What to show? Or, How to save and promote silent films

[Mike Gebert]

Um... I'm needed back on the planet Earth now.

Anyway, I'm not sure what this rather curious thread is about any more, but one tendency that I think should be resisted is the following argument:

1) Thousands don't come out for Cinecon...
2) Therefore no one wants to watch silent film.

The problem with this is, if you made a spectrum of audience-friendliness for silent films, Cinecon would be about as far to one end as you could get, maybe only Pordenone devoting an entire festival to Edison films of 1906 goes further. I mean, its main virtues are rarity and obscurity... of course that determines who it's going to draw, the hardest of the hardcore. So you can hardly say there's no audience at all, based on that.

The marketing problem that Cinecon has isn't the lack of an audience for these things but the lack of feeder events to lead people to want to experience silent/early sound film on that level. To make one diehard Cinecon attendee, you need ten attendees of regular silent film programming at X where they see the things that aren't so rare, and you need one hundred folks who give it a shot once in a blue moon, and you need one thousand locals who own a DVD of Casablanca.

So from a marketing perspective, it seems like the most valuable things Cinecon could do are:

1) Identify potential feeder events in Los Angeles and elsewhere (since there's little difference between flying in from San Francisco and flying in from Illinois) and try to establish relationships with them that allow you to publicize the fact and existence of Cinecon among their participants.

This could include co-sponsoring events-- if Cinecon helped present showings of the occasional warhorse at the Egyptian or wherever, that would be a way to get the name out among people dabbling in silent film who have not yet taken the plunge of a long festival. This doesn't have to mean putting up money, I'm sure there are many things Cinecon folks have to trade with other organizations in terms of contacts, knowledge, whatever.

The most obvious audience to target is the SFSFF's-- does Cinecon do anything to make itself known to their audience? Because that's a huge missed opportunity if not.

2) Work on accessibility for newbies. I'm going to agree with Mike S. that it's tough to commit to $1000+ for a weekend titles unseen. But it's also that Cinecon seems like a meeting of a club where everyone knows everyone, which makes it hard to get into. To some extent all the fests are like that-- I mean, jeez, I was on AMS ten years or more before I thought hey, I could go to those, too! Even some titles without times would help-- if I knew two or three things that I really wanted to see, it wouldn't bother me not knowing everything that was going to be shown, or when.

[Harlett O'Dowd]

The most obvious audience to target is the SFSFF's-- does Cinecon do anything to make itself known to their audience? Because that's a huge missed opportunity if not.

Exactly. And the fests (let's not make this Cinecon-centric, even if it was EB who started this thread) should market themselves as a more intense fix for fans jonesing for more vintage film.

Something along the lines of -

"Did you enjoy the SFSFF? Need more? Well, come down to LA Labor Day weekend for Cinecon. There you can see films you can't get here or on TCM or at Netflix. Many of these films haven't been seen by anyone since their original release. On top of that we have celebrity guests from the studio era, memorabilia sales, auctions, booksignings and seminars presented by some of the best and brightest writing on vintage film today. Some of the big ticket items for this year's lineup include..."

Repeat as necessary at Academy screenings, etc.

I often compare the vintage film community to the opera world. The vast majority of americans would rather shove steel spikes through their eyes than sit through an opera, but many newbies will enjoy an AIDA or BOHEME if properly prepped and their first exposure is a good one. Some of those people will come back to listen to more Verdi and Puccini. Some of the adventurous will try a bit of Wagner - and some who do, don't go back to the Italians. Others will embrace the entire spectrum. But very very very very few Strauss and Monteverdi fans walk in off the street totally uninitiated. They almost all spring from the larger Verdi/Puccini/Mozart pool.

The college/TCM/SFSFF crowd is where the vast majority of future Cineconners will spring. These are the people the festival planners need to seek out.

[Bob Birchard]

The most obvious audience to target is the SFSFF's-- does Cinecon do anything to make itself known to their audience? Because that's a huge missed opportunity if not.

Exactly. And the fests (let's not make this Cinecon-centric, even if it was EB who started this thread) should market themselves as a more intense fix for fans jonesing for more vintage film.

Something along the lines of -

"Did you enjoy the SFSFF? Need more? Well, come down to LA Labor Day weekend for Cinecon. There you can see films you can't get here or on TCM or at Netflix. Many of these films haven't been seen by anyone since their original release. On top of that we have celebrity guests from the studio era, memorabilia sales, auctions, booksignings and seminars presented by some of the best and brightest writing on vintage film today. Some of the big ticket items for this year's lineup include..."

Repeat as necessary at Academy screenings, etc.

This has turned into a discussin about Cinecon and other festivals, and that is not where I was headed when this started.

As far as I can see all the festivals that show rarer stuff do what they do in the way of promotion and the results are pretty much the same--attendance isn't appreciably higher in Columbus or Syracuse than it is at Cinecon.

