I feel like I’ve known about the Nitrate Picture Show ever since it started in 2015, but somehow it never occurred to me that one of the perks of moving to Ithaca, New York was that I could easily go. Not until last year, that is, when Rico Gagliano’s MUBI Podcast devoted an episode to it. “Rochester is only 90 miles away!” I thought. Less than six months after that I purchased a festival pass, and last Thursday I boarded an OurBus which deposited me at the Frederick Douglass – Greater Rochester International Airport two hours later. And so it was that I found myself sitting in front of these amazing gold curtains that evening awaiting the start of my first close encounter with a nitrate film print:
The movie they sloooowly rose on was Black Narcissus. The Nitrate Picture Show is different from other events I’ve been to in that its constituent parts aren’t just movies, but individual prints of those movies. As Camille Blot-Wellens pointed out in her “Keepers of the Frame” talk, every scratch on them provides clues about the conditions under which they were exhibited in the past, and these stories are “part of the history of film itself.” Graham Brown characterized the print we saw of Black Narcissus as “better than very good” when introducing it, and his program notes explain that it also opened a legendary 1992 Pacific Film Archive series curated by Edith Kramer called The Primal Screen. The film serves up a heady mixture of the ludicrous (David Farrar’s Mr. Dean bouncing up and down on a tiny pony in shorts which Brown described as getting even shorter in each scene) and spectacular (matte paintings of the Himalayas by W. Percy Day) which is every bit as strange as the feelings which bewilder Deborah Kerr’s Sister Clodagh and her fellow nuns. I loved the moment when Sister Philippa (Flora Robson) leaves a bouquet of the flowers she’s been growing instead of vegetables at the grave of Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) and the Christmas scene in which Mr. Dean is simultaneously his best and worst self. I saw Black Narcissus for the first time about twenty years ago in a film class and thought it was terrific, but somehow never got around to watching it again. I won’t wait that long next time!
Two other movies I was eager to revisit were The Blue Angel and Duel in the Sun. I think it’s fair to say that the former is more well-known today as director Josef von Sternberg’s first collaboration with star Marlene Dietrich’s than as a great film in its own right: according to this awesomely bonkers spreadsheet, only seven critics voted for it in the latest Sight & Sound poll, good for a tie for 520th, while the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Top 1,000 list has it at 553rd. The print we saw is from 1931 and (to casually toss around some language I became quite familiar by the end of the festival) had a shrinkage rate of 1.1%, which per Anna Kovalova’s program notes is low for one nearly a century old. I remembered this as a fall from grace story, and to be sure the sight of Professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) cock-a-doodle-dooing on stage in front of his former colleagues is one of the most devastating in all of cinema. But what struck me on this viewing is that Rath isn’t very impressive at the beginning of the film. He is rather an officious stuffed shirt who is more concerned about whether the pile of books on his desk is perfectly straight than he is in actually teaching his students anything. Indeed, his moment of humiliation echoes an earlier scene which takes place on his wedding night–after he has already thrown away his career. See too his dead pet bird, which had “stopped singing long ago.” This man needed a change! Could he have been happy as a clown or in some other role with his wife’s cabaret troupe? And if he had truly embraced this new career, might he not have ever lost her respect?
Duel in the Sun, which screened the following day, suggests that the answers to these questions is “no.” Pearl Chavez, who is played by a 27-year-old Jennifer Jones but is (somewhat disconcertingly) clearly supposed to be 13-15 years old, is in love with Joseph Cotten’s Jesse McCanles and lusted after by Jesse’s brother Lewt (Gregory Peck). When the latter rapes her, she’s spoiled forever as far as Jesse is concerned. Heartbroken, she decides to go all in on being Lewt’s girl–in the next scene she’s even chomping on an apple! But she winds up in pretty much exactly the same place as Immanuel Rath, pathetically clinging to Lewt’s leg in an unsuccessful attempt to keep him from fleeing to Mexico without her. The print we saw was compiled from two in Martin Scorsese’s collection at the Eastman Museum, which is pretty darn cool.
The most revelatory screenings for me were all part of the “Nitrate Shorts” program. It began with a selection of Technicolor trailers which per Anthony L’Abbate’s program notes documented the evolution of the Technicolor “look” from understated yellows and browns in the 1930s to a brighter color design by the middle of the next decade and ended with screen tests from Gone with the Wind, both of which were interesting. I also enjoyed the Disney animated shorts Flowers and Trees and The Band Concert. But I was positively blown away by Norman McLaren’s direct animation Hen Hop and Mary Ellen Bute’s “seeing sound film” Synchromy No. 4: Escape. Both can easily be found online, and it’s definitely possible to appreciate the conceptual framework behind them this way. I doubt you’ll find the brilliant reds of the former or mysterious blue smoke and luminescent orange triangles of the latter moving the way I did last Friday, though, in the absence of a big screen, archival print (from La Cinémathèque québécoise and Museum of Modern Art respectively) in good condition, and theater full of cinephiles. It makes me wonder what other experimental films that I saw under suboptimal conditions I’ve been guilty of underrating.
