Found

Guy Maddin talks about movies, writing, his writing about movies, and the allure of Ann Savage and the Osmonds

SF360.org editor’s note: On the occasion of the opening of My Winnipeg this Friday in Bay Area theaters, we’re re-running an entertaining interview Johnny Ray Huston, arts editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, conducted for us with Maddin two years ago, when Maddin was the recipient of a major award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. He also appeared at the Festival this past spring with My Winnipeg, and was back in town this month doing a live presentation for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Due to brilliant works such as his 2001 short ‘The Heart of the World,’ GuyMaddin is a more-than-worthy choice for the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, but I’d like to suggest that he also deserves praise for his writings about film. For example, ‘Death in Winnipeg,’ his account of time spent on the set of a recent TV movie about the Osmond family, is one of the best and funniest pieces of journalism my bloodshot eyes and addled brain have beheld in the past decade. That article and other scribblings by Maddin can be found in ‘From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings,’ a beautifully-designed tome featuring hyper-compressed descriptive wit that is signature Maddin. In conjunction with Maddin’s SF visit, I recently spoke to him about his second career as a film writer, as well as other topics.

topics: authors, cult cinema, directors, san francisco international film festival, screenwriting, silent film

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Experience

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Back at the Castro this weekend for the 13th year, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents a variety of titillating titles, showing 12 feature films over 2 1/2 days. I’ve attended each SFSFF since its start in 1996, and can always feel the sincere passion for these classic films exhibited by everyone involved. The perfect marriage of form and content, the Festival makes sure to get the best 35mm prints of films both famous and bizarre, as well as world-class musicians to accompany all the films, which are shown in a bona fide film palace built in 1922.

This year’s lineup includes such silent icons as Lon Chaney, Harold Lloyd, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies and flapper Colleen Moore, but also lesser-known characters such as Chief Buffalo Long Lance, the supposed Blackfoot chief who, well, wasn’t. This year’s film directors famous as well as infamous include Tod Browning, René Clair, Carl Dreyer, King Vidor and William Desmond Taylor (yes, the victim of the never-solved murder with suspects including three film actresses, one stage mother and the GM of Paramount Pictures).

topics: bay area, film festivals, silent film

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Found

Niles Essanay's Voguing eunuchs and raving madmen

Squint your eyes as you walk down main street Niles and you can almost see Charlie Chaplin with his paramour, Edna Purviance, strolling over to the local Nickelodeon to catch a film in 1915. Not much looks changed in the historic town of Niles (now a part of the conglomerate city of Fremont—but don’t call it Fremont in front of Niles locals.) Having just spent three invigorating days in Niles watching crowds cheering as world-class musicians improvised brilliantly to films from the years between 1903 and 1917, I can report that silent films are alive and well.

topics: bay area, silent film

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The List

The many faces of Faust

The Faust legend has resonated throughout cultures, genres and media for centuries—particularly in Germany, where it began. It was already popular in various literary and performance forms (notably Christopher Marlowe’s 1588 drama) long before Goethe wrote the most famous and influential of all interpretations, the two-part stage epic simply called Faust In honor of that work’s 200th anniversary, the Goethe-Institut is hosting a mini Faust-fest offering four memorable screen versions of the story.

topics: bay area, german cinema, silent film

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Breaking the Silents, in three programs

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival‘s third annual Winter Event, a one-day mini-fest taking place Saturday at the Castro Theatre, is meant as a lower-key complement to the festival’s longer outing each July. But this year’s compressed exhibition, consisting of three separate programs and an evening mixer with live music, is an especially impressive affair. If the nonprofit festival’s mission means showcasing silent era films with the power to enthrall and delight as well as enrich popular understanding of cinematic art and culture, this wide-ranging lineup, introduced by notable authorities throughout, does it thrifty justice. What follows is a commentary-filled list of the lineup in reverse chronological order.

