Archival Spaces

261: My Fifty Years in Film Studies

Archival Spaces 261

My 50 Years in Film Studies

Uploaded 22 January 2021

After my freshman year at Ohio University, which ended prematurely with the Ohio National Guard occupying campus in the wake of the Kent State killings, I transferred to the University of Delaware, because my parents had moved there from Germany and I was able to attend as an in-state student. I still wasn’t sure whether I would declare English or History my major, but I did have to find off-campus housing, due to lack of dormitory space. One of my three flatmates at the Colonial Gardens Apartments was Joe Johnston, who had ambitions to become a filmmaker, so the apartment began filling up with film books, which I started to peruse. Do you mean one can actually study this stuff? I was intrigued by the mixed media – images and texts – of most film books at that time, but sensed only much later that this was in fact a new field, not overcrowded with dozens of dissertations on Shakespeare or the Franco-Prussian War.

*Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1943, Sergei Eisenstein)*

I was not a film buff but a reader, although I had started going to Ohio U’s excellent campus film programs the year before, seeing a number of Ingmar Bergman films, which perplexed me, as well as Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil (1968), which infuriated me. And I did have an early epiphany about film’s power when I saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. A Space Odyssey (1968) in high school, which baffled and impressed me. In any case, in January 1971, the middle of my sophomore year, the University of Delaware instituted a new experimental “Winterim” program which allowed students to take a 1-3 credit, pass/no record course on a topic of interest, outside of the usual academic requirements. Joe and I discussed signing up for a lecture/film series dedicated to Sergei M. Eisenstein, then he disappeared to New York. I, of course, had no idea what I was getting myself into or that film study would morph into a fifty-year professional career.

The Eisenstein course consisted of afternoon sessions, where Gerald R. Barrett lectured and discussed the assigned readings, followed by evening lectures and screenings open to the public. We met for the first time on January 6, 1971, with a screening of Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944), accompanied by UD Professor Stephen Lukashevich’s lecture on Eisenstein’s use of Russian History, and ended with a screening of Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) and a lecture by Professor Barrett, summarizing the two week course. Barrett, who was teaching in the English Department as an ABD, had organized the course and was particularly interested in film studies, later becoming my first mentor.

Jerry Barrett, George Stewart, top left, ca. 1974

There followed in quick succession, Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1946), Strike (1925), Potemkin (1925), Ten Days That Shook the World (1928), Pudovkin’s Mother (1926), The General Line (19239), ¡Que Viva Mexico! (1932) and Alexander Nevsky (1938). While most of the lectures were given by UD professors from the departments of history, art history, and music, Martin A. Gardner, a New York film critic, and John B. Kuiper, Head of the Motion Picture Division of the Library of Congress, presented talks on Russian drama and The General Line, respectively. John had written his dissertation on Eisenstein at the University of Iowa in 1960. Ironically, I had no memory of him when we met four years later at LOC, while I was visiting as a George Eastman Museum intern; nor could I have anticipated that he would become my boss at GEM thirteen years later.

That lack of memory was probably connected to the fact that I was indeed totally over my head. Not only were all the prints dupey 16mm copies, probably rented from Audio-Brandon, but the silents were also shown without musical accompaniment, as was the practice at the time; no restorations with full orchestral scores. Hardly a great introduction for someone who had never seen a full-length silent film. That Eisenstein’s films are intellectually challenging, goes without saying, even if you possess the critical vocabulary, which I certainly didn’t. But I was fascinated, especially Potemkin, and Mother, the latter possibly because it more closely conformed to my underdeveloped viewing experience.

The assigned readings included excerpts from Arthur Knight’s The Liveliest Art, Ivor Montague’s Film World, Dwight MacDonald’s essay on Eisenstein and Pudovkin, as well as selections from Eisenstein’s Film Form, Film Sense, and Film Essays. The readings were also difficult for a beginner, especially the Eisenstein texts. I read, but it would take several years of rereading and reviewing before I actually understood.

