Redding’s 7th Annual Silent Film Festival

Old City Hall

www.shastaartscouncil.org

Lillian Gish Star of Shasta County Arts Council’s

2012 Silent Film FestivalOctober 19-20, 2012

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October 19-20, 2012 Schedule

Friday, Oct. 19

6pm Laugh Show - Includes:• Your Darn Tootin'  - Laurel &

Hardy • The Rink - Charlie Chaplin • The Boat - Buster Keaton• Frogland - (a French animated

puppet film)8pm Greed - shot on location in San Francisco, Oakland, Iowa Hill

Saturday, Oct. 20

10am - Laugh Show repeated Saturday morning (75 minutes)11:30am - The Lost World & short film The Ghost of Slumber Mountain1:30pm - The Great K&A Train Robbery & short film, Danger Ahead3pm - Mother5pm - The Scarlet Letter7:30pm - D.W. Griffith Film Orphans of the Storm

All programs presented with LIVE music by Frederick Hodges  

Shasta County Arts Council Old City Hall, 1313 Market Street

Redding, CA 96001 530-241-7320

All-Festival Pass $45 BEST DEAL!

$8 pre-sale per film$10 per film at the door

$2 for children 12 & under

*Laugh Show includes four short features & is considered one film

Limited Advance Tickets available by calling Shasta County Arts Council at

530-241-7320 Visit us online at www.ShastaArtsCouncil.org

A State/Local Partner to the California Arts Council

Ticket Pricing & Information

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Upcoming Events at Shasta County Arts CouncilDick Turner Concert - 4pm November 4

Thom Berry’s Musical Ventures - 8pm November 16second saturday Art Night - 5pm-8pm November 10, December 8

ArtsMart at the Shasta Mall- 10am-9pm, November 3 Annual Holiday Gift Show at Old City Hall - November 8-December 24

Funded, in part, by ...

!

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Chico’s Silent Film Festival March 2013 Details coming soon at ...

www.FriendsoftheArtsUpstate.org A State/Local Partner to the California Arts Council

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Festival made possible by ... David Shepard & Associate Director Peter Hogue

David Shepard of Blackhawk Films is renowned world-wide for film preservation.

Shepard, who lives in Hat Creek, began restoring films when he joined the American Film Institute in 1968 as one of

their first staff members. In 1987, he bought the Blackhawk Films library. This is

the seventh time Shepard has shared his treasures with Redding and the Shasta County Arts Council. Thank you, David!

10am - 9pmSaturday Nov. 3

Live Performance, Music, Artists, Kid’s Zone

Brought to you by Shasta County Arts CouncilTo learn more, call 530-241-7320

David Shepard Brings Film Festival to Chico in March 2013

Don’t Miss it!

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Special Thanks to our Hotel Sponsor!

Best Western Hilltop Inn2300 Hilltop DriveRedding, CA

For reservations, call1-866-257-5990

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Music by Frederick Hodges

Hailed by the press as one of the best jazz and ragtime pianists in the world, Frederick Hodges is sought after by today’s foremost orchestras, festivals, conductors, and collaborative musicians. His artistry, virtuosity and charisma have brought him to the world’s most renowned stages, leaving audiences around the globe captivated.

Classically trained as a concert pianist, Frederick Hodges has established a reputation as a truly versatile artist equally sought after as soloist, singer, guest soloist with the California Pops Orchestra, and dance band pianist with Don Neely’s Royal Society Jazz Orchestra. His extensive repertoire includes all the best ragtime, stride, and novelty piano solo pieces. He has appeared on national television, radio, and in several Hollywood films. He is also a much sought-after silent film accompanist for both live performances and on DVD. He performs regularly at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum.

Frederick has participated in many prestigious festivals including in Sacramento Jazz Jubilee, the WestCoast Ragtime Festival, The Blind Boone Festival in Columbia Missouri, the Templeton Ragtime Festival at Mississippi State University, the El Segundo Ragtime Festival, and the Sedalia Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival. His website is: www.frederickhodges.com

 7:30pm Saturday, Oct. 20 D.W. Griffith’s Orphans of the StormStarring Lillian Gish ...

