Archival Spaces

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).

**Marta Velasco**, **Xonia Benguria, Alina Troyano** **in “The Lady From Havana”**

275: Marriage in the Shadows (1947)

Archival Spaces 275

Marriage in the Shadows (1947, Kurt Maetzig)

Uploaded 6 August 2021

At the Nazi Mixed Marriage Office *in Ehe im Schatten* **(1947, Kurt Maetzig)**

Although I have been studying German cinema for decades, I’m less familiar with films from the German Democratic Republic, simply because for a long time, it was just harder to see those films. The DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft) was formed in 1946 and as an arm of the communist Socialist United Party (SED) maintained a monopoly until the demise of the GDR in 1990. Now Kanopy has made a very large selection of films from the DEFA collection at the University of Massachusetts- Amherst available, and I have been watching regularly. Recently, I caught up with an early so-called “rubble film” classic, Ehe im Schatten / Marriage in the Shadows (1947), directed by Kurt Maetzig. Starring Paul Klinger, it was the film debut of Ilse Steppat, who would later marry Max Nosseck, a German-Jewish director returning from Hollywood. In retrospect, I’m, surprised I never saw the film, given Ehe deals with the expulsion of German Jews from theater and film after 1933, a topic of my dissertation. While the black and white film is very much a melodrama in the Ufa style before and during the Third Reich, – Bertolt Brecht called the film kitsch – Marriage in the Shadows clearly states that anti-Semitism was rampant in the German population and not just imposed from above by the Nazis.

The film opens in early 1933 with a theater performance of Friedrich Schiller’s “Intrigue and Love” (Kable und Liebe, 1784), staring Elisabeth Maurer and Hans Wieland. The Jewish actress is blacklisted shortly thereafter, and inexplicably, the “Aryan” Wieland marries her in the belief that he can protect her. Hans, initially the second fiddle to her star, continues his upwardly mobile career in Nazi Germany, even though a Jewish colleague strongly suggests the couple emigrate. Flash forward to the days before the November 1938 pogroms: His career is going gang-busters, while Elisabeth is suffering from intense isolation; unable to appear in public, she expresses doubts about their marriage, but he again dissuades her from emigrating. Like her Jewish former costume assistant, she spends days at the Nazi Mixed Marriages Bureau, applying for ration cards. The film’s last third takes place in 1943 when Elisabeth is ordered to hard labor, and Jews are being deported “to the East.” Hans talks her into attending the premiere of his newest film, ostensibly to cheer her up, where she charms a high-ranking Nazi, who is unaware of her status. When he finds out, he orders her deportation, and the couple commit double suicide.

Marriage in the Shadows is dedicated to the German film star Joachim Gottschalk, who committed suicide with his Jewish wife and 9-year-old son in November 1941. Meta Wolf had been a successful young actress when the couple married in 1930. Somehow, they avoided attention after the passing of the Nuremberg Race Laws, because Gottschalk was only acting on local stages. However, in 1937 Gottschalk scored a huge film hit with You and I, so-starring Brigitte Horney, becoming with her the Ufa’s dream couple, idolized by millions of German women. Despite pressure from Ufa executives, Gottschalk refused to divorce his wife. However, when in April 1941 Gottschalk took Meta to the premiere of The Swedish Nightingale, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels banned him from film work unless he divorce. Gottschalk refused, further infuriating Goebbels who ordered Gottschalk drafted and his family sent to Theresienstadt. Goebbels forbid anyone from attending the funeral, although Horney and a few brave colleagues did go, while the German public only learned of Gottschalk’s fate after World War II, although there were many rumors.

**Looting Jewish shops** in *Ehe im Schatten*

Hans imagines his wife on a train to Auschwitz in *Ehe imn Schatten*

In adapting the Gottschalk story to film, Kurt Maetzig probably intuitively understood that only a melodramatic treatment about a tragic film star could reach a primarily female audience hardened by twelve years of anti-Semitic propaganda. Interestingly, Maetzig who was himself blacklisted by the Nazis in 1935, and whose Jewish mother committed suicide in 1944, moved the fictional couple’s suicide to 1943, probably so he could portray the effects of the Allied bombing of Berlin (blamed on the German Fascists) and the deportations of Berlin’s Jews, which only began days before the Gottschalks killed themselves. Simultaneously, Maetzig limits his visualization of Nazism to a few brief shots: the Brownshirts marching in 1933, a single S.A. man ordering civilians to loot Jewish shops on 9 November 1938, while several SS types appear during the final premiere; furthermore, Hans imagines Elisabeth’s deportation and incarceration in a camp by the SS, but in contrast to the reality of the 3rd Reich, there are no Swastikas visible, and only two tiny Nazi Party pins. Two years after the end of German fascism, such symbols may have been too potent, possibly calling forth positive rather than negative reactions. Ironically, this dearth of Nazi symbols reinforces the film’s thesis that the German middle class, especially artists, were collectively guilty of turning a blind eye to Jewish suffering and opportunistically refusing to resist fascism.

Ilse Steppat and Paul Klinger in *Ehe im Schatten*

But, according to film scholar Bernhard Groß (Die Filme sind unter uns), Hans and Elisabeth are also responsible for their own fate. Like the protagonists in Schiller’s bourgeois tragedy that opens the film, they suffer from hubris, rubbing her Jewishness in the face of the Nazi bureaucrats, and by refusing to emigrate, despite numerous opportunities. Their tragedy is that like many German intellectuals, they keep telling themselves things will not be so bad under Fascism, that they can mitigate the worst Nazi excesses, that they can protect themselves. Indeed, the film is based on a post-war novella by Hans Schweikert, It Won’t Be so Bad, who, by the way, was one of those opportunists who profited greatly from the film industry, though not an overt Nazi.

When Marriage in the Shadows opened in Hamburg in April 1948, Veit Harlan and his wife, Kristina Söderbaum, the notorious director and star of Jew Süß (1940), attempted to attend the local premiere but were rebuffed. Like far too many Germans, they yearned to continue their lives without repercussions for their passive and active crimes. Thanks to American Military Occupation policy, which favored anti-Communism over de-Nazification, all but the worst German mass murders were allowed to continue their middle-class lives and careers without consequences. Meanwhile, Marriage in the Shadows became a huge hit, bringing in over 10 million viewers in all four zones of occupation. Gottschalk’s female fans, millions of them war widows who had lost husbands and sons, made it so.