Archival Spaces

295: SFSFF

Archival Spaces 295

San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Uploaded 13 May 2022

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival celebrated its 25th Anniversary, 5-11 May 2022, and its first live iteration since before the pandemic in 2019. It may also be the last SFSFF at the storied Castro Theater, which the owners -rumor has it – are converting to a concert venue sans seating. In any case, festival directors Anita Monga and Stacey Wisnia put together a stellar program with revelations at every turn. Due to teaching commitments, I missed several days but what follows are some of the highlights for me.

I was bowled over by Mikio Naruse’s 1933 masterpiece, Apart From You, a late silent, shown in a 35mm print from the National Film Archive of Japan. The film follows the fates of two geishas, one aging, the other young, both unhappy in their oldest profession, but trapped because they are supporting families. Terugiku falls in love with Kikue’s son, Yoshio, attempting to keep him from a life of crime, but the couple nevertheless part ways at film’s end because their familial commitments trump personal happiness. There are no big dramatic moments, just the women’s emotional struggle, expressed in intense close-ups, for example, when Kikue’s regular customer leaves her for a younger woman, or when Terugiku realizes her drunkard father wants to sell her younger sister, forcing her to continue working to feed her family.

Saturday evening, DJ Spooky presented his The Rebirth of a Nation Remix, a program he has been performing since 2005, but shown here with a modern score by Classical Revolution and Guenther Buchwald. Cut down from its ostensibly three-hour version to 70 minutes, DJ Spooky focuses on intimate scenes of the Caucasian Cameron and Stoneman families, juxtaposed with epic scenes of war and conflict. While Spooky and critic Wesley Morris discussed the project’s attempt at Brechtian distancing effects, I was surprised that the film still held its toxic power, in particular in the KKK “rides again” finale, despite digital manipulation. But the cut-down also made manifest the film’s racist core, its (and Griffith’s) obsession with miscegenation as the root of all evil.

Sunday’s discovery was the Ukrainian film, Arrest Warrant (1926, Heorhii Tasin), which not only eschewed the reigning Soviet aesthetic of montage and its anti-psychological treatment of actors but also presents an extremely ambiguous view of the Russian Civil War of 1918-20. The second of four films that Tasin directed for VUFKU before Stalin destroyed the Ukrainian company (see Archival Spaces 294), Arrest Warrant’s heroine, Nadya, is the lover of a Red Army Commissar. He asks her to hide important documents when the town is overrun by the White Army. She is psychologically tortured by her White Russian captors, aided by her ex-husband who is conspiring to take away their mutual child. The Bolsheviks don’t come off well either: when the Reds return, her lover believes without evidence that she has betrayed the cause, the woman a victim of patriarchy on all sides. Tasin’s film is constructed through continuity editing rather than dialectic montage, his use of chiaroscuro lighting and dream sequences – as the woman falls into delirium– is heavily influenced by GermanExpressionism, unlike anything else in 1920s Soviet cinema.

Sunday’s other revelation was Sylvester (1923, Lupu Pick), which was previously a more or less lost film since the only known nitrate print was inaccessible for decades. The Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin beautifully reconstructed the film with its original score by Klaus Pringsheim; in fact, the score was a guide for the new edit. Scripted by Carl Mayer without subtitles, the film is identified by Lotte Eisner as an expressionist Kammerspiel, but, like Mayer’s next film, The Last Laugh (1924), [and G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925)], Sylvester includes expressionist and new realist elements. Pick continually cuts between realistically shot public street scenes of drunken New Year’s Eve revelers of all classes with the intimate emotional struggle of a wife and mother-in-law for the affection of the husband-son, all punctuated by images of the eternal sea, reminding us of nature’s absence. It is in Eugen Klöpfer’s oversized, lumbering but essentially static body, paralyzed in the face of demands by the two women in his life, that we recognize Eisner’s definition of expressionist acting.