Attendance is much higher at the SFSFF--and one may attribute this to advertising (they have a budget), e-mail outreach, or a local film culture, etc. But my guess is that (for the most part) it is because they are showing well-known titles with still-remembered stars.

Tuning the "pitch" to "You're gonna see something you've never seen before and are unlikely to ever see again" is not the sort of tagline that will resonate with many people--and that is the issue I've been attempting to address.

Audience loyalty at Cinecon, Syracuse, Cinevent at. al. is pretty high. Once people get "hooked" they tend to stay hooked.

One such fellow, named Steve Lamb, came to his first Cinecon two
years ago, was enthralled, and has been spreading the word among friends and acquaintances ever since (I know this because we have dinner occasionally and he tells me he's been out evangelizing). To date, none of the people he's hit up have shown any inclination to come.

Now one might suggest that the problem is with the pitch, but I don't think that's it.

I think it goes back to my old saying that you'll never go broke running a revival theater if you run a double bill of Citizen Kane and King Kong every week. Familiarity rather than adventure is the key to getting asses in seats.

Michael criticizes the promotion for Cinecon (although he seems uninclined to do anything about it but to complain), but setting that aside, Michael talked the Cinematheque into doing a series of early Columbia talkies a few years ago--rare pre-code stuff--and the attendance was absolutely dismal. In fact that series is one of the reasons why the Cinematheque has generally avoided older films in its regular programming (though, of course, there are occasional exceptions). As Sam Goldwyn said: "If nobody wants to see your picture, there's nothing you can do to stop them."

I agree that the point of the fan festivals is to show rare stuff. For those of us putting on the shows it is about the only reward we get--to see some stuff we haven't seen. I also know that there is an audience for rare stuff--they come year after year--and there are at least some newbies each year--but that audience is a relatively small one.

My thought is that one has to have a certain number of miles of film through the old projector before one seeks to look beyond the well-known classics. The search for repeating the feeling of elation one first experienced on seeing "The Mark of Zorro" or "The Gold Rush" when a 10th or 20th screening of those classics just doesn't quite do it anymore is perhaps what drives a movie lover to look beyond the DVD rack and what's playing on TCM

[greta de groat]

Allright, but there must have been some reason why Griffith got the "Father of Film" - title at such an early point in film history. Did he have the better PR, was it all hearsay, one film historian copying another? If pre-home-video availability is the key, how did the pre-selection process come to pass? Why have the Griffith films been kept and shown by archives and film museums all over the world and not others?

(Sorry for jumping in so late... )

Well, i've been reading an interesting book by Joyce Jesionowski called Thinking in Pictures, which dissects Griffith's Biograph films and discusses the way he clarifies time and space in his films though editing and how clear expressive he was able to make his films seem while saying in the 1 reel format. She does contrast them with contemporary films from other producers and describes how its different from the use of the master shot and analytical editing practices that came to be the Hollywood norm. Now i feel like i need to go back and look at them and others again, but my memory is that Griffith uses a lot more editing than his most of contemporaries in this period and that the average quality is very high. And that seems to have been recognized by his contemporaries.

But of course that's one factor to be added to the others previously mentioned such as self promotion, working with tons of people who went on to long and important careers, lots of surviving films that are relatively easily available, the MOMA factor, auteur theory, etc.

greta

[Derek B.]

This has turned into a discussin about Cinecon and other festivals, and that is not where I was headed when this started.

As far as I can see all the festivals that show rarer stuff do what they do in the way of promotion and the results are pretty much the same--attendance isn't appreciably higher in Columbus or Syracuse than it is at Cinecon.

Attendance is much higher at the SFSFF--and one may attribute this to advertising (they have a budget), e-mail outreach, or a local film culture, etc. But my guess is that (for the most part) it is because they are showing well-known titles with still-remembered stars.

Tuning the "pitch" to "You're gonna see something you've never seen before and are unlikely to ever see again" is not the sort of tagline that will resonate with many people--and that is the issue I've been attempting to address.

Audience loyalty at Cinecon, Syracuse, Cinevent at. al. is pretty high. Once people get "hooked" they tend to stay hooked.

I had to miss Cinecon this year for personal reasons so I didn't participate in the earlier topic; I'll add a few notes here. Reading about the various conventions on a.m.s was always interesting but the thing that finally got me to go to my first Cinecon was seeing a couple of films I particularly wanted to see on the schedule (Sorrell and Son and The Canadian, in 2005). I enjoyed it very much and this year was the first I've missed since then and I expect to be back next year.

I have been going to SFSFF since 2000. In discussions waiting in line or between films I sometimes bring up other venues for silents such as The Stanford Theatre, The PFA, and now Niles (including the festival) and Cinecon. Most of the time it appears that the people I talk to aren't particularly interested. And The Stanford does show well known films so it is not simply a question of whether people know the films. On the other hand I talked to someone there this year who told me he had started going to Cinecon after I told him about it at SFSFF a couple of years earlier. Of course this goes to Mike's ten/hundred/thousand comment above.

