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Movie Review
| Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934. Scott Simmon, curator; Martin Marks, music curator. National Film Preservation Foundation, 2007. 4 DVDs. 739 mins. (National Film Preservation Foundation, http://www.filmpreservation.org)
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| A distressing statistic for those interested in the study of early American cinema is that over 90 percent of all films made before 1920 are lost forever. On the other hand, one of the most welcome developments in the past decade has been the effort to preserve and make available on DVDs a wide range of films from that era. Central to that effort in the United States has been the series of boxed dvd sets from the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF). The first two—Treasures from American Film Archives (released on 4 discs in 2000, with an Encore Edition in 2005) and More Treasures from American Film Archives (on 3 discs, 2004)—each won Film Heritage Awards from the National Society of Film Critics. Together they include a variety of films, from Thomas Edison's early Blacksmithing Scene (1893) to William S. Hart's 1916 feature western Hell's Hinges, from Scott Bartlett's experimental film OffOn (1967) to footage of Goose Tatum and others from the Negro baseball leagues, from footage of the rural South by Zora Neale Hurston to Ernst Lubitsch's Lady Windermere's Fan (1925), from Robert Riskin's World War II documentary Autobiography of a Jeep (1943) to footage of Marian Anderson's famous 1939 concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. |
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The NFPF's newest collection, Treasures III, should be of even more interest to historians of American cinema and culture. As film historians such as Kevin Brownlow (Behind the Mask of Innocence [1990]), Kay Sloan (The Loud Silents [1988]), Steven Ross (Working-Class Hollywood [1998]) have shown, because American narrative film was born and began its development at a time when many Americans were clamoring for reform, it should be no surprise that American movies were sometimes deeply embedded with social concerns. The curator of Treasures III, Scott Simmon, observes in the program notes that "in the years before World War I, virtually no issue was too controversial to bring to the screen: abortion, anarchism, unionization, the vote for women, child labor, organized crime, prostitution, loan sharking, juvenile justice, homelessness, police corruption, workplace discrimination, immigration, and more" (p. ix). Treasures III offers a fascinating and wide range of such social issue films from five different archives: the George Eastman House, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Archives, and the UCLA Film and Television Archives. |
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Each disc is organized by a topical focus. Disc one, "The City Reformed," touches on urban issues that occupied Progressive reformers, including organized crime, poverty, health, workplace safety, urban corruption, and children's welfare. "New Women," disc two, demonstrates some of the ways that early movies represented women's conditions in general and the suffrage movement in particular. Most of the films in the third disc, "Toil and Tyranny," deal with representations of the working class, unions, and struggles between management and labor, except the final film on the disc, Cecil B. DeMille's last silent film, The Godless Girl (1928), which touches on the conflict in a high school between traditional religious beliefs and a rational, atheist position, and then becomes an exposé of cruel practices in American juvenile reformatories. Finally, "Americans in the Making," disc four, collects movies that treat immigration, race relations, and wartime pressures to generate "100% Americanism," then concludes with eight newsreels about Prohibition that exhibit a wide spectrum of attitudes on the Eighteenth Amendment. |
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