in the streets invited audiences to join in the chorus; this tradition of participation appeared in movie theaters by the mid-teens. When sound arrived Fleischer Studios’ delightful “Screen Songs” added witty animated prologues and celebrity singers to prepare the audience for the ball that bounced through the lyrics.
Ub Iwerks’ bizarre Balloonland (1935) has appeared in many video collections, often under its 16mm home-movie title The Pincushion Man. However, the Blackhawk Films Collection holds the original nitrate red/blue Cinecolor negatives, and this astonishing film is presented here with fully restored picture and sound prepared in collaboration with the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
Play Safe, a Fleischer Studios “Color Classic”, is one of the first cartoons in three-color Technicolor made after Disney’s exclusive license on the process expired early in 1936. A few shots innovate animation filmed vertically with characters moving among three-dimensional sets. The pioneering Fleischers also made Ko-Ko, Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman cartoons.
GRACE NOTES
In the 1920s, radio brought African-American music into the mainstream; early sound films presented Black vaudevillians, bands, and singers to movie audiences. Radi-Ators presents the Utica Jubilee Singers, students at Utica (Mississippi) Normal and Industrial Institute (now Hinds Community College). Their choral arrangements (known as “Jubilees”) were published as sheet music and recorded on Victor records; the Singers also toured Europe in 1927-28 before making this 1929 film, restored from a 35mm silent positive and its separate 16-inch Vitaphone sound disc.
RCA produced Black and Tan to showcase its Photophone sound system. Film Daily said upon its release in November, 1929, “Duke Ellington and his all-colored orchestra put over the hot jazz – and how.” Director Dudley Murphy collaborated with Fernand Léger on Ballet mecanique in 1924 and seasons this film with avant-garde sequences while also telling a story. The late Karl Emil Knudsen, well-known Danish producer of jazz records, purchased the original negative from Dudley Murphy, and supplied the print from which this transfer was made.
After a decade performing in and recording with the top hot jazz bands of New Orleans, Chicago and New York, legendary trumpeter and vocalist Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong moved to Los Angeles in 1930, and then toured Europe. Armstrong’s work in this period remains a foundation stone in all of jazz history. These three numbers were filmed in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1934.
Jazz Hot is a major discovery -–a unique sync sound film record of Django Reinhardt, greatest of jazz guitarists, here with violinist Stéphane Grapelli and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. It’s undocumented, but J’attendrais (I Will Wait) was perhaps filmed to promote the Quintet’s tour of Britain in the summer of 1939. Discovered thanks to Fabien Ruiz, a world-renowned tap dancer, its revelation prompted a ten-year legal dispute, ending in a settlement, which allows Lobster the exclusive right to show the film, with permission from the estates of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grapelli.
DVD 3 – PROGRAM 3
PERSUADE ME
The notorious fake California Election News was secretly produced by MGM in 1934 for the film industry’s campaign against Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle and many other works. Sinclair’s EPIC (End Poverty in California) platform won him a landslide Democratic nomination for governor. Terrified at the idea of a socialist reformer running the state, Republicans organized one of the dirtiest-ever campaigns. The people in these “candid” interviews are actors; the films were designed to frighten voters into selecting any candidate except Sinclair.
Bosley Crowther’s history of MGM, The Lion’s Share, told us these films had existed, but no one we asked imagined they survived. However, perfect nitrate prints of episodes 1 and 2 were among the papers of Governor Merriam at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, California, and we were allowed to copy them in return for 35mm safety prints.
The following three films from 1935-38 present Fernandel, Jacques Tati and Michel Simon, each an important French film star, in screen advertisements which were projected in commercial cinemas. Film ads in Europe predated the American practice by several decades.
As with newsreels, commercials were often left behind in theatres as the producers did not request return of the prints. We used to pile them all on one shelf, without keeping track of where they were found. But one day when the shelf was full, we decided to watch them all, and found these among many others.
During Hollywood’s “golden age,” studios produced elaborate books, trailer reels, and junkets to sell the studio’s seasonal block of releases to exhibitors. This one for France from MGM features Laurel & Hardy (dubbed into French); it also announces films that later became classics.
This print came from a shoe factory in Nancy that received old film to be rendered into glue. When the manager saw the films without cans, he decided against destroying them and bought the prints for the equivalent price of the glue. He put the films in the attic of his country house, where we found and bought them from his grandson. This group consisted of about 300 reels of film including many silent French and German films previously believed lost, and the only known complete 35mm print of the 1927 Laurel & Hardy comedy Flying Elephants. But in September, 2007, we discovered another complete print of the same film, in Brittany!
