City Paper: Into the Vaults
Bruce Calvert
Into the Vaults
Through the past with this year's round of DVD sets.
by Sam Adams
Home theater may be killing the blockbuster, but the DVD boom ironically
seems to have sparked an unprecedented interest in the earliest forms of
cinema-or, at least, so you'd infer from the spate of boxed sets devoted to
the medium's infancy. The four-disc Treasures from American Film Archives
sold well enough to spawn a sequel, More Treasures from American Film
Archives 1894-1931, and was reissued as a lower-priced "encore edition" this
spring. Kino's voluminous Edison: The Invention of the Movies (1891-1918)
($89.96), boasts 12 hours of unfiltered actuality, early narrative and
unconscious surrealism, along with hours of interviews and commentary. In
their omnivorous sweep, the Edison films provide a fossil record of life in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries; alongside a young D.W. Griffith's
turn in Rescued from an Eagle's Nest is post-quake footage from San
Francisco and a whimsical short riffing on Theodore Roosevelt's fondness for
hunting. To call the Edison films an essential part of movie history almost
diminishes them: This is American history, full stop.
A more idiosyncratic cross-section is offered by Unseen Cinema: American
Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941 ($99.99), a jaw-dropping seven-disc collection
whose definition of "avant-garde" encompasses everything from abstract
collage to Busby Berkeley fantasia. A whopping 19 hours from start to
finish, the box is as daunting as it is rewarding-even one of its
thematically curated discs is too much for a single sitting-but measured
viewing yields practically bottomless dividends. Purchase is a no-brainer
for any serious a-g head, but like the Treasures boxes, Unseen Cinema may be
best for those who don't know they want it. Its provocative
cross-referencing demolishes prejudices high and low, opening doors you
didn't even know were closed. Even better: At less than a c-note
(significantly less through some retailers), it may be the best
minute-for-minute deal on the market. (For a fuller accounting, see
Screenpicks.)
Speaking of steals, The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection ($89.95) packs almost
all of the silent comedian's classic features as well as a hefty helping of
short subjects onto three two-disc sets, filling a gaping void in one fell
swoop. (Each twofer is sold separately, but the box comes with a bonus disc
awash in archival clips, interview snippets, brief bios and a sampling of
Lloyd's non-nude 3D photography.) Lloyd often took credit for creating the
most "realistic" of silent comedy archetypes, a bespectacled, straw-hatted
striver he called "the glasses character," or simply "the boy." Inevitably
ranked third in the pantheon, Lloyd has neither Chaplin's blithe buoyancy
nor Keaton's deadpan obliviousness; instead, he's bourgeois can-do-ism
personified, a make-good artist who bluffs his way through death-defying
feats while wishing he was safe at home. In Safety Last!, home to Lloyd's
iconic clock-face dangle, the derring-do of his 12-story human fly act is
undercut by his desperate attempts to scramble to safety; in The Freshman,
often called the most successful comedy of the silent era, he turns his
bookworm body into a human tackling dummy in an almost pathetic bid to be
liked. (His stuttering attempts at communication with the fairer sex in Girl
Shy are almost too painful to contemplate.) The shrewdest of his
contemporaries, Lloyd maintained control of his own negatives, and as a
result, the films in the collection look uniformly lovely (better, in fact,
than Keaton's or Chaplin's). The set has a few gaps, some filled by Kino's
two collections of Lloyd shorts, but after so many years of digital drought,
the sudden flood of Lloydiana will sate all but the thirstiest fan.
Warner Bros., who have established themselves as the undisputed leader in
packaging Hollywood classics, turned out boxes galore this year: collections
devoted to Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Steve McQueen, among
others. The heavyweight, though, is their 10-disc Greta Garbo Collection
($99.92), a mammoth trove of enigmatic Scandinavian goodness, despite its
odd lacunae (both the silent and sound versions of Anna Karenina are absent,
presumably held for a future two-shot). More modest if no less obsessive are
multidisc sets devoted to Ben-Hur and The Wizard of Oz, each embossed with
an intimidating wealth of extras. The Oz disc is particularly a delight,
boasting a stunning new transfer whose digitally aligned Technicolor
elements practically melt through the screen. Extras include genuinely
informative commentary, a disc-length documentary, and no fewer than five
previously filmed versions of the Oz story, a reminder of the popularity of
L. Frank Baum's original books.
[snipped]
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Bruce Calvert
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http://home.comcast.net/~silentfilm/home.htm