Sweet preserves

A DVD box set of golden oldies

For film freaks this holiday season, it's as festive as smooching 'neath the mistletoe, an equivalent to those vintage Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong CDs on which jazz fans routinely groove: Treasures from American Film Archives, 50 Preserved Films: 1893-1985. This four-DVD box set issued by the National Film Preservation Foundation offers 11 hours of dazzling early film features, documentaries, animations, and experimental shorts, all lovingly preserved by nonprofit archives across America, from the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress to the tiny Minnesota Historical Society and Alaska Film Archives.

Your $99.99 purchase (www.image-entertainment.com, 818-407-9100) also gets you a scholarly, entertaining book of program notes by Scott Simmons and explanations of the remarkable accompanying music arranged, and often played (on piano), by one of our local treasures. MIT senior lecturer in music Martin Marks knows his world music, from obscure medieval composers to turn-of-the-century Tin Pan Alley. A typical five minutes for a set of 1901-'04 shorts includes snippets from Schubert's Moments Musicaux and Scott Joplin's "The Favorite," the pop tune "Sidewalks of New York," and a sampling from Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee. Marks adds, "I couldn't resist referring to `Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow-Wow' (1893), now forgotten but endearingly flippant."

The super-highlight of the four DVDs is a two-minute sequence within the 1937 WPA documentary We Work Again that showcases a Harlem-based stage production of Macbeth for the Federal Theatre Project. It's Shakespeare transported to a voodoo-ambient Haitian and performed by an African-American cast, the bold conception of a 20-year-old director, one Orson Welles. Recently discovered, this clip is one of the earliest filmed records of Welles's artistry: we see the play's spectacular conclusion, when "Birnam Wood" lands in the lap of Macbeth, here a megalomaniac black ruler probably inspired by Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones.

Other assorted curiosities:

* Her Crowning Glory (1911). Preserved by the UCLA Archives, this is an intro to America's first popular film comedian, round-bellied John Bunny, who died in 1915 and was mourned around the globe.

* Snow White (1916). Restored by the George Eastman House, this 63-minute live-action feature stars a woefully over-aged Marguerite Clark (she's 32). It enthralled the 15-year-old Walt Disney when he was growing up in Kansas City; he acknowledged it as the inspiration for his 1937 animated masterpiece. The early version is a rough-hewn amalgam of sundry Grimm Brothers tales, though the scenes in which the dwarfs (children in whiteface?) find sleeping Snow White are not far afield from how Uncle Walt would do them.

* The Chechachos (1924). The only film from the Alaska Moving Picture Company proves that there have always been vigorous indies, some of them far from Hollywood. This one stars an almost all-Alaskan cast who are comfortable with dogsleds and glaciers and also take a stab at melodrama: a lost child, a mother's abiding love.

* Rose Hobart (1936). Preserved by the Anthology Film Archives, this is the visionary surrealist work of artist Joseph Cornell, and perhaps the first postmodern movie. Cornell did what no one had done before: he took a schlock 1931 Hollywood potboiler, East of Borneo, and reshot and re-edited it into a disjunctive Jungian dream picture that's both disturbing and hilarious. He renamed his version for its dreamy, B-movie-star actress.

* Negro Leagues Baseball (1946). There's little extant footage of those legendary years of segregated African-American athletes, so this eight minutes of anonymously made film preserved by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is essential. Shot at Cincinnati's Crosley Field, it features the Indianapolis Clowns and their lanky first baseman. Reece "Goose" Tatum became far more famous with the Harlem Globetrotters; much of the ball juggling here on the baseball diamond is akin to the Globetrotters' basketball routines.

Let me end by noting that two key New England archives are represented in this collection. The National Center of Jewish Film -- which, housed at Brandeis University, is the most important archive for the preservation of Yiddish films -- offers a 17-minute sequence (too short!) from the 1937 Tevye, with the great Maurice Schwartz as Sholom Aleichem's lovable future Fiddler on the Roof dairyman. You'll swear this film was made in rural Poland -- there's even a priest speaking shtetl Yiddish. But no, it comes from Jericho, Long Island and was financed by a New York restaurateur.

Northeast Historic Film, in Bucksport, Maine, has a mandate to preserve not only professional features produced in Northern New England but also amateur home movies. We are treated to delightful 1936-1937 footage by Archie Stewart, an automobile dealer who filmed his family with a 16mm sound camera. What fun! His two elementary-school-age daughters throw a tea party, and, sporting British accents, they include their large-snouted family dog, which, decades before the canine experiments of William Wegman, is dressed almost like Whistler's mother.

---

The Film Culture archive

---