Greetings from Hollywood!
Our first week in LA officially ended a couple of hours ago, and if you’ve been reading our blog, you would know that we had a pretty packed but exciting week. As much as I want to go back to some moments in this week (our meeting with Krista Smith, or the time when we were at Venice Beach and I didn’t get fish and chips for dinner), I know it’s impossible. However, we are able to go way way back in the time of cinema (we actually just went in to the talkie era of filmmaking in our class): meeting Mary Pickford, staying in an abandoned beach house with Doris Kenyon, and driving down Sunset Boulevard with William Holden.
It is quite amazing that we can view films from over a hundred years ago. I’m sure none of the “actors” from Workers Leaving Lumière Factory realized that millions of people from 122 years later would see their faces and spend time studying them. However, a lot films from the early time of Cinema were not as lucky- many of them are damaged or completely destroyed over years. That’s why film preservation and restoration are extremely important for our study.
On Thursday, we visited the Academy Film Archive (also known as the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study), and had a chance to meet with some film restorers who have been working on film preservation/restoration for a very long time, and brought many old films back to life, and to a broader audience. Because of their work, we now are able to watch a quirky trailer for the 1961 horror film Konga, a 5-minute clip from Stan Brakhage’s experimental films, or The Ocean Waif by Alice Guy (the first female director). Alice Guy directed and produced over 1,000 films (many of them single reelers) during her film career, however, not many survived. The Ocean Waif, one of her only surviving feature-length films, was rescued and brought back to life by many film restorers. Although 15-20 minutes from the film is missing, it still is a great resource for us to study the early silent film era and her aesthetic style. It also provides us with an rare opportunity to understand a female filmmaker’s perspective and approach to a somewhat repetitive romantic storyline from 1916.
I read a very angry review about The Ocean Waif the other day – the writer was very upset that he paid for an “uncompleted film” and asked what’s the point of restoring it. Well, the point is – this is an extremely valuable resource; and because of many films like The Ocean Waif, we’re able to have conversations with characters from decades ago, to study the history of film and to learn from it. And none of this would happen without the film restorers.
