1300B. batch5/20260908_161216

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## HEADING: 1300B.
## LEFT COLUMN
In the Orient - Tony Sarg's Marionettes, Columbia, USA, 1929, 9:52
In the Orient (1929) preserves a performance by Tony Sarg (1880-1942), father of modern puppetry in North America. In the 1920s and 1930s, Sarg's troupe toured with such productions as "Treasure Island" and "Alice in Wonderland;" more than three million people saw his shows at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933. Sarg was also an illustrator, made silhouette films, and designed Macy's animated Christmas window displays. This film was preserved from a 35mm silent print with a separate 16-inch Vitaphone disc for the sound.

Ain't She Sweet - (with Lillian Roth), Fleischer Studios, USA, 1932, 7:11
19th century song pluggers in vaudeville theaters and in the streets invited audiences to join in the chorus; this tradition of participation appeared in movie theaters by the mid-teens. When sound arrived, Fleischer Studios' delightful "Screen Songs" added witty animated prologues and celebrity singers to prepare the audience for the ball that bounced through the lyrics.

Balloonland - Ub Iwerks (Cinecolor), USA, 1935, 6:41
Ub Iwerks' bizarre Balloonland (1935) has appeared in many video collections, often under its 16mm home-movie title The Pincushion Man. In 1974, the Blackhawk Films Collection acquired the elements and copyright of Iwerk's 75 "Flip The Frog," "Comicolor" and "Willie Whopper" cartoons, produced between 1930 and 1936. Blackhawk holds the original nitrate red/blue Cinecolor negatives, and this astonishing film is presented here with restored picture and sound prepared in collaboration with the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Play Safe - Fleischer Studios (Technicolor), USA, 1936, 7:05
Play Safe, a Fleischer Studios "Color Classic", is one of the first cartoons in three-color Technicolor made after Disney's exclusive license on the process expired early in 1936. A few shots innovate animation filmed vertically with characters moving among three-dimensional sets. The pioneering Fleischers also made Ko-Ko, Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman cartoons. This edition is mastered from an original 35mm dye transfer print.

PROGRAM TWO - GRACE NOTES
Radi-Ators - (with the Utica Jubilee Singer), Columbia, USA, 1929, 9:18
In the 1920s, radio brought African-American music into the mainstream; early sound films presented black vaudevillians, bands, and singers to movie audiences. Radi-Ators presents the Utica Jubilee Singers, students at Utica (Mississippi) Normal and Industrial Institute (now Hinds Community College). Their choral arrangements (known as "Jubilees") were published as sheet music and recorded on Victor records; the Singers also toured Europe in 1927-28 before making this 1929 film, restored in 1992 from a 35mm silent positive and its separate 16-inch Vitaphone sound disc.

Black and Tan - (with the Duke Ellington Orchestra), RCA, USA, 1929, 18:10
RCA produced Black and Tan to showcase its Photophone sound system. Film Daily said upon the film's release in November, 1929: "Duke Ellington and his all-colored orchestra put over the hot jazz - and how." Director Dudley Murphy collaborated with Fernand Léger on Ballet Mecanique in 1924 and seasons this film with avant-garde sequences while also telling a story. The late Karl Emil Knudsen, well-known Danish producer of jazz records, purchased the original negative from Dudley Murphy and supplied the print from which this transfer was made.

Louis Armstrong in Copenhagen - Denmark, 1934, 9:05
After a decade performing in and recording with the top hot jazz bands of New Orleans, Chicago and New York, legendary trumpeter and vocalist Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong moved to Los Angeles in 1930, and then toured Europe. Armstrong's work in this period remains a foundation stone in all of jazz history. These three numbers were filmed in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1934.

