Monday, November 18, 2024

Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! (ColdEye Films, BayView Entertainment, 2024)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 17) my husband Charles and I watched three quite interesting presentations from Turner Classic Movies: a 2024 documentary called Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! and two “Silent Sunday Showcase” entries both directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! was produced and directed by Peter Flynn and dealt with film collectors, the small subgroup of movie-mad people who obsessively trolled abandoned theatres, wastebaskets and wherever movie industry people might have disposed of films they didn’t think had any more commercial value. Despite the public pronouncements of many people involved in creating the cinema as a technology that they were inventing a means to record motion permanently, film was an unstable medium from the get-go. The reasons why are all too well known to movie geeks like me: the early films were made on a substance called cellulose nitrate, and it is very flammable. Later a more stable acetate base was invented which was called “safety film” because it wasn’t as flammable as nitrate (though it also didn’t produce the beautiful gradations of black and white of nitrate), but it had its own deficiencies. As it decays it starts giving off the odor of vinegar, and often film preservationists have opened a long-forgotten can of film only to find it reeks of vinegar, indicating either that it’s already begun to decay or that it’s so far gone it’s unsalvageable. There are all too many sequences in this film of archivists attempting to unspool a roll of film and finding out it has essentially glued itself to itself over time, rendering it too far gone to be preserved. Ironically, Flynn’s narration hails digitalization as the great savior of the film legacy, but ignores that digital transfers come with their own set of problems. A digital file can become useless if the software with which it was created is abandoned or discontinued, or if there are seemingly minor errors like missing bits in the transfer. This is why, even though the major film studios shoot almost entirely on digital these days, and less than 2 percent of all modern movie theatres are actually equipped to show film, they still transfer their elaborately shot digital productions to film for preservation purposes.

Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! is dedicated to one particularly intrepid film preservationist in particular: the late Louis DiCrescenzo, who was particularly interested not only in collecting the films themselves but also the original equipment with which they’d been made and shown. DiCrescenzo, who died in January 2024 just after he was filmed for this documentary, was luckily able to find a younger man, Jeffrey Crooks, whom he could train to run the old equipment and maintain the collection after he passed. Many film collectors aren’t so lucky: their children often don’t see any value in old film – “That’s that crazy stuff my dad was into, which kept him from spending time with me,” they think – and toss it out like so much trash when they inherit. One film collector arranged to donate his archives to the Library of Congress precisely so the collection would be preserved after he was gone. A few names in the film would be familiar, at least to certain kinds of movie geeks, like Ron Furmanek, Rick Prelinger (whose collection became the basis for the movies available on archive.org) and the remarkable Malkames family (whose name is pronounced “Mal-CAMES,” not “Mahl-KAHM–es” as I’d always assumed). Great-grandfather Karl Malkames was one of the cinematographers on D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915). Grandfather Don Malkames (1904-1986) also worked as a cinematographer and shot many of Louis Jordan’s music videos in the 1940’s as well as feature films like Jigsaw (1949), Project X (1949) and The Burglar (1957). Father Karl and son Rick continued the tradition, and Rick has a Web site devoted to his collection – including sound home movies of the Malkames family gathered around a piano taking turns singing and playing.

One of the most interesting running themes of Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! is the obsession of one particular collector, Eric Grayson, with restoring one particular film: the 1929 Mascot part-sound serial King of the Kongo. Using surviving 35 mm sources, a 16 mm cut-down print and digital software to clean up flaws in the image quality, Grayson was ultimately able to piece together a complete version of the picture. The sound was another matter, since the film was shot on the Vitaphone system with the sound on a separate disc (a series of 10-minute phonograph records, one per reel). Among Grayson’s problems were that the Vitaphone discs ended up in the hands of record collectors, not film collectors, while the film itself was plundered for stock footage by various people after its initial release. My husband Charles said he hoped that if and when the film is completely restored, there would be some explanation for the lengthy … pauses … in the … talking sequences … between the … actors’ cue lines and … their own. This was quite common in the very earliest sound films, the result of sound engineers who had become the new dictators of Hollywood. They insisted that the only way recorded dialogue could be understood by the audience is if actors delivered their lines slowly and carefully paused between the cue line and the reply. The fact that there had already been plenty of talking records that weren’t made in this hideously unnatural fashion, and which had sold well, was ignored. The few early talkies that are still entertaining were made by directors like King Vidor, Lewis Milestone, William Wyler, Rouben Mamoulian and Frank Capra who overrode the dictates of the sound engineers and told the actors to speak normally, but King of the Kongo’s director, Richard Thorpe (who later went on to a sinecure at MGM and there directed Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock), didn’t have that kind of determination or clout. The one actor in King of the Kongo you’re likely to have heard of, Boris Karloff, actually spoke his lines naturalistically as he did in his later films, but the others acted in that hideously stagy manner prescribed by the sound engineers.

One of the problems with film preservation is that old prints of movies are quite valuable to the people with an interest in them, but not to the rest of the world. Another problem many film collectors faced, especially in the 1970’s, was pressure from the movie studios literally to put them out of business. One collector actually recalled being prosecuted by the FBI and forced to serve a six-month jail sentence after his collection was decreed to be stolen goods and held in violation of the copyright laws. This was especially ironic since most of the items he had had simply been thrown away by the major studios. Later on, with the rise of home video and then DVD’s, the studios finally realized there was gold in them thar archives, and a number of studios literally had to cut deals with the film collectors they’d once tried to put out of business to get important scenes needed to restore old films to their original running times and content. Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! is a remarkable documentary about the unsung heroes of film preservation – towards the end Flynn makes a rather kvetchy comment about the fact that when the rediscovered 1922 film Beyond the Rocks, directed by Sam Wood and co-starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, was re-premiered there was a long list of people in the program who’d participated in the restoration but no mention of whoever had owned the print in the first place – and the overall fragility of our audio-visual recorded legacy.