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Two films from avant-garde film renaissance of the late ’90s, Peggy Ahwesh’s Nocturne (1998) and Jesse Lerner’s Ruins (1999), join ten shorts made by Bay Area women artists to be preserved through the 2020 Avant-Garde Masters Grants, awarded by The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation.

UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will preserve ten films that were distributed by the Bay Area–based Serious Business Company (SBC), an independent film distribution company founded by Freude (1942–2009), operating from 1972 to 1984. Among them is Gunvor Nelson’s masterpiece My Name is Oona (1969). Named to the National Film Registry in 2019, this portrait of the artist’s daughter uses a repetitive soundtrack and rhythmic editing to capture the joyful chaos of childhood. Also distributed by SBC and slated for preservation are Alice Anne Parker’s I Change I Am the Same (1969), a playful critique of clothing and gender roles, four films exploring domesticity and the artistic life made by Freude, Josie Winship’s animated Bird Lady vs. the Galloping Gonads (1976), Karen Johnson’s Orange (1970), and Judith Wardwell’s satirical take on America’s sanitation obsession, Plastic Blag (1968).

Peggy Ahwesh’s Nocturne evokes gothic literature and horror film history, weaving stark black-and-white imagery with footage taken with a PixelVision video camera. The dreamlike narrative mixes text and spoken word to create a minimalist psychological horror film. Anthology Film Archives is supervising the preservation and will premiere the new print as part of a Peggy Ahwesh retrospective alongside other films preserved through NFPF programs.

XFR Collective will oversee the preservation of Jesse Lerner’s feature-length collage essay Ruins. Mostly comprised of archival footage, Ruins is a mischievous melding of fact and fiction that takes on the trappings of traditional museums. It explores the way history is constructed by official means and pokes holes in those narratives with wit and bite.

Now in its 18th year, Avant-Garde Masters was created by The Film Foundation and the NFPF to save films significant to the development of the avant-garde in America. Funding is generously provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. The grants have preserved 200 works by 78 artists, including Kenneth Anger, Shirley Clarke, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Oskar Fischinger, Hollis Frampton, Barbara Hammer, Ernie Gehr, George and Mike Kuchar, and Carolee Schneemann. A full list of films preserved through the program can be found here.

The start of talkies in 1929 in Hollywood jumpstarted Lionel Barrymore’s brief career as a director as studios required an experienced hand with spoken dialogue and Barrymore had had great success on stage before he became a movie actor. Ten Cents a Dance was the last movie he directed, and he was offered the job after being nominated for a directing Oscar for Madame X in 1930.

The shoot was plagued with difficulty including health problems for the director and star. Barbara Stanwyck, the leading lady, fractured her pelvis and was sidelined for a few days. But Barrymore suffered from chronic arthritis and was in constant pain. In the biography “The Barrymores: The Royal Family in Hollywood,” author James Kotsilibas-Davis writes, “Heavy medication dulled his pain and his direction. ‘You’d start a scene and look around and find he’d fallen asleep,’ leading man Ricardo Cortez states. ‘He tried his best,’ recalls Barbara Stanwyck. ‘As a performer, you just had to try harder.’ At the Hollywood preview, somebody transposed the reels, and the picture was run backward. Rumors circulated that Barrymore had lost his wits. Eventually, hung together correctly, Ten Cents a Dance became a personal success for Columbia’s new star.”

But Barrymore was disillusioned with directing and returned to acting, something he referred to as “the family curse.” In a New York Times interview in 1930, Barrymore said, “I have been with pictures for 21 years and don’t yet understand what the public wants. I tried, but the public taste is a riddle to me. It’s easy to fail ... Mind you, I don’t admit failure as a director, I don’t think I did, but I refuse to assume the burden of production. It wears a man down too fast.”

He would win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar the following year for A Free Soul.

Barrymore did Ten Cents a Dance no favors. Graced with a winning actress and a very good writer, Jo Swerling (who also wrote Platinum Blonde, The Pride of the Yankees, It’s a Wonderful Life and the Tony-winning Guys and Dolls on Broadway), the Pre-Code film is badly paced and misses every opportunity to show off Stanwyck’s natural talent. (Eddie Buzzell, a Columbia director, was hired to punch up the comedic scenes.)

