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279: L.A. Rebellion 10 Tears On

Archival Spaces 279

L.A. Rebellion Project – 10 Years On

Uploaded 1 October 2021

Tomorrow the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ newly opened Academy Museum begins a seventeen-film series, “Imperfect Journey: Haile Gerima and His Comrades” (2 October – 14 November) which is being presented in conjunction with Gerima becoming the Museum’s first Vantage Award winner. The program will include all of Haile’s films, beginning with Sankofa (1993), films of his comrades Shirikiana Aina, Julie Dash and Ava DuVernay, and his students at Howard University, Malik Sayeed,, Arthur Jaffe, Bradford Young, Raafi Rivero, and Merawi Gerima (Shirikiana and Haile’s son). To see Haile Gerima, the most radical black nationalist of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers so honored by the bastion of a formerly racist institution like the Academy is something probably neither he nor the governors of the Academy would have dreamed of fifty years ago, when Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Jamaa Fanaka, and Billy Woodberry first entered UCLA’s film school.

But after in September-December 2011, UCLA Film & Television Archive organized its massive 58-film retrospective, “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema,” conceptualized by myself in co-curatorship with Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Allyson Nadia Field, and Shannon Kelly, the L.A. Rebellion began entering the mainstream after having with a few exceptions fallen out of film history. That program also included a symposium and was followed by a book publication (2015), a touring program throughout the United States and Europe (2012-15), and the publication of a three DVD teaching set (2015). Furthermore, several programs in 2013 and 2015 presented new restorations, especially of women filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion, including Ijeoma Iloputaife, aka Omah Diegu, Stormé Bright, Jacqueline Frazier, Imelda Sheen, and Alile Sharon Larkin.

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015)

It all began with a very modest idea to participate in the Getty Foundation-funded “Pacific Standard Time” exhibition of post-World War II Art in Los Angeles. I had met Billy Woodberry in 1984 at the Berlin Film Festival and shown his work in Rochester at George Eastman House. The Archive had also preserved a number of Charles Burnett’s films, including Killer of Sheep, which was subsequently named to the National Registry of American Films. When we wrote our first grant application, we thought we would show the work of eight to ten UCLA film students; by the time we were finished, we had identified 50 student filmmakers. Shortly after receiving initial funding, Professor Allyson Nadia Field joined the faculty of UCLA’s School of Film, Theater and Television. Since she wrote her dissertation on African American uplift films of the 1910s, it was only natural that she join the curatorial team. Just as serendipitously, Professor Jacqueline Stewart, at that time a member of the Cinema and African-American Studies faculty at Northwestern, asked me whether she could spend a year at UCLA Film & Television Archive and in the Moving Image Archives Program, learning about film archiving. Jacqueline not only kick-started the whole project as part of her “internship” work for the Archive but became a vital member of the curatorial team.

Filmmakers and presenters at the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema” symposium, on November 12, 2011 at the Archive’s Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood Village, CA. Back: Ben Caldwell, Morgan Woolsey, Daniel Widener, Jan-Christopher Horak, David James, Robert Wheaton, Michael T. Martin, Jamaa Fanaka, Larry Clark. Middle: Chuck Kleinhans, Cauleen Smith, Julie Dash, Samantha Sheppard, Alile Sharon Larkin, Zeinabu irene Davis, Monona Wali, Abdosh Abdulhafiz, Charles Burnett. Front: Ed Guerrero, Jacqueline Stewart, Clyde Taylor, Allyson Nadia Field, Gay Abel-Bey. PHOTO CREDIT: Todd Cheney, UCLA Photography.

In the almost twelve years of my directorship of the Archive, the L.A. Rebellion project in all its phases was one of my proudest achievements, maybe because we were dealing with a living generation of filmmakers, and not just restoring the work of those long dead. Some like Haile and Shirikiana, Billy Woodberry, Jamaa Fanaka, Ben Caldwell, Jacqueline Frazier, and Ijeoma Iloputaife remained friends, although we lost Jamaa in 2012. Some filmmaking careers have since even been reinvigorated: Billy Woodberry has been on a tear, producing a number of award-winning films, including And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead (2015); Julie Dash is slated to direct an Angela Davis bio-pic after completing two shorts and four television episodes (Queen Sugar, 2017); Barbara McCullough competed her long awaits Horace Tapscott: Musical Griot (2017); Zeinabu Irene Davis premiered her documentary, Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema from UCLA (2015); Charles Burnett as directed several shorts and the massive three-hour documentary, After the Lockdown: Black in LA (2021); S. Torriano Berry continues his amazing productivity with a new documentary of African American life in Iowa.