D. W. Griffith, “the father of American film,” was also the first grand master of movie melodrama, and this epic extravaganza from 1921 is arguably the wildest and most expansive of his forays into that pulse-pounding realm, in a career that also included The Birth of a Nation (1914), Intolerance (1915), Broken Blossoms (1919), and Way Down East (1920). The orphans in this case are two imperiled young women played by the Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy, and the storm is the French Revolution and all the historical turmoil that goes with it.  The film is based on a sensationalistic stage play (with perhaps a little of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities thrown in for good measure), but Griffiths opens it up for large scale cinematic flourishes and gives free rein to a full array of melodramatic excesses – revolution, plagues, evil aristocrats, mob violence, kidnapping & false imprisonment, a blind “orphan,” rampant cruelty and chronic lasciviousness. Here, writes the critic Billy Stevenson, “…the Revolution becomes a giant, writhing, orgiastic dance, ultimately continuous with the aristocratic revels that it was intended to oppose….”  With Monte Blue as Danton, Sidney Herbert as Robespierre, Lucille LaVerne as the fearsome La Frochard, and Joseph Schildkraut as the benevolent Chevalier de Vaudrey). Filmed mostly at Griffiths’ 14-acre studio in Mamaroneck, New York.

MAIN FEATURE

1921 epic extravaganza by D.W. Griffith

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6pm Friday, Oct. 19 - Laugh ShowRepeated - 10am Saturday, Oct. 20 You’re Darn Tootin' with Laurel & Hardy “This is the story of two musicians who played neither by note nor ear, instead they used brute strength.”  Stan and Ollie make a mess of the town band, get into trouble with the police while busking for change, and end up setting off a small riot of tit-for-tat pratfalls.

The Rink with Charlie Chaplin   Charlie’s famous tramp character is an amorous waiter on roller skates.  The roller rink becomes a dance floor/arena for Chaplin’s balletic slapstick antics, and his inspired rambunctiousness gets full play in the restaurant and at the birthday party of his beloved (Edna Purviance).

The Boat with Buster Keaton   Here the famously unsmiling comedian is a boat-builder who takes his wife and kids along for the ill-fated maiden voyage of his new vessel which bears the comically auspicious name “Damfino.”

Frogland (a.k.a. The Frogs Who Wanted a King)  Russian émigré Wladyslaw Starewicz, an early master of puppet animation, made this politically barbed cartoon in France in 1922.

Film Notes by Peter Hogue

5pm Saturday, Oct. 20 - The Scarlet LetterThere have been nearly a dozen film versions of the classic American novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, but this one from 1926 remains the most highly regarded of them all.  The great Swedish director Viktor Sjostrom (aka Victor Seastrom) mounted this MGM production in a richly expressionistic style.  And he had a major star, the great Lillian Gish, for the role of Hester Prynne, the woman of Puritan times condemned to wear the scarlet “A” for  adultery and achieves her own heroic dignity in the process.  “Miss Gish has a strong inclination for such parts,” wrote Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times, “and in this vehicle she gives an excellent, conception of the courage of a young woman in the face of sneering, scorn and tittle-tattle.”  Lars Hanson plays Hesterʼs illicit lover, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, and D. W. Griffith stalwart Henry B. Walthall plays Hesterʼs long-absent husband, Roger Prynne.  And Frances Marion, a bold and gifted screenwriter (and a novelist of some note), authored the skillful screenplay adaptation.

Film Notes continued ...

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In 1923, Eric von Stroheim set out to film a comprehensive version of Frank Norrisʼ muckraking novel McTeague. The result, with an eight-hour running time, was rejected by the studio (MGM); subsequently, von Stroheim’s  footage was edited down repeatedly, until finally in 1924 the 140-minute version that will be shown tonight was put into release. Von Stroheim disowned the version that was released, but its status as a major work of cinematic art was soon established and to this day, Greed continues to be viewed as one of the great masterpieces of American cinema. The main story remains intact, with the conflicted relationships of three central characters – a dentist named McTeague (Gibson Gowland), his close friend Marcus (Jean Hersholt),  and Marcus’ girlfriend Trina (ZaSu Pitts) who marries McTeague instead. The three of them are all doomed players in a triangular tragedy of greed, lust, and self deception. In von Stroheim’s frank and gritty imagery, the unsparing naturalistic details of Norris’ fiction take on a pungently cinematic life of their own. Greed’s legendary climax comes in a grueling showdown shot on location in Death Valley, and an important part of the film’s special pungency comes from von Stroheim’s insistence on shooting scenes in the actual Bay Area locations designated in the novel (San Francisco, Oakland, Iowa Hill).

