Back to school with "Film 50"

By Max Goldberg

The working-week is at its summit Wednesday afternoons, but I have the time free this spring and, beginning last week, decided to avail myself of “Film 50,” an open-to-the-public course co-presented by the UC Berkeley Film Studies Program and its adjoining Pacific Film Archive. I studied film as an undergraduate in Connecticut, but in the last few years my pursuits in cinema have largely been self-directed: something admittedly made easier by the rapidly proliferating DVD market. Still, while retrospectives, festivals, and stocked DVD shelves afford non-academics deep looks into certain pockets of film history and culture, there is something about a class which suggests a broader map of the medium. This seems especially true of “Film 50,” which, as an intro course taught by Marilyn Fabe (author of “Closely Watched Films”), emphasizes what film can do as much as where it has been.

Or such was the case last week, in any event, when Fabe brought a full house (the course is split between students and the public; PFA publicist Shelley Diekman tells me some of the older faces have been attending the course throughout its 15-year history) the precipitous developments of early cinema, racing from Edison to Griffith in a little less than three hours. Even the most hardened film cynic (or, for that matter, the most rarified film academic — which Fabe is decidedly not) cannot help but be chastened by this formative work in which one quite literally sees the discovery of that which is cinematic. Otherworldly in their silence and movements (and bodies and tone), these are not the sort of films one seeks out on a Saturday night, but once parked in front of the screen, the revelations are many, the implications ranging.

Fabe began with a series of Edison films, all running a little under a minute and filmed in the inventor’s famed “Black Maria” studio, a squat New Jersey building covered in back tarpaper and ceiling windows to light the scenes (the building was on a turntable and could be rotated to achieve the desired sunlight). These films, originally meant for individual consumption via peep hole machines, still have one foot in vaudeville, with many performers (strongmen and dancers) performing for the camera in a pure cinema of attractions. Already, though, one senses that the limits were being pushed: “Cockfight” has two plains of action with men betting behind the fighting birds, and “The Barbershop” attempts naturalism in representing a scene instead of presenting a performer.

Still, it would take two French brothers to give the medium its own distinct shape. Auguste and Louis Lumière’s (has there ever been a name so sweetly fitting?) innovations were both technological and aesthetic. They invented a lightweight camera which allowed location shooting and, in Fabe’s words, “to bring the world to Paris and Paris to the world.” The brothers also had the bright idea to project their moving images rather than sticking Edison’s clumsy peep-hole model (which, come to think of it, we’re reverting to when we watch films on laptops or, perish the thought, iPods). Hence, the first public movie screening on December 28th, 1895, which included among other shorts, “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.” In long shot we look back into time and watch as the sea of faces criss-cross the frame (the Lumière frame is infinitely more dynamic than Edison’s with multiple plains of action and a tactful use of off-screen space). With other shorts like “Snowball Fight” and “Babies Quarrel” (which Fabe lightly described as an early stab at cinema verité), one can trace a line from the Lumi

02.01.2007