Archival Spaces

309: Art Cinemas in Crisis

Archival Spaces 309

Only in Theatres (2022)

Uploaded 25 November 2022

There is a shot in the new documentary Only in Theatres of Greg Laemmle, the CEO of the storied Laemmle Theatres in Los Angeles, patiently putting up new lettering on the marquee, a cumbersome still analog process. The image is not only emblematic of Laemmle’s hands-on approach to running one of the oldest, continuously operating art house circuits in the country, but also his central role in this film. Raphael Sbarge’s Only in Theatres begins in the summer of 2019 when Laemmle announced that he was selling the family’s chain of nine theatres and 41 screens, only a year after they had broken ground on new cinemas in Newhall and Asuza, CA. The business was off 30%, due to new streaming channels, so the family was losing money. This is a film about the crisis in film exhibition, even before the COVID-pandemic generated an even deeper crisis. That the film ends on a hopeful note is a testament to the cinephilia of Greg Laemmle and his audience.

**Sigmund Laemmle with sons Kurt and Max**

**Carl Laemmle** **(Center) with Max Laemmle, 1928**

Carl Laemmle who had founded the Universal Film Co. in 1912, ran the studio until his removal in 1936, after which the diminutive film pioneer focused on helping his relatives and many others to get out of Nazi Germany. Among those refugees were his brother Sigmund Siegfried Laemmle and his two sons, Max and Kurt. Kurt was the first to get into the film exhibition business, purchasing the Ritz Theatre in Lowell, IN. in 1935 (sold in 1942). Max Laemmle, who had run Universal’s Paris operations arrived in L.A. in 1938, after which the Laemmle brothers opened the Franklin cinema in Highland Park, just north of downtown Los Angeles. The business eventually grew to include five neighborhood movie theaters. However, television in the late 1950s caused the chain to shrink to a single cinema, the Los Feliz Theatre, and the departure of Kurt Laemmle. In the 1960s, Max Laemmle’s son, Robert Laemmle joined the company, and the chain began specializing in art films, foreign films, and other independents. In the 1970s and the 1990s, the Laemmles expanded to include locations in Pasadena, Westwood, Santa Monica, the San Fernando Valley, and downtown Los Angeles.

**Laemmle Royale, former Tivoli, West L.A.**

In 1988, Gregory Laemmle joined the company, bringing a third generation of the Laemmle family to the operation, while Robert remained the nominal owner. Greg opened the Sunset 5 in 1992 and the Laemmle Pasadena in 1999, the former the most successful new art house in the country. By the time Greg offered the chain for sale, it owned Claremont 5, the Fine Arts center on Wilshire Blvd., The Glendale, The Santa Monica Film Center, the Music Hall, the Noho 7 in North Hollywood, The Playhouse 7 in Pasadena, the Royal on Santa Monica, and the Town Center 5 in Encino, CA. While The Sunset was sold to Sundance in 2012, the Fine Arts was abandoned in October 2019, and the Pasadena cinemas were sold to the Landmark chain in May 2020.

In Only in Theatres, numerous filmmakers and critics attest to the incredible influence the Laemmle cinemas have had on the film culture in Los Angeles, bringing European art films and American independents to a city that only supported the product of the commercial studios. Among those interviewed are Ava DuVernay and Alison Anders, both of whom credited the Laemmle’s with their becoming filmmakers, film critics Leonard Maltin, Kenneth Turan, Kevin Thomas, and film historians Michael Renov and Ross Melnick, all of whom attest that the Laemmle Theatres enriched the film landscape by taking financial risks on films that were not necessarily box office blockbusters.

The documentary returns repeatedly to Greg Laemmle and his wife, Trisha, who nervously await offers in fall 2019, obsessing about their finances, and Trisha worrying that Greg was ruining his health, due to the strain of operating the theatres without the help of their three sons, who had no interest in taking over the business. Greg mentions over and over the pressure of the family legacy to support art cinema and serve a community in danger of completely disappearing. Finally, on Christmas Eve at a traditional screening of Fiddler on the Roof (1971), Greg Laemmle announced that the family would not sell the chain. Then the pandemic hit and everything shut down. In order to keep going, Laemmle divested some of the properties, but also eventually had to sell his L.A. home, moving to Seattle in January 2021. Finally, in April 2021, the theatres reopened, including the new Laemmle Newhall. Greg Laemmle noted that the chain was in a good position and ready to grow again. Seldom has a film about a film exhibitor been as intensely personal struggle as Only in Theatres; we witness Greg Laemmle’s anguish and suffer with him.

