GELFAND’S WORLD--What might 20th century art have become? What would life be like, had Hollywood not taken over primacy in the cinema? Would Los Angeles even be a major city? We can sit back and muse over that idea this Labor Day weekend, as the true cinephiles and anybody with a $25 bill can get together in Hollywood and watch classic movies 14 hours a day. It's the ultimate insiders' meetup, but open to outsiders. The gathering and lots of rare films (along with They Were Expendable, starring John Wayne) is available to everyone who would like to attend Cinecon at the Egyptian Theatre from Thursday night through Monday.
The thought about film evolving without Hollywood is inspired by the promise of seeing a newly restored movie that is now 106 years old. The Son's Return was made in 1909 by D.W. Griffith, and features the younger Mary Pickford along with the now forgotten Charles West.
What's interesting from a historical point of view is that Griffith and his actors worked out of Fort Lee, New Jersey. In fact, Fort Lee was pretty much the capital of American film production in that era. Fort Lee is better known right now as the western end of Governor Chris Christie's bridgegate scandal, but just a few years ago, historians wrote about Fort Lee as Hollywood on the Hudson. Fort Lee had the studios, it had Griffith productions, and it got the investment it needed. Then Hollywood took over.
The fact that Hollywood became Hollywood, and Los Angeles became the creative capital of the world, is the result of luck, historical happenstance, and our admirable lack of cloud cover during the winter months.
One other curious parallel. When Griffith's The Son's Return was made, it was precisely the year that Pablo Picasso's early cubism appeared. There's actually a connection, or so it is said. More on that later.
The exodus of film companies to the west coast was spread out over a couple of decades, but the big money and the big stars were solidly ensconced here within a few years after the peak of the Fort Lee film industry. There were some exceptions. New York is a center of art and commerce that has its own film culture, as anyone who has seen Dog Day Afternoon will recognize.
If you look at The Son's Return or any one of hundreds of other movies shot across the Hudson in New Jersey, you will see how things might have been. To illustrate that point, let me tell you a brief story from another continent.
At the time of this story, I was attending a film festival in northern Italy. It was populated by film historians and scholars, many from Europe and Britain. One morning, I was watching a retrospective of early D.W. Griffith shorts, made at the time (roughly 1910-11) when Griffith worked on the east coast during the temperate months and brought his movie company to Los Angeles during the winter. So there we were, looking at movies shot in the summer and fall in Fort Lee, and in the clear, warmish winters here in southern California.
To a native Californian, the look of New Jersey is strikingly different from that of southern California. Our little secret, not so secret after all, is that our vegetation is more sparse, lacking the lushness of the humid summertime of the east coast. You can really see it. Southern California is dry, and film shots showed it.
I mentioned this to the esteemed film scholar from Serbia sitting immediately to my right. He was surprised by my remark, but eventually caught the drift as we watched a few more films. Even in the black and white of a century past, you can see the differences. It's not just the number of trees or the density of their leaves. It's the whole look.
Of course, it is possible to shoot human stories in pretty much any terrain, but the overall feel of a shot, and the way that the director moves people around in a shot, depend on what's in the actor's way, and what natural features make themselves available. We don't have Niagara Falls or Times Square, and the east coast doesn't have the Sierra Nevada.
There is a Los Angeles look. There is a California desert look. There is a southern California hillside look. They are all quite different from each other, but even more different from the east coast look.
{module [1177]}
Even the residential neighborhoods look vastly different. That's why film companies in Los Angeles have a few favorite places for shooting scenes when they need an eastern look. There are places that look eastern enough to pass. San Pedro's 6th Street and parts of downtown Los Angeles have doubled for urban New Jersey and backstreet New York City when the script demanded.
So why did the movie makers come out here when they had New York City, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Appalachians at their disposal? The answer has been the subject of debate for more than half a century. One theory is that film companies were evading patent enforcement by the Edison Company. How true that might or might not be, there is another obvious reason. In the early days of film, scenes were shot using natural light because of technical limitations. We have lots of sunny days. We don't have long weeks of snow and ice during the winter months.
Filmmakers who visited Los Angeles figured out pretty easily that they could get their shots done without having to worry about it raining at 3 pm and hailing at 6. They also had every kind of terrain, from beach to mountain top to valley, and they could get their cast and crew out to the location on the Red Car. It was a place that was ideal for filming. Festivals showing classic films reveal a Los Angeles that existed back then. Some features from a hundred years ago still exist. It is an exposure to modern history that is hard to beat.
Another modern miracle for the taking
There's one other plus to this weekend's events. Colleen Moore was a talented actress who comes across as capable of being both romantic and comedic. Unfortunately, there are few Colleen Moore films that survive, due to the unfortunate tendency of the old film stock to burn. The 1929 film Synthetic Sin, newly restored, will be shown Friday night. The story of how this film came to be available some 85 years later is worthy of mention. The year of this film's making, 1929, is right on the cusp. It's after sound films (the "talkies") took the world by storm, but studios still had silent productions in the pipeline. Studios added sound to films that had originally been shot using silent film techniques. The sound track for this film existed separate from the film itself. For a long time, people did not realize that both the sound and the film were still in existence. Through happenstance and sheer luck, people with knowledge of the existence of both -- one for the film, and one for the sound track -- were present when the subject came up. We now have a restored version that will allow the lucky audience to experience what their grandparents and great grandparents experienced in their own times.
In this sense, watching early film is like having your own time machine. You get to be there in the only way we have available to us.
For those of you who might want to join us, notice that there will be films featuring some of the early cinematic geniuses, including Douglas Fairbanks, Erich von Stroheim, Mary Pickford, and the 3 Stooges (OK, just wanted to see if you were listening).
There will also be a special showing of the Laurel and Hardy movie in which the daring duo try to move a piano up a steep set of stairs. I think everybody has heard about this film, but I look forward to getting a chance to see it as it should be seen, on the big screen with musical accompaniment.
One more thought about the movies and a possible connection to Pablo Picasso. Recent Picasso scholars began to realize not only that Picasso and his companions loved going to the movies in the early days of the 20th century, but that they were probably affected artistically by the experience. You might think of cubism as a way of adding the flickering changes of the film image to painting, implying movement in a painting that was already routine in film. The New York Times has treated the subject in depth, suggesting that early film and the invention of the modern artistic world are inextricably linked. Revisiting the cultural contributions of 106 years ago is not only of interest in terms of visiting what our great grandparents saw, but in seeing what pioneering artists and designers saw at the time.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 72
Pub: Sep 4, 2015