Stanwyck plays Barbara O’Neill, a worldly-wise taxi dancer at a dancehall who attracts the eye of rich Bradley Carlton (Ricardo Cortez), who is willing to tip her $100 just to talk to her. Unfortunately, as whipsmart as Barbara is at the dancehall, her brains turn to mush when she meets a fellow lodger at her boarding house, college student Eddie Miller (Monroe Owsley). Eddie gives her a sob story, she gives him her $100 tip, and before you know it, the two are married. Eddie starts out no good and progresses to being worse. Barbara asks Bradley to employ him, the two hide their marriage from everyone, Eddie makes her leave her job at the dance hall, then he loses their money with some shady deals with shady friends on the stock market, embezzles from Bradley, tries to skip town, is saved by Barbara who tries to sell her virtue to Bradley for $5,000 and when Eddie ungratefully takes the money and then tries to blackmail Bradley, then Barbara’s eyes are opened, and she leaves him for Bradley.

But the movie does have its pleasures. Stanwyck is completely appealing as Barbara and is given a lot of snappy dialogue. “What’s a guy gotta do to dance with you girls?” asks a sailor of Stanwyck. “All you need is a ticket and some courage” is her comeback. Describing the manager of the dancehall, she has this to say to Bradley: “She’s got to keep the place hot enough to avoid bankruptcy and cold enough to avoid raids.” When things unravel between Barbara and Eddie, she retorts, “You’re not a man. You’re not even a good sample.” And when Barbara asks Bradley for the $5,000 promising to pay him back, he says incredulously, “At ten cents a dance? That’s 10,000 dances!”

The original poster had this tagline in all caps: SHE WAS A DANCE HALL HOSTESS BUT THE BAND NEVER PLAYED ‘HOME SWEET HOME’ FOR HER! Stanwyck, with top billing above the title in only her fifth movie role, poses in an evening gown, one strap of her bodice falling off her shoulder. Other ads were even more metaphorically bodice-ripping. ‘With a lump in her throat and a pang in her heart ... SHE DANCED!’ screamed a print ad in the Toledo News Bee of April 3, 1931. ‘BLISS FOR A MOMENT... AND THEN REMORSE!’ was another one. ‘She dreamed her way to paradise ... but danced a path to torment’ was yet another.

Ricardo Cortez was the stage name for Jacob Krantz, the son of Austrian immigrants, who jettisoned his Jewish name in favor of one bestowing a Latin lover persona to match his dark good looks. After all, this was the time when Rudolf Valentino and Ramon Navarro were matinee idols. Cortez mostly played villains in his career and is best known for playing Detective Spade in 1931’s The Maltese Falcon. (By the way, Stanwyck was born Ruby Stevens.)

Owsley, who died of a heart attack at age 36, was Hollywood’s go-to guy when they were casting a cheating liar. In fact, he played another such cheat in another 1931 film with a similar storyline. In Honor Among Lovers, Claudette Colbert lives to regret her marriage to Owsley and ends up with her boss Frederic March.

The movie started out with different titles – Roseland was one, Anybody’s Girl was another. But the release title was taken from a popular song of the time written by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart for Florenz Ziegfeld’s play “Simple Simon” and sung by Ruth Etting in the 1930 production. Her version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. It was also inducted into the National Recording Registry in 2011. As an aside, the song was actually written for a different singer, Lee Morse, who was unable to perform it when she showed up drunk at the Boston tryouts. Etting stepped in for her at Ziegfeld’s request, and history was made.

The film was preserved with funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in association with The Film Foundation. The source material for the preservation was the nitrate original picture and track negatives. Picture and sound master positives were made from these negatives as were two show-quality access prints.

If you love the cinema, you live with it. The films that comprise its history and the most precious manifestations of its particular power and beauty live with you in turn. You evolve and so does your relationship with individual films. Sometimes you grow away from them: they reveal their fault lines and their weaknesses and you come to see that the you of a particular time and age completed the film for itself. But there are other films—very, very few—that become more emotionally complex and uncanny with each new viewing.

To grow up in the 60s and 70s with parents and grandparents and a television set was to live through the 30s and 40s and 50s through their eyes as they watched the films they’d first seen as children and young adults. So, I saw Dodsworth for the first time on television. I don’t remember the circumstances, I just knew that my parents liked it and that I liked it, and that I found it very special without really knowing why. The older I got, the more it moved me. Watching the Academy/Film Foundation restoration on a big screen one year ago, with a packed audience that included William Wyler’s daughters Catherine and Melanie, was a deeply moving experience for me.

