After spending a decade in the exploitation trenches with grindhouse compatriots Roger Corman and Monte Hellman, Nicholsonmade a sudden jump to stardom playing washed-up ACLU lawyer George Hanson in Easy Rider at the age of 32. The role set the pattern for the next glorious decade: with an Old Hollywood sense of star power and a scruffy, definitely R-rated attitude, Nicholson straddled generations.

Five Easy Pieces, 1970.

The hippies saw a genteel but like-minded rebel; their parents found a rough-edged, neurotic link to earlier Method luminaries like Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. Nicholson’s work with some of the foremost New Hollywood directors (Bob Rafelson, Roman Polanski, Hal Ashby) speaks for itself and stands capably for the strengths of the era. Nicholson and the films he made were ferociously adult — angry, righteous, ultimately mellowing out. Our sampling of Nicholson’s ’70s best— Five Easy Pieces, The Fortune, The King of Marvin Gardens, Chinatown, and  The Passenger— documents a radiant personality breaking and re-making the rules of acting.

The King of Marvin Gardens, 1972.

Chinatown, 1974.

]]> http://blog.eastmanhouse.org/2012/01/31/you-dont-know-jack-jack-nicholson-in-the-70s/feed/ 0 http://blog.eastmanhouse.org/2011/12/14/one-last-look-40s-to-60s-film-restoration/ http://blog.eastmanhouse.org/2011/12/14/one-last-look-40s-to-60s-film-restoration/#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:58:14 +0000 jared case http://blog.eastmanhouse.org/?p=6046 In this last of the blogs focusing on the films that are being broadcast on Turner Classic Movies ‘Tribute to George Eastman House’ (all day today!), I’m highlighting the films made in the middle of the Twentieth Century. George Eastman House’s collections are packed with great silent films, and films from the early studio era, but the selection is broader than that. These last four films hint at the important work from the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s that still needs preservation.

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE (1942) is one of only six films directed by writer Albert Lewin. Loosely based on the life of Gaugin, it follows George Sanders as he deteriorates from family man to self-obsessed painter hiding out in the tropics. Our material is notable for its sepiatone footage, similar to the ‘Kansas’ scenes that bookend THE WIZARD OF OZ. This type of toning imitated the look of silent films and was used for hundreds of projects from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, but most of the surviving prints no longer have the tone, but are instead black-and-white reproductions. There is also a scene using Cinecolor, a short-lived two-color process. The restoration was done in 1993 with the assistance of Crystal Pictures, Inc.

PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (1951)

PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (1951) is another of the 6 films directed by Lewin, along with the well-known PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY (1945). One of our highest-profile restorations in recent years, this Technicolor marvel weaves together the legends of Pandora’s Box and The Flying Dutchman into a tragic 20^th-Century romance starring James Mason and Ava Gardner. Especially important to the film, and essential that we get right, is the blue of the sea, often reflected in Gardner’s wardrobe, beckoning the two lovers into each other’s arms. This restoration was completed in 2009 with the help of The Film Foundation.

FEAR AND DESIRE (1953)

FEAR AND DESIRE (1953) was Stanley Kubrick’s first feature film, after he had worked as a photographer for Look Magazine in New York City and directed two documentary shorts for RKO. A low-budget, independent production, he cast New York actors and took them to the California hillsides to create an allegorical war drama that starred, among others, Paul Mazursky, who went on to direct such films as BOB& CAROL & TED & ALICE (1969), HARRY AND TONTO (1974) and DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS (1986). Legend has it that Kubrick was embarrassed by the film and sought out copies of it to suppress the title and remove it from his legacy. George Eastman House received their print from the original American distribution company and preserved the film in 1989.

The last film being shown on TCM is also the latest film in the tribute. In 1964, Philip Kaufman, who went on to write three Indiana Jones movies and direct such films as INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978), THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1988), RISING SUN (1993) and THE RIGHT STUFF (1983) – a personal favorite – started his career with the impressionistic feature GOLDSTEIN, which dreamily follows the separate adventures of a pregnant woman and an old man in Chicago. This avant-garde film was preserved from original material donated to George Eastman House by the director himself, one of several artists that entrust us with their life’s work. The preservation was finished just this year and has not been seen in theaters.

I want to thank you for taking the time to read my impressions of the salute and for watching the films on TCM (All day today!). I have the honor of appearing with Robert Osborne, starting at 8pm tonight to discuss four of our featured films: FEAR AND DESIRE, HUCKLEBERRY FINN, PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, and ROARING RAILS. I hope that everyone reading this enjoys the salute as much as we at George Eastman House have enjoyed bringing it to you.

Happy Holidays!