[Rodney]

As far as I can see all the festivals that show rarer stuff do what they do in the way of promotion and the results are pretty much the same--attendance isn't appreciably higher in Columbus or Syracuse than it is at Cinecon.

Attendance is much higher at the SFSFF--and one may attribute this to advertising (they have a budget), e-mail outreach, or a local film culture, etc. But my guess is that (for the most part) it is because they are showing well-known titles with still-remembered stars.

Tuning the "pitch" to "You're gonna see something you've never seen before and are unlikely to ever see again" is not the sort of tagline that will resonate with many people--and that is the issue I've been attempting to address.

Well, they do show some warhorses, but it's hardly "for the most part." SFSFF gets good (sometimes even sell-out) attendance for really obscure films as well. One can hardly say that a The Wild Rose, Les Deux Timides, Chicago, The Silent Enemy, Lady of the Pavements, or the 1929 Erotikon, are well-known titles with still-remembered stars.

And they do pitch the "something you've never seen before" angle when appropriate: people didn't come to see Her Wild Oat or Bardelys the Magnificent because they were familiar with the films. The draw was that these were newly rediscovered films that hadn't been shown since the 1920s.

In my opinion, the reasons SFSFF attracts a large audience are that a large, hip, clued-in audience feeds itself (it's fun to watch movies with that crowd); the Castro Theater is a near-perfect place to watch these films; some people may come for Douglas Fairbanks and Harold Lloyd and find it so entertaining that they come back for the more obscure fare; and if I may say so myself, SFSFF goes out of its way to get a set of top professional musicians that turn the shows from a rare screening of an obscure film into a serious and often once-in-a-lifetime concert event, where you know that even if the movie proves to be not your cup of tea, you'll still get a great theater organ, piano, or small orchestra concert.

In other words, SFSFF uses much the same methods of attraction that movie palaces used in 1925, and it seems to work for them.

[R Michael Pyle]

Allright, but there must have been some reason why Griffith got the "Father of Film" - title at such an early point in film history. Did he have the better PR, was it all hearsay, one film historian copying another? If pre-home-video availability is the key, how did the pre-selection process come to pass? Why have the Griffith films been kept and shown by archives and film museums all over the world and not others?

(Sorry for jumping in so late... )

Well, i've been reading an interesting book by Joyce Jesionowski called Thinking in Pictures, which dissects Griffith's Biograph films and discusses the way he clarifies time and space in his films though editing and how clear expressive he was able to make his films seem while saying in the 1 reel format. She does contrast them with contemporary films from other producers and describes how its different from the use of the master shot and analytical editing practices that came to be the Hollywood norm. Now i feel like i need to go back and look at them and others again, but my memory is that Griffith uses a lot more editing than his most of contemporaries in this period and that the average quality is very high. And that seems to have been recognized by his contemporaries.

But of course that's one factor to be added to the others previously mentioned such as self promotion, working with tons of people who went on to long and important careers, lots of surviving films that are relatively easily available, the MOMA factor, auteur theory, etc.

greta

I've been going back for the last couple of months watching the Griffith shorts. I'm at about 100 or so right now, and they just never cease to amaze me. A couple of nights ago I saw "Her Terrible Ordeal" (1910) and was sadly disappointed because I've watched so many fantastic shorts from the same year and later, and even earlier for that matter, but this one lacked good opening exposition and had almost zero character development. On the other hand, some I've watched recently told in 15-18 minutes a story that many modern movie makers couldn't tell in less than two and a half hours! The ability to tell an incisive story was one of Griffith's great achievements. His competitors couldn't do it incisively. The fluidity, probably from cutting and editing in a creative way, was his other achievement. Frankly, except for one or two features, I think the total achievement of Griffith exists more in his short films than all the rest. I never tire of learning new things I didn't see the first, second, or third times when I watch films like "A Corner in Wheat" or "The Musketeers of Pig Alley", even things like "An Acadian Maid" or "The Modern Prodigal". If you watch some of the shorts made in 1912 or 13 by Thanhauser, the difference is so immense it's astounding. But enough already.

[R Michael Pyle]

This is simply a marketing comment, perhaps silly, perhaps not. Cinecon has been going on now for a long time. The younger crowd, even film enthusiasts, may not have any idea that the plan is to showcase those films that are not viewed often, or have not been viewed for a long time. Perhaps a tag line should accompany Cinecon, something like Cinecon, the showcase for films too long unseen. Obviously I'm not a marketer because that's a lousy line, but you get my drift. People come and people go, and sometimes ideas fall through the cracks, no matter how well an annual thing seems to go - or not.

[Mike Gebert]

James Card I think claims that Griffith placed a trade ad laying claim to all kinds of technical innovations, most predating him, and that that exalted his reputation at the time and ever since. Of course, you'd only be credible making such claims if you were already immensely respected, and I don't doubt that Griffith's achievements from the Biographs through the enormous commercial success of The Birth of a Nation made him one of the leading figures of the time.