1. Evening
At the top of the program comes “Flesh and the Devil” (1927), a great Greta Garbo-John Gilbert match-up, in fact their first, and the one that notoriously started their fiery real-life romance pretty much on screen for all to see. In this steamy, censor-tempting adaptation of Herman Sudermann’s novel, “The Undying Past,” about two German army buddies divided by a willful enchantress named Felicitas, MGM and Louis B. Mayer struck gold with the fateful pairing of stars (even if it cost Mayer more than he bargained for in agro down the line). Bunkmate to Gilbert’s Leo as the story opens is beloved friend Ulrich (played by Garbo’s fellow Swede and former costar Lars Hansen, looking a bit goofy if well coiffed beside the rakish Gilbert). Meeting Felicitas at a train station, Leo is hopelessly smitten. But a duel and a stint in Africa later, Leo returns to find his best friend married to the woman he loves. This being, supposedly, Calvinist Germany, there’s naturally a pastor nearby. “My boy,” as this moral authority explains to Leo in a theme-spelling inter-title, “when the devil cannot reach us through the spirit, he creates a woman beautiful enough to reach us through the flesh.” Having said this like it’s a bad thing, the pastor feels compelled to add (strangely enough, while puffing away on a cigar stuffed into a pipe molded to resemble a leggy nymph), “Once before that woman led you into temptation and you sinned. … Aren’t you afraid of what she may do to you a second time?” Sure, it’s a dumb question. But dialogue and plot points are naturally secondary in Flesh and the Devil, gratefully making way for the groundbreaking lovemaking on (and off) the screen, including a sequence in Church where Garbo memorably turns communion into something less than holy and a lot more interesting.

Garbo’s Felicitas, a heartless temptress, followed fast on the heels of her previous MGM film called, not coincidentally, “The Temptress.” That came after playing yet another vixen for MGM. If it sounds like type casting, it’s important to remember that Garbo, as biographer Barry Paris points out, was also inventing a whole new type, something post-vamp, post-flapper, and something immediately captivating to audiences: a mercurial spirit that could shift so startlingly from aloof beauty to avid desire, all behind a face that was riveting. Of course, few faces have been so seriously, exhaustively contemplated. The Face even became a nickname. (“It is indeed an admirable face-object,” as Roland Barthes has inimitably put it). And though it’s been said ever since her early silent pictures for MGM were first released, seeing “Flesh and the Devil” confirms the impression that Garbo and the screen were made for one another, both enlarging the other. Moreover, given how she managed so successfully the transition to sound dialogue films (a graduation her costar and lover, the hitherto immensely popular Gilbert, famously flunked), it’s striking that one doesn’t miss her distinctive voice here. She’s perfectly complete on the silent screen, as the able director Clarence Brown (who worked with her many times) knew full well. “Flesh and the Devil” — which screens at the Castro in a pristine 35mm print from the Library if Congress (an institution whose name takes on an unusually erotic resonance in this context) — will be introduced by the Library of Congress’s Christel Schmidt.

2. Afternoon
The afternoon program, meanwhile, proves at least as alluring: DW Griffith’s masterpiece “Intolerance” (1916), a film as outlandishly unique as it was radically innovative and path-breaking, and one that fairly demands the big screen. “Intolerance” was DW Griffith’s lavish answer to his critics in the wake of his cinematically radical but politically reactionary and vehemently racist, if vastly influential Civil War and Reconstruction saga, “Birth of a Nation.” It was also another cinematic revelation, pioneering among other things the multi-story narrative. Injustice and inhumanity are the themes linking four disparate stories spanning multiple centuries and civilizations. Each story unreels in its own special tint, with the colorized result looking not so much modern as unto itself, peculiar and weirdly beautiful. What Babel wanted to be “Intolerance” was.

3. Morning
Finally, starting things off in the late morning is an intriguing and uncharacteristically chatty program called Vitaphone Vaudeville, a set of shorts from the “Vitaphone Varieties” series, which consisted of almost 2000 sound films put out between 1926 and 1930 using the same technology as the first talking feature, “The Jazz Singer” (1927). Introduced by Robert Gitt, of UCLA’s Film & Television Archive, the selection offers a mix of enduring and forgotten names, including a hokey little Depression era scene featuring a young Spencer Tracy on the cusp of future fame. But first come more classic vaudeville acts like a little frolic entitled “Chips of the Old Block”(1928) featuring the Foy Family. It opens on a young man with a guitar and a vaguely dyspeptic expression standing passively between two singing and dancing young women, presumably fellow chips of some unseen block. (Let’s just say the choreography here could have benefited from a movement coach, or maybe just a moving coach.) Enter the rest of the Foy clan, fancy steps, pratfalls, false teeth and other yucks at the ready. Amusing if only in its nostalgic glance back at the more piffling performances that defined the vaudeville era, “Chips” leaves little mystery why the Foy Family is not a household name.

