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![]() The Library of Congress National Film Registry takes the classics on tour. By Steve Vineberg DECEMBER 15, 1997: When I was in college and under the delusion that movies were forever, a film historian told me about a visit he'd once made to a studio vault that housed nitrate prints. Until the development of safety film, the material out of which all movie stock was constructed was nitrate, a doubly perilous substance -- it's highly inflammable and it disintegrates over time. For many years the studios took no notice of their aging product; they simply locked films away and let them rot. My historian friend said the stench that permeated the broiling, airless vault he'd been taken to in search of an early movie musical was so powerful that he could still call it up at will, years later.
The American films earmarked for preservation by the Library of Congress, at the rate of 25 a year, are deemed by the 18-member National Film Preservation Board to be of "cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance," and anyone can make a nomination. (You can send recommendations to Steve Leggett at the National Film Registry or e-mail them to sleg@loc.gov.) The National Registry Tour booked for a week at the Coolidge Corner is a way of publicizing this crucial project. It's a sampling of preserved movies -- eclectic, of course, since by definition the entire archive is eclectic. Cultural artifacts like the 1969 The Learning Tree (December 16), the first mainstream coming-of-age movie by an African-American, and historical artifacts like the 1938 March of Time newsreel "Inside Nazi Germany" (December 14) stand side by side with silent movies, classics from the '40s and '50s, and celebrated Vietnam-era pictures. What they share is the quality of restored films, the kind of visual sharpness you normally get only in this year's releases.
On the other hand, I applaud the tour (and Coolidge programmers Marianne Lampke and Connie White, who made their own choices from the touring repertoire) for bypassing Chaplin and Keaton, whose work is widely available and very familiar, in favor of Harold Lloyd's entrancing Safety Last (December 13 and 14). Lloyd was certainly Chaplin's equal, if not quite Keaton's; yet popular history has tended to undervalue his contribution to silent comedy -- fewer than half a dozen of his films, for instance, are available on video. Safety Last, one of his most invigorating vehicles, is a fine example of his Horatio Alger-style go-getter persona, and it contains the quintessential Lloyd image: the star hanging from a clock atop a skyscraper -- the 20th-century American both elevated and (comically) paralyzed by the machine age of which he's also the perfect embodiment. The least interesting choices in the series are probably 2001: A Space Odyssey, Chinatown, and Raging Bull, though fans of these movies will be pleased to see first-rank prints. I'm more excited about John Huston's The Battle of San Pietro (December 14), Fred Wiseman's High School (December 15), and Max Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman (December 15 and 17), and about the prospect of seeing a spanking new print of F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (December 12), one of the glories of the late silent period. One of the ironies of the passage from silents into talkies is that it didn't occur when silent movies were on the decline, though they'd become rather ornate and probably needed a kick in the pants. Sunrise, with its overlay of romanticism and its passages of expressionism, is an example of how breathtaking silent technique could be in the hands of a master. Murnau was a German, a refugee from Hitler who brought the legacy of the pre-Third Reich German Expressionism with him when he emigrated, and who worked in Hollywood until his untimely death in the early '30s.
High School, from 1968, came at the beginning of the richest period of the documentarian Frederick Wiseman's career, which coincided with the hottest years of the Vietnam War. In these movies, Wiseman the complex humanist comes in contact with institutions that, by their very nature, stymie the humanistic impulse: the police force (Law and Order), the Army (Basic Training), the medical establishment (Hospital), the welfare system (Welfare). (Wiseman's contract with PBS calls for a new documentary each year; last week he delivered Public Housing, marking a return, after two decades, to the kind of subject matter that engaged him in those great old days.) What's most remarkable about these films is Wiseman's steady refusal to vilify anyone. High School is a tragicomedy about the futile efforts of adolescents to retain some scrap of dignity and individuality, but the teachers and administrators and guidance counselors who put them down aren't monsters. They're victims too, their most humane responses eaten out of them by the demands of serving a rigid, misbegotten system. The National Film Registry Tour series includes such landmark documents as The Great Train Robbery (the 1903 picture that pioneered the use of editing), Gertie the Dinosaur (the first cartoon), and Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (the pilot film of the avant-garde movement of the 1940s). It offers a handful of movies that rank among the most memorable Hollywood has produced: Duck Soup, the best of the Marx Brothers farces; Ernst Lubitsch's enchanting romantic comedy Ninotchka; Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, a psycho-killer thriller that anticipates the themes of David Lynch's Blue Velvet; John Ford's My Darling Clementine; On the Waterfront, one of the movies that defined modern American acting; Orson Welles's film noir Touch of Evil.
But someone was also smart enough to include Letter from an Unknown
Woman (December 15 and 17), one of four pictures Max Ophuls made during his
brief, agonized sojourn in America in the late '40s. Ophuls, a German Jew,
outran the Nazis through Europe, making films in Italy and France and the
Netherlands before eventually crossing the Atlantic. His methods, like those of
other gifted European filmmakers who ended up here in the '30s and '40s, were
dramatically at odds with the modus operandi of the monolithic big studios;
Hollywood had no respect for them, or for the movies he produced out of his
tension with what he saw as bizarre, unfathomable priorities. Yet Letter
from an Unknown Woman (1948), which stars Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan,
is exquisite -- a film that, like the best European work Ophuls did before and
after his American interlude, views 19th-century romanticism with a tragic
irony that's distinctly modernist. Letter from an Unknown Woman may not
be the greatest of the movies on tour, but it's the one that, for me,
underscores what's noblest in the Library of Congress project: the desire to
preserve treasures that contemporary filmgoing has casually swept under the
rug.
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