The error comes when we think of him as being clearly above everyone else at the time and in strictly linear ways. When the reality is that different people are always better at different things. Griffith's sense of editing was too choppy and abrupt for him to have achieved the careful, precise mood that Irvin Willat's pictures have. Griffith would never have thought up that coolly clinical overhead shot of the robbery in Tourneur's Alias Jimmy Valentine; it's not how he thought about his characters. DeMille was always stagier but sometimes that meant his scenes were far more sustained and intense than Griffith's quicker-to-move-on scenes were.

Griffith was immensely admired for achievement and artistic success, as say Steven Spielberg is today, but that doesn't mean we judge Scorsese or Lynch or Michael Mann by the degree to which they are or are not Spielberg.

[R Michael Pyle]

The error comes when we think of him as being clearly above everyone else at the time and in strictly linear ways. When the reality is that different people are always better at different things. Griffith's sense of editing was too choppy and abrupt for him to have achieved the careful, precise mood that Irvin Willat's pictures have. Griffith would never have thought up that coolly clinical overhead shot of the robbery in Tourneur's Alias Jimmy Valentine; it's not how he thought about his characters. DeMille was always stagier but sometimes that meant his scenes were far more sustained and intense than Griffith's quicker-to-move-on scenes were.

I look at surviving films of Victor Sjostrom and even a film like "Ingeborn Holm" (1913) is so far in advance of most of Griffith, though not all of it. On the other hand "Terje Vigen" (1917) and "Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru" (1918) definitely equaled Griffith who, by that time, was trying to out epic his Italian rivals. With Stiller's "Herr Arnes pengar" (1919); with Elvey's "The Life Story of David Lloyd George"; with Gance's "J'Accuse" Griffith was suddenly out of his league. Griffith's ability to tell a story well still went on for years, but the quality of his direction didn't improve any, just remained where it had been. Still, for the body of work which does survive from the early period, he's probably as good as it gets at that time.

[Chris Snowden]

Griffith's ability to tell a story well still went on for years, but the quality of his direction didn't improve any, just remained where it had been.

I agree with that, and it's ironic because the slam we always hear against Edwin S. Porter is that his development as a director stalled out by 1910, while Griffith and the rest of that new generation passed him by. But we could argue that only a dozen years later, Griffith, Olcott and the others of that generation had gone into permanent decline themselves. Meanwhile, the next generation (Murnau, Ford, Leni, etc.) was just getting revved up.

I don't think a lot of people will agree with me about Griffith and the Biographs, but here goes: The best of the Griffith Biographs are as good as it gets in American cinema of that time. Of the more obscure Griffith Biographs, there are many that are very good, but also a surprising number that are sloppily-made and badly-acted. The same guy who made A Corner in Wheat and The Girl and Her Trust was also capable of The Sealed Room and Friends.

Overall I really don't see Griffith being head and shoulders above everyone else during those years. The Biographs are generally much better than the Thanhousers, yes, but the Vitagraphs are pretty much just as good and the Edisons aren't far behind.

As for Griffith's reputation in the business: when he was leaving Biograph, he did engage what we would call a publicist, who took out giant ads crediting Griffith with all of Biograph's successes and with every innovation in cinema of the previous decade. You can see one of these in Robert Henderson's D. W. Griffith: The Years at Biograph and elsewhere. The smashing success of The Birth of a Nation a couple of years later cemented the image of Griffith as the master of American cinema.

The amusing thing about the idea of Griffith being such a superstar is that there are some Biographs whose directorship is unknown: we don't know if they were made by Griffith, Frank Powell or Tony Sullivan. If Griffith was so much better than everyone else, shouldn't his films be unmistakably his?

[rollot24]

Perhaps a tag line should accompany Cinecon, something like Cinecon, the showcase for films too long unseen.

I had heard, not too long ago, that some film history classes only showed clips of famous films, as if that were enough.
Make a case to film schools about the rareties you show.

[Christopher Jacobs]

The entire decade of the 1910s were a tremendous period of experimentation in filmmaking styles and cinematic storytelling techniques. I think the reputation of Griffith as "father of cinema" really dates to the unprecedented commercial and artistic and critical success of THE BIRTH OF A NATION. Griffith was not the first to make a feature or even an epic feature, or to use closeups or cross-cutting, but he did tend to do it more consistently than many of his contemporaries in the 1910-1915 period. The still-raging sociopolitical controversy that a mere movie was able to cause, combined with the huge audiences for THE BIRTH and Griffith's close personal connection to all aspects of its production confirmed his reputation as one that other directors would try to emulate (and would quickly surpass, while Griffith kept on doing mainly what he'd been doing). His critical reputation remained high from 1915 through about 1921, the formative period of the studio system we know today, so that is why his greatest works during those years (both artistically and commercially) are a key part of the silent film canon.