Limite(1931, Mário Peixote) is a Brazilian avant-garde film I have been chasing for at least 40 years available since its restoration in 2010. The two-hour-plus film, financed and directed by a wealthy Brazilian amateur, includes only snippets of narrative: two women and a man adrift on an endless sea, a confrontation between two men in a cemetery, a man and a woman foot-bathing, etc. Its construction of images of nature – while eschewing images of modernity – could be from a structuralist film from the 1960s (as could the minimalist electronic score by Matti Bye Ensemble), but also reminds me in its extreme subjectivity of Henwar Rodakiewicz’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1931), and of the existential dilemma in the isolation of its human subjects. We are caught in an endless dream between consciousness and sleep, life and death.

Another wonderful discovery was Dans la nuit (1930, Charles Vanel), independently produced and possibly the last French silent film to be released before the talkies arrived. Shot on location in northern France, near Vanel’s childhood home, the film’s first half presents a bucolic paradise of happy quarry workers and a manic country wedding, all sweetness and light. But just as many early images are bifurcated between light and dark, e.g. the taking of the wedding portrait, the film morphs into a nightmare when the young husband is mutilated in a quarry accident and loses the affection of his wife. Ten years after World War I, Vanel analogizes the trauma of France’s war wounded, his hero wearing a mask to hide his disfigured face, a trope future horror films would repeatedly utilize.

So many good films, so little time but I have to mention all the truly wonderful musical accompaniments not named above: Frank Bockius, Timothy Brock, Philip Carli, Clubfoot Hindustani with Pandit Krishna Bhatt, Stephen Horne, Sasha Jacobsen Quintett, Monte Alto Orchestra, Donald Sosin, and the professional debut of William Lewis. Their inventive live performances added a whole other dimension beyond music and sound.

294: Kyiv Film Archive in War

Archival Spaces 294

Ukrainian Film Archives in Peril

Uploaded 29 April 2022

When the Giornate del cinema muto got its start in 1982 in Gemona, Italy, it was partially in response to a devastating earthquake that had rocked the area of Friuli in 1976, leaving its residents shell-shocked. I was reminded of that fact when recently reading about the Aleksandr Dovzhenko Center, the Ukrainian Film Archive, which has been organizing screenings in the subways of Kyiv and Kharkiv to cheer up shell-shocked residents. According to several published reports, curators from the archive have been projecting Ukrainian silent animated and live-action comedy shorts, like Grandma’s Gift (1920s), the silent feature, Adventures of Half a Rubel (1929, Aksel Lundin), as well as recently produced comedy features, like The Best Weekend (2022, Vladyslav Klimchuk) and Star Exchange (2021, Oleksiy Daruha). As Maria Glazunova from the Dovzhenko Center noted on the Ukrainian website, Real Cinema, “These shows in the subway… help us survive in these difficult times.”

Named after Aleksandr Dovzhenko, the pioneering Soviet-Ukrainian film director of Arsenal (1929) and Earth (1930), the Aleksandr Dovzhenko Center was founded in Kyiv in 1994 on the site of the country’s largest film laboratory, taking over responsibility for Ukraine’s moving image preservation from Gosfilmofond, the Soviet/Russian film archives. According to the Archive’s website (https://dovzhenkocentre.org/en/about/), the Center houses more than 7,000 feature films, documentaries, Ukrainian and foreign animated films, and thousands of archival records from the history of Ukrainian cinema. The Archive now maintains modern climate-controlled film vaults, the only surviving film laboratory in Ukraine, a Cinema Museum, a non-film archive, a multimedia library, and a publishing department. Its mandate, like that of many archives in the Federation Internationale des Archivs du Film (FIAF), which it joined in 2003, is to promote, research, and distribute Ukraine’s national film legacy at home and abroad. Since 2013, the Center has been distributing films abroad and recently made In Spring (1929, Mikhail Kaufmann), an avant-garde documentary by Dziga Vertov’s brother, available to George Eastman Museum, which organized a benefit screening for victims of the Ukrainian war.