Only in Theatres opened on 18 November in Laemmle’s cinemas, after a sneak preview on the 13^th at the Laemmle Royale, co-hosted by Hilary Helllstein and the L.A. Jewish Film festival. Like art cinema exhibitors Dan Talbot, Walter Reade, Don Rugoff in New York, the Laemmle’s belong to a rare breed of film showmen who are not just about the money, but about loving movies.

308: Maddow’s “Ultra”

Archival Spaces 308

Rachel Maddow’s Ultra Podcast

Uploaded 11 November 2022

***The Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939, Anatole Litvak)***

I’ve been listening to Rachel Maddow’s podcast, “Ultra,” narrativising the activities of home-grown American Fascists in the immediate pre-World War II period who openly supported and even carried out terror acts for the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler. The podcast has reminded me of “The Fifth Column” chapter in my dissertation, Anti-Nazi-Films in Hollywood, which analyzed Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939, dir. Anatole Litvak), among other films. The term 5^th column had been coined during the Spanish Civil War to explain how Franco’s Fascists had conquered Madrid with four military columns from the outside and a fifth column from inside. While some contemporary critics maintained that Hollywood’s anti-Nazi-Films were crude propaganda, their visualization of Nazi activity was not exaggerated; Maddow’s “Ultra” demonstrates that the threat of a white nationalist, anti-Semitic cabal in America was much greater than any Hollywood screenwriter could ever have imagined. Maddow could have started her podcast with the back story to Confessions.

The Confessions of a Nazi Spy was based on an actual trial in October 1938 of members of the German-American Bund in New York, the Hamburg-America shipping Line, and the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. The pro-Nazi German American Bund, organized into fifty-five chapters around the country, staged huge rallies at Madison Square Garden and elsewhere, where funds were collected for the Reich. However, of the 18 accused conspirators, only four were found guilty, while the American press seems to have treated the case rather lightly, grossly underestimating the threat. Warner Brothers began working on a film, even before the trial ended, even though the German Consul tried to stop the production and cast members were threatened with death by native rightwingers. The film, starring Edward G. Robinson as FBI investigator Leon G. Turrou and Francis Lederer as the German-American spy, opened on 28 April 1939 and caused a sensation. The film cleverly melds a spy story with both real and staged footage of Nazi Party activities in Yorkville; a prologue was added for the 1940 rerelease, consisting of newsreel footage of the Nazi Blitzkrieg. Unlike the real trial, Litvak’s film chose a happy end with the conspirators behind bars and American Democracy saved. At the box office, the film fared poorly. Nevertheless, Hollywood had made a film that was overtly political, explicitly partisan for American Democracy, and against the influence of Nazism or its American base. American critics complained that it was overly propagandistic. Like the journalists covering the trial, film critics remained complacent to radical right-wing activity in America. Once World War II began five months after the film’s opening, attitudes would begin to change in the USA.

Senator Lundeen Making America Great (1940)

Rachel Maddow’s “Ultra” podcast begins with the plane crash of Minnesota Senator Ernest Lundeen on 31 August 1940, who had been working closely with and getting paid by Nazi agent George Sylvester Viereck to keep America out of the war in Europe, even writing Lundeen’s speeches for him. On her website, Maddow reproduces one of those speeches: “The leaders of the movement to get us into war, employ falsehoods as their most deadly weapon… Thus an entirely false picture is created in the mind of the American public, as if Hitler actually threatened to descend on the United States.” But it wasn’t just speeches by isolationist senators, like Burton Wheeler and Gerald Nye that were a threat, it was actual violence.

**The Brooklyn Boys of the Christian Front**

Father Charles E. Coughlin, an anti-Semitic Catholic Radio Demigod

In the next podcast, Maddow reveals the plans of Father Charles E. Coughlin’s Christian Front to create a militia armed with military-grade machine guns to overthrow the government and bomb Jewish and “communist” businesses. Eighteen members were arrested in January 1940, but again the Justice Department bungled the case so that 9 of 13 defendants were acquitted and a mistrial declared for the rest. It would take the government four more years to put together another case against the Christian Front. The trial opened in April 1944 with sheer pandemonium in the Court, what with initially 30 accused and 22 separate defense teams all screaming at once. But that prosecution, too, would explode. But I get ahead of Rachel.