PAYMENT DEFERRED (1932)

PAYMENT DEFERRED (1932) is one of my personal favorites in the TCM lineup. I consider it a proto-noir, in that the protagonist (the fabulous Charles Laughton) experiences the same type of dilemma, decision and destruction that characters such as Walter Neff of DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) and Christopher Cross of SCARLET STREET (1945) endured in the golden age of noir. The plot follows Laughton, a bank clerk, as he struggles to keep his family financially afloat. He has news about an impending shift in the money markets but has no capital to take advantage of it. A long-lost nephew (an early appearance by Ray Milland) shows up on his doorstep but has no interest in Laughton’s proposal. Before Milland leaves, Laughton plans and executes a cold-blooded murder, stealing Milland’s money and burying him in the back yard. Laughton makes a killing on his investment, but is haunted by the body in the garden. It has little of the stylistic effects that are the hallmarks of the noir look, but the themes are the same and Laughton’s performance is grand. Like many of the MGM films we have here, the originals came to us early in our professional life. A nitrate picture negative and a nitrate track negative were received in 1967 and our print was taken directly from these in the 1970s, as was a new Fine Grain Master. Airs at 6:15 pm.

In 2007 Fox produced the mammoth and impressive “Ford at Fox” DVD Box Set, boasting 24 of the director’s films in one beautiful package. One of the films in the set, THE WORLD MOVES ON (1934), came directly from our material. We received a nitrate positive from Fox in 1972 and performed our own preservation in 1989, creating new pic and track negs and a new print. For the new preservation, Fox decided to use the old track neg, but went back to the nitrate to create a new pic neg and, with those elements, a new print. The story starts in 1825 New Orleans and follows the lives and loves of the Girard family over several generations, through the first World War and the stock market collapse to the present day. The cast is led by Madeleine Carroll, Franchot Tone and Reginald Denny. Airs at 2:45 am.

The shortest film featured is a 1937 documentary entitled THE SPANISH EARTH and directed by Joris Ivens, a well-known Dutch director that was deeply influenced by Russian greats Eisenstein and Pudovkin. The company that sponsored this film, Contemporary Historians, was formed by group of American writers and intellectuals, including Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker and Archibald MacLeish. The film follows loyalist forces and the land-working people of Spain as they struggle to survive the onslaught of Franco’s army, and as released was narrated by Ernest Hemingway. Our print was a pre-release positive that still retained the narration by a 21-year-old Orson Welles. We got our original material, a nitrate positive print, back in 1958, and performed a standard preservation, creating new pic and track negs and a new print in 1985. Airs at 9:00 am

We’ve covered nearly 20 years of film history, from an early feature released in 1918 to a documentary released solidly within the sound era. The last four films will take us all the way into the mid-‘60s, rounding out a fascinating slate of preserved wonders.

THE SILENTS

The first film playing in the salute to George Eastman House is the 1989 restoration of the 1918 version of THE BLUE BIRD. The film was based on the play L’Oiseau Bleu by Maurice Maeterlinck and produced by Famous Players-Lasky, which later became the modern Paramount Pictures. It was one of the American films of French director Maurice Tourneur, whose career shifted back to France at the end of the silent period. Tourneur is likely best known as the director of the Mary Pickford films POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL (1917) and PRIDE OF THE CLAN (1917), the first feature-length adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1920), as well as producing Jacques Tourneur, the director of OUT OF THE PAST (1947) and CAT PEOPLE (1942). The preservation began with a 35mm nitrate positive loaded with beautiful color tints that add to the fantastical feel of the film. We printed new negatives and made sure that the color remained in the new prints that were reconstructed from multiple sources. The results are gorgeous, and the score by Mont Alto Orchestra complements the images. This will be a TCM premiere, but if you like it, you can buy this version on DVD from Kino. Airs at 6:15 a.m.  

HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1920)

 William Desmond Taylor’s HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1920) was the first adaptation of Mark Twain’s seminal American classic, and the last in a loose trilogy of Twain films directed by Taylor. Taylor may be best-known now for his notorious murder and the careers it ruined, but he was quite a prolific director in his own right. Much was made of the 2009 premiere of this film at GEH, and it has shown in San Francisco, Chicago and Pittsburgh since then. Again, we worked from a tinted nitrate positive, but this print had Danish intertitles (the words on the screen in between the action), which made it difficult to understand. We asked one of our Selznick graduates, Ulrich Ruedel, to do a rough translation of the intertitles, then Anthony L’Abbate, our Preservation Officer, took these translations and adjusted the language to that of the Twenties, and used Twain’s original text for much of the dialogue. In order to re-construct the titles, Anthony used the 1920 version of DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE as a template for typeface, background and spacing. One of the best uses of tinting in the film is the scene in which Huck, attempting to steal some butter, hides it under his hat. Seated near a fireplace, Huck and the butter both heat up, the butter dripping through his hair and down his face. All of these shots of Huck are tinted red, visually supporting the heat and nerves that he is experiencing. A brand-new score by Mont Alto Orchestra was commissioned for this screening.  Airs at 9:15 p.m.