As for general editing techniques, Griffith's work is often inconsistent, sometimes within the same films, but what he did that worked best was what other directors started to do more often (whether or not he was responsible for "inventing" one technique or another). On the other hand, Mack Sennett is the one who should probably be credited with even greater understanding of the potential for extremely fast editing. Many of his films or sequences within them are cut just as fast if not faster than today's hip, flashy comic-book action films. Some of the early Fairbanks features have this frenetic Sennett-inspired editing style, but it was Griffith's late 1910s style that became adopted and refined by mainstream filmmakers. The standard continuity style of editing was well established by the mid to late teens and remains the primary style of editing today. It's only been the past 20 years or so, since MTV and now the ease of computer-based editing, that the extreme of Mack Sennett's (or Sergei Eisenstein's) shot lengths of one to six frames has again become common.

The canon of "classic" silent films (to return a bit closer to the original topic) should include the influential, like Griffith's major features and Sennett's best shorts, as well as the merely entertaining, as well as recent rediscoveries that demonstrate that the big names like Griffith or DeMille or Sennett were not the only or even the first to use techniques they've been credited with for decades. Of course it helps get newer and younger fans of silent films when those they're exposed to happen to be all three. It might be worth going over a number of early, lesser-known titles that appear to have direct parallels in some of today's current hits (either in certain techniques or in thematic content) to come up with a revised canon for introducing young moviegoers to silents (letting them acquire enough of a taste and historical perspective before exploring the more "difficult" or obscure titles).

--Christopher Jacobs
http://hpr1.com/film
http://www.und.edu/instruct/cjacobs

[spadeneal]

I agree with that, and it's ironic because the slam we always hear against Edwin S. Porter is that his development as a director stalled out by 1910, while Griffith and the rest of that new generation passed him by. But we could argue that only a dozen years later, Griffith, Olcott and the others of that generation had gone into permanent decline themselves.

I don't think a lot of people will agree with me about Griffith and the Biographs, but here goes: The best of the Griffith Biographs are as good as it gets in American cinema of that time. {...} The amusing thing about the idea of Griffith being such a superstar is that there are some Biographs whose directorship is unknown: we don't know if they were made by Griffith, Frank Powell or Tony Sullivan. If Griffith was so much better than everyone else, shouldn't his films be unmistakably his?

BTW Chris -- love your blog.

It hasn't been too long since it wasn't yet clearly established that Wallace McCutcheon and Wallace "Wally" McCutcheon were two different people, and this still isn't worked out on imdb. Wallace McCutcheon (1853-ca. 1913?) was a major figure in early American cinema and almost as important as Edwin S. Porter. Wally McCutcheon (ca. 1870-1928) proved so bad a director that Griffith was given the job to replace him. Some of the Biograph films made during the transition are credited to either or neither or both. Over the Hills to the Poorhouse is sometimes credited to Griffith, but Kate Bruce -- and she was in it -- accredited it to McCutcheon. The Fight for Freedom appears to be something that McCutcheon started and Griffith finished -- there may be a few instances of that. It is indeed helpful to know that The Adventures of Dollie is Griffith's first directorial effort, as we don't have that information for a lot of filmmakers in this period.

It is still the conventional wisdom that Griffith directed EVERY Biograph short made in 1909. Do you know how many that is? A lot, really an awful lot of subjects. The earliest and first name among directors on my list of 60 who studied under Griffith is that of Mack Sennett. Although his first official directing credit doesn't come until after Frank Powell's debut, All On Account of the Milk (1910), I suspect that Sennett at least co-directed some of the comedy films with Griffith before that; certainly he wrote several of them. Powell is now shown on imdb to have co-directed some subjects with Griffith in 1909.

It's a shame that we don't know more about scenarists at Biograph in this period. Griffith himself was writing them, so was Sennett and even some of the actors -- anyone could contribute a scenario. Gene Gauntier was working at Kalem, but selling Biograph scenarios under the table. They were making 1-2 subjects a week, so the volume of work was incredible. They were making them so fast that I can entirely understand how Griffith might produce work that is not recognizably his, or have any distinctive stamp. But the same would be true of the others -- what would it have looked like if Sennett had tried his hand at directing a melodrama, for example?

There's just still a lot of work to be done in terms of researching the Biographs. Griffith might lose a few directorial credits in the process; probably not very many. At least he wouldn't gain King of the Cannibal Islands (1908), as that was McCutcheon.

spadeneal

spadeneal

[greta de groat]

To follow up on a couple of points

Sennett is another who worked closely with Griffith, and he seems to have realized that was Griffith was doing for drama would work for comedy, and the quick pace and snappy editing feel to me like kind of the mirror image of Griffith films.