**The Ruins of the Hercules Powder Plant in Kevil, N.J.**

**William Dudley Pelley and his Silver Shirts**

While episode 3 begins with a terrible act of right-wing sabotage at a Hercules Powder Plant in Kenvil, N.J. on 12 September 1942, killing 52 and injuring 125, and destroying 30 buildings, it mostly concerns the efforts of a private citizen, Leon Lewis. An L.A.-based Jewish lawyer, Lewis in 1933 began documenting subversive activities by American white nationalist groups in Los Angeles, like William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts (Silver Legion of America). When he went to the law, the L.A. Police sat on their hands, stating they saw no threat. On 12 November 1942, three more munitions factories were blown up, killing 16 more people, but no one was ever arrested in the aftermath of either act, even though the FBI had evidence of involvement by pro-Nazi groups.

German American Bund Rally in Madison Square Garden, 1939.

**Senator Burton Wheeler and Charles A. Lindbergh**

Episode 4 takes up the story of Ernest Lundeen again, showing the way Lundeen and numerous other members of Congress supported the Nazi cause by forming the America First Committee. Nazi agent George Sylvester Viereck actually paid dozens of members of Congress to send millions of pieces of Nazi Propaganda, printed and paid with taxpayer dollars, through Congress’s free mail service. While the Justice Department named a special prosecutor, William Power Maloney, to investigate Viereck and members of Congress, including Rep. Hamilton Fish (NY) who had willingly misappropriated government funds for Nazi propaganda but Burton K. Wheeler and other America First’ers used their influence to get Maloney fired and shut down the investigation after a grand jury had convened.

But Justice did not close down the investigation, it hired a new special prosecutor, John Rogge who widened the investigation, and gave it focus, indicting the Christian Front insurrectionists for sedition (although Congressmen were spared); they had conspired to overthrow the government by undermining the armed forces in time of war. That four-year prosecution ended in a mistrial when the trial’s verbal violence literally may have killed the judge.

Maybe in future episodes, Rachel Maddow will reveal why the U.S. government has consistently failed prosecutions of right-wing terrorists, but been so successful at prosecuting leftists? Hopefully, she will also reveal why the present crop of seditious Trump insurrectionists in Congress have avoided prosecution or even real scrutiny.

America First Rally in Madison Square Garden, 1941

**Donald Trump’s MAGA base saluting the Fuehrer**

307 Lynn Spigel’s TV Snapshots

Archival Spaces 307

Lynn Spigel’s TV Snapshots Archive

Uploaded 28 October 2022

On 21 October 2022, Film Quarterly hosted a webinar with Professor Lynn Spigel (Northwestern University) to discuss her new book, TV Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022). Reprising an interview between Bruno Guarana and Spigel in Film Quarterly (Fall 2022, 76/1), the event was hosted by editor B. Ruby Rich. Known for her pioneering work on television, including Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (1992) and TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (2009), Spigel has turned her sights on televisions themselves, rather than the content projected through the box. For her new book, Spigel not only amassed a huge archive of everyday snapshots of people in front of their television sets in mid-20th century America, but analyzed the images to discover why people made such photographs of themselves with their TVs, and the uses such personal social spaces engendered. As she noted, “Armed with snapshot cameras, people re-envisioned the dominant (industry-prescribed) spectator’s use of television, and made themselves the stars of their own TV scenes.”

Lynn began by noting that it was researching her previous books that she started seeing and becoming fascinated with family snapshots taken in front of the home’s television set. She first sought out flea markets to find such photos but realized that this was a too inefficient way of collecting and began to do internet searches, where she soon found thousands. In fact, there was a community of collectors specializing in such images with whom she had to compete. And while amateur cameras and film were calibrated for white skin, these TV snapshots not only documented white middle-class American households, but also African-Americans, Asians, and other ethnicities, making them significations of class, race, gender, and even architecture. While digital access proved a boom to her work, she explained that she gave up on using digital tools to classify, order, and analyze the images, even though computer programs had been developed for such works, choosing instead to organize them analog, placing her images in albums according to subject matter and context, as the original users would have done. I understand the impulse because the analog offers a tactile experience of materiality, reproducing the original reception, and allowing for contextual comparisons

Spigel has divided her book into five chapters, based on these categorizations: 1.) TV Portraits: Picturing Families and Household Things; 2.) TV Performers: A theatre of everyday life; 3.) TV Dress-Up: Fashion Poses and Everyday Glamour; 4.) TV Pin-Ups: Sex and the Single TV; 5.) TV Memories: Snapshots in Digital Times.

