Archival Spaces

373: IMAX à la 1900

Archival Spaces 373:

American Biograph Co. 68mm Films Added to UNESCO Register

Uploaded 16 May 2025

A month ago, the British Film Institute, London, and Holland’s Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, announced in a joint press release that their unique collection of 300 68mm films from the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company had been added to UNESCO’s International Memory of the World Register. In total, 341 68mm Biograph films are known to exist, with smaller collections from the Museum of Modern Art (36 titles), New York, and the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (5 titles), Paris. The wide-screen format from the turn of the last century was officially protected during the 221st session of UNESCO’s Executive Board meeting between 2 – 17 April 2025 in Paris. The films join previous collections added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2011: the Jean Desmet Collection of early cinema from the Eye Filmmuseum, the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection (See Archival Spaces 363) and the General Post Office Collection from the BFI, as well as the silent films of Alfred Hitchcock, which were inscribed on the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register in 2012.

**William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson** **with a Biograph camera**

**Dickson at St. Mark’s Square, Venice (1898)**

In the earliest days of cinema, there were several successful competitors to the 35mm format. Founded in 1895 by William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, who had worked for Thomas Edison, inventing both 35mm film and the Kinetoscope, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company patented a new 68mm format. Terry Ramseye claimed it was to circumvent Edison’s 35mm patents, but Paul Spehr has maintained Dickson believed image quality was at stake. Requiring significantly larger Biograph projectors, which were in competition with Thomas Edison’s Vitascope and the Lumiére Brother’s Cinematograph, 68mm films were produced for both big screen projection and viewing in Mutoscopes. The 68mm format was four times larger than 35mm, with an image area of 2 by 2+¹⁄₂ inches (51 mm × 64 mm), projected at 32 fps, resulting in an extraordinarily sharp image, without the flicker and jumpiness of its competitors, and is comparable to today’s IMAX format.

While the Biograph camera punched in perforations in the 68mm negative in order to keep the frame in registration, 68mm prints lacked lateral perforations; instead, projectors used a continuously moving friction feed device (mutilated rubber rollers), that had to be watched constantly in projection, lest the frame line creep south. Like 35mm full aperture frames, the 68mm format had a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The 68mm Mutoscope negatives were also used to produce paper-based images in a flip card system for the company’s Mutoscope peep-hole machines, which had begun competing with Edison’s Kinetoscope in 1897. The American Mustoscope and Biograph Company actually enjoyed a degree of success for several years with both projection and parlor machines, and only discontinued production of films in 1903.

Now digitized, these marvelous sights are accessible on the Eye Filmmuseum’s website and on YouTube. Stream The Brilliant Biograph: Earliest Moving Images of Europe | Eye Film Player.

**Children on Marken Island** **(1898)**

The primary attraction of moving images in the days before even stationary cinemas had been founded was the visual pleasure of seeing the world move, seeing everyday life in faraway places, so Biograph’s cameramen travelled the world. Among the most popular films were images filmed from moving trains, with exotic landscapes rushing by, or, as in Irish Mail (1898), a steam locomotive’s speed captured by a cameraman riding on a parallel track, rushing through train stations, until the faster train passes out of frame. Conway Castle (1900) on Wales’ northern coast is even seen in hand-tinted images, the train passing through the castle’s walls. Other moving camera scenes filmed from boats depict the waterfront in Venice and its gondolas (1899), the Prinsengracht canal in Amsterdam (1899), and British Naval warships on the high seas.

What we would now term anthropological scenes were also popular, depicting images of daily life, like an encampment of Roma (1898), the women cooking over open fires, while the men pose for the camera, or Dickson and his family in Venice’s St. Mark’s Square, feeding pidgeons, while his toddler runs in and out of frame. There are also memorable events, e.g., a funeral in Rome (1898), the casket of the departed and the mourners shrouded in black hoods, or a London fire brigade leaving the station (1899), a very popular motif memorialized later in Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1902). Other scenes reveal Hungarian peasants drinking at a pub, Italian peasants dancing the tarantella, or Dutch children from the Island of Marken at play. Given the large format and also the conventions of the time, close-ups were non-existent, although on occasion the camera will be close enough to reveal details on faces, as in a scene of a procession of Capuchin monks in the Vatican.