Another student in the Eisenstein course, George Stewart, became a life-long friend, and we both followed up by taking Jerry Barrett’s “Intro to the Art of Cinema” course in the Spring semester of that year. For that course, I wrote a final research paper on the Czech New Wave, which had been getting a lot of press in America at that time. I had been in Prague until five days before the 21 August invasion in 1968. When I went to pick up my paper at the end of the semester – a habit students no longer engage in – Barrett ask me, whether he could publish it in a book he was writing on teaching film studies. The book never appeared, but now I was hooked, deciding to make film my career. I subsequently took a number of other film courses with Barrett and started writing film reviews for the UD student paper, The Review. I admit, I liked to see my name in print and loved watching movies. I was just waiting for Jay Cocks to move on at Time, so I could take his place.

*Winter 1971, behind the Colonial Gardens, Newark, DE. Photo by Joe Johnston*

260: Paul Leni’s Waxworks

Archival Spaces 260

Restoration of Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924)

Uploaded 8 January 2021

A courageous little distributor of classic and silent films, Flicker Alley has just released a blu-ray-DVD dual-format edition of Paul Leni’s canonical Das Wachsfigurenkabinett / Waxworks (1924), directed by Paul Leni. This new digital restoration, carried out by the Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin and the Cineteca di Bologna, offers a completely new visual experience. I had previously seen a number of different 35mm prints while researching the German-Jewish photographer/cameraman, Helmar Lerski, but all of them originating from the nitrate master positive at the British Film Institute. Seeing Waxworks in this new digital version revealed many visual details previously hidden in the patina of the emulsion, but digitality has its own pitfalls.

Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss in Waxworks (1924, Paul Leni)

Waxworks is considered by film historians to be a “pure” Expressionist film, like The Cabinet of Caligari and Genuine (1920), all films defined by their expressionist décor, visual design, and acting style, in contradistinction to more realistic Weimar era films, like The Last Laugh (1925) and Metropolis (1927), which have been said to display expressionist lighting and camera angles. Interestingly, Waxworks, as the last pure expressionist film, is also the first to highlight expressionist lighting, as it would be inherited by American film noir, thanks in no small part to Jewish émigrés from Berlin. Not surprisingly, Waxworks opens, like Caligari, on a fairground, a place of wonder in German cinema, as well as the first home of cinema.

Waxworks relates the stories of three historical figures, depicted in a fairground wax museum, Haroun al Rashied, the Caliph of Bagdad, Ivan the Terrible, and Jack the Ripper. In the film’s frame story the attraction’s owner hires a young journalist to create stories for his wax figures, which in their cinematic incarnation are played by Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, and Werner Krauss, respectively, the three most famous actors of the era, while a young William Dieterle impersonates the writer. Interestingly, the three stories are not weighted evenly in terms of length – indeed a fourth episode, Rinaldo Rinaldini was never shot, due to budget issues, although the figure is clearly visible in the attraction’s line-up – nor are the episodes stylistically similar beyond some expressionist features.

The 1001 Nights sequence is relatively evenly lighted (except later night scenes), in order to highlight the outrageous set design, a riot of intestinal passageways, rotund architecture, oversized balloon-like headdresses, and obese bodies. The shorter Ivan the Terrible story intensifies the gaze on elongated, tortured bodies, their agony inscribed on faces in high-key lighting. The final Jack-the-Ripper sequence turns the journalist narrator into a subject, as he dreams, the serial killer is stalking his sweetheart, the proprietor’s daughter. Only roughly five minutes in length, the sequence is a densely constructed series of superimpositions, in which the hero and heroine are haunted by the phantom image of Jack, the Ripper. Not only are the episodes shorter, but their central characters are progressively less developed with Werner Krauss literally a ghost without a solid body.