ROARING RAILS (1924) is another recent restoration similar to HUCKLEBERRY FINN. A tinted nitrate was the basis of the preservation, but it had Dutch subtitles. We asked another Selznick graduate, Elisa Mutsaers, to do a rough Dutch-to-English translation, and Anthony worked his magic again, utilizing resources from our Paper, Poster and Stills Collection to re-create the PDC (Producers Distributing Corporation) logo for the new intertitles. ROARING RAILS is what Variety would call a “meller,” industry for “melodrama.” In a very large nutshell, “Big Bill” Benson is a World War I veteran who adopts a French war orphan and struggles through poverty upon losing his job as a train engineer. Moving West, he finds another job, but his son is blinded in a sabotage attempt. Not having any money, he takes the blame for a murder he didn’t commit to save a rich man’s son who has promised to pay for the operation his son needs. “Big Bill” is played by Harry Carey, a veteran of over 200 films, many of them Westerns, 29 with John Ford. He is also the father of Harry Carey, Jr., himself a veteran of 150 films. World-renowned accompanist Dr. Philip Carli, a Rochester resident and frequent Dryden Theatre collaborator, recorded an all-new score for this film on the Moller organ at the Capitol Theatre in Rome, NY. Airs at 1:15 a.m. 

A PAGE OF MADNESS (1926)

A PAGE OF MADNESS (KURUTTA IPPEIJI, 1926) is the only foreign film in the tribute. The story of a man who takes a job at an insane asylum to be near his wife, who is a patient, and how their daughter’s engagement affects the family, is told with no dialogue, only images and a percussive score that drives the action as well as underlines the cacophony of confusion that threatens to tear the woman apart. The film’s director Teinosuke Kinugasa is not as well-known in this country as his contemporaries Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, but directed over 100 features in his native Japan, including JUJIRO (CROSSROADS, 1928), JOYU (THE ACTRESS, 1947) and JIGOKUMON (GATE OF HELL, 1954), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. This film was originally preserved in the 1970s from an acetate 35mm positive, and then revisited in 2001 with a re-recorded score.  Airs at 3 p.m.

These are just some of the films that will be broadcast during the tribute, and, hopefully, some you’ll be looking out for. I’ll tackle the changeover period between silent and sound films in my next piece. But as a special behind-the-scenes bonus, I’ll leave you with this: all the films mentioned in this article are held by George Eastman House!

It is fairly simple and straightforward to find and select stills when requested by a film title or by a person’s name.  That is how the stills in the collection are physically organized in the vault; it is also how stills are most frequently requested. But what about requests for stills that show certain subjects, such as World War I airplanes, stars with their pets, Technicolor cameras on set, or…

Jewelry?

This was the task at hand when we received a request for stills of stars wearing beautiful jewelry that could be used in conjunction with the upcoming Carole Tanenbaum Vintage Collection Jewelry Trunk Show and Sale.

In this case, the catalog record unfortunately does little in trying to get at stills that show lovely pieces of jewelry on lovely actresses.  The catalog record for a still typically captures the title of the film and the actors and actresses shown in the still, but doesn’t go to the deeper level of what objects happen to be in the still, or how well accessorized the actresses are. This is where creative thinking, some research, and of course knowledge of the stills collection come into play.

A little research into jewelry designers such as Joseff of Hollywood, whose company designed jewelry for films for over 30 years, was the first step that led us to several titles as likely sources of stills featuring outstanding jewelry:  Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Humoresque, Kismet, Singin’ in the Rain, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Cleopatra were just a few.  Our search quickly led us to the Warner Bros. Keybook Stills Collection for an abundance of stills of Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942) and Joan Crawford in Humoresque (1946), both very well appointed in 1940’s jewelry.

Images of even more stunning jewelry creations, worn by Grace Kelly and Jessie Royce Landis in To Catch a Thief (1955) and by Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963), were found in the Core Publicity Stills Collection.

Film stills of this era were primarily shot and printed in black and white (even the stills shot for color films).  So for color images, we consulted a collection of gorgeous color transparencies from the 1950’s featuring such stars as Mitzi Gaynor in a publicity portrait for There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954) and Dorothy Dandridge in a publicity portrait for Island in the Sun (1957).

It never fails to surprise me how many different ways there are to access the stills collection, and for so many different and unexpected purposes.  Requests like these keep an already fascinating job even more fascinating!