I like the Vitagraph films and would appreciate seeing a lot more. But one difference i notice in them is that they seem to make a lot of use of the space in a single camera setup. The way they choreograph a scene within a room, for example. I haven't seen enough of other studios except maybe Thanhouser , Edison, and Gaumont to generalize. I really love it that so many Thanhousers are available now so that we can really look the output of a single company, and i sure wish we could have access to a really big group of Vitagraphs and Kalems--though with Kalem since there were all those units in different parts of the country, i wonder if they had a house style at all.

greta

[Mike Gebert]

One of the most insightful comments about silent film I've ever read was Charles Musser's observation to the effect that, don't assume that early films are trying to become modern films using modern filmmaking language, and just aren't that good at it yet. They have their own goals and ways of getting there.

I think this applies to why I don't think we should see Griffith as the guy in front of a single-file line heading toward modern filmmaking. One, I don't think he was the guy in front necessarily-- more like, he was one of a number of people progressing in different ways. He may have been celebrated and particularly good, but that doesn't mean others were following him exactly. They had their own goals and ways of getting there.

Two, I don't think he was exactly heading our way anyway. As I've sort of noted before, his use of discontinuous cuts (eg., a cut to a closeup which doesn't at all match the preceding longshot) isn't because he was lousy at matching cuts-- it may be because he didn't share our assumption that the two shots were supposed to follow each other as precisely like seconds on the clock, any more than two paragraphs in a novel are assumed to follow on a precise timeline. He had his own goals and ways of getting there, too.

So this is how I'd want to see our view of the teens change, not a single line of progress toward a preordained goal but a multiplicity of ways of using film language in the act of being invented simultaneously. That's what Musser's comment (which, admittedly, was meant to apply more to the preceding decade) means to me.

[drednm]

Just because Griffith basically invented modern film, that doesn't mean he speaks in a modern sensibility about film.

[Mike Gebert]

But what does that mean, to have invented modern film?

What about his films and no one else's at the time is our inheritance? That's the question I'm not sure anyone can answer today.

[drednm]

No you're probably right.... I was just defending Griffith's lack of continuity before that even became something his audiences would have been aware of....

[Damfino]

I'm also completely fascinated by Griffith's run of Biograph shorts, and I agree that other than a few features, his best work is in the Biographs. (I'm very sad that more of them haven't been released, but we silents-lovers are used to this....)

It's hard to describe just why they stand out so much, it's a combination of the visual poetry, the acting, the instinctive cutting, the concision, and the sheer primal/emotional nature of many of them (or, if you will, the melodrama). And, in many cases, the quaintness. Some of us may also have bonded to the Biograph "house style" early on....
Of course they're not all fantastic - there are some great ones, many good ones, and lots of average "sausages", as Griffith called them - the point is, the average is kept pretty high, considering he was making 2 films per week!
Once we get to the features, the bipolar nature of Griffith's filmmaking becomes more apparent - as others have mentioned, he can dive from brilliant to excruciatingly bad, with little in-between, and his 'average' seems to stall a while, then keeps getting lower. But it's not really fair to judge a director by his junk...almost all the great directors have some dire films.

Others have rightly pointed out, Oh, but here all these other films from 1913-15 that are just as good, or better in different ways, so why the constant worship for Griffith?
I have a couple thoughts -
By 1913, OF COURSE there are lots of other good, groundbreaking directors - those prewar years saw an explosion of creativity in films around the world. But if you're looking just a little earlier, at 1909-1910, it seems to me Griffith starts looking much more advanced in what he was doing. I think not many of us can name five great dramatic shorts of 1910....I could be mistaken, though!

But then the next issue is the lack of context - many of you Nitratevillians will be exceptions, but most of us have seen very few dramatic shorts from those years, and practically nothing has been released - some Edisons, a remarkable number of Thanhousers, some dribs & drabs of others.....and this bucketload of Biographs.
So when I see an early Griffith and say Wow, that was something, I'm terribly aware of the void I'm seeing him in, the 80-90% that's missing from those years. I don't know what he was watching, or what audiences could compare him to.....not just American films, but presumably theaters in the US in those years were full of French shorts too, France being one of the leading film-exporting countries before the war. The recent Gaumont set is just a tiny step in our education.

I have a feeling that talk of a silent "canon" is decades too early - it's not just that 80% of these films are ashes - or that too much of the surviving proportion is, basically, junk - but with almost all surviving silents entombed alive in various archives - and even the hardcore silents fans on this board having seen only a small fraction of what's available - when almost yearly new, unknown surprises pop up in this little-mapped corner of cinema - it's no wonder that the Big Names of fifty years ago are still Names today, some people at least know who they are. A hundred years after Griffith started making films, it's still too soon to tell what the "canon" could be.

[Bob Birchard]

Griffith's sense of editing was too choppy and abrupt for him to have achieved the careful, precise mood that Irvin Willat's pictures have. Griffith would never have thought up that coolly clinical overhead shot of the robbery in Tourneur's Alias Jimmy Valentine; it's not how he thought about his characters. DeMille was always stagier but sometimes that meant his scenes were far more sustained and intense than Griffith's quicker-to-move-on scenes were.