According to Jürgen Kasten’s Der expressionistische Film (1990), the Berlin premiere version of 12 November 1924, began with the Ivan episode, then Jack, then Haroun al Rashied, but was changed shortly after. Budget issues and a lawsuit by the screenwriter Henrik Galeen delayed the production which probably began in Summer 1922, and caused the elimination of Rinaldini, with shooting completed in November 1923.

William Dieterle, Olga Belaja in *Waxworks*

It has long been my contention that Helmar Lerski, the film’s cinematographer has been unjustifiably ignored in favor of Paul Leni’s highly stylized and abstracted sets. While comedy and playful set design dominates the first story, the Ivan and Jack episodes, in particular, allow Lerksi to create filmic space solely with light, through high key close-ups and intensely lighted figures within a black frame. This manipulation of cinematic space through light matched Lerski’s practice of making close-up photographic portraits, for which he often used black velvet, wide-angle lenses, and a battery of Jupiter lamps and mirrors, to eliminate all superfluous visual information, and thus better explore the landscape of the face. The Jack the Ripper sequence’s almost cubist visual design, layering superimposition over superimposition, would not have been possible without Lerski’s framing of bodies against black backdrops.

The new restoration’s carnivalesque tinting and toning seem to emphasize the intense pools of light that structure the images (excepting the Haroun al Rashied episode), but digitality also flattens out space, thus intensifying the effects of Paul Leni’s abstract stage and costume design. Indeed, the tinting turns even scenes with movement from background to foreground into two-dimensional spaces, given the saturation of the tints. The digital image flattens space, obliterating any sense of fore and background, because scanners remove grain and sharpen all data, eliminating depth cues based on focus. But viewing habits are changing, so many may prefer such images.

Apart from the two discs (DVD & Blu-ray), the set includes a handsome booklet, an audio commentary by Adrian Martin, an interview with Julia Wallmüller from the Deutsche Kinemathek about the restoration, a conversation with Kim Newman, as well as a bonus of Paul Leni’s short crossword puzzle films, Rebus-Films Nr. 1 (1926).

259: Dutch Films in the 1930s

Archival Spaces 259

Cinefest: 33rd Film Historical Congress

Uploaded 30 December 2020

The 17^th International Festival of German Film Patrimony, sponsored by the Hamburg Cinegraph, was accompanied by a film historical conference from 20 – 22 November under the heading, “Cinema, War and Tulips. German-Dutch Film Relations.” As in the case of the film festival (see Archival Spaces 257), the Congress took place online, but during regular business hours in Hamburg (9:30 AM GMT), which meant this reviewer in California pulled three all-nighters, something I haven’t done since college.

The keynote, titled “Panorama, Academy and Archive, German-Dutch Film Relations,” was given by Ivo Blom, a professor in Amsterdam and former curator at the Eye Institute. Blom noted that Dutch images of Germany and German images of the Netherlands have always been based on stereotypes, even if many Dutch people worked in Germany over the years (Truus van Alten, Ernst Winar, Jaap Speyer), while many German-Jewish refugees fled to Amsterdam in the 1930s. However, the rich history of German-Dutch production, distribution and exhibition, has yet to be written, e.g. by analyzing the Eye’s pre-WWI Jean Desmet Collection or the Filmliga Collection of avant-garde film.

Independent scholar Thomas Tode followed up with a discussion specifically of the Dutch and German film avant-garde, beginning with the thesis that the Dutch masters (Rembrandt) in art were fascinated by light, an obsession shared with filmmakers, like Joris Ivens, who has started his career studying optics and working on the design of the Kinamo, a lightweight 35mm camera that became the workhorse of avant-garde filmmakers, like Ivens, Moholy-Nagy, Luis Trenker, Hans Richter, and Alexander Hackenschmied. Next, Rommy Albers, Head of the Dutch Film Collection at EYE, discussed the career of Haro von Peski, a little known film director and producer, who after directing two films in Holland, set up a production company in Berlin in 1931, Majestic-Film, which produced 13 films under van Peski (the company continued to produce films until 1939). Peski returned to Amsterdam in 1935 but was not able to produce any more films under the Majestic label.