Dodsworth is a film about misplaced devotion and the freedom to become yourself. It is deeply felt by its director, who translates his feelings into cinema. It is, unlike many other American films of its era, absolutely frank about adult matters like who is sleeping with whom and what love is and isn’t. The opening image of a slumped Sam Dodsworth, not just acted but embodied by Walter Huston, looking out for the last time on the auto factory he’s created and is leaving behind…Dodsworth on the deck of the Queen Mary making the transatlantic crossing, gazing out like a wonderstruck boy at Bishop’s Light on the English coast as a fur-clad Mary Astor calls out to him from her deck chair…the stunning confrontation between Dodsworth, his wife Fran (Ruth Chatterton) and her European lover (Paul Lukas) when he’s caught them red-handed…Fran’s chilling encounter with the traditional Viennese mother of a second lover…I could go on and on and on about moments big and small, the subtle inflections and gestures that are the lifeblood of all great films. I’ll just say that Dodsworth builds unassumingly to a final confrontation between man and wife that is perfectly staged, eternally shocking, deeply stirring, and genuinely deserving of a term that has been severely cheapened through overuse: life-affirming.

See you in 2021.

- Kent Jones

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DODSWORTH (1936, d. William Wyler)
Restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation, in association with the Samuel Goldwyn Jr. Family Trust. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Sometimes, the act of preservation is the film.

W.C. Fields, a man of the 19^th century, started on the music hall circuit as “the Tramp Juggler,” remade himself as the “Eccentric Juggler,” and he gradually came to be known (or publicized) as the world’s greatest juggler. Before he turned 20, he was supporting his family with his increasingly elaborate act, and he toured the world. He began to incorporate little remarks and exclamations and asides into his routine. He moved onto vaudeville and then to Broadway, where he made the transition to comedy, and then the Ziegfeld Follies, where he became a full-blown sensation. He appeared in a few silent films but he became a film star with the coming of sound. Between 1930 and 1933, he made a series of two-reelers that were built around his persona and his almost supernatural comic timing, physical and verbal, and a merciless sense of humor that would enshrine him, along with The Marx Brothers and Humphrey Bogart, as a countercultural icon long after his death.

I’m not sure if The Fatal Glass of Beer, restored by UCLA with the help of The Film Foundation, is my favorite of the shorts, but it’s by far the most outlandish. It looks like it was shot in a matter of hours rather than days, on sets constructed by underpaid carpenters between lengthy visits to the bar. Visually, it makes an average Brady Bunch episode look like a Mizoguchi movie. But the ramshackle nature of the enterprise is part of the point and crucial to Fields’ act—everything, including the man himself, seems to be on the verge of falling apart and then falls back together again. The humor of this particular film is satirical in nature, and the targets are great white north rescue melodramas and the mid-19^th century theatrical sensation The Drunkard.

To people with no knowledge of these reference points and no sense of Fields’ popularity, The Fatal Glass of Beer might be as incomprehensible as Babylonian cuneiform. But I think that “accessibility,” especially when it’s “immediate,” is a severely overrated attribute of movies or literature. In the case of many of the films that I love, I was intrigued or sparked by something within them before I fully understood them. In the case of The Fatal Glass of Beer and the other Fields shorts, I would suggest watching them for the first time with a child by your side, if at all possible.

**

Today, on a personal note, I want to remember someone who passed away this year, largely without notice. Robert Geisler, known to his friends and many acquaintances as Bobby, would have turned 69 yesterday. He and his old partner in life and business, John Roberdeau (who died in 2002), have three film credits to their names on IMDb, the last of which is The Thin Red Line. Bobby had many more projects that he tried mightily to get off the ground, for the stage and the screen, right up to the end. He was a dreamer, on an elaborate scale, and his dreams kept him alive. He was a true believer, and I never met anyone else quite like him. Yesterday, his mother Ann made a donation to The Film Foundation in his name. That would have made him smile.

- Kent Jones

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THE FATAL GLASS OF BEER (1933, d. Clyde Bruckman)
Preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by The Film Foundation.