Rediscovering American Cinema - FREE February 25, 2008

ADMISSION: FREE

website: http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/events/panel.shtml
phone: (773) 702 8574

A rousing discussion of current issues in film culture - in particular American cinema and the preservation of American film heritage - with three distinguished friends: Tom Gunning, noted early cinema scholar and chair of the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago; Dave Kehr, noted critic and contributing editor at Film Comment; and Mike Mashon, head of the Moving Image section of the Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division.

Their discussion will be followed by a screening of a restored 35mm print of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Golden Bed, a 1925 film in which Lillian Rich plays a prime Southern belle whose frivolous romances with European gentlemen, American candy moguls, and other lesser suitors leave her with nothing but her titular golden bed by the film’s end. The film will be accompanied by Daniel Sefik on piano.

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Most of today’s finest film scholars first investigated the history of the medium under less-than-optimal conditions: famous films were more often read about than seen—and when they were seen, murky 16mm prints or erratic late night television showings constituted the most common viewing conditions. Local censors or penny-pinching distributors mutilated prints with impunity. Masterpieces of the talkie period faded and shrunk in the warehouses of local print exchanges. Silent pictures were well-nigh impossible to see outside of a handful of classics screened at museum venues. Intrepid film societies and revival theaters achieved some success in rewriting the standard narratives of film history, but often faced curatorial constraints because of their marginal profit potential for the industry at large.

Today preserving film heritage ranks as a national priority. Scholars now know more about the conditions of film production, distribution, and exhibition than at any time in the history of the field. Labels like the Criterion Collection publish DVD versions of familiar films with enough background information and exegesis to rival the critical editions of our most storied novels. Other projects like the Unseen Cinema compilation and the ongoing Treasures from American Film Archives series go even further, collecting obscure or unknown works, annotating them with the insights of original research, and re-integrating them into central strands of cinema history. But studios still hesitate to dig beyond the surface of their massive libraries, assuring our canons by default; independents still struggle to bring their existence to the attention of taste-makers.

Tonight we will examine the state of film scholarship and appreciation in the twenty-first century with three of its foremost exponents:
Tom Gunning, the Chair of the University of Chicago’s Committee on Cinema and Media Studies, has published extensively on early cinema, the avant-garde, and issues of modernity. He has written books on the films of D. W. Griffith and Fritz Lang, though his energy for investigating new and unknown films and filmmakers is inexhaustible by all accounts.

Dave Kehr, free-lance critic, contributing editor at Film Comment, and proprietor of the widely-admired blog davekehr.com, has been a leading light for historically-inflected popular film criticism for over thirty years. His work has been featured in the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and elsewhere. He cultivated an appreciation for the pleasures of Frank Borzage, Anthony Mann, Frank Tashlin, and Allan Dwan while he was an active Doc Films member during the early 1970s.

Mike Mashon, the Head of the Moving Image Section of the Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, has overseen the preservation of American film heritage with exquisite taste and care. Recently he supervised the Library’s transition to the state-of-the-art National Audio Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia. His vision of the Library’s role in public life has allowed Doc Films to present retrospectives of the films of Maurice Tourneur and William S. Hart, among other rare films.

The panel discussion will be followed by a screening of a restored 35mm print of Cecil B. DeMille's THE GOLDEN BED. In this 1925 film, Lillian Rich plays a prime Southern belle, Flora Lee Peake. Flora marries a European gentleman in hopes of keeping her plantation solvent, but her new husband dies (on an icy glacier!) while fighting with one of Flora's other rejected suitors. Flora returns home and successfully seduces candy mogul Admah Holtz whom her sister Margaret had been fond of. Flora leads her and Admah down a path to ruin - and all that's left for her is her golden bed.

Photoplay remarked that THE GOLDEN BED was "DeMille's last and perhaps worst picture under his [current] contract. A lavishly stupid spectacle. A pearl onion in a platinum setting." In other words, more than ripe for rediscovery. Like many DeMille films of the period, THE GOLDEN BED is both ribald pabulum and exciting proof of genuine visual style. Print courtesy of the George Eastman House. Preservation funded by the Film Foundation.

Official Website: http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/events/panel.shtml