My wife hates it when I talk in terms of fractions, but it’s been more than one-quarter of my life spent here at Eastman House, and the thing that attracted me, inspired me and drives me to this day is the wonderful film preservation program that we all play a daily part in.

George Eastman House has collected close to 28,000 titles in the last 60 years, and has been preserving them on film for almost as long, keeping them in vaults that will make sure they are accessible to future generations for hundreds of years to come.

Robert Osborne with Eastman House's Jared Case on the TCM set, taping the Salute to George Eastman House, airing Dec. 14.

In my current role as Head of Collection Information and Access, I get to talk to people about these films, whether it’s for exhibition at our own Dryden Theatre, or researchers who come to Rochester to view films from the collection, or institutions around the world that borrow the prints and play them at their own venues. So, when I received the opportunity to talk about some of these films with a national audience, I jumped at the chance.

Turner Classic Movies chose George Eastman House to be the focus of a 24-hour salute, providing airtime for films that have been conserved, preserved, restored, and reconstructed by the Motion Picture Department. The highlight of this salute to George Eastman House will be the introductions provided by longtime TCM host Robert Osborne and, as a representative of the museum, myself. I visited the studio on Friday, Nov. 11, to tape the segments for broadcast.

The four movies highlighted with introductions are Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire (1953), Technicolor gem Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), early action film Roaring Rails (1924), and the oldest-existing film version of Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn (1920).

I did a lot of research and preparation in advance of the trip. I made sure I knew about not only the films themselves, but also the preservations that George Eastman House provided for them – the history, the technical aspects, the materials used. I tried to anticipate any question about the films that might be asked, and even prepared short papers to structure the information in my mind.

"Huckleberry Finn" (1920)

But I needn’t have worried. Mr. Osborne and the entire crew at Turner Classic Movies are so kind, professional, and generous that they made the entire experience a joy. We sat down for an hour and a half and had casual (but informative!) conversations about the films, the George Eastman House, and preservation in general. The set looked gorgeous, staged for the holiday season, and I had a great time, from the first minute to the last.

As the tribute day approaches, I will blog again, in more detail about the salute, as to what will be on, and when to watch. But the date to remember is one month from today — Wednesday, December 14 — starting at 6:15 a.m. on Turner Classic Movies.

When Taylor passed away in March 2011, so passed one of the last bona fide queens of a bygone era. While her stunning looks and tabloid-ready personal life often eclipsed her talent in the public’s eye, her staggering career lasted nearly 70 years, encompassing triumphs on stage, screen, and television. Although Taylor had been acting for several years, her big break came at age 12 as plucky jockey Velvet Brown in National Velvet. Unlike other child stars of her day, her appeal came not from her girlishness, but from her preternatural assuredness and dark beauty, traits that helped her ease into adult roles after a string of mostly forgettable contract pictures.

Taylor with Mickey Rooney in NATIONAL VELVET (1945).

She came into her own as an adult star — at age 17 — with the first of three iconic collaborations with lifelong friend Montgomery Clift, A Place In The Sun. As the intoxicating socialite who tempts working-class Clift away from his pregnant girlfriend, Taylor earned widespread acclaim and cemented her reputation as a serious actress.

It wasn’t until 1956, however, that Taylor truly entered the Hollywood stratosphere, earning four Academy Award® nominations in a row for iconic performances in films like Raintree County, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, and her first Oscar® triumph, Butterfield 8. Not classically trained, it was her charisma, her presence, and her tough charm that would come to define her acting style and persona. Taylor earned her well-earned second Academy Award® for Best Actress® for her role in the 1966 film Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

As ‘Maggie the Cat’ in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, (1958)

Taylor spent the second half of her career using her celebrity for humanitarian efforts. Before AIDS was widely acknowledged, she was at the forefront of HIV/AIDS activism, and eventually raised $270 million for the cause that she described as “her life.” Fittingly for a dual citizen of Britain and the United States, Elizabeth Taylor was royalty in all the right ways: charming, beautiful, generous, and talented.

Please join us at the Dryden Theatre as we pay homage to one of Hollywood’s finest stars. The series begins Thursday with National Velvet. The roster also features A Place in the Sun, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Raintree County, Giant, Little Women, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Thursday, Nov. 3, 8 p.m.
National Velvet
(Clarence Brown, US 1945, 125 min.)

Thursday, Nov. 17, 8 p.m.
A Place in the Sun
(George Stevens, US 1951, 122 min.)

Thursday, Dec. 1, 8 p.m.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(Richard Brooks, US 1958, 108 min., 16mm)

Thursday, Dec. 8, 7 p.m.
Raintree County
(Edward Dmytryk, US 1957, 187 min., w/ intermission)

Thursday, Dec. 15, 7 p.m.
Giant
(George Stevens, US 1956, 197 min.)