The same might be said for “Dick Rich and his Melodious Monarchs,” an act preserved in a musical filmlet from 1929. The portly Rich, looking for all the world like a maitre d’, here lungs the lyric to “Ramona” before his comparatively lean (and one suspects underpaid) band kicks the tune into double time. An unidentified sequined woman joins Rich for the following number, “There Must Be a Silver Lining (That’s Shining for Me),” in a rather giddy pairing that quickly devolves into a ventriloquist act of questionable merit. At last, Rich, getting richer by the minute, introduces “Sunshine,” featuring the sequined woman again, index fingers in dimples, which brings matters to a merciful close.

But then there’s George Burns and Gracie Allen, strutting their stuff in “Lamb Chops,” also from 1929, in which the vaudeville and TV legends effortlessly carry the usual barrage of corny hit-and-miss humor with their trademark chemistry: shy, silly, and strangely enduring. A rare treat to see them thus on the big screen. Also of particular interest is “The Hard Guy” (1930) for its young and strapping star, Spencer Tracy. An amusingly clunky early Depression Era scene pitched somewhere between melodrama, social protest, and comedy, it unfolds in a rundown city apartment where an embittered ex-soldier and out-of-work breadwinner (a dutiful Tracy, still in no position to turn down work either) complains to his hungry wife and little girl about hard times and hard luck and all manner of hard things. “Guy, you’re getting hard boiled again,” she warns him. “Well, I been in hot water long enough to get hard boiled.” Etc. Etc. This Guy is one sour quipster. But perhaps suspecting a happy ending, his wife tries reassuring him with yet another straight line: “We’ll be back on easy street again,” she says. “I don’t know,” he fires back. “Easy street isn’t a one-way street by a long shot. There’s plenty of guys going the other way.” This Guy, for one. Spencer, on the other hand, was about to make a fat U-turn via a 1930 play called “The Last Mile” and a John Ford film called “Up the River.”

topics: castro theatre, film festivals, silent film

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San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Throughout Anthony Asquith’s taut psychological thriller, “A Cottage on Dartmoor,” a recurring joke is made of characters going out to the “talkies.” The film was made in 1929, still in the thick of the transition to sound (“The Jazz Singer,” itself only a “part-talkie,” had premiered two years earlier), and one senses a touch of snide reproach in Asquith’s elbowing. Though the coming of sound was heralded with much ballyhoo, the earliest such films couldn’t hope to match “A Cottage on Dartmoor’s” stylistic fluidity and panache due to clumsy camera boxes and difficulties with synchronization. The story of the transition to sound is often told in terms of those actors and actresses who couldn’t make the switch (see “Singin’ in the Rain”), but filmmakers saw as much of a threat in the new technology’s disruption of their craft, with many decrying a kind of regression to a most primitive “cinema of attractions.” Sound cinema did of course mature, both in terms of artistry (thanks to masters like Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, and Fritz Lang) and entertainment-value (‘30s genres like the backstage-musical and screwball-comedy), but this doesn’t take anything away from the intense lyricism and efficient modes of storytelling achieved during the silent era. San Francisco audiences can wish the last eighty years away at the Castro Theatre this weekend for the 12th annual Silent Film Festival, an embarrassment of riches spooling out over three days starting this Friday, July 13.

This year’s festival is happily eclectic, thanks to Stacey Wisnia and Stephen Salmon’s co-programming, with 11 features giving some sense of the range in silent era productions — something all too easily lost in the reductive “AFI Top 100” annals of film history. So while there’s the usual pick-of-the-litter of stars (Valentino! Brooks! Novarro! Nazimova!) and directors (Ernst Lubitsch, Cecil B. DeMille, Georges M´liès), the cumulative effect here is panoramic, with everything from flamboyant spectacles to ephemeral throwaways represented.