The afternoon sessions began with EYE researcher Annette Schulz’s talk on Rudi Meyer, the German Jewish film producer who was responsible for numerous exile films in the 1930s and became a prominent film distributor in the Netherlands after surviving Auschwitz, also producing films in the 1950s by Gerard Rutten and Bert Haanstra. André Van Der Velden, a professor at the University of Utrecht, discussed the rivalry between the Dutch Tuschinski owned cinemas in Rotterdam and Amsterdam and the German UFA-owned Rembrandt (Amsterdam), Luxor (Rotterdam) and Asta (Den Haag) cinemas.

Saturday morning began with Bundesarchiv archivist Evelyn Hampicke discussing the ambiguous career of Fritz van Dongen, the Dutch actor who was featured in at least two Nazi propaganda films, which communicated racist ideology, before emigrating to Hollywood, where he changed his name to Philip Dorn and became an upstanding anti-Fascist in numerous anti-Nazi films. After the break, Timur Sijaric, a doctoral candidate in music at the University of Vienna, lectured on the film music of Alois Melichar for the Hans Steinhoff Nazi bio-pic, Rembrandt (1942), which was wholly shot in the occupied Netherlands. Interestingly, Sijaric notes that the composer utilized verboten 12-Tone techniques in his composition for Rembrandt, but Goebbels hated the film anyway, and it failed with audiences, despite being one of the most expensive German films of the war years.

Next, Kathinka Dittrich van Wehring, who received this year’s Reinhold Schünzel Prize, spoke about her efforts to research German refugee filmmakers in Holland, when she directed the Goethe Institute Amsterdam in the 1980s, and in her 1987 dissertation. Van Wehring noted that the home office of the Dutch government banned any anti-fascist topics in films, so the features made by German émigrés were apolitical and mostly harmless entertainment. In the afternoon session, Tobias Temming spoke about the image of Germans in post-1945 Dutch feature films, while Katja S. Baumgärtner, a doctoral candidate at the Berlin Humbolt University, discussed an East German documentary, Women in Ravensbrück (1958), co-directed by the Dutch-German team of Joop Huisken and Renate Drescher.

Sunday morning began with Anke Steinborn, an academic at the Viadrina University of Frankfurt/Oder, discussing Bert Haanstra’s use of Rembrandt lighting. Next, Karl Griep, former director of the Bundesarchiv’s film department, presented a classic content analysis of the image of Holland and the Dutch in German post-war newsreels, noting that stories about sports far outstripped any other topic. Finally, Anna Schober de Graaf discussed the use of identification figures (taxi drivers, pedestrians) in Dutch post-war documentaries to create empathy, while independent researcher Michael Töteberg reviewed the film careers of two Dutch producers who helped jumpstart New German Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, namely Rob Houwer and Laurens Straub.

*Michael Kohlhaas* (1969, Volker Schloendorf, produced by Rob Houwer)

Despite a few very minor technical glitches, Hamburg’s Cinegraph, the Eye Institute, and the Bundesarchiv should be congratulated on this conference on German-Dutch film relations, which despite a degree of heterogeneity certainly pointed the way towards further research in this under-exposed area of film history. A publication in German is forthcoming.

258: Edward Stratmann (1953-2020)

Archival Spaces 258

Edward Stratmann (1953-2020)

Uploaded 17 December 20

Edward Stratmann, my colleague and friend, has died. His distinguished career in film archiving began almost at the same moment in the same place as mine, making us life-long fellow travelers on a remarkable professional journey into what was then still a field in its toddler stage. Even though we were never close friends in the 45 years I knew Ed, we had a relationship of mutual respect while he worked for me that turned into a deep sense of caring and warmth, once I left Rochester. Edward was one of the most down-to-earth people I ever met, absolutely honest, loyal, discreet, and extremely good-natured. In the rarified academic atmosphere of the museum, Ed was a nuts-and-bolts practitioner, who learned film preservation from the bottom up.