Thursday, Dec. 22, 8 p.m.
Little Women
(Mervyn LeRoy, US 1949, 121 min.)

Thursday, Dec. 29, 8 p.m.
Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?
(Mike Nichols, US 1966, 131 min.)

One of my most recent projects involves The White Shadow (1924), a 6-reel British feature film directed by Graham Cutts that includes some of the earliest on-screen work by Alfred Hitchcock. The film was recovered as part of an international collaboration between the New Zealand Film Archive and the five major nitrate-holding U.S. archives – George Eastman House, The Museum of Modern Art, The Library of Congress, the Academy Film Archive and the UCLA Film and Television Archive – to return, preserve and make available U.S.-produced films that no longer exist in US archives. The project was initiated and is coordinated by the National Film Preservation Foundation, a grant-giving organization which has provided funding to institutions in all 50 states and Puerto Rico to preserve rare films in their collections.

 The condition of the print (seen above) was shrunken, brittle and showing signs of advanced decomposition.

Through the project we’ve identified and repatriated films such as:

• Maytime (with an early performance by “It Girl” Clara Bow)
• Won in a Cupboard (the earliest known film directed by comedienne Mabel Norman)
• The Sergeant (the first known fictional film shot in Yosemite)
• Upstream (directed by John Ford)
• The Love Charm (a previously unknown early Technicolor short) and
• Pathe News: Virginian Types (featuring stencil-colored images of the residents of Old Rag Mountain, soon after it was announced that they would be evicted from their land to make way for the creation of Shenandoah National Park, and 10 years before being photographed by Arthur Rothstein as the forced-relocation was finally taking place.)

These two last films will become part of the George Eastman House nitrate collection and be preserved with funding from the NFPF. Click here to see videos of some of the newly-preserved films and a partial list of titles returning to the U.S.

So how did THE WHITE SHADOW, a British production, end up becoming part of this U.S.-film focused project? One of the goals of the project has been to inspect and identify when possible all of the items in the American section of the archive’s international nitrate collection. Given that intertitles in the film bear the name of Selznick (an American distribution company who also apparently handled the international distribution) and that the film stars Betty Compson, a famous American actress, the film had been classified (not unreasonably) as likely being an American production. Thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the NFPF was able to provide the man-power to inspect films in more detail and provide concrete identifications where possible.

Missing its opening credits (not unusual with films of this year), The White Shadow was originally inventoried as “Twin Sisters” (a placeholder title taken from the cans the films arrived in), I was able to identify the first two reels of the film based on the distributor, cast – the film stars not only Compson, but also British actor Clive Brook – information gleaned from the film stock itself (such as the date of the stock’s production that is printed on the film’s edges), and piecing together the story, then using internet resources and the archive’s reference library to confirm the film’s true identity. A week later I inspected a reel titled only “Unidentified American Drama,” and by matching the cast, sets and storyline, identified it as the title’s third reel.

With support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Academy Film Archive, the film has been preserved by the New Zealand Film Archive and Park Road Post-Production in Wellington. Given the condition of the print – shrunken, brittle and showing signs of advanced decomposition – the work proved difficult. Now printed on 35mm polyester film stock, new prints and duplicate negatives will be housed at the Academy Film Archive and the NZFA. The BFI will also receive a print to supplement their on-going Hitchcock preservation project. The preserved film now includes new opening credits and a coda that summarizes the missing reels, taken from a synopsis filed with the Library of Congress as part of the title’s copyright entry.

The $64,000 question is of course where are those three missing reels? There are a number of possibilities: We are 99.9% certain that the reels are not in the NZFA’s nitrate vault – though there are other as-yet unidentified reels from the same depositor in the collection, none match The White Shadow. The other three reels could have been lost or misplaced before the collector (New Zealand projectionist Jack Murtagh) acquired the film, the reels – printed on nitrate stock, which is particularly prone to decomposing when stored in warm or humid conditions – could have broken down sometime in the last 88 years, or perhaps they are, right now, sitting in another collector’s attic or basement, waiting to be discovered and reunited with the reels know to currently exist – it’s impossible to know.

The now-familiar gasp from the audience as the existing footage suddenly ends at what is possibly the film’s most dramatic scene never fails to drive home the need for conserving and preserving what titles we do have – be it ones with a famous name attached (which does make that constant problem of funding a bit easier to overcome), or equally culturally significant but long-forgotten documentaries or works by small production companies orphaned after the studio closed – and re-energizes my drive to keep looking for cinema’s lost history.

As I said, I have (what is for me) the best job in the world – after all, who knows what else is out there, just waiting to return to the screen?

That was the feeling in the air at George Eastman House on Saturday, July 16, as National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) Chairman Rocco Landesman and Congresswoman Louise Slaughter toured Eastman House.

NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman, left, and George Eastman House’s Tony Bannon discuss the three-strip Technicolor process in the camera gallery at Eastman House.

Hosted by Tony Bannon, the museum’s Ron and Donna Fielding Director, the guests were shown the Speed Graphic camera that shot the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima, displayed alongside the image, as well as a NASA Lunar Orbiter, Lumiere Cinematographe, and a three-strip Technicolor camera that had been used on studio lots for many celebrated MGM films.

And this was all before Landesman and Congresswoman Slaughter took their seats in the Dryden Theatre to experience films from the Eastman House motion picture archive, restored with the support from the NEA. The selected titles included the oldest film version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910), an early sound film from Theodore Case (1925), screen tests from Gone With the Wind (1939), and a documentary directed by Paul Morrissey (1965).

Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, co-chair of the Congressional Arts Caucus, tells why it’s important to support the arts in Rochester and nationally.

Slaughter, co-chair of the Congressional Arts Caucus, is a longtime supporter of the arts as well as Eastman House, continuing to connect Rochester to the leadership of the arts in Washington, D.C. It for this tireless work the museum honored her with the inaugural George Eastman Medal of Honor in 2006.

The threads of George Eastman House are intertwined with those of federal agencies that serve the public, such as the Library of Congress and the National Archives. In this vein the museum’s collections and preservation schools and workshops have national and global reach and impact. But this, of course, cannot be achieved without support.

Both Landesman and Slaughter told local TV press how important it is to experience the country’s leading cultural organizations firsthand, in person.

“Film is a great art form, our cultural heritage, and right here is where it is preserved,” Landesman said. “Tony Bannon is a legend throughout the country for the work he does and we want to support him and George Eastman House.”

A private viewing in the Dryden Theatre of films from the Eastman House archive restored via support from the NEA. On the screen here is the oldest film version of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (1910)

]]> http://blog.eastmanhouse.org/2011/07/18/experiencing-eastman-house-alongside-the-nea-chairman-and-congresswoman-louise-slaughter-2/feed/ 0 http://blog.eastmanhouse.org/2011/06/14/eastman-house-painted-with-color-this-week-with-kodachrome/ http://blog.eastmanhouse.org/2011/06/14/eastman-house-painted-with-color-this-week-with-kodachrome/#comments Tue, 14 Jun 2011 21:12:35 +0000 Dresden Engle http://blog.eastmanhouse.org/?p=4315 In just over a year’s time George Eastman House has been painted with large splashes of Technicolor, Colorama, and now Kodachrome, via three important acquisitions.

As the world’s oldest museum photography, the vast collections feature all processes and formats of motion pictures and photography. And the color collections continue to expand. The Technicolor corporate archive was formally acquired in March 2010, followed by Kodak’s gift of the Colorama archive – the images and history of the 60×18-foot images that dominated Grand Central Terminal from 1950 to 1990 –  announced in June 2010.

An elder from the Rubari tribe, from the last roll of Kodachrome, photographed by Steve McCurry in India.

Fast forward one year and the photographs from the last roll Kodachrome were donated to Eastman House on June 12, 2011. Kodachrome was the first commercially successful color film, and experienced a quarter-century of rich, unparalleled colors as well as a love affair with countless photographers. Kodachrome film was manufactured in various formats to suit still and motion picture cameras, and required a complex processing system.

When Kodak announced in 2009 it would no longer produce Kodachrome film, company officials announced two ways the famed film would be celebrated: 1) National Geographic and Magnum photographer Steve McCurry would be given the last roll off the Kodak production line and 2) the images from that historic roll would be donated to the archives at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film.

McCurry’s historic journey took him in 2010 to his hometown of New York City to western India and finally to Parsons, Kansas. That final stop was to the last lab in existence to process Kodachrome, which would close at the end of 2010, but not before developing his precious roll.

“I don’t think there’s ever been, in the history of photography, a better film, a better way to actually look at the world than with Kodachrome,” McCurry said. “This was the only way I shot for decades.”

McCurry spoke at Eastman House this week before a capacity audience, shared the 31 photographs he captured from the 36-frame roll — some frames were duplicate images — and told stories of his travels and his fears the roll would be harmed by airport security scanners. He talked with the audience and Anthony Bannon, the Ron and Donna Fielding Director at Eastman House, about celebrating Kodachrome. A color film process that lasted longer than any other, it was extolled since the Great Depression for its sharpness, archival durability, and vibrant yet realistic hues.

Dr. Anthony Bannon, left, and Steve McCurry with prints from the final roll of Kodachrome.