Not only did many of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers travel with the touring program, as they had done in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when their work was being celebrated at a host of European film festivals, if not in Amerika, L.A. Rebellion films continue to be shown in retrospectives in the last five years at New York University, St. Mary’s College, Indiana University Cinema, MUBI, The Smithsonian, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Chicago Film Society, Barcelona, the TCM Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro, Athens (Greece) Avant-Garde Film Festival, The Broad/ Art + Practice, among many other sites. Furthermore, the L.A. Rebellion is now part of the standard film curriculum at many American universities, including courses at the University of Chicago, Williams College, University of California Irvine, San Francisco State University, University of Pittsburgh, and the Baltimore Youth Film Arts.

**Chris Horak and Billy Woodberry at Redcat, 2015**

**Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Barbara McCullough, 2011**

In 2017, Charles Burnett received an Honorary Award from the Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, one of the first indications that the Academy was trying to bring filmmakers of color into the fold. Expanding its membership in 2019 to include many women and persons of color and hiring Jacqueline Stewart as chief artistic and programming officer in 2020 were two further steps. Julie Dash’s Illusions and Daughters of the Dust, as well as Charles Burnett’s To Sleep With Anger and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts are now all on the National Registry. At the moment, filmmaker Khadijah Louis is in pre-production on a film about her grandfather, Jamaa Fanaka, my “friend for Life.”

**Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Julie Dash, Barbara McCullough, C Horak, Allyson Nadia Field, Zeinabu irene Davis, 2011**

278: Restored Paper Prints

Archival Spaces 278
Amazing Tales Online: Library of Congress’s Paper Prints restored
Uploaded 17 September 2021

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival has been hosting screenings and special Zoom webinars, an extension of their in-person “Amazing Tales” program during the festival, where film archivists report on preservation projects. On 29 August, SFSFF hosted two women from the Library of Congress who have been restoring the so-called Paper Print Collection at the Library, Megan Holly and Erin Palombi. Moderated by Archivist Kathy Rose O’Regan, and with a cornucopia of visuals in their PowerPoint, Erin and Holly presented a history of the unique paper prints and their most recent restoration, utilizing the newest digital tools.

**Paper Print of George Méliès in *The Untamable Whiskers* (1904)**

The paper print collection came into being at the end of the 19^th century, due to the U.S. copyright law which made it impossible to register films, since they had just been invented. However, since one could register photographs at the Copyright Office, film producers almost immediately began putting films on paper rolls – either whole films or single images of every scene- in order to protect themselves from piracy, which was a huge problem in the early days of cinema. Indeed as some historians have noted, piracy was the film industry’s business model. The first copyrighted film was Thomas Edison’s Record of a Sneeze [Fred Ott’s Sneeze], copyrighted 7 January 1894. Finally, with the passage by Congress of the Townsend Amendment in 1912, films could be copyrighted, though some producers did continue to send paper prints until 1917. As a result, virtually every American film made between 1894 and 1913 existed in a paper print, although a major gap exists between late 1894 and October 1896, and other prints also disappeared over the years. Nevertheless, given that 75% of American films made during the silent era have disappeared, due to nitrate decomposition, the paper prints constitute an amazing survival rate. Ironically, the paper prints were completely forgotten until 1942, and would have been completely lost, had not two employees at the Library, Howard Walls and Theodore Huff, discovered a dusty room filled with thousands of film rolls.

I first heard this amazing story when I published Gabriel M. Paletz’s seminal piece, “The Paper Print Collection and The Film of Her,” as founding editor in the inaugural issue of AMIA’s The Moving Image (Vol. 1, No. 1, 2001), and, then, followed up with Charles “Bucky” Grimm’s “A Paper Print Pre-History,” in Film History (Vol. 11, No. 2, 1999). I won’t go into the details, because they are now a matter of public record, but will note that Walls and Carl Louis Gregory built an optical printer and began copying the paper prints on 35mm film in the 1940s. Unfortunately, funding was lacking, so the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences eventually got involved and forced out Walls, hiring Kemp Niver who copied the paper prints onto lower quality 16mm film, for which he won a special Academy Award in 1955. The situation is more complicated and worthy of a detective story, including the fact that Niver started out as a bodyguard in – ahem – private law enforcement.