*The Man With the Movie Camera* (1929, Dziga Vertov)

Ukraine has of course had a rich history of cinema. Mikhail Kaufmann shot Vertov’s avant-garde masterpiece, The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa, as well as several other documentaries. The films were produced by VUFKU, the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (Всеукраїнське фото кіноуправління), which had been founded in 1922, but was closed down on orders of Stalin in 1930, its infrastructure becoming part of “Ukrainafilm” the Soviet owned Ukrainian Cinema Industry Trust. Other important directors of this period of Ukrainian national cinema included Petr Chardynin, Vladimir Gardin, Favst Lopatynsky, Marko Tereshchenko, and Ivan Kavaleridze. According to Olena Goncharuk, the director of the Dovzhenko Center, many of the studio’s leading figures were imprisoned or executed (Lopatynsky) as Stalin suppressed the Ukrainian national revival. Kavaleridze and Dovzhenko were censored as Ukrainian nationalists, and Dovzhenko was forced to move to Moscow, basically in exile for the rest of his life. Until the death of Stalin in 1953, only a handful of Ukrainian language features were produced, but a new generation of Ukrainian directors then arose, including Leonid Bykov, Viktor Ivchenko, Yuro Illenko, Mikhail Vartanov (who I hosted at George Eastman Museum in the 1990s), Leonid Osyka, and Mykhailo Ilienko. However, the most famous Ukrainian film before the country regained its independence in 1991 was Sergei Parajanov’s Shadow of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964).

In the 2000s, Ukrainian films have gained increasing international attention, including Firecrosser (2011, Mikhail Ilenko), Such Beautiful People (2013, Dmytro Moyseyev), The Guide (2014, Oles Sanin), Julia Blue (2018, Roxy Toporowych), and the Academy Award-nominated Netflix documentary, Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight For Freedom (2015, Evgeny Afineevsky).

Until the founding of the Dovzhenko Center, Ukrainian film history was housed in Moscow. As Goncharuk noted: “All the films that were shot in Ukraine or with the participation of Ukrainian directors were moved to Russia to the Gosfilmofond archive.” Until the Ukrainian “Maidan Uprising” in 2013-14, removing Putin’s puppet from power, Gosfilmofond and the Dovzhenko were cooperating on the restitution of Ukrainian films to Kyiv, especially the films of Vertov and Kaufmann. However, communication between the organizations then stopped.

**Aleksander Dovzhenko Film Center Exhibition Space**

The war has had a devastating effect on the Dovzhenko Center. While a skeletal staff has been trying to protect the archive and organize film screenings at home and abroad, many of the Center’s curators and archivists have dispersed across Europe among the four million-plus Ukrainians who have been forced from their homes. As Goncharuk notes, a big part of the team, works distantly, including lawyers, the finance department, and researchers. One can only hope that the indiscriminate Russian bombing of civilian targets will spare Ukraine’s film history.

*Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom* (2015, Evgeny Afineevsky)

293: Austria on Hollywood’s Screens

Archival Spaces 293:

Austria Made in Hollywood

Uploaded 15 April 2022

**Fay Wray and Erich von Stroheim in *The Wedding March* (1928, Erich von Stroheim)**

Back in December, I reported on the Academy Film Museum Symposium “Vienna in Hollywood. The Influence and Impact of Austrians on the Hollywood Film Industry 1920s – 2020s.” Now, I have finally caught up with an excellent book that focuses less on Austrians in Hollywood and more on the image of Austria and Austrians in Hollywood cinema: Jacqueline Vansant’s Austria Made in Hollywood (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2019). A professor of German at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Vansant presents close analyses of fourteen out of ca. fifty films with Austrian settings, produced during the classical Hollywood period from the 1920s to the 1960s, noting that Austrian characteristics and stereotypes in these films were filtered through American perceptions and contexts, rather than the historical realities in Austria. And like the checkered history of that country, American views of Austria have vacillated between positive, often nostalgically tinged images as a happy multi-ethnic empire of benevolent rulers and “sweet young things” and negative images, based on its decadent, even promiscuous, anti-democratic legacy.