Born November 29, 1953 in Biloxi, MS at Kessler Air Force Base, he moved to Rochester with his large family, where he graduated from high school and attended Monroe Community College and Rochester Institute of Technology. In 1975, he started working for Seymour Nussbaum, the facilities manager at George Eastman House, then transitioned to the film department. It was in September 1975 that I came to Rochester on a National Endowment for the Arts post-graduate internship in the film department, where I spent a year working for the legendary James Card. Ed was already reporting to Assistant Allan Bobey, so he would often hang out with us film dept. grunts, including projectionist Bob Ogie, while Card was often absent.

When I returned to Eastman Museum in 1984, Ed was handling vault management and shipping, as well as sometimes projecting films when no one else was available. I almost immediately took over programming the Dryden Theatre from Kay Mcrae, Director John Kiuper’s secretary, so I had to work closely with Ed to traffic prints. At that time, as later after I had become head of the department, I spent a lot of time hanging out in Eddie’s Dryden Theatre office, usually to have a cigarette break (still smoked back then), since I could always rely on him having a smoke.

In 1987, I asked Edward to become our preservation officer with the title of Assistant Curator. Although he had no professional training, I knew he was a quick learner and I was confident we would learn together. One of our first projects was Maurice Tourneur’s The Blue Bird (1919), a beautifully tinted nitrate print from the Cinémathèque Française. Ed also started accompanying me to the Association of Moving Image Archivists conferences, where he happily mingled with other film preservation technicians, soaking up their expertise. In 1998, I had the privilege of successfully nominating Eddie for AMIA’s Dan + Kathy Leab Award, given to film archivists for their contributions to the field of film preservation.

But the project Ed was really passionate about was the reconstruction of The Lost World (1925) with stop-motion animation by Willis Obrien. We had a very good tinted 16mm print, which had been cut down for its Kodascope release, which we blew it up to 35mm, producing the most complete negative available, though still only 40% of its original length. Then in 1992, we discovered a 35mm nitrate material in Czechoslovakia, probably struck from the original foreign negative. I left Eastman before the lost material arrived, but Ed followed through, working with Paolo Cherchi-Usai to crowd-source $ 80,000 and eventually produce a magnificent new negative and print that was now missing only about a reel, much of it consisting of shortened titles and only one major sequence, namely the attack of cannibals. The reconstruction premiered in 1997 and was one of Edward’s proudest achievements and a major contribution to film history.

While continuing his work overseeing the Film Department’s film preservation work, Ed also became a teacher after the founding of the Jeffrey Selznick School in 1996. As the instructor of record for the school, Ed was lionized by the students, especially because of his story-telling prowess. Ed organized annual student trips to John E. Allen, to the Library of Congress, to Syracuse Cinefest, where Ed would invite me to give impromptu talks to the students. Since its founding, the school has graduated more than 280 archivists from twenty-eight countries in its one-year certificate and two-year Master’s programs. Just how much the students idolized Ed became clear when more than seventy-five alumni attended his retirement party, held in May 2016 in conjunction with the Eastman Nitrate Film Festival. Indeed, many of today’s most prominent younger generation moving image archivists received their training with Edward, including Rita Belda, Jared Case, Liz Coffey, Brian Graney, Andrew Lampert, James Layton, Heather M. Linville, Regina Longo, Brian Meacham, Anke Mebold, Paul Narvaez, Cyndi Rowell, Ulrich Rüdel, Vincent Pirozzi, Christel Schmidt, Albert Steg, Dwight Swanson, and Katie Trainor.

Seeing Ed in 2016 at his party, I realized his health was extremely fragile and was the main reason for his retirement. However, until this last week, I was unaware of the fact that he had been in and out of the hospital several times this last year. Edward Stratmann passed on 10 December 2020 in Greece, New York. For me, it is the end of an era.