Cine Salon, the film series that screens in the fall free-of-charge at the Howe Library in Hanover, returns Monday night for its 20th season.
Curated by Bruce Posner, a Hanover film restorationist, historian and all-around cineaste, Cine Salon is notable for showing films that are historic, unusual and little seen. And many of them have transformed cinema in some way, or transformed how we think about the possibilities of cinema.
Take the first entry in the 16-week series, “In Dialogue, Thierry Fremaux: Lumiere! 1895-1905,” a compendium of 114 short, short films by the French Lumiere brothers, who, along with Thomas Edison, not only invented film but also began to write its vocabulary.
The films will be introduced, via Skype, by Thierry Fremaux, the director of both the Institut Lumiere in Lyon and the Cannes Film Festival. Who better to talk about the incalculable influence of the Lumieres on film?
So is this Cine Salon’s Best. Season. Ever?
It might be, said Posner, who has overseen digital restorations of American and European avant-garde classics which are now compiled in Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1893-1941 and the new Blu-ray/DVD release of Masterworks of American Avant-Garde Experimental Film 1920-1970.
Most recently, Posner directed the digital restoration, with sound, of Moana, the 1926 Robert Flaherty documentary about life in the South Pacific.
And he, and other film professionals in the Upper Valley, convene annually on the second Saturday in October, for Home Movie Day, when people can bring in their old home movies to screen. (This year it falls on Oct. 15, and it’s being held at the Howe as part of Ciné Salon.)
The overarching themes of the 20th anniversary of Ciné Salon, which runs through Dec. 12, are ambitious.
“It’s the theme of the old, the new, what is cinema, what was cinema. It’s Lumiere on one end and Andy Warhol on the other,” Posner said.
More than that, the slate of films being shown on the 20th anniversary comment, not so obliquely, on how radically the film industry, and the act of watching movies, has changed in 20 years.
Those two decades have seen the rise and fall of VHS and the VCR, the rise of HDTV, Blu-Ray, direct streaming via computer and cell phone, the phasing out of 35 millimeter film stock in favor of digital cameras and projection, the introduction of Youtube, and the so-called Golden Age of Television, all of which have nibbled away at, or taken big bites out of, audiences going to movie theaters for first-run films.
“We see films so differently now,” Posner said. “The idea that you have this group of people in a room watching movies is almost antiquated. This might be the last time a group of people sit in a room and look at these things in a public way, not a classroom way.”
Posner’s guest list for “Ciné Salon at 20” is not to be sneezed at:
Hanover curator and collector Trevor Fairbrother talks about Andy Warhol’s films, Screen Tests and Couch, on Sept. 26.
Hanover’s own Virginia Heffernan, a cultural critic and author of Magic and Loss: The Internet As Art speaks in person about art, film, genius and the internet as one of civilization’s greatest inventions on Oct. 3.
Film critic and historian David Thompson, who is perhaps best known for his compendium The Biographical Dictionary of Film, which is sporadically reissued with new entries, introduces (most likely via Skype) a most unusual screening of one of Vincent Minelli’s first films, The Clock, a 1948 picture that starred Judy Garland and Robert Walker.
Thompson taught film at Dartmouth College and while there, ran side-by-side on the screen two prints of The Clock, one going forward and one going backward.
“The juxtapositions are mind-blowing, and all of a sudden this completely conventional thing just shoots off to the stars,” Posner said.
Also that evening, local pianist Bob Merrill, who often accompanies silent films when they are shown at the Hopkins Center, will play new music to Charlie Chaplin outtakes along with other juicy tidbits, on Oct. 24.
Amherst College film professor Amelie Hastie, joins Posner to speak on the directorial career of Ida Lupino, the British-born actor turned director.
Lupino directed a number of films in the 1950s, which makes her not only one of the few women in Hollywood to direct, but one of the few to address such so-called “women’s issues” as abortion and rape that were rarely touched on in the more mainstream Hollywood fare. Hastie talks on Oct. 31.
Noted American film restorationist David Shepherd, who is slated to Skype in to discuss some of the silent films he’s worked on, including films by Charlie Chaplin, director Raoul Walsh and European and American avant-garde films. Nov. 7.
Posner said he is somewhat surprised to have reached 20 years.
“We live in a small community so I think it’s amazing that anyone shows up. I told myself if no one showed up, I’d stop.”
But they showed up; so Ciné Salon continues.
(On another note: the list of Ciné Salon sponsors is more proof of the success of artistic and community collaboration in the Upper Valley, among them AVA Gallery and Art Center, the Main Street Museum, Dartmouth Department of Film and Media Studies, Lebanon Opera House, White River Indie Films, and the Vermont Archive Movie Project.)
And by the time it reaches 25 years, maybe Posner will get that gold watch he jokes he’d like to receive.
Here’s a list of some of the other screenings to look forward to:
During the era of racial segregation there was a rich culture of independent African-American filmmaking and black-owned movie houses. Pioneering African-American filmmakers Oscar Michaeux and Spencer Williams made movies that played to black audiences, riffing on canards and stereotypes about African-Americans that were legion in Hollywood filmmaking. Lying Lips (1939), directed by Michaeux, and The Blood of Jesus (1941), directed by Williams, screen on Oct. 17.
“Wicked Woman & Bad Girls Go To Hell.” There’s an entire subculture devoted to worshipping the C and D camp movie cult classics featuring scheming women and stupid chumps — and, usually, inept scripts, acting and direction. Two of them, Wicked Woman (1953) and Bad Girls Go To Hell (1965) screen on Nov. 14.
A tribute to maybe the ultimate New York film director — and no, it’s not Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese. Two Sidney Lumet classics, 12 Angry Men, set in a New York City jury room, and Murder on the Orient Express, which is set, not on the #7 line to Flushing, but in the 1920s on the luxurious Paris to Constantinople train, screen Nov. 28.
Finally, a tribute to two talents who died this year. New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham, who for decades, took the pulse of the city streets, and the times, by looking at its fashion. And experimental filmmaker and professional cinematographer Peter Hutton, who filmed going to sea on container ships. Dec. 12.
All screenings begin at 7 p.m. in the Mayer Room of the Howe Library.
For a complete listing, and schedule, consult thehowe.org/media/pdf/event-series-schedules/cine-salon-20-flyerx.pdf.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.