The subjects McCurry shot on the last roll include Robert DeNiro and photographer Elliott Erwitt, plus unknown people in various parks in New York City; McCurry in his hotel room in Parsons awaiting film processing; and in India – where McCurry noted “color is important culturally” and where he used Kodachrome’s magic to subtly render contrast and color harmony in depictions of Bollywood luminaries in Mumbai and the Rubari tribe in Rajasthan on the verge of extinction.

“I thought, ‘What better way to honor the memory of Kodachrome than to try and photograph iconic places and people?’ It’s in (my) DNA to want to tell stories where the action is, that shed light on the human condition,” McCurry said. He planned the trip, which he calls “a six-week odyssey,” for nine months. A crew from the National Geographic Channel followed him on his journey. That special has not aired yet in the United States but debuted this spring on European television.

Kodachrome was produced for 74 years, from 1935 to 2009, in a wide variety of formats, including 35mm slide film and 8mm movie film. McCurry used Kodachrome for his well-known 1984 portrait of the green-eyed “Afghan Girl” on the cover of National Geographic.

Kodachrome is appreciated in the archival and professional market for its dark-storage longevity, with colors remaining intact for decades. The early papers of one of the creators of Kodachrome, Leopold Godowsky, are held in the archives at Eastman House, as are many varieties of Kodachrome film in original boxes from several decades as well as moving footage, slides, and photographs, including the documentation of Sir Edmund Hillary’s history ascent of Mt. Everest.

“It’s definitely the end of an era,” he said of Kodachrome. “It has such a wonderful color palette…a poetic look, not particularly garish or cartoonish, but wonderful, true colors that were vibrant, but true to what you were shooting. It was the gold standard of imagery.”

Proof of its affect on popular culture, Kodachrome was the subject of Paul Simon’s song “Kodachrome” and Kodachrome Basin State Park in Utah was named for it, becoming the only park named for a brand of film.

Eastman House will present a display of projected images in early July and will mount an international tour of the photographs in 2012.

Chaplin in a scene from 1936′s ‘Modern Times’.

For me, Charlie Chaplin is a ballet dancer. Watch the roller skating scene in Modern Times and tell me that Chaplin couldn’t have easily become a world-renowned dancer if he hadn’t been an actor. Where his comedy comes from is in the way he used those elegant movements and then combined them with absurd situations and melodramatic story elements. Chaplin is perfection on the big screen and there’s a reason that nearly one-hundred years after his first film debut audiences are still delighted at what he does.

If Chaplin was a ballet dancer then Buster Keaton was an acrobat. Keaton designed and performed stunts of such outrageous construction that it’s amazing that he was never seriously hurt while performing them. Buster Keaton’s trademark stone-face that never once showed a single trace of emotion adds an action hero aloofness to his act that is hard not to like. In spite of Keaton’s emotionless demeanor you’ll be amazed at how easy it is to connect with the actor.

Then of course there’s the lovable Harold Lloyd who is perhaps more forgotten to today’s audiences than either Chaplin or Keaton. Lloyd’s personality is that of the everyman and he so perfectly personifies the self-motivated, go-getter attitude of the American audience in the 1920’s. With his boyish charm and round glasses to see Harold Lloyd is to instantly love him. Lloyd, like Keaton, was very much an acrobat and his stunts were so dangerous that I’ve witnessed even today’s audience’s gasp at his death-defying feats.

There were others of course. Harry Langdon still has his devout followers and Laurel and Hardy are still well known. But Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd are the best of the best. With the advent of services like Netflix and cable channels like TCM it’s easier than ever to find these silent comic gems, but like the comedic films of today half of the fun is watching them with an audience. This is why the George Eastman House and the Dryden Theatre are so important to our Rochester community.

Throughout June, you’ll have a number of chances to share with an audience the great humor of Charlie Chaplin. The big ones will be there: The Kid, The Great Dictator, and Modern Times, but don’t miss his early shorts and lesser-known movies.

Tuesday, June 07 2011, 8:00 pm Sunnyside / Payday / Shoulder Arms
Thursday, June 09 2011, 8:00 pm The Great Dictator
Sunday, June 12 2011, 2:00 pm The Circus
Tuesday, June 14 2011, 8:00 pm A Woman of Paris
Thursday, June 16 2011, 8:00 pm A King in New York
Sunday, June 19 2011, 7:00 pm Modern Times
Tuesday, June 21 2011, 8:00 pm Monsieur Verdoux
Thursday, June 23 2011, 8:00 pm The Kid
Sunday, June 26 2011, 7:00 pm City Lights
Tuesday, June 28 2011, 8:00 pm The Idle Class / A Day’s Pleasure / The Pilgrim
Thursday, June 10 2011, 8:00 pm Limelight

Buster Keaton appears in a cameo with Chaplin in 1952′s ‘Limelight’- their only on-screen pairing.