**Biograph Cameraman on Swiss Train (1903)**

In one remarkable scene, advertising a new Martini rear-engine automobile (1903), we see the car driving towards the camera across railroad tracks, then the cameraman and his camera on a flatbed, followed by another shot of the vehicle driving in a rail bed through the Swiss mountains. This kind of self-reflexivity, displaying both the image and the means of production, was rare, but not unique, e.g. Interior New York Subway (1905, Biograph), which I wrote about in my essay on Bill Morrison’s Outerborough (2005), reworks another 68mm Biograph, New York to Brooklyn Across Brooklyn Bridge (1899). Finally, while there are no views of the Biograph projector in action, there is a scene of audiences leaving a Biograph projection at the Carré Circus in Amsterdam (1899).

It seems miraculous to look into the living and breathing world of 125 years ago, as if it were an image from today.

371: German Genre Films II

Archival Spaces 371

Berlinale Retrospective II

Uploaded 18 April 2025

**Inga Seyric, Regina Jorn in *The Girls from Atlantis* (1970**)

Six weeks ago I posted my blog about the Berlinale Retrospective “Wild, Weird, Bloody. German Genre Films of the 70’s,” which included films from both East and West Germany: crime, horror, musicals, melodramas, not New German Cinema. I also noted that I missed a number of West German films, including Spare Parts (1979, Rainer Erler), The Tenderness of Wolves (1973, Ulli Lommel), and The Girls from Atlantis (1970, Eckhardt Schmidt), ostensibly a German crime drama, horror film, and a sci-fi, respectively. With many thanks to my former Munich Filmmuseum colleague and long-time friend, Robert Fischer-Ettel, I was able to now see these films on Vimeo. From my Berlin colleague, Philipp Stiasny, I also learned a bit more about the Austrian director Rolf Olsen who directed Bloody Friday (1972). While I had attributed the German film’s extreme violence and lurid aesthetics to Italian Giallo formulas, Stiasny in a DVD review of Olsen’s Playgirls of Frankfurt (1966) and The Devil’s Girls (1967) noted that the director cultivated a yellow journalism style, “creating a dynamic, explosive headline oriented cinema,” which certainly also applies to Bloody Friday.

*Fleisch* (1979, Rainer Erler) with Jutta Speidel

**Fleisch (1979) with Wolf Roth, Jutta Speidel**

Rainer Erler, a director who produced mostly films for German television, shot the crime drama, Spare Parts/Fleisch, in New Mexico and New York for ZDF (2^nd German Television). After the wedding of a German-American couple, the husband is abducted when they spend a night in a seedy Las Cruces, N.M. motel. Monika (Speidel), the bride, escapes and enlists Paul (Roth), a Polish-born cross-country trucker delivering meat to New York wholesalers, to help find her husband and they are soon on the trail of an ambulance service that delivers bodies to a Roswell hospital, where the bodies, whether dead or not, are harvested for organ transplants. The scenes with truckers using CB radio to track the ambulance and communicate with each other are a direct homage to Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy (1978), made a year earlier and a big hit in Germany. After meeting the female doctor in charge of the hospital, Monika allows herself to be transported to New York, with both husband Mike (Herbert Herrmann)and Paul both comatose on the same flight. The film works quite well as a thriller, but unlike American genre films that usually end with the perpetrators brought to justice, there is no such satisfaction here for the audience. Indeed, although Dr. Jackson (Charlotte Kerr) regrets her actions and is killed by the bad guys, the film criticizes the American police for not following through to investigate the crime syndicate behind the organ dealing scheme.

**Kurt Raab in Tenderness of Wolves (1972)**

***Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe*** **(1973) with Ingrid Caven**, **Kurt Raab**

Produced by Rainer Werner Fassbinder who is featured in a supporting role, The Tenderness of Wolves/Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe is, like so much of Fassbinder’s early cinema, beholden to genre, in this case, horror and crime, but more akin to art cinema and melodrama. The director, Ulli Lommel, a Fassbinder collaborator who played in no less than twelve of the master’s films, casts Fassbinder regular Kurt Raab (Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, 1970) in the title role of the Fritz Harrmann, the notorious Hannover serial killer who in the 1920s cut up his 27 young male victims and was rumored to have sold their human flesh to local restaurants as beef and pork. While Fritz Lang’s M (1931) transformed Haarmann into a child murderer who can’t help himself, Raab’s pederast is a lonely gay man, abandoned by his male lover and looking for love; he kills when he is disappointed. He lures vagrant young teens to his flat with the promise of food and work, then murders them by strangulation or biting into their adam’s apple, earning him the title of “Vampire of Hannover.” However, all but one of the murders are committed off screen, the major focus of the film being on Haarman’s relations with his non-biological family of pimps, prostitutes, and bar owners, and his attempts with his former lover to earn money through begging, police informing and other shady activities. Not surprisingly, the extended family consisted of Fassbinder regulars seen as supporting roles in numerous other films, including Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Caven, Brigitta Mira, Wolfgang Schenk, and Fassbinder himself as an unsavory pimp.

