More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894-1931 (review)

Though Spielberg and Lucas messed up the curve, sequels are seldom as good—or as profitable—as the originals, the Roman numeral after a title being a warning sign of base commerce and subpar quality. Wrestling the cellophane off More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894–1931, the three-disc, fifty-film DVD follow-up to the landmark 2000 collection Treasures from American Film Archives, one expects the flash and glitter that made the original so dazzling might dim the second time around, that the raiders of the lost film archives had already pillaged the choicest nuggets and left the clinkers behind in cold storage for the next, tardier band of tomb raiders. Yet however large looms the shadow of its well-remembered ancestor, Treasures II digs open a chest full of valuables in near-mint condition—fourteen-karat classics and iron-pyrite ephemera alike—that will prove irresistible to the obsessive-compulsive scholars, teachers, and buffs whose eyes light up at the sight of long-buried film loot.

As with the primogenitor, descriptions like "eclectic smorgasbord" fail to do justice to the dizzyingly flea market–cum–scavenger hunt quality of the material encoded herein. Scanning the marquee titles is like flipping though the card catalog of the motion picture branch of a Borgesian Library at Babel: industrial films (the labor intensive toil that delights only the owners in De-Light: Making an Electric Light Bulb [1920]), commercials (the hard-sell browbeating of Buy an Electric Refrigerator [1926]), animation (the countdown-to-Prohibition satire The Breath of a Nation [1919]), serials (the statistically unlikely exploits chronicled in The Hazards of Helen: Episode #26 [1915]), early sound newsreels (a dapper George Bernard Shaw, born ham and camera hog, seizing his moment in the spotlight for Fox Movietone), protean avant garde (Robert Florey's neck-craning montage of architectural phallocentricity, Skyscraper Symphony [1929]), sing-along (follow the bouncing ball for a rousing version of the Civil War anthem Tramp, Tramp, Tramp [1926]), ethnographic fragments (the surprisingly sharp camerawork and inquiring eye that informs Zora Neal Hurston's Fieldwork Footage [1928]), Saturday-matinee fodder (Clash of the Wolves [1925], a star vehicle for Hollywood's least temperamental matinee idol), and unclassifiable exemplars of the truly whacked-out (There It Is [1928], a trippy comedy short that plays like a bad acid flashback).

Where to begin? The collection is not assembled for linear spectatorship but for piecemeal sampling: days, maybe weeks will elapse before each of the fifty titles is cued up and eyeballed, with program notes read and commentary tracks heeded. Chosen for maximum pedagogical exploitation, the lineup is destined to book its longest-running play dates as a boffo lesson plan for resourceful educators: the brief running times of the bulk of the clips fit perfectly into teachable blocks of fifty or eighty minutes.

The lessons will yoke the visions from history with the grammar of cinema. If all motion picture film is a window on the past, the relics from the primordial ooze of the first thirty years bespeak "a kind of time travel," as film historian Tom Gunning marvels. How closely the earliest films are linked to the early Republic is gleaned in the surviving snippets from Rip Van Winkle (1896), featuring the famed nineteenth-century stage actor Joseph Jefferson, born in 1829 and thus "probably the earliest-born actor to star in a film," suggests Scott Simmon, curator of the DVD set for the National Film Preservation Foundation. Watching The Invaders (1912), Thomas Ince's progressive western (the title refers to the nonnative Americans), one realizes with a jolt that the real Oglala Sioux in the cast may well have shot arrows at the Seventh Cavalry in their days as young braves. Appropriately, too, the illuminating presence of the Big Kahuna himself pops up in a reenactment titled Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory (1897), although cynics...