THE GENERAL

From the "day job" basket:

Kino has just released a deluxe DVD of Buster Keaton's THE GENERAL that I produced. We mastered the film in HD from a fine grain master struck from the original nitrate camera neg (you archival nuts will know what that means). I can safely say there is no better version of THE GENERAL in release. Its bonuses include three musical scores to choose from -- including Carl Davis's celebrated orchestral score, which has been unavailable in the US for more than a decade. Plus documentaries, etc. No, I'm not trying to sell anything, but passing on relevant information to those who share my interest in silent film.

Click on the image to view a trailer I cut together for the release:

Thomas Alva

I Googled myself recently (WHAT OF IT?!) and discovered that an old interview with me has surfaced on Film Threat, in which I discuss the DVD boxed set I produced for Kino in 2005: Edison: The Invention of the Movies (which has a pretty cool website, by the way).



I'll copy-and-paste the introduction here, then you can CLICK HERE to read the interview itself.

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The American motion picture industry began with Thomas Edison and his brigade of inventive technicians during the final years of the 19th century. Edison never directed films and was only occasionally involved in their production, but under his leadership a new entertainment took root and quickly blossomed - literally beyond his eventual control.
Kino on Video, in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Library of Congress, has assembled 140 films produced by Edison in a four-disc DVD set called Edison: The Invention of the Movies. Beginning with the blurry, ghostly figures of the Monkey-Shines camera tests of 1889 (made at his celebrated Black Maria Studio in New Jersey) through the short oddball films designed to be seen in the kinetoscope machines (a single-viewer contraption where a 50-foot film ran in a loop) through the 1918 theatrical feature The Unbeliever starring Erich von Stroheim, this remarkable collection spans the development of the nascent cinema from its crude experimental beginning to the dawn of the modern film industry.

Many of the films in Edison: The Invention of the Movies are being made available on DVD for the very first time, most notably the 1895 Dickson Experimental Sound Film, which marked the earliest known attempt at synchronized sound in movies (the soundtrack of this 14-second effort was restored from a damaged wax cylinder and perfectly matched to the rather odd imagery of a man playing a violin while two other men danced a fox trot). There are some familiar titles to be seen here, including The John C. Rice - May Irwin Kiss and the landmark Western The Great Train Robbery, as well as hitherto obscure gems such as glimpses of turn-of-the-century celebrities like sharpshooter Annie Oakley and bodybuilder Eugene Sandow.

Bret Wood, who produced Edison: The Invention of the Movies, spoke with Film Threat on the unique challenges of bringing the harvest of silent Edison films into a single DVD presentation.

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CLICK HERE to read the interview.

Incidentally, my digital restoration of Monkeyshines is being screened this week in Italy at the 2008 Pordenone Silent Film Festival. I'll be here... holding down the fort.