Ulli Lommel would move to New York shortly after the production of The Tenderness of Wolves, his directorial efforts moving continuously between exploitation and art with such films as Adolf and Marlene (1977), Cocaine Cowboys (1979), and Blank Generation (1983), the latter two shot for Warhol’s Factory. He was still directing direct-to-video films as late as 2018.

***Männer sind zum lieben da*** **(1970)**

Isi ter Jung, Barbara Capell in *Männer sind zum lieben da*

Eckhart Schmidt’s The Girls From Atlantis/Männer sind zum lieben da is a sci-fi film without any scenes in outer space, nor any special effects. Indeed, it is more a satire on the German softcore porn wave that dominated low-end, commercial filmmaking in Germany from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s. A group of pretty women in their 20s arise out of a forest lake near Munich, like Venus de Milo, except that they are clothed in Carnaby Street fashions, complete with tiny suitcase purses as fashion accessories. Their mission is to seduce as many young studs as possible, shrink them in the act of sex to 5 inches, and pack them in their handbags for transport back to an almost male-less planet in a far-off galaxy. All the women work hard to fulfill their quota by exposing their breasts at least once to the audience, except Atlantis (Isi ter Jung), who just can’t seem to get it right and even falls in love with one of her prospects. Raoul (Horst Letten) also loves her, too, so he volunteers to return to the stars with her. In the end, it is all a dream. Despite the superficial nudity, this is a sweet, almost innocent comedy, Schmidt poking fun at the German bourgeoisie and attitudes about sex – we see a traveling gay porn salesman, a thief disguised as a priest, a crooked village mayor, and his shrewish wife, a wife who begs Atlantis to seduce her gluttonous husband, and a voyeuristic professor of sexology who is afraid of physical contact, while the boys are all too willing to have casual sex.

Marianna Sock in *Männer sind zum lieben da* **(1970, Eckhart Schmidt)**

Watching Männer sind zum lieben da, I suffered a moment of melancholy and mourning because I had become friends in Munich with both Eckhart Schmidt and his wife of forty-plus years, Isi ter Jung. Back in 1997, as director of the Munich Filmmuseum, I had organized with Robert Fischer the first retrospective and monograph of Schmidt’s film work. He, like other more genre-orientated and less leftist Munich-based directors, e.g. Rudolf Thome, Klaus Lemke, had been snubbed by Enno Patalas and the critics around Filmkritik, and as a result, was excluded from the New German Cinema canon. When the Schmidts moved to L.A. in the early 2000s, we became good friends, lunching at least once a month at Petit Four on Sunset. Isi died tragically of cancer at 64 in 2007 – she was the most gracious person ever, both my wife and my mother-in-law Janet were mightily impressed with her – and Ecki passed away in October last year at 85, having moved back to Munich just before the pandemic. I still miss them both.

**Rainer Werner Fassbindeer, Barbara Bertram in *The Tenderness of Wolves* (1973, Ulli Lommel)**

370: Hobart Bosworth

Archival Spaces 370:

Hobart Bosworth Films on Blu-Ray

Uploaded 4 April 2025

Unless you are a silent film aficionado, you probably may not have heard of Hobart Bosworth. He was already in his 40s when he started his film career at Selig-Polyscope, starring in The Count of Monte Cristo (1908), after battling tuberculosis for almost a decade. He was a big man, playing men of action in westerns, war stories, and sea tales. He directed his first film for Selig in 1911. After acting in 150 shorts, his breakout film was The Sea Wolf (1913), an adaptation of Jack London’s novel, which featured London in a small role. Unfortunately, the film is lost, as are almost all of Bosworth’s shorts, except an early version of The Wizard of Oz (1910). Also lost, his several other Jack London films, except for half of Martin Eden (1914), and most of his later starring features. He quit directing in 1915 but continued to star in more than fifty features at Universal, Goldwyn, and Paramount until 1921, then slipped into supporting roles. After the coming of sound, Bosworth’s roles shrunk even further, usually playing in poverty row westerns. His last role was in 1942, and he died a year later.