While images of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, appeared occasionally in American cinema prior to the mid-1920s, Vansant rightly points out that it was the man you love to hate, Erich von Stroheim who most lastingly influenced Hollywood’s Austria. In his two Viennese films, Merry-Go-Round (1923) and The Wedding March (1928), von Stroheim, critiques Austria under Emperor Franz Josef I as a decadent, anti-democratic society with a rigid class structure, while at the same time expressing an intense nostalgia for the pomp and circumstance of Austrian nobility. Unlike most biographers of von Stroheim, who have focused on von Stroheim’s wholly fictional biography as an Imperial military officer when he in fact was born an Austrian Jew and social outsider, Vansant analyses how the director employed contemporary American perceptions of Austria to develop moralistic narratives about the hedonism of the ruling class, thereby drawing parallels to America’s roaring twenties, while also nostalgically fetishizing aristocratic etiquette.

In the following chapter, Vansant looks at four Paramount comedies: Evenings for Sale (1932, Stuart Walker), Champagne Waltz (1937. A. Edward Sutherland), Billy Wilder’s The Emperor Waltz (1948), and Michael Curtiz’s A Breath of Scandal (1960). The first two films were situated in a post-World War I republican Vienna, untouched by economic hardship and political instability. Evenings for Sale features an impoverished but amoral aristocracy looking for financial support from American merry widows on European junkets and comes down on the side of American Puritanism, while Champagne Waltz pits Austria’s high culture (opera) against American low culture (jazz) in its central romance, its robust American male rescuing an old-world female and bringing her to New York. The Wilder and Curtiz films, on the other hand, imply that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was both racist and anti-democratic, in contrast to the down-home simplicity and moral strength of their American heroes.

*The Great Waltz* (1938, Julien Duvivier)

In the wake of the so-called Anschluß which unified Nazi Germany and Austria, several Hollywood films tried to construct metaphorically an Austrian identity – separate from Germany – through music and equestrian sport. In The Great Waltz (1938, Julien Duvivier), Franz Josef and Johann Strauss meet after the 1948 revolution to articulate their love for Austria, while the Franz Schubert bio-pic, New Wine (1941, Reinhold Schünzel), emphasizes the Austrian roots of the composer while drawing parallels between the repressive Austria of the 1820s, and the New Order of 1938. Finally, Florian (1940, Edwin L. Marin) utilizes its story of a royal Lipizzaner horse and its human companions before and after World War I to explain to Americans the plight of Austrian refugees after the Anschluß.

**Erich von Stroheim in *So Ends Our Night* (1941, John Cromwell)**

The demise of Austria in March 1938 was directly visualized in three Hollywood films. While So Ends Our Night (1941, John Cromwell) and They Dare Not Love (1941, James Whale) take diametrically opposed views on Austria’s guilt or innocence in supporting Adolf Hitler, Once Upon a Honeymoon (1943, Leo McCarey) is more ambivalent, even as it cautions Americans about the dangers of Nazism. Based on Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, Flotsam, So Ends Our Night uses newsreel footage to visualize Austrians enthusiastically cheering Adolf Hitler’s entrance into Vienna to tell its story of Jewish refugees harried across the map of Europe as the Nazi war machine marches on. Strangely, They Dare Not Love also utilizes newsreels, indeed takes its cue from The March of Time’s “Nazi Conquest No. 1” to argue bizarrely for Austrian’s victimhood and the restoration of an Austrian monarchy. Finally, Honeymoon has a democratically-minded American journalist trying to woo a naïve American golddigger who is planning to marry an Austrian aristocrat and secret Nazi, just as Americans in general needed to be convinced that German fascism was dangerous.

**Julie Andrews in *The Sound of Music* (1965, Robert Wise)**

The dichotomy between Austria as an innocent victim of the Nazis and an enthusiastic Fascist collaborator also characterized two Hollywood wide-screen extravaganzas of the 1960s: Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music (1965) and Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal (1963). While the popular musical avoided all discussion of politics, except to create a dramatic raison d’etre for the von Trapp family’s Technicolor flight over the Alps, the fictional biography of an American church leader clearly accused Austrian Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of supporting and sympathizing with the Nazis.

Common to Hollywood’s version of post-Imperial Austria, as Vansant notes about The Sound of Music, is that “there is no mention of political dissent, no civil strife, and no Austro-Fascist government.” (p. 124) Like most of Hollywood’s costume films playing on foreign soil, films about Austria often revealed more about America’s collective fantasies than about the German-speaking nation along the Danube.