Editor’s note: Originally appeared in Democrat & Chronicle Rochester Young Professionals blog page.

Buddy Squires on location

Among those being honored are Oscar®-nominated and Emmy®-winning cinematographer Buddy Squires, who has been called “the visual poet.” He will receive the inaugural Golden Lens Award for Cinematography presented by Kodak and the festival, at 6:45 p.m. Thursday, April 28. Our evening with Buddy Squires will feature clips of his work and a talk with the audience

Of the amazing festival schedule the high point for me – truly a highest point – is a chance to be with Buddy Squires. He is a leading filmmaker and it will be a rare honor for us to be with him here.

Yes, he is best known for photographing the films of Ken Burns and is a founding member of Florentine Films. Buddy’s films with Ken Burns are preserved at George Eastman House, which houses the Florentine Films archive. Burns and his writing partner Geoffrey Ward were at Eastman House last August and when we honored them each with the George Eastman Medal of Honor.

Buddy has earned several Oscar® nominations and Emmy® awards for cinematography, as well as for producing and directing, plus several additional leading cinematography honors, including two previous awards from Kodak. A Kodak colleague, Lauren Lung, calls Buddy “a master of cinematic art” and his work “iconic and timeless.”

The festival’s film roster includes a screening of Strangers No More (2010), the current Oscar® winner for Best Short Documentary, for which Buddy served as cinematographer.

The 360 | 365 George Eastman House Film, which celebrates its 10^th anniversary in 2011, is the only contemporary film festival in the United States aligned with a major motion picture archive.

"Jazzmania" (1923), restored by Eastman House.

The festival lineup features three screenings from the Eastman House archives, including a recent restoration, Jazzmania (1923), accompanied by live jazz band The Djangoners, a rare nitrate screening of Gone to Earth (1950), and A Matter of Life & Death (aka Stairway to Heaven, 1946), which was photographed by Jack Cardiff, and will follow a screening of a new documentary titled Cameraman about the famed cinematographer.

We screen premieres as well as restored films daily in our Dryden Theatre, and the 360 | 365 George Eastman House Film Festival provides an additional platform to present archival films and our work as a world leader in film preservation

This festival is a rich blend of our film history with the newest film releases, selected by an exceptional programming team, comprised of an award-winning filmmaker, a nationally celebrated film critic, and Eastman’s House’s experienced film programmer.

A full schedule can be found at www.film360365.com.

See you at the movies!

The three-minute reel, which archivists estimate was filmed in 1861 or 1862, reveals an active battlefield as well as behind-the-scenes footage of Union soldiers in encampments and marching in formation.

After finding the unmarked reel and after determining its authenticity, Eastman House contacted filmmaker Ken Burns. He plans to visit the museum immediately to begin research.

“This moving footage would have significantly enhanced my Civil War documentary,” said filmmaker Ken Burns, who earned an Emmy® Award for his nine-part documentary The Civil War (1990), which featured thousands of still photographs. “We are seriously considering opening up the film to include this priceless new material.”

Eastman House preservation staff has painstakingly created digital scans of the rare and fragile footage, allowing for the creation of online video.

Click on the video link below to be among the first to witness history – the first motion pictures ever captured of the Civil War!

The camera loved Elizabeth Taylor and she became a skilled and inspired craftswoman in front of its lens. We are fortunate that George Eastman House conserves many core titles of her film legacy as well as superb still photographs of the star. Film prints of Lassie Come Home, National Velvet, Father of the Bride, Raintree County, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, Cleopatra and Butterfield 8 are conserved in the motion picture vaults. Nickolas Muray’s stunning 1948 photograph taken of the 16-year-old Taylor just as she was embarking on the adult phase of her career is one of the gems of the Eastman House photograph collection.

Elizabeth Taylor was recognized in her lifetime for her work as an actress and an activist, twice honored with Academy Awards for Best Actress, she was also the recipient of the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and was a Kennedy Center Honoree. She should also be remembered as a strong, forceful young woman who took charge of her career, became a producer, and was daring in her choice of roles. When asked by an interviewer to name the most difficult actors he had worked with, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz answered by naming two stars who were the exact opposite: Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando. Mankiewicz had nothing but praise for Taylor’s artistry, commitment and professionalism on both Suddenly, Last Summer and the troubled Cleopatra. The latter film nearly sank the Twentieth Century Fox studio, was fraught with problems and huge cost overruns. But Mankiewicz maintained that he never lost a day because of his star – she was always on time, prepared and dynamite in front of the camera.

Elizabeth Taylor’s vibrant beauty, her earthiness and good humor and her sheer joy in life made her a force of nature. Her film legacy remains the most eloquent testimonial to this remarkable woman who brought intelligence, grace and beauty to our world.