While television sets, their size, and their color capability, became a sign of affluence as the 1950s progressed, Spigel argues that consumers also used them to inhabit a space of resistance to a culture of conspicuous consumption and its prescriptions. Indeed, the television quickly became a household object integrated into the homes and lives of almost all Americans, where “people arranged and photographed the tv set in relation to other household activities and things.” (p. 28) TV snapshots not only documented a family’s technical proficiency in operating the new media tool but also “enact(ed) their relationships with each other through their mutual engagement with the new tv.” (p. 32) While images of families or just children watching tv are common, many more show families engaged in other social activities in front of the television, whether holiday parties, even weddings, reading, or playing games. For example, Christmas trees were often placed in close proximity to or even on the television set, setting the stage for the holidays. For African-Americans and other ethnic minorities, the television was a particularly ambiguous object, since on tv they were either invisible or portrayed in racist terms, but tv allowed them to perform their real identities in front of the set.

The television room in the family home thereby became a performance space, where family members could act out their identities, or different “forbidden” identities, as in the case of a woman seen in drag. At other times family musicians performed in front of the television, or through trick photography placed themselves inside television sets as if they were really on tv. Television was thus used ritualistically as a “portal object,” according to Spigel, whereby families would often photograph themselves or their children in nice clothes before going out.

Indeed, performances often involved women or children dressing up, creating fashion shows, and wearing clothes specially made for television viewing. Such clothes were necessary fashion magazines stated because cocktail dresses were unsuitable for sitting on the floor to watch tv. Women, i.e. family mothers, sometimes took the snaps themselves because they were actually competing with the television for the attention of their husbands who were glued to the latest sports event. As Spigel writes: “Even if the tv is turned on in these shots, the focus is not on the screen image, but on the woman’s fashion choices and her ability to strike an enticing pose.” (p. 124) When women were behind the camera, it was not just an issue of self-objectification, but rather of the presentation of personal identity. At the same time, women often complained to TV executives about the plunging necklines and overly sexualized images of glamour girls on tv, which they perceived as threats to their marriages.

Such glamour shots in front of the television set sometimes spilled over into erotic pin-up shots, even overtly erotic images. In her fourth chapter, Spigel discusses the history of the pin-up in public media in relation to television, from Kodak advertisements to magazine ads, and Playboy photos. Amateur photographs of women pin-ups in the home often mimicked or lampooned media pin-ups, and photography magazines suggested that amateur photographers actually use their wives as models for such imagery. “In these snapshots, the tv set may well have served as a backdrop for sexual flirtations between posers and camera operators.” (p. 216)

In her final chapter, Lynn Spigel discusses the after-life of these analog photographs, their media ecology, now digitized and circulating on the internet, on social media sites, and in virtual digital photo archives. Photo sharing is seen as a form of social communication on sites like Flickr and Pinterest, but also a “big data business governed by corporate logics of viral marketing…” (p. 224). As social communication, they articulate nostalgia and memory for the individuals who post them, but they are also performative in the sense that posters are attempting to attract “likes.” A kitsch sensibility and retro aesthetics are now in play, when photographers produce new photographs that look like they are old, critically commenting on television and mid-century domestic culture. Richly illustrated with many close readings of individual snaps, Spigel’s TV Snapshots is a fascinating read for anyone interested in television culture.

306: Andrew Sarris

Archival Spaces 306

Andrew Sarris

Uploaded 14 October 2022

It was fifty years ago that I first met Andrew Sarris as an undergraduate. A film critic for The Village Voice, Sarris was the first reviewer I read regularly after becoming interested in film, even getting a subscription to the weekly paper, which also published Jonas Mekas’s weekly missives; another hero of mine. Sarris had been invited to speak at the University of Delaware by my first film professor, Gerald A. Barrett, who was also a follower of Sarris. It was also a pre-publication tour for The Primal Screen. More than just a critic, Sarris was the primary promulgator of the auteur theory in America and had already gotten into some famous spats with the likes of Pauline Kael. The auteur theory was Sarris’s interpretation of the politiques des auteurs, the critical effort of future French New Wave filmmakers, like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, to upgrade Hollywood commercial cinema and downgrade the French “cinema of quality” directors of the previous generation. After Sarris visited Newark, DE., on 17 October 1972, presenting a lecture and informally discussing his work with a small cadre of Barrett’s students, I published a piece on the visit in the University’s student newspaper, The Delaware Review, where I had been writing my own reviews since February of the same year. Here is a reprint of that article:

“Andrew Sarris, the film critic for The Village Voice and the foremost American spokesman for the Auteur Theory of film, lectured on filmmaking and social trends and answered questions from a small but interested crowd during a Student Center Council sponsored appearance on campus Tuesday night.

After talking about his new book, The Primal Screen, Sarris spoke about filmmaking trends in the sixties. According to Sarris there developed after the death of John Kennedy a sense of absurdity, of gratuitousness in America. What became important was the existential now, because the future presented only a vision of the apocalypse.

Every film became the “last” film, packed with the essence of the universe in every shot. Films no longer served as vehicles of communication rather they became “heavy” artistic statements on the state of contemporary existence.

ALIENATION

The telephoto lens (as used in the last shots of The Graduate), showing movement without moving, became a characteristic film technique in the sixties. The general alienation became apparent in the increasing fragmentation of film narratives and disjointed editing or jump-cutting.

*The Graduate* (1967, Mike Nichols) with Dustin Hoffman

The focus in cinema shifted to youth, in effect wiping out traditional age groupings. Thus, an actor like Dustin Hoffman (35 years) plays an adolescent, while Clint Eastwood (47) is a member of “Youth for Nixon.”

AUTEUR THEORY

When asked about “the Auteur Theory” in the discussion, Sarris gave a brief history of its conception. He went on to say that the Auteur Theory was basically designed to reevaluate the history of the American cinema and the neglected artists (directors) working within the Hollywood studio system

The “theory,” which was really only a set of tentative notes according to Sarris, stipulated that a director’s total output be considered and evaluated on the basis of thematic as well as stylistic continuities.

MAJOR GENRES

Another premise of the theory was that such minor literary genres as the western became major genres by the very nature of the cinema. Thus, it was necessary to reconsider the work of such directors as John Ford, although his primary work was in westerns.

Finally, Sarris stated that directors such as Buster Keaton and Alfred Hitchcock were not great artists as individuals, but that their genius when working within the cinema, did, in fact, produce great art. Sarris explained that the mystical experience of film, cinema as a kind of fantasy, made it the most exciting form of art.

PAST WORK

On the level of practical application, Sarris justified the Auteur Theory as a method to make meaningful connections between a single film and the director’s past work. Sarris conceded however that this was of little value in evaluating the first film by a new director.

In his own weekly criticism, Sarris relies on his knowledge of film history, technique, and intuition. He also mentioned his own aesthetic bias against ambiguity and modernism in subject matter and classical montage in technique.”

Reading these lines fifty years later, I’m reminded how much I idolized Sarris at the time. BTW, I also loved reading Molly Haskell’s pioneering feminist criticism, she being Andrew’s spouse. I inhaled Sarris’s The American Cinema (1967), cover to cover, and entered into a whole new world of classic American cinema. My film education had only started two years before, so I knew virtually nothing about the richness of American cinema. I had had no idea who John Ford was. The Auteur Theory may have gotten some things wrong in terms of the way the studio system actually worked, but it served to organize the work of American film directors. It gave me a program for Hollywood research; it allowed me to begin to differentiate careers and thereby understand the ways the studio system actually worked.

The Auteur Theory engendered thousands of hours of discussion. Years later, when I was archive director in Munich, I met Pierre Rissient and became friends with him; besides being the eminence grise at Cannes, Pierre was a living, breathing auteurist. How many discussions about Sirk or Siodmak? I remember one time sitting with Pierre and another Frenchman, while they each tried to find the most obscure film by a director in Sarris’ “Far Side of Paradise.”

When I wrote the article, my career goal was to become a film critic, like Sarris. I never did become a working film reviewer, but Sarris did publish my first professional film review in the Voice exactly two years later in October 1974, when I wrote about Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali – Fear Eats the Soul (1974), which I had seen at the Berlin Film Festival before its American premiere at the New York film festival.