Wisnia and Salmon turn to always-reliable Ernst Lubitsch to make a strong first impression opening night with “The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg,” a winning romantic comedy not frequently screened (it was one of the few titles missing from the Pacific Film Archive’s Lubitsch retrospective earlier this year) in spite of lavish MGM production, serious star power from Ramon Navarro and Norma Shearer, and plenty of the director’s trademark polish. Produced in 1927, this Lubitsch isn’t so sophisticated as the two which preceded it, “The Marriage Circle” (1924) and “Lady Windermere’s Fan” (1925), but there are still plenty of instances of the director’s effortless comic “touch” dotting the conventional, satisfying romance story. An especially memorable sequence opens with the two head-over-heels lovers criss-crossing in and out of the same frame looking for one another. They end up on opposite sides of a wall; the prince aimlessly tosses a little coaster over, it plunks her, and she returns the favor. Bounding the wall in a single jump (this being Navarro, of course), the prince leaps to Kathi’s embrace. They frolic into the frame, pausing between two hedges before Kathi teasingly runs on. The camera tracks along, pausing again between the next two hedges for another playful interlude, and then off they go again, but when the camera plants between the next set of hedges, the lovers take a prolonged moment to arrive, allowing the audience to marinate in whatever frisky naughtiness might be occurring off-screen. It’s this consummate sense for timing and flow which makes it easy to understand why Paramount turned to Lubitsch to film their musical comedies in the years to come (“The Love Parade,” “Monte Carlo,” “The Smiling Lieutenant”).

“The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg” is A-List all the way, with stars and director in no danger of being forgotten. Such is unfortunately not the case for director William de Mille (older brother to Cecil, whose typically hysterical “The Godless Girl” closes out this year’s festival) and starlet Lois Wilson, the pair behind 1921’s “Miss Lulu Bett,” a surprisingly heartfelt, gentle rendition of Zona Gale’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. With its sharply observed domestic detail and underplayed romance, the film will come as a tonic to those who write off silent melodrama as being overly stagy and histrionic. Where other actresses might wallow in the title role — Miss Lulu Bett is a Cinderalla-type, the unappreciated housekeeper for her sister’s noisome family — Wilson is all the more compelling for her restraint, casting tired eyes as stacks of dirty dishes and hopeful ones towards the thought of something better.

“Miss Lulu Bett” is a sweet pick-me-up, but “A Cottage on Dartmoor” comes as something more like a revelation, shocking for its blithe treatment of psychosis and murder, but more stunning still for a treatment of subjectivity so wildly stylized, it might well make Brian de Palma blush. Expressionistic landscapes, psycho-active close-ups, and freewheeling montage editing all make this a dark dream worthy of cinema’s most implicating directors (Hitchcock, Buñuel, Welles, etc.). So who is this Anthony Asquith anyhow? The fellow who went on to direct “The Browning Version” and “The Importance of Being Earnest,” apparently, though that’s still no accounting for “A Cottage on Dartmoor”‘s bold strokes. Relayed with an enfolding flashback structure that will make any noir fan’s head spin (local aficionado Eddie Muller introduces the film at the Castro), the film narrates an unbalanced barber’s infatuation with one of his assistants, an obsession which grows dangerous (scissor-play ensues) when she gets engaged to a jovial customer. Almost casual in its visual inventiveness, a typically brilliant sequence weaves colossal suspense from several strands of action in a movie-theatre: fragmented flashbacks, quickening edits, and several layers of spectatorships all render the scene with a kind of abstract feverishness that conjures Hitchcock (major shades of “The Man Who Knew Too Much”) as much as “Man With a Movie Camera.”

