Journal of Film Preservation N° 60/61 - FIAF

and fanciful approach and made one wish that the other films
planned by the same team had been produced.
Both Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, whose likenesses show up in
the set decoration of Daydreams, were significantly represented in the
Sacile screenings. The Cook, containing one of Keaton’s early
appearances with Fatty Arbuckle, was recently rediscovered in
Norway and provided more than its fair share of laughter. Lloyd’s The
Kid Brother was the festival’s closing event, in a stunning print struck
from the camera negative accompanied by Carl Davis conducting his
score. A quality picture in every sense of the word, it combines the
best of comedic, dramatic and production values and deserves to be
far more widely seen than it has been hitherto.
“Rebels of the Twenties” was the title of a program that gathered
together some of the most interesting early American avant-garde
films. Some were well-known, others less so. Most were shorts, the
notable exception being the Nazimova-Rambova Salome from 1923,
with Robert Florey and Ralph Steiner particularly well-represented in
the selection.
An extraordinary find of some ninety films from cinema’s first decade
was brought to Sacile by Lobster Films. Much attention was directed
to the fact that seventeen of the thirty Georges Melies films thus
recovered had been considered totally lost, but the collection as a
whole served as a kind of time capsule. Many of these brevities were
comedies, set in a world in which everyone seems to conceal pilfered
food under bulky clothing and the only motivation a man required to
don women’s clothing was to find some. Not only the comedies
elicited laughter: one of the longest items was a six-minute Samson
and Delilah in which the first locks fell from the hero’s head before
the scissors had touched him, and this was followed by the
unforgettable Pour la fete de sa mere, in which a family tragedy runs
its course in just over two minutes.
Rick Schmidlin presented his video reconstruction of von Stroheim’s
Greed, to varied reactions. This writer found that at least one
important function was accomplished by the project: because the
missing sub-plots, albeit in the form of stills, were carefully integrated
into the film footage, the complexity of the original concept is
grasped in a way that well-intentioned reconstructions in book form
have not been able to facilitate. The post-screening discussion also
raised the oft-neglected point that Greed and von Stroheim were far
from the only victims of the notorious mutilation. The loss of the
sophisticated narrative techniques also served to impede the
development of other contemporary directors.
The Photoplay restoration of von Stroheim’s The Wedding March was
introduced by co-star Fay Wray, who was clearly touched by the
waves of adulation from the members of the audience, hardly any of
whom had been born when she began her film career. A later
60 Journal of Film Preservation / 60/61 / 2000