The General

I spent many months scratching my head, trying to make sense of this. And when I finally thought I had the basics figured out, Ed Watz, in an aside, proved me totally wrong. So I tried it again, and then David Pierce made a post that demolished even my rewrite. Let me try this yet again.

It was in 1933 that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) founded its motion-picture library. For the first two or three years, MoMA probably convinced the studios to sell release prints that were no longer needed. That might be how MoMA acquired Go West. For Our Hospitality, in 1940 MoMA acquired a freshly made nitrate print directly off of the negative. That was probably all that MGM would agree to. There had been duplicating films from Kodak going back to the mid-1920’s, and they gave rather good results. Prior to this, attempts to duplicate film were inevitably grainy and smeary, entirely unacceptable. The new duplicating-positive (colloquially “lavender”) and duplicating-negative stocks were a tremendous technological advance. These new stocks allowed the camera negative to be printed to a low-contrast fine-grain positive that, in turn, could be used to produced a copy negative of passable quality. Then, in 1936, Kodak performed a miracle, and it was a game-changer. Kodak released its new improved “lavender,” Eastman Fine-Grain Duplicating Film 1365. This resulted in more than passable quality, actually quite fine quality. Once the 1365 was introduced, MoMA would purchase lavenders instead of prints, and it certainly purchased lavenders of Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator.

David Pierce informs us that in 1935, MoMA asked if Harvard would be interested in donating its copies of those 13 movies. Harvard agreed, and in 1936 those movies were on file at MoMA.

In 1941, to cater to the new private film clubs that were sprouting up all over the country, MoMA made 16mm circulating prints of any films for which it had lavenders, and that is how Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator were made available. The General was also made available, and that is why I conjectured above that at least one of each pair of positives at Harvard must have been a lavender. MoMA did not purchase any other Buster movies, for the simple reason that funds were limited (per Ed Watz). My guess is that the studios agreed to share their intellectual property only because those particular films were by then considered worthless. The studios had zero intention of ever reissuing them.

MoMA probably made a single 35mm nitrate print of Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator for in-house use. The 16mm print of The General, by the way, appears to have been mounted onto three 1,200 reels. MoMA offered those 16mm prints to libraries and film clubs and other nonprofit organizations, and untrained projectionists operating subpar machines battered those prints. Thus did a new generation discover Keaton and proclaim him a genius, a description Buster sincerely rejected.

Here is how MoMA’s 16mm circulating prints opened:

This title replaced the original main title.

By the time that the film societies were beginning to sprout, accompanists as a species were extinct. As far as I can determine, film societies presented silent films dead silent, with no music at all. MoMA, of course, had staff pianists who accompanied, among them Arthur Kleiner, but MoMA was not a film society; it was a museum supported by the Rockefellers and the CIA. Among film societies, though, I know of three admirable outliers that appeared out of nowhere in later years. Here is one:

Zo, what was that? That was certainly the 16mm MoMA print, double-sprocket silent. The short films on the program were all, I’m pretty sure, in the MoMA rental catalogue. What was this about “a sound track added”? It must have been a homemade soundtrack on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, with musical selections likely pulled from a music lover’s library of them thar newfangled LP vinyl discs. Alternatively, and rather more likely, it could have been someone spinning discs. It was definitely not an optical track on the actual film print; I’m absolutely certain of that.

And here is a screening at the Santa Rosa Junior College:

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Revives Some Buster Keaton Movies