If for nothing else than “A Cottage on Dartmoor,” this year’s Silent Film Festival would be a rousing success, but there is, of course, much more to look forward to. Start with “Camille” and its incomparable diva turn from Alla Nazimova, the Russian-born actress who trained with Stanislavsky before garnering unprecedented creative control (directed by Ray C. Smallwood, the film is tellingly credited as a “Nazimova Production”) and paychecks for her gleefully outré work in Hollywood. This is camp of the first order, with art director Natasha Rambova’s ostentatious Art Deco sets accentuating Nazimova’s androgynous litheness and her shock of black curls. As if you needed more of a reason: Rambova was purported involved in a love affair with Nazimova before marrying smoothie co-star Rudolph Valentino who was then arrested for bigamy since he wasn’t technically divorced from his first wife. Hollywood Babylon, ahoy!

More fun is to be had at Cecil B. DeMille’s reform-school rant, “The Godless Girl,” as well as a program of classic slapstick produced by Hal Roach (one of which apparently features “double-jointed Arthur Stone as a robot run amok.”). Coming all the way from the Cineteca di Bologna, “Maciste” is the first in a long series of Italian action films concerning Bartolomeo Pagano and his superhuman strength. Of more local interest, “The Valley of the Giants” was partly filmed in Kings Canyon National Park, with a ripping wilderness adventure playing out amongst the giant sequoia.

Finally, a special note as to two programs spotlighting the more obscure corners of the silent era, “More Amazing Tales from the Archives” and “Retour de Flamme.” Film critic Dave Kehr recently noted on his website that of the 144,366 titles spanning the new Turner Classic Movies Database, only 5,257 are available on video — 3.64 percent, for those keeping score. One can safely assume the percentage is good deal lower than that for the silent era. Even something like “Beggars of Life” — a 1928 production with a major star (Louise Brooks) and director (William A. Wellman, fresh off winning the first-ever Best Picture Oscar for “Wings”) — needs to be fought for, let alone the innumerable minor masterpieces which are, at the very least, of tremendous historical value. The “More Amazing Tales” program features a demonstration of the processes and spoils of preservation work courtesy of Rob Stone from UCLA and Patrick Loughney from the George Eastman House. Besides some illuminating history regarding the antiquated 28mm format, one can expect Clara Bow fragments, San Francisco newsreels, and even a couple of silent trailers — all for free, though coffee might be a good idea since this program starts Sunday at 10:30am. The “Retour de Flamme” program costs, but Parisian collector Serge Bromberg looks to be packing a lot of heat in his artfully arranged program of early French cinema: trick films, travelogues, skin flicks, M

topics: castro theatre, film festivals, silent film

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Stacey Wisnia, talking silent pictures

Stacey Wisnia has been a vibrant fixture in the San Francisco film scene for years now. She recently became the Executive Director of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which since 1992 has presented the best restorations and revivals of silent film classics in the Bay Area. SFSFF is coming up (July 13-15), and the program is packed with gems. SF360.org sat down with Wisnia to get the scoop on this year’s fest and the direction of the organization.

SF360: Where are you from?

Stacey Wisnia: I was born in the Bay Area, but I mostly grew up in South Lake Tahoe.

SF360: How did you get into the film scene in the Bay Area?

Wisnia: While I was studying film at SF State, I had an internship at SF Cinematheque and ended up volunteering for them for about three years. I ran their box office when they were at the Art Institute, organized their filmmaker archives, wrote program notes, etc. When the Fine Arts Cinema in Berkeley re-opened as a rep house in the mid-‘90s, I lived across the street above King Dong and helped them work out some of the kinks of their new business. Then I moved to New York for a couple years and worked at Film Forum as the assistant to their Repertory Programmer, Bruce Goldstein. Bruce gave me an incredible film history, exhibition and programming education. When I moved back to San Francisco, I started managing the Castro Theatre and got to know all the fantastic local festivals including the Silent Film Festival — which I looked forward to every Summer.

SF360: Is it strange to go back to the Castro Theatre after managing it and sustaining it, and now coming back as a Festival director?

Wisnia: Yes, but knowing the theater and its eccentricities so intimately is also a great advantage for us. I know what to look out for and what to expect.

SF360: The schedule of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival looks terrific. I’ve been hoping to see ‘A Cottage on Dartmoor’ for a long while now. Who is programming the fest?