**Reginald Owen as Emperor Franz Josef I and HelenGilbert in *Florian* (1940, Edwin L. Marin)**

292: Film Erotica

Archival Spaces 292

Film Erotica in Papal Film Archives

Uploaded 1 April 2022

My wife and I have been in Rome for the past ten days. Since this is not our first trip to Rome, we have forgone most of the Roman antiquities sites, and have focused on visiting libraries, archives, and private collections of art, including the Galeria Colonna and Galeria Doria Pamphili, still owned and maintained by two of Rome’s wealthiest and most prestigious families, both of whom have been supplying Popes to the Vatican for the last five hundred years. Unfortunately, many of the city’s most famous libraries, including the Biblioteca Casanatense and the Biblioteca Angelica are closed, possibly due to COVID, but who knows, since both websites say they are open. In both cases, we were told, “Non lo so,” when asked when they will open. However, we were vey lucky to see a virtually unknown rarity in Rome’s landscape, namely the Filmoteca de la Pape, or Papal Film Archives.

Getting into the Filmoteca de la Pape, – not to be confused with the Vatican film Library – was a major undertaking and took weeks of negotiation with the Brussels office of the Federation Internationale des Archivs du Film – before we got to Rome, and finally only a letter from Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles got us into the facility. The reason it is so difficult to see this archive, is because it houses one of the largest collections of film erotica in the world, rivalling even the Kinsey Archives Collections. Its official name is the Filmoteca Erotica de Pape, but for obvious reasons the more neutral term is being used.

The Papal libraries have of course been secretly collecting erotic images and books since the latter stages of the Inquisition, when Francisco Goya was summoned in 1815 for having painted The Naked Maja (1805). At the time, administrators in the offices of Pope Pius VII hoped to eradicate all such visual temptations to the flesh by confiscating or purchasing whatever they could find, destroying much of it, but keeping a percentage as documentation of the devil’s work. When Pope Leo XIII was informed by a papal spy in the offices of the Archbishop of Paris, His Eminence François-Marie-Benjamin Richard de la Vergne, in 1899 that the Lumiere Brothers were distributing pornographic films under the table, along with their more famous La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon and L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, papal authorities sprung into action, founding the Filmoteca de Pape as a compliment to a similar archive of pornographic photographs that had been set up in the 1850s, after profane images of naked male and female bodies began circulating. For a few years, there was a power struggle between the two archives, but eventually the Filmoteca de Pape won its independence.

Wisely, the Papal authorities decided that it would not be politic to have such an archive within the confines of the Vatican itself, so a building was purchased in a back courtyard off the Piazza de Renzi in the Vicolo del Cinque in Trastevere. While official films of the Vatican are housed in the Vatican Film Archives proper, the Filmoteca de Pape collected blue material from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1970s. As a staffer told us, the Archive gave up acquiring new material at the time, because funds had been cut and the amount of pornographic material being produced morphed into an avalanche that could no longer be contained. According to the Filmoteca de Pape’s curator – understandably they wished to remain anonymous – the earliest erotic film in the collection is Fatima’s Coochie-Coochie Dance (1896), an Edison kinetoscope film, which shows a gyrating belly dancer.

The Filmoteca’s earliest French pornographic film is A L’Ecu d’Or ou la bonne auberge / At the Golden Shield or the Good Inn from 1908, which survived in a 9.5 mm copy. Unfortunately, many of the earliest films from the turn of the 20^th century no longer survive, because the Filmoteca for decades did not have climate-controlled vaults, leading to nitrate decomposition, including as paper records indicate, close to 100 films, produced in the brothels of Buenos Aires and exported to Europe to be shown at stag parties, or what the Germans called “Herrenabende.” One Argentine film that has survived is El Satario / The Satyr, which may have been produced as early as 1907.Besides the French, who specialized gay and straight porn, sometimes in the same film, the Austrians and Germans were big producers. Another gem in the collection of the Filmoteca de Pape is Am Abend, a ten minute German film from 1910.

We were hoping to actually see a few examples from their rich collection of silent porn, but unfortunately COVID restrictions did not make it possible. Their new climate-controlled vaults, however, rival any of those in Italy.