There is no question that Griffith was recognized very early on among other industry professionals. There is a 1909 letter from Francis Boggs to William Selig in which Boggs says that he feels that visually his films are a strong as Griffith's, but that he intends to concentrate on the acting in his films because he feels that Griffith is far ahead of him in this regard.

It is instructive to listen to what other directors of the time said about Griffith. De Mille said: "He taught us how to photograph thought." Irvin Willat admired Griffith's scenes, but thought Griffith's pictures were a mess from a technical perspective. Always the comments seem directed toward a recognition of Griffith's "way with actors."

Later I think they also admired Griffith's making pictures on a grand scale and adding a sense of prestige to what was considered a pretty lowly art form at the time.

Griffith was certainly capable of great technical execution. The shooting of the Musketeer of the Slums by the Friendless One is a tour de force in editing. The trial of The Boy uses cinematic shorthand in a way that was virtually unique at the time. But, as others have pointed out, this is not what Griffith was interested in.

[precode]

Uh-oh. Evil Bob's been getting into the mushrooms again.

As far as I can see all the festivals that show rarer stuff do what they do in the way of promotion and the results are pretty much the same--attendance isn't appreciably higher in Columbus or Syracuse than it is at Cinecon.

Um, no. Attendance IS much higher at those two. I know because 1) I go to them every year and 2) I can count.

Attendance is much higher at the SFSFF--and one may attribute this to advertising (they have a budget), e-mail outreach, or a local film culture, etc. But my guess is that (for the most part) it is because they are showing well-known titles with still-remembered stars.

This has already been debunked above.

Tuning the "pitch" to "You're gonna see something you've never seen before and are unlikely to ever see again" is not the sort of tagline that will resonate with many people--and that is the issue I've been attempting to address.

Permit me to disagree. If you really think "Hey, come see CASABLANCA for the 100th time!" is gonna fill hotel rooms and airplane seats, I have some land in Arkansas I'd like to talk to you about.

Michael criticizes the promotion for Cinecon (although he seems uninclined to do anything about it but to complain),

Right, it's that other Michael who's constantly haranguing you for fliers for Syracuse, Columbus and San Francisco, which more often than not I don't get. And when you did give me some for SF this year, it was roughly 200--hardly adequate for a festival that draws thousands of people. And I've long given up hollering about updating the website, getting out the registration form earlier, creating an e-mail newsletter, publicity in general and Lord knows what else because everyone else complains as well, but no action is ever taken.

but setting that aside, Michael talked the Cinematheque into doing a series of early Columbia talkies a few years ago--rare pre-code stuff--and the attendance was absolutely dismal. In fact that series is one of the reasons why the Cinematheque has generally avoided older films in its regular programming (though, of course, there are occasional exceptions).

Great story. One small problem. It's total crap. That festival played the Nuart, not the Cinematheque, and while it broke no records, it was deemed successful enough to play other theatres around the country (including the Film Forum, Castro, Brattle and Music Box), despite the horrendous shipping costs for 15 prints.

Bottom line: it really doesn't matter WHAT films Cinecon programs if not enough people know about the show in the first place. Until this is properly addressed, nothing else much matters.

Mike S.

[Penfold]

I know Pordenone is a special case for many reasons, not least of which is funding via regional funding support, and sponsorship. However, in the 7/8 years I've been going, they have consistently sought out the younger element; via the Collegium, which may not be reproduceable without the funding, but also via elements like a presence on Facebook. Have a look at their facebook page, and go through the 441 'friends' of the Giornate. What figure would you put as the average age....about thirty ??? Yes, some may not attend; but many do; and all have obviously heard of the Giornate, so you can add to those attending a chunk wanting to, saving up.....while they do their degrees/MA's...
Do any of the US Cinephile events use Facebook as a marketing tool ?? Plug into pre-existing groups of younger cinephiles-in-waiting congregated around the Selznick School, or those Uni's with big Film History reputations?? Or Film Archivists organisations?? Facebook is free...

[DShepFilm]

Hey, Bob and Michael, it's time to let you know that I for one (and am sure I can speak for many in this matter) think you're both terrific, and I am deeply grateful for the incredible amount of volunteer work you and others do to organize and present Cinecon. I managed to attend for two days this year and thought it was great even if the masterpiece quotient on the films shown was not too high -- the experience is about so much more than that, and lots of masterpieces are available to all of us on DVD.

I do lots of volunteer work where I live, including an annual silent film festival sponsored by our Shasta County Arts Council (it even nets a modest annual profit for them). My compensation, of course, is the pleasure of bringing films with good live music to audiences that would never know about them otherwise (although we do get a few silent film groupies who come from Oregon, San Francisco and even Idaho).

Anyway, the point is that these events are lots of work, but they are brought into the world to bring pleasure; not recrimination, whining or dispute. If those unfortunate side effects became MY "reward" for huge and otherwise uncompensated efforts, I'd think it time to quit, or in your case, at least perhaps to scale back to the moveable feast of ancient Cinecons.