Wisnia: Thanks. Stephen Salmons and I co-program the festival. We are really looking forward to showing ‘A Cottage on Dartmoor’ and introducing our audience to Anthony Asquith. This is a terrific example of how sophisticated the acting and camerawork were in the silent era, especially in the late ’20s. We are bringing Stephen Horne from London to provide piano accompaniment. He’s played his fabulous score with this film at a few other festivals including the silent film festival in Pordenone, Italy.

SF360: Do you attend the Pordenone film festival?

Wisnia: Yes, I’ve gone the last two years and hope to make it an annual expedition. This is a wonderful festival and a great place to meet musicians and archivists and learn what they are working on. The relationships I’ve made — or built upon — and the films I’ve seen in Pordenone have played a role in some of our programming. In fact, this is where I met Stephen Horne. This festival also inspired our idea to include a free preservation program, Amazing Tales from the Archives, which we are bringing back this year due to the popularity of last year’s program.

SF360: Didn’t you also check out an archive in Bologna? What was that like?

Wisnia: Cineteca di Bologna is an incredible place and organization. I was very impressed with them. They have a huge collection of international films — and lots of silents. They also have their own film lab, a theater that operates year round, a film library that is open to the public where people can come to watch videos of films from their collection, fantastic film publications, and an internationally renowned film festival which happens right before ours, so unfortunately, I may never get to go to it. While I was there, they showed me some films on a flat bed.

‘Maciste,’ which we are including in our festival, had just been restored by them and I had the pleasure of seeing it in Pordenone a few days after my visit to Bologna.

SF360: Is the direction of the SFSFF going to change at all now that you are the Executive Director?

Wisnia: Well, this is still a relatively young festival and we are beginning to outgrow some of the ways we have been operating, so some change is inevitable. Our mission to expose the public to entertaining silent films and educate them about this incredible art form will not change. I’m very excited about the future possibilities for the festival and I have many ideas about ways we can grow over the next few years. We are trying out some new things this year, as we did last year. Since I’ve joined The Silent Film Festival we have slowly expanded the programming — adding the preservation program and a ‘mini festival’ in the winter. This year we added another program to the Festival and moved our Saturday reception to become an Opening Night Party, something we haven’t had before. As we expand, there is more room to be adventurous with our programming choices. This is also a result of our audience’s curiosity growing as they are exposed to the diverse range of silent films through our festival. We have tried to connect more with silent film lovers throughout the year by starting a monthly email newsletter where we let our subscribers know what we are up to as well as informing them about other silent film events going on around the Bay Area.

SF360: It seems like we always talk a little about this. Would you consider allowing less traditional musical accompaniment to the films you present? It is against the ethos of the Festival?

Wisnia: We want our audience to experience silent films in a way similar to how they would have during the silent era, and the music is a big part of this. I agree that pairing silents with contemporary musical accompaniment is a great way to introduce younger audiences to silent film, who otherwise wouldn’t consider seeing something without sound or even black & white. For now though, this isn’t a direction I see us going anytime soon. This is why co-presentations with festivals like the SF International are so fun for us. It gives us an opportunity to collaborate on something a little different from what we would produce at our festival — with limitations of course.

SF360: I noticed on your schedule that you have a ton of sponsors, but one that caught my eye is the McRoskey Mattress Company. What’s up with that?

Wisnia: Yeah, we have a great bunch of sponsors and our festival would be much smaller without their generous contributions. The McRoskey Mattress Company has been an especially good friend to us and our audience seems to love them too. They have been making mattresses in San Francisco since 1899 and they are amazingly still operated by the McRoskey family. And, they are crazy about silent films! This is a great partnership.

SF360: And, you are giving away a mattress, right?

Wisnia: This year we are having our first raffle fundraiser and the grand prize is a $5000 shopping spree at McRoskey, which can get you a really nice new bed. We are putting a McRoskey bed on the Castro mezzanine during the festival too. Hopefully, there won’t be any riots over who gets to lay on it during intermissions. These are very comfortable beds — and you know how wild these silent film folks can get.

topics: bay area, film festivals, q&a, silent film

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