**Hobart Bosworth, Jane Novak in *Behind the Door* (1919)**

Given Bosworth’s monster career in the 1910s, we are indeed fortunate to have two of his feature films now on blu-ray, released by Flicker Alley, and lovingly restored by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival: Behind the Door (1919) and Below the Surface (1920), both directed by Irvin V. Willat for the Thomas Ince Co. While the first film had initially been reconstructed in 1994 from an incomplete print and outtakes at the Library of Congress, Rob Byrne and his team at the SFSFF accessed a 35mm Russian print from Gosfilmofond in 2015 to produce a virtually complete version, merely augmented in a very few places by stills to maintain continuity, as documented in Willat’s original script. Tinting is based on notations on the leaders of the LOC print. Likewise, Below the Surface was reconstructed in 2021 by the SFSFF from a 35mm nitrate negative and a 35mm safety dupe negative, both at the Library of Congress with financial support from the National Film Preservation Fund. The tinting is based on a surviving nitrate at the Eye Institute, Amsterdam. Both films are essentially sea stories, while Kevin Brownlow has called Behind the Door “the most outspoken of all the [World War I] vengeance films.”

Novvak, James Gordon, Bosworth in *Behind the Door*

Wallace Beery, Bosworth in *Behind the Door*

Indeed, while Behind the Door does not visually reveal the final act of vengeance “behind the door,” it leaves little else to the imagination in its depiction of violence, especially the early blood-drenched brawls and later gang rapes. The film opens in a small town in coastal Maine, where Captain Oscar Krug returns seven years after the end of WWI; His story is presented in a series of flashbacks going back to 1917, when America entered World War I against the Germans. The early scenes create sympathy for the German-American whom the townspeople unjustly attempt to drive out, although he is an American-born patriot. In these scenes, I kept thinking of film theorist Hugo Munsterberg, who was completely ostracized around the same time at Harvard by anti-Germans and most probably died as a result. Krug enlisted in the Navy, having previously served under Admiral Dewey in Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War, as he tells the crowd. He is appointed Captain of the SS Perth, which is sunk by a German U-Boat. Krug survives, as does his wife (Jane Novak), who had – unbeknownst to him – stowed away on the vessel, and they are rescued by the same U-98, better said, she is taken aboard, and he is left to die, swearing vengeance. Given that Bosworth was 52 years old, he looks a little too old to play the part, but Willat’s staging of the action scenes covers up that deficit, and the flashback scenes narrated by Krug and the German U-Boat Captain are extremely effective, as is the film’s restored tinting.

Lloyd Hughes as Paul, Bosworth in diving suit in *Below the Surface*

Apparently, women complained about Behind the Door’s violence, so Bosworth’s next film offered some compensation to female audiences. While Below the Surface also opens on the Maine Coast with an exciting rescue of a sunken U.S. Navy submarine, the film for much of its length is a melodrama, pitting father against son. Martin Flint and son Paul are deep sea divers leading a quiet country life, until a pair of grifters from the city try to convince the divers to retrieve gold coins from a sunken vessel, so they can bilk investors into financing a non-existent expedition. The vamp pretends to fall in love with Paul, so he will go down when his father refuses, which he does successfully. But the son collapses mentally when he finds his wife has disappeared, leaving their torn-up marriage license, and blames his father. To save the son, dad looks for the errant bride; before the climax another shipwreck ensues. Scenes of deep sea diving thus bracket a film melodrama, which pits traditional moral values against the supposed immorality of modernity. However, the print is so utterly gorgeous, and the action sequences thrilling, so one can forgive the melodrama.

Extras include the original Russian release version of Behind the Door, a doc on the restoration, and Patrick Stanbury’s interview with Kevin Brownlow about Irvin Willat. Flicker Alley is thus to be commended for giving us two films with Hobart Bosworth in his prime, when we have previously only seen him, e.g. as a supporting actor in The Big Parade (1925) or a bit part in The Crusades (1932).

**Publicity Photo at California Theater, Los Angeles, 1920**

369: Chełmno Holocaust Film

Archival Spaces 369:

The World Will Tremble (2024)

Uploaded 21 March 2025

**Roll call in Chełmno**, *The World Will Tremble* (2025)

A Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival screening of The World Will Tremble (2025) preceded its L.A. run this week at the Laemmle Theatres in Beverly Hills and Encino. The title is a quote from a village Rabbi in Rzuchow, Poland who has just heard the testimony of two prisoners, escapees from the Nazi death center at Chełmno (Kulmhof) in early January 1942, where Jewish populations from the surrounding villages are being systematically gassed in mobile vans. The title bears a degree of irony because we now know that while the BBC and the New York Times reported on the mass killings as early as June and July 1942, few wished to hear of it. It is known, for example, that U.S. State Department officials actively blocked reports about the mass murder of Jews from reaching the United States. The British Foreign Office, known to be filled with anti-Semites, was no better: when Polish diplomat and eye-witness Jan Karski met with Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, his report fell on deaf ears.

**Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Jeremy Neumark, *The World Will Tremble* (2025)**

**David Kross, *The World Will Tremble* (2025)**

Directed by Israeli-American, Lior Geller, The World Will Tremble, opens with a group of Jewish prisoners digging a large pit under the watchful eyes of armed Nazi guards. Three are chosen to go back to the camp – actually an abandoned manorial estate – where they are told to sort clothing and thereby witness the murder of Jewish villagers. Transported by truck, the arrivals, men, women, and children, are told they will be sent to Leipzig to work, but first need to write a letter home and be de-loused. Leaving their clothes and suitcases behind, they are herded into a truck, whose exhaust is connected to the van’s enclosed interior. The victims are killed by carbon monoxide poison before the gas vans reach the field where the dead are buried in mass graves by the prisoners who had dug the pits. Miraculously, two of the men assigned to the work detail manage to escape, helped by a Polish farm woman who gives them railroad uniforms, and a stolen motorcycle. They make it to the home of a village rabbi (Anton Lesser), where they report what they have seen. That account eventually made its way through the Polish Underground to London, where it is reported on the BBC on 26 June 1942, the earliest evidence of the Shoah to reach the Allies.

Divided essentially into two halves, Geller’s film visualizes for the first time, this earliest phase of the Shoah, before the Nazis perfected an industrialized form of death in Auschwitz, only months later. We hear the Camp Commandant Herbert Lange (David Kross) saying Berlin wants more “productivity,” 700 dead a day, are far too few. In reality, no less than 152,000 humans were eventually killed in Chełmno. We also see the unbelievable cruelty of the Nazi guards, whose target practice consists of forcing inmates who hold glass milk bottles over their heads, which are then shattered by bullets, or who have the inmates dance to the tune of flying bullets. When a young Jewish woman who has been serving as Lange’s sexual relief is accidentally killed, the Commandant screams at the guard to get him another. But while we see the faces of inmates carrying bodies, the corpses in the van and mass graves remain discreetly out of camera range, thus avoiding exploiting the memory of the dead.

**Original Grojanowski Report** **in Polish (1942)**

**Chełmno** **Memorial at site of mass graves**

Although accurate in spirit, The World Will Tremble does condense some of the admittedly confusing historical facts. One of the film’s escapees, Mordechaï Podchlebnik (Jeremy Neumark Jones), did escape from Chełmno, later testifying at trials in Poland (1945), at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961), and appearing in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1984), but he was not one of the authors of the first report. During the Winter of 1942, five prisoners escaped: Mordechaï Podchlebnik, Milnak Meyer, Abraham Tauber, Abram Roj, and Szlama Ber Winer (alias Yakov Grojanowski). Grojanowski (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) fled Chełmno to the Warsaw Ghetto, where his “Grojanowski Report” to the Ghetto’s Oneg Shabbat resistance group formed the basis for the BBC broadcast and later media reports. The New York Times wrote on July 2^nd: “In the early Winter the Germans were methodically proceeding to exterminate all Jews. They sent special gas chambers on wheels… In the village of Chełmo near Kolo ninety persons at a time were put into the gas chambers.”(p. 6) According to other published sources, two further Chełmno survivors, Yitzhak Justman, and Yerachmiel Yisrael Widawski, deposited their testimonies at the Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto in March 1942 with Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau and later spoke with Rabbi Chanoch Gad Justman in the the Częstochowa Ghetto. Widawski’s description of finding his fiancé among the corpses forms one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the film.

**Gas Wagon produced by Deutz (Coloigne) used in Chełmo** **(1945)**

I first read about the Chełmo gas wagons when I was a graduate student, writing a seminar paper about Holocaust news in the German exile newspaper, Freies Deutschland/Alemania Libre, published during World War II in Mexico City by exiled German Communists. Not surprisingly, the horror of Auschwitz, Maidanek, and Sobibor has overshadowed the crimes committed in Chełmno. Thanks to Lior Gelller, we now have a film about this often under-reported site of the Shoah, and its handful of survivors.