Master Hands (1936) is a sponsored paean to the machine age, an almost-wordless celebration of industrial production at the Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan. Apparently produced for showing at a stockholders meeting, it was never distributed as seen here, but was later reworked for more prosaic uses. The unique original print of Master Hands was rescued by Rick Prelinger from the garage of a former employee of its producer, the Jam Handy Organization; it is presented through his courtesy, and is included in the National Film Registry.
This astonishing advertising film made in 1938 for Philips Radio in Holland is the work of a brilliant animation pioneer, George Pal. In the process Pal called “puppetoons,” puppets composed of numerous interchangeable wooden parts are filmed frame-by-frame. Pal devoted months of work to this five-minute dream in Technicolor!
We saw this film as the owner was loading it into a truck, preparing to move to the south of France. Unfortunately, he had an accident (he was frightened but not hurt) and all the cans were scattered on the street. He picked them up as well as he could, but decided that nitrate film was definitely too dangerous and that VHS copies would be easier to handle. Lobster bought the entire collection.
Ancestors of music videos, the next three films were made during World War II for coin-operated jukebox devices found in restaurants, bars, and train stations. On built-in glass screens, they projected 16mm films of artists performing popular tunes. These examples, although not in perfect condition, are time capsules of their era. William Frawley was a vaudevillian and musical comedy performer decades before he played Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy.
We bought Yankee Doodler for a preposterous amount of money; the seller felt compassionate about it and sent us the other two as a gift, along with many more.
Chuck Jones took a break from directing Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies and Private Snafu cartoons to make this labor-sponsored film for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1944 Presidential campaign. It was produced by Industrial Film and Poster Service which, later rechristened UPA, earned animation immortality with Gerald McBoing Boing and the nearsighted Mr. Magoo.
Blackhawk copied this film in 1975 from a nitrate 35mm Technicolor print in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library at Hyde Park, New York.
TELL ME A STORY
D. W. Griffith directed For His Son in 1912, one of about 450 films he made for the pioneer Biograph Company. His works included every genre, and techniques he developed shaped screen narrative for two generations. Griffith was also a moralist, and made many films on the folly of unbridled ambition. Until the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 put a stop to the practice, Coca-Cola actually contained cocaine. Charles Hill Mailes plays the doctor; Charles West, his son.
The Biograph negatves were posted as collateral for a bank loan and were put into storage after the pioneer producer ceased production in 1916. The negatives were donated by the bank in 1939 to The Museum of Modern Art, and pioneer television producer Paul Killiam bought commercial rights to them from the bank in 1952. Blackhawk later purchased this film among many 35mm elements Killiam made for his daily 15-minute syndicated show “Movie Museum.” Music by Sydney Jill Lehman.
Suspense (1913) was directed by Lois Weber with her husband Phillips Smalley. Although there are earlier examples of some of Weber’s impressive techniques, her bravura filmmaking more than makes up for the plot, which was swept into cinema from 19th-century grand guignol. Blackhawk’s 35mm negative was made from one of two surviving original prints in Britain’s National Film Archive, London. Music by Donald Sosin.
Thomas Ince leased 17,000 acres of spectacular California land to produce rugged westerns like The Heart of an Indian, also known as The Indian Massacre (1913). With the men, livestock and wagons of the Miller Brothers 101 Wild West Show, it has the genuine and unglamorous "feel" of the frontier. The reissue British main title erroneously credits J. Barney Sherry in the lead; it is actually Francis Ford (made up as an Indian), with Ann Little, William Eagleshirt, Art Acord and Bob Kortman. This is one of approximately a dozen Ince productions acquired as original negatives by Paul Killiam from Harry Aitken, once President of Ince’s original distribution company. Blackhawk purchased Killiam’s 35mm master some fifty years after it was copied for (but never used in) Killiam’s “Movie Museum”. Music by Rodney Sauer.
ONE FOR THE ROAD
In Giuseppe Tornatore’s beautiful Cinema Paradiso (1988), the local priest previews the weekly film show and censors objectionable shots. Decades later the small boy in the film, now a middle-aged man, receives his legacy: the edited reel of all the excised snippets. The story was too good not to be true. Here, just as found near Brussels in 1997, is an actual reel of “stolen kisses”. But before us the clips were never spliced together, so it was clear that the projectionist never intended to watch them again.
3-DVD, 7 hour set due 1/22 SAVED FROM THE FLAMES
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DShepFilm is David Shepard, one of the foremost figures in film preservation, who has been invited to be our January Guest Star. We will all get a chance to know him better.
See this thread where our enterprising members outed this info early (and impressed the hell out of me).
DShepFilm is David Shepard, one of the foremost figures in film preservation, who has been invited to be our January Guest Star. We will all get a chance to know him better.
See this thread where our enterprising members outed this info early (and impressed the hell out of me).