Robert Flaherty’s Oidhche Sheanchais/A Night of Storytelling is a similar case. In the podcast referenced above, founder Paolo Cherchi Usai explains that the Nitrate Picture Show started with the question, “why do [early films] look so awful?” The answer is that they don’t–this impression is rather the fault of the bad reproductions which are the only versions of these movies most people ever get to see. The print we saw of Oidhche Sheanchais embodies this ideal. This screening was actually the first time it was ever projected for an audience and Haden Guest’s program notes describe it as being in “excellent physical condition, with a remarkable flexibility and without a single splice.” As the first sound film ever made in the Irish language, I would have been intrigued by this movie regardless; under these circumstances, I was spellbound. Another festivalgoer remarked to me over dinner that Seáinín Tom Sheáin’s “story that was already old a thousand years ago” didn’t seem to have any particular moral. To me this is exactly the point. Something happened to Martin Conroy and his sons that was so crazy, people are still trying to figure out what it means generations later. I think this must be the exact kind of immortality that Brendan Gleeson’s Colm Doherty chose to pursue in The Banshees of Inisherin.
My biggest discovery of the weekend was probably You and Me, which Peter Bagrov’s program notes describe as “one of the best prints ever screened at the festival.” It jumped around a bit at times, but was the source of the most memorable black and white images I saw, which is of course a credit not just to nitrate film stock, but also to cinematographer Charles Lang. George Raft and Sylvia Sidney are terrific in the lead roles, and the latter performs calculations on a blackboard which rival Hippolyte Girardot’s mathematics in A Christmas Tale even if they are misguided–crime may not pay, but you still can’t afford most of the objects of desire in Kurt Weill’s opening musical number on honest wages. As I already said on Twitter, I had no idea that director Fritz Lang’s filmography included anything so eclectic! There’s also a wonderful tour of late-30s New York City ethnic restaurants. The final reels of Force of Evil and Leibelei/Flirtation made nearly as much of an impression on me. Ken Fox’s program notes indicate that the print we saw of the former was “one of the most challenging for a projectionist” due to its 100+ splices and significant warpage. Indeed, this was the only movie which needed to be stopped, but the brief pause didn’t detract one iota from the inventive final shootout in a darkened office or John Garfield’s Orphean descent down, down, down to the banks of the Hudson River not to bring back his deceased brother (who is played by a very good Thomas Gomez), but rather to redeem his soul. The latter, meanwhile, features impressively inventive photography for so early in the sound era, including an unforgettable snowy sleigh ride and a camera which agonizingly refuses to look away from the face of a young lady (Magda Schneider) who has just been informed that the love of her life (Wolfgang Leibeneiner) was killed in a duel over another woman (Olga Tschechowa).
I saw two other films which were new to me: Silence Is Golden, an airy light trip down memory lane to the dawn of France’s film industry by director René Clair starring Maurice Chevalier, and a Technicolor print of a “sponsored [by Westinghouse Electric] film” called The Middleton Family at the New York World’s Fair from the Prelinger Archives. Cain and Artem would have been on this list as well, but I skipped the Sunday afternoon screenings in favor of meeting my family at the Strong National Museum of Play and hitching a ride home with them afterward, which also means I missed the “Blind Date with Nitrate” screening of The Third Man. I did, however, attend the Sunday morning screening of The Wizard of Oz. In the festival’s second “Keepers of the Frame” lecture, Jon Wengström speculated that while even in a post-physical media future people will undoubtedly continue to find ways to project movies on big screens for large audiences, such exhibitions will no longer be standardized. He might have been thinking of this very film. As Anthony L’Abbate noted in his introduction, the print we saw from 1945 afforded Nitrate Picture Show attendees a rare opportunity to enjoy The Wizard of Oz the way audiences did during its initial theatrical run, which is not true of nearly anyone who sees it today on DVD and Blu-Ray releases which feature colors updated for contemporary tastes “that would make [Technicolor consultant] Natalie Kalmus turn over in her grave.” I can’t rationalize leaving my loving wife to take care of our girls by herself for days at a time just so that I can watch see movies more than once or twice a year, so I went to Rochester thinking it might be awhile before I returned. Experiences like this one are utterly unique, though, and I find that my appetite isn’t nearly satisfied. This may not turn out to be an annual excursion for me, but think I’m at least going to have to go back for more in 2024.
The Prodigal Cinephile 