Something old, something new

Tonya | 4/20/2007 1:29 pm | Screen Siren

You settle into your seat at the movie theater. On screen appears a silent, black-and-white image that looks like it came forth from the dusty vaults of early film history. It instructs you to turn off your cell phone. You obey the message, but nearby someone else's phone rings, and he answers it and starts talking loudly. You think about grabbing an usher and complaining, but a man onscreen has a better idea: he pulls a giant lever, and the man on the phone, who you realize is an actor, shakes and falls down as if executed.

This is one of the interactive, short silent films produced by Wisconsin Bioscope, one of the few film companies in the world that still makes silent black-and-white films on 35 mm film stock. The company is helmed by Dan Fuller, an instructor in UW-Madison's Communication Arts department, and staffed by a new group of students each fall in his production class "Making the Early Silent Film." Wisconsin Bioscope is unique in that they eschew modern filmmaking methods in favor of silent-era equipment and production techniques, such as using a wooden camera with a hand crank that was made sometime around 1923. "At one point, all of our equipment was just garbage," says Fuller.

"This is unique because no one else thinks they can do it. People think it's impossible." The film stock used by Wisconsin Bioscope is so slow and light-insensitive that, as in real productions in the early silent film era, filming can only be done outside under direct sunlight or in a studio powered by multitudes of extremely high-wattage lamps. In addition, 35 mm film production can be prohibitively expensive, with 1,000 feet of film, or about 16 minutes, costing $224. "It's only cheap if you can find a way to do it yourself," says Fuller. And that is what Wisconsin Bioscope does, developing and printing their own film and splicing it together by hand.

Although modern technology is at their disposal, the filmmakers of Wisconsin Bioscope restrict themselves to using era-appropriate methods. Special effects can be achieved by using the creative techniques of early filmmakers. Simply stopping and starting the camera can create the illusion of a person disappearing. Filming, cranking the camera backwards, and filming again can create an overlapping double-exposure. And color can be had by painstakingly painting the print, frame by frame.

All of this hard work pays off, often with a spot in Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, the largest silent film festival in the world, which takes place every October in Pordenone, Italy. The festival is one week long, and all films are shown with live musical accompaniment, sometimes a full orchestra. Fuller describes the festival's audience as serious films scholars, there to see the restored works of the silent film masters, and who find new films "if not annoying, unnecessary."

"You get the sense that they're thinking "�what's the point?'"

"What is the point?" I ask.

"That's a good question." He thinks. "The interaction is justification for all this."

Fuller goes on to describe one of the standout films of Wisconsin Bioscope's oeuvre. Entitled Daddy Don't, it is a melodrama that was screened in Pordenone last year. "It really looks old," says Fuller. The plot follows a man who comes home, drunk, clutching a whiskey bottle, and raises his hand to hit his wife. Next, the pianist in the audience, who has been providing the musical accompaniment, stops playing and yells at the drunkard to stop. The pianist storms out of the theater and suddenly appears onscreen. He takes the drunkard's bottle of whiskey, yells at him, tells him to do what's right for his family, and then walks offscreen, huffs back into the theater, and sits at the piano, whiskey bottle in hand.

Fuller explains how he'd like to make more films to get the entire audience participating. Besides this sort of audience interaction, Fuller hopes that Wisconsin Bioscope can be useful in doing work for film archives, such as staging and shooting bits of film to replace shots that are missing in old silent prints.

On Saturday, May 5, last fall's Wisconsin Bioscope films will be shown at the Cinematheque, opening for the restored silent films Her Wild Oat (1922) and For Alimony Only (1926), with live piano accompaniment by David Drazin. The bill will include A Expedicao Brasileira de 1916, a short film that stars UW-Madison professor and prominent author and film critic David Bordwell, in his on-screen debut as the Brazilian Minister of Aviation who, according to the film, sent an ill-fated expedition to the moon in 1916. The screening begins at 7:30 pm.

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