**Paper print and corrected digital copy of *The Fatal Hour* (1908)**

In any case, what film historians saw over the next fifty years from that early period were often dupey 16mm prints from the Niver collection. Now, two L. Jeffrey Selznick School graduates, Meghan Holly and Erin Palombi, have begun digitizing these invaluable documents of film history. In explicating the restoration process, the archivists note that after placing rolls on plastic cores and in acid-free archival boxes, they prepare the rolls for scanning, by removing all extraneous objects, dirt, then repairing tears, using heat-set tissue, which is a long-fibered repair tissue that activates between 176°F and 194°F. The tissue is coated on one side with an acrylic adhesive, allowing the tissue to be attached to the non-emulsion side of the paper, allowing the rolls to be automatically advanced through the scanner.

**Frame enlargement from *The Ingrate* (1908)**

The films are then scanned with a Stokes scanner – especially built by Stokes Imaging, Inc. – at the Library in 2K, creating 16 bit TIFF files. The archivists noted that they had experimented with 4K, but that at that resolution, the image picked up all the imperfections on the surface of the paper, making images less legible. I have noticed a similar phenomenon when silent films are scanned at 4K, revealing the previously invisible wood grain on the sets. In any case, after scanning, digital image stabilization, clean-up, and contrast tools are utilized to produce high-quality images that almost approximate the original films, as exemplified by The Fatal Hour (1908) and The Ingrate (1908), two early D.W. Griffith Biograph films previewed. As is proper in today’s restoration technology all interventions and actions are documented for every print.

The new results are remarkable and certainly belie the “fractured flickers” reputation of such early material. Unfortunately, while many paper prints are now available for viewing online, many were restored in the late 1990s with a previous generation of digital tools that did not include image stabilization. Hopefully, these Spanish-American War actualities will be rescanned in the kind of quality Holly and Palombi demonstrated with their new restoration efforts.

277: Bonn Silent Film Festival

Archival Spaces 277

Bonn Silent Film Festival: Panel Discussion

Uploaded 3 September 2021

Between August 12 and August 22, 2021, the 37th International Silent Film Festival – Internationalen Stummfilmtage – Bonner Sommerkino – was held in Bonn, Germany, co-organized by the Förderverein Filmkultur Bonn e.V. The live version of the Festival has taken place for decades in an open-air cinema at the University of Bonn, and this year – given the ongoing COVID pandemic – required not only the usual accreditation but also social distancing and a vaccination pass. However, the restored and digitized films were also available online for forty-eight hours after the screening, allowing people like me to actually view the program. Programmed by newly appointed Artistic Directors Eva Hielscher and Oliver Hanley, the films were invariably accompanied by live music by internationally known musicians, including Elisabeth-Jane Baldry, Günter Buchwald, Stephen Horne, Richard Siedhoff, Daniel Stetich, Sabine Zimmer, and Sabrina Zimmermann.

Even though I have seen literally hundreds and hundreds of silent films over my forty-five-year career as a film historian and archivist, I had actually only seen a couple of the films shown in Bonn this year. Some of the highlights for me were the following:

*Girl in Tails* (Foto: Svenska Filminstitutet/SF Studios)

Flickan i Frack/Girl in Tails (1926), a Swedish film, directed by Karin Swenström, was a revelation. Swenström was a well-known actress in Sweden who directed half a dozen films in the 1920s, which are completely unknown abroad. Here she plays a supporting role as the wealthy éminence grise in a very conservative, small town in Sweden, where the local school and church are the center of all life. That stifling atmosphere is familiar to us from Ingmar Bergman or the 2005 Oscar Foreign Film nominee, As It Is in Heaven (2005, Kay Pollak), but this film has a strong feminist aspect: A very smart young woman wears tails to the graduation ball because her father refuses to buy her a gown, even as he pays for tails for her brother. She is interested in a local classmate/nobleman, who she tutored to graduation, and moves in with his family when she breaks with her father after being ostracized by the town. The young nobleman’s chalet is populated by a group of five highly accomplished professional women, whose relationship to him and each other is unclear, but their mannish demeanor, cafe klatsches, and cigar smoking could be mistaken for a lesbian commune.

*Zuflucht* with Francis Lederer, Henny Porten

Another discovery for me was Zuflucht/Refuge (1928), starring Francis Lederer and Henny Porten and directed by Carl Froelich. Lederer portrays an upper-middle-class, German ex-soldier who returns to Germany destitute, after fighting as a Communist revolutionary in Russia and is afraid to go home to his mother because his brother had ridiculed him for his political beliefs. He meets and falls in love with Porten’s proletarian vegetable market woman, but their happiness is short-lived because he has apparently contracted tuberculosis. While the film is clearly a melodrama a la Henny, it also visually reproduces the working classes of late 1920s Berlin in an almost neo-realist manner, similar to Joe May’s Asphalt (1928) or Piel Jützi’s Mother Krausen’s Trip to Heaven (1929). The scenes in a Wedding tenement, when the mother’s limo pulls up and is surrounded by hoards of dirty-faced children is remarkable.