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Film Notes Continued ... Friday, October 19, 2012

3pm - Saturday, Oct. 20 - MotherAlong with Sergei Eisenstein and others, Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953) was one of the architects of the golden age of Soviet cinema in the 1920’s.  His special gifts for characterization and metaphorical editing are boldly evident in this adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s best-known novel.  (“A mother finds her loyalties divided between her striking worker (and potential revolutionary) son and her strike-breaking husband, who dies during a skirmish between the two sides; but when her son is arrested on weapons charges, she firmly attaches her allegiance to the revolting workers, in Pudovkin’s often powerful if occasionally vaguely corny look at the failed revolution of 1905” -- Iain.Stott.)  Whereas Eisenstein’s style of montage (film editing) emphasized “the masses” and the dialectical collision of abstract forces, Pudovkin’s gives more attention to the emotional dynamics of individual characters and the historical events into which they are swept. Pudovkin’s approach makes elements of the setting -- a bridge over an ice-clogged river, the wintry weather, and the doors and wall of prisons and factories -- into significant aspects of the harsh passage from oppression and injustice to moral rebellion and revolutionary commitment.  Vera Baranovskaya is particularly memorable in the title role.

8pm Friday, Oct. 19 - GreedFriday’s Main Feature

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Serving Sizes

Saturday, October 20, 2012

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11:30am Saturday, Oct. 20 - The Lost WorldPreceding Short: The Ghost of Slumber Mountain It’s no accident that this early landmark of special-effects moviemaking plays something like a precursor to King Kong – Willis O’Brien, the great pioneer of animated wildlife in movies, created the stop-motion monsters and jungle miniatures for both films. Adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, this sci-fi jungle adventure has modern British scientists and explorers encountering pre-historic creatures in a remote South American setting that O’Brien and company created almost entirely inside First National Pictures’ studios.  The cast of live-action human characters includes a couple of iconic faces from Hollywood’s Golden Age, Wallace Beery as a notably combative zoologist and Lewis Stone as an avuncular nobleman who supports the expedition.  Bessie Love, a silent-era star who was still appearing in major films in the 1980’s, has what amounts to the Fay Wray/terrified heroine role here, with Lloyd Hughes playing the role of the young hero who romances her.  Burly Bull Montana has the heavily-made-up role of a menacing man/ape. Preceding short subject: Willis O’Brien’s The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1919).  The story of a man’s encounter with the ghostly Mad Dick who shows him a place where dinosaurs still exist.  O’Brien wrote, directed, created the dinosaurs, and played the ghost.

1:30pm Saturday, Oct. 20 - The Great K&A Train RobberyPreceding Short: Danger AheadTom Mix was the first great star of what we now think of as Saturday matinee westerns made for younger audiences.  And this film is one of the few surviving examples of the action-packed spectaculars he made while under contract to the Fox studios in the 1920ʼs.  As the title suggests, this one has Mix tracking down train robbers, but as is customary with matinee westerns, spectacle and action matter more than story.  The great attractions in this case include scenic glories from the Royal Gorge and other Colorado locations, grand scale chase scenes, sensational action (with daring stunt work by Mix himself), and the dynamic presence of Mixʼs top-billed co-star, Tony the Wonder Horse.  Youthful Dorothy Dwan, who was in 39 movies before retiring at the age of 24, plays the heroine, hefty William Walling plays her father, the railroad magnate who calls Tom to the case.  History-minded viewers may welcome the filmʼs documentary glimpses of the Shoshone Dam and of vintage railway rolling stock.  Also on the program: Danger Ahead, a comic adventure short with Hairbreadth Harry (played by Earl McCarthy) involved in some further railway action.

Film Notes continued ...

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