Jazz Hot - (with Django Reinhardt), France, 1939, 6:20
Jazz Hot is a major discovery - a unique sync sound film record of Django Reinhardt, greatest of jazz guitarists, here with violinist Stéphane Grappelli and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. It's undocumented, but J'attendrais (I Will Wait), published in 1937, was filmed perhaps to promote the Quintet's tour of Britain in the summer of 1939. Discovered thanks to Fabien Ruiz, a

## RIGHT COLUMN
PROGRAM THREE - PERSUADE ME
California Election News #2 - USA, 1934, 6:52
The notorious fake California Election News was secretly produced by MGM in 1934 for the film industry's campaign against Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle and many other works. Sinclair's EPIC (End Poverty in California) platform won him a landslide Democratic nomination for governor. Terrified at the idea of a socialist reformer running the state, Republicans organized one of the dirtiest-ever campaigns. The people in these "candid" interviews are actors; the films were designed to frighten voters into selecting any candidate except Sinclair.

Bosley Crowther's history of MGM, The Lion's Share, stated that these films had existed, but no one we asked imagined they survived. However, perfect nitrate prints of episodes 1 and 2 were among the papers of Governor Merriam at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, California, and we were allowed to copy them in return for 35mm safety prints.

Week-End - (with Fernandel) - Virginia Week-End Tobacco, France, 1938, 2:17
Coté nui-t-la - (with Jacques Tati) - LEVITAN and Co., France, 1935, 1:31
Clo-Cloche - (with Michel Simon) - Coporal, France, 1935, 2:08
The following three films from 1935-38 present Fernandel, Jacques Tati and Michel Simon, each an important French film star, in screen advertisements which were projected in commercial cinemas. Film ads in Europe predated the American practice by several decades.

As with newsreels, commercials were often left behind in theatres as the producers did not request return of the prints. At Lobster, we used to pile them all on one shelf, without keeping track of where they were found. But one day when the shelf was full, we decided to watch them all, and found these among many others.

MGM Promo Reel - (with Laurel & Hardy), MGM, France, 1936, 8:30
During Hollywood's "golden age," studios produced elaborate books, trailer reels, and junkets to sell the studio's seasonal block of releases to exhibitors. This one for France from MGM features Laurel & Hardy (dubbed into French); it also announces films that later became classics.

This print came from a shoe factory in Nancy that received old film to be rendered into glue. When the manager saw the films without cans, he decided against destroying them and bought the prints for the equivalent price of the glue. He put the films in the attic of his country house, where Lobster Films found and bought them from his grandson. This group consisted of about 300 reels of film including many silent French and German films previously believed lost, and the only known complete 35mm print of the 1927 Laurel & Hardy comedy Flying Elephants. But in September, 2007, we discovered another complete print of the same film, in Brittany!

Master Hands - Chevrolet Motor Co., Jam Handy, USA, 1936, 31:48
Master Hands (1936) is a sponsored paean to the machine age, an almost-wordless celebration of industrial production at the Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan. Apparently produced for showing at a stockholders meeting, it was never distributed as seen here, but was later reworked for more prosaic uses. The unique original print of Master Hands was rescued by Rick Prelinger from the garage of a former employee of its producer, the Jam Handy Organization; it is presented through his courtesy, and is included in the National Film Registry.

Philips Broadcast of 1938 - George Pal, Phillips Radio, Holland, 1938, 4:57
This astonishing advertising film made in 1938 for Philips Radio in Holland is the work of a brilliant animation pioneer, George Pal. In the process Pal called "puppetoons," puppets composed of numerous interchangeable wooden parts are filmed frame-by-frame. Pal devoted months of work to this five-minute dream in Technicolor!

Yankee Doodler - Soundies Dist. Corp., USA, 1942, 2:54
Rosie the Riveter - Soundies Dist. Corp., USA, USA, 1943, 2:38
Dear Arabella - Soundies Dist. Corp., USA, USA, 1942, 2:38
Ancestors of music videos, the next three films were made during World War II for coin-operated jukebox devices found in restaurants, bars, and train stations. On built-in glass screens, they projected 16mm films of artists performing popular tunes. These examples, although not in perfect condition, are time capsules of their era. William Frawley was a vaudevillian and musical comedy performer decades before he played Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy.

Blackhawk Films bought Yankee Doodler for a preposterous amount of money; the seller felt compassionate about it and sent us the other two as a gift, along with many more.