*Seine gelehrte Frau* (1919) with Esther Carena

I was also bowled over by Seine gelehrte Frau/His Learned Wife (1919), starring Esther Carena and directed by Eugen Illés, i.e. Illés Jenő, as he was known in Hungary. Also called Women Who Shouldn’t Get Married, this is a feminist film about a highly successful woman obstetrician, Dr. Ada Haller, who neglects her husband, he a wealthy factory owner, leading him somewhat reluctantly to have an affair. When his mistress becomes pregnant, the doctor must deliver the baby but is unable to save the mother. Realizing her own culpability in her husband’s philandering, she takes the child as her own, leading to a reconciliation with her husband. Esther Carena was a well-known and popular film diva from 1915-1919 who remains underexposed in film history because so few of her films survive, and because the pre-Caligari period has been neglected. Indeed, this recently and beautifully restored title from the Federal German Archives is not even listed in any of the German filmographies and it is unclear how many of her more than 25 pre-1920 films survive.

On Sunday 8-22, the Festival hosted a Zoom panel discussion with a host of film programmers and archivists to discuss “finding an audience for (silent) film heritage today.” Among the participants were the Hielscher and Hanley, Thomas Christensen (Danish Film Archive), Elif Rongen-Kaynakci ((Eye Institute, Amsterdam), Janneka van Dalen (Austrian Filmmuseum), Matjey Strnad (Czech Film Archive), Ellen Harrington (Deutsches Filminstitut, Frankfurt), Rob Byrne (San Francisco Silent Film Festival) with Grazia Ingravalle (Brunel University, London) moderating. There was general agreement that even though audiences are often gray-haired, younger audiences, are enthusiastic, especially in Eastern Europe.

It was also agreed that special events, in particular those featuring live musical accompaniment, were successful in winning over new audiences, but that the musicians had to be chosen carefully and had to be professional. Programmers also had to be convinced of the quality of the films they show, in order not to waste time or turn off the audience due to flawed films. While some felt that films with racial or gender stereotypes should be avoided, others noted that discussions about such stereotypes have been productive and desirable for audiences. Finally, it was noted that online platforms for silent films, both temporary for festivals or permanent archival sites, have vastly increased audience numbers and won them over for silent films.

Certainly, this blogger has been grateful for the online programs of Bonn and Pordenone.

*With a Motocycle Above the Couds* (1929) **Oesterreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna**

276: Cuban Star Xonia Benguria

Archival Spaces 276

Remembering Cuban Film Star Xonia Benguría

Uploaded 20 August 2021

In October 2017, UCLA Film & Television Archive screened a new 35mm restored print of Casta de Roble (1954) in the massive retrospective, Recuerdos de un cine en español: Classic Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930-1960. Its star, Xonia Benguría, died in Astoria, N.Y. on 31 July 2021 after sixty years in exile. Earlier, in July 2016, Luciano Castillo, Director of the Cinemateca de Cuba, had hand-carried a dupe negative of the film, along with several other pre-revolutionary Cuban films to Los Angeles from Havana for preservation. In Casta de Roble, a young peasant girl, played by Xonia Benguría, who also wrote the script, has a baby by the master of the plantation, which is taken away from her. She marries and has another son, but the loss of the child has scarred her for life. Shot mostly on location in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, the film visualizes the harsh life of peasants and workers in a sugar economy, where only a privileged few at the top benefit, while the workers are enslaved as tenant farmers. Directed by Xonia’s then-husband, Manolo Alonso, the film had a keen sense of style, its social realist narrative enlivened by many compositions quoting Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovchenko. Given that for five decades the Communist government suppressed the knowledge of any filmmaking activity in Cuba before 1959, the film was a revelation.