I used to have a Russian friend who knew four words of English: "Don't worry -- be happy!" Not bad advice ( especially if it's all you can say). We only go 'round once. My advice is that you do Cinecon in a way that brings gratification, or not at all.

David Shepard

[drednm]

OK so here's a question..... we have a film festival here in Santa Fe... but how do I go about starting a silent film event???

Any ideas??

[precode]

Do any of the US Cinephile events use Facebook as a marketing tool ?? Facebook is free...

Syracuse, Columbus and San Francisco all have FaceBook pages, and I believe Slapsticon has one in the works. Cinecon does not. It has been suggested. More than once.

Mike S.

[precode]

Anyway, the point is that these events are lots of work, but they are brought into the world to bring pleasure; not recrimination, whining or dispute. If those unfortunate side effects became MY "reward" for huge and otherwise uncompensated efforts, I'd think it time to quit, or in your case, at least perhaps to scale back to the moveable feast of ancient Cinecons.

I used to have a Russian friend who knew four words of English: "Don't worry -- be happy!" Not bad advice ( especially if it's all you can say). We only go 'round once. My advice is that you do Cinecon in a way that brings gratification, or not at all.

David Shepard

David, you're 100% right. But when factually inaccurate (that's the polite term) statements about Cinecon in general and me in particular get posted here, I have to respond. As numerous politicians have learned to their sorrow, lies that go unchallenged become accepted as truth.

Mike S.

[Rodney]

OK so here's a question..... we have a film festival here in Santa Fe... but how do I go about starting a silent film event???

Any ideas??

Starting a silent film festival was discussed several years back over at alt.movies.silent, and you could Google under "Groups" to see if you can find that thread.

Many film festivals have a silent film element -- does the Santa Fe Film Festival do any revivals? The Telluride Film Festival, for instance, always revives five or six (usually obscure) older films. Some are part of a series recommended by a festival guest, and one or two are silent. The Denver International Film Festival is less reliable, but they've done a number of silent movies over the years. I've seen silents advertised also at San Francisco and Toronto, and certainly they show up at other festivals. So you could try to interest the Santa Fe festival. I'd approach them with a proposed title, especially if you can tell them why it's interesting, where a print is available, and include a few glowing reviews from recent presentations.

The advantage to having an existing festival involved is that they already know how to do film screenings -- ticket sales, projection equipment, projectionists, theaters, fund-raising, getting a crowd to show up, etc. The disadvantage is that if they aren't interested in silent film, there's not a lot you can do, since it's not your event.

The advantage to starting a new festival is that you can do whatever you like and show films you want to see. The disadvantage is that you're taking a big risk, usually attempting something at which you don't have a lot of experience, and it could be an expensive failure for any number of reasons. If you'd like to start small, sometimes public libraries have a film and/or concert series that already has a budget, and you could get involved as a volunteer. Community arts centers are also sometimes interested in programs and concerts, so locate a local musicians to work with you. There, you may need to stick with 16mm and DVD projection, of course.

I started doing some silent film shows twice a year at the Louisville Arts Center (seats about 80 people), and a few years back when Money magazine rated Louisville the top most livable small town in the U.S., the capsule review mentioned the screenings of silent films as a cultural asset. The series has been popular, and it's future has never been in any doubt.

And in Santa Fe you've got a great theater, the Lensic. Don't they do silent films from time to time?

[drednm]

The current festival, as far as I know, shows only new stuff and a lot of Southwest and Indian-centric stuff. The Lensic manager, whose name I can't think of, didn't seem interested when I contacted him although that theater would be a great venue.

The Screen, part of the dying or dead College of Santa Fe, probably has shown silents films occasionally. So much for Greer Garson's millions. When I tried to make contact with The Screen when Beyond the Rocks was touring, I got the usual zero response.

It seems that one of the local theaters has shown a silent film over the last few years but it was always the same film: Steamboat Bill, Jr.

[Rodney]

The current festival, as far as I know, shows only new stuff and a lot of Southwest and Indian-centric stuff. The Lensic manager, whose name I can't think of, didn't seem interested when I contacted him although that theater would be a great venue.

The Screen, part of the dying or dead College of Santa Fe, probably has shown silents films occasionally. So much for Greer Garson's millions. When I tried to make contact with The Screen when Beyond the Rocks was touring, I got the usual zero response.

It seems that one of the local theaters has shown a silent film over the last few years but it was always the same film: Steamboat Bill, Jr.

Steamboat Bill Jr. has a lot of advantages -- it's public domain, it's a great film and a huge crowd-pleaser, and it may be that somebody at the theater owns a print.

And there are some quite good "Indian-centric" and "Southwestern interest" silent films, so if that's what they're interested in, it would be a great place to start. Both Redskin and The Silent Enemy are available in nice 35mm prints. And even though Beau Geste and Son of the Sheik are set in Algiers, they were both filmed at White Sands.