**Chris Horak and Luciano Castillo at LAX with Cuban films**

Born in Cuba on 4 October 1924, Xonia Benguría grew up in privilege. Her family’s extensive sugar plantations allowed her father to become a well-respected calligrapher, her mother a dedicated housewife who encouraged the artistic ambitions of her three children; Carmina, an older sister, became internationally known for reciting poetry. At twelve, young Xonia was sent to Averett College’s prep school in Danville, Virginia, to learn English. Returning to Cuba a year later, she had ambitions to act and sing and made her debut in May 1944, singing her own songs at Havana’s Teatro Auditorium. She followed that up by acting in the play “Petit Farándula” at the Teatro America, and a radio play, “Rendezvous at Five.” Shortly after the end of World War II, Benguría went to New York to study with Frances Robinson Duff, the “foremost dramatic coach” in America who had trained the likes of Helen Hayes, Katherine Hepburn, and Miriam Hopkins.

**Chicharito (Alberto Garrido) and Sopeira (Federico Piñero)**

Returning to Cuba in the late 1940s, she married the actor Alberto Garrido from the Afro-Cuban comedy team of Chicharito (Garrido) and Sopeira (Federico Piñero), and gave birth to a son. She co-starred with the duo in two Cuban musical comedies: Escuela de modelos/School for Models (1949) and Cuando las mujeres Mandan/When Women Rule (1951), both directed by José Fernández. In the first film, she played a scantily clad nightclub dancer-singer. The latter featured the comic duo as Cuban nationals who desert from the Korean War and land in a country run by Amazonian women. Treated as sex toys by their two female captors (Benguría & Olga Uz), they lead a successful revolt for machismo. The films seem typical for Cuban film productions of the period.

After Xonia divorced Garrido, she married Manolo Alonso with whom she had a daughter. A prominent film director and close confidant of Cuban President, Ramón Grau San Martin, Alonso was born in Havana in 1912. In 1938, he started the 1^st Cuban newsreel, Noticiero Nacional, and was involved in founding Cuban television in 1950. Alonso directed his first feature, I am Hitler (1944), a series of satirical sketches, and, Siete muertes a plazo fijo/Seven Timely Deaths, a thriller-comedy in 1950. Alonso probably met Benguría while he directed Garrido and Piñero short films, and hoped to star her in Leonela, which remained unproduced; based on the 1893 novel by Nicolás Heredia about the colonial sugar industry on the verge of bankruptcy, exploited by ruthless big-city merchants. But nothing in the couple’s biography could predict the ideological turn away from Hollywood-style comedy to Casta de Roble, which in exploring the plight of the poor in a rural society followed the lead of Emilio “El Indio” Fernandez’s Mexican films, like Río Escondido (1948).

The project came to fruition when Xonia showed her script for Casta de Roble to David Silva, a well-known Mexican actor who agreed to star. Alonso hoped to hire Gabriel Figueroa as cameraman, who was unavailable but managed to secure the Spanish cinematographer, Alfredo Fraile, who would shoot J. A. Bardem’s The Death of a Cyclist (1955). Hailed as a new beginning in Cuban cinema, Casta de Roble (1954) met with unanimous praise in Cuba and abroad, where Columbia picked up distribution.

Unfortunately, it was the last Cuban film for the couple, who would divorce, remarry, and divorce, again in exile. After the revolution in 1959, Castro asked Alonso to build up the Cuban film industry, but he declined for ideological reasons. After the intervention of the Japanese Ambassador, Jotaro Koda, the family was allowed to leave Cuba, arriving in Miami in December 1960.

Benguría and Alonso at New York premiere of Mike Todd’s *Around the World in 80 Days*

In exile, Manolo Alonso directed La Cuba de ayer (1960s), a compilation of pre-revolution newsreels. Meanwhile, Xonia Benguría worked in New York Latinx theatres, including the Teatro LATEA, IATI Theater, Nuestro Teatro, and INTAR Theatre. In 1989, she starred in the premiere of Luis Santiero’s “Lady From Havana,” and received raves from the Miami New Times: “Creating very different characters in the course of one evening, and giving both roles depth and honesty, is an acting challenge, but these women make it look easy. Xonia Benguria commands center stage as the Queen Mama Beba, and portrays Gloria in Act Two with a fragile dignity.” Xonia had hoped to come to L.A. for the premiere of Casta de Roble’s restored print, but age and illness prevented it.

For more information on Manolo Alonso, see Alejandra Espasande Bouza’s excellent article, “Manolo Alonso: A Cuban cinematic pioneer, http://alejandra-espasande-bouza.blogspot.com/2008/10/manolo-alonso-cuban-cinematic-pioneer.html. Many thanks also to Fabricio Espasande Bouza, who pulled together a ton of information on Benguría and translated it for me. See also Hollywood Goes Latin. Spanish-Language Filmmaking in Los Angeles, ed. by María Elena de las Carreras and J.C. Horak (Brussels: FIAF, 2019).