Silenced Laughter

Awaiting its cue, the unaccompanied grand piano sits to the side of the stage, camouflaged by dimmed lighting. The Academy screen adorns the wall behind, looking far too small for the posh theater. But when the projector hums and whirs, the films that flicker across the silver curtain match its diminutive size. Ancient shorts, from the silent and early days of sound, starring jesters of the pratfall, but these clowns aren’t the well-known and well-shown masters of yesteryear. These are the forgotten ones, remembered, if at all, as a faded photo or an unexplained footnote.

No Chaplin, no Lloyd. Buster may attend, but only unannounced with a good-natured sales pitch. Laurel and Hardy are here, but they came separately. Mabel’s alone but the center of attention for once, while Langdon is regarded as royalty. All around, other old ghosts gather to laugh again, their tricks and gags perhaps cruder than their greater peers, but still better than cinematic history would relate to memory.

Welcome to Slapsticon 2007, the sanctuary of lost slapstick.

A few months before, while milling around the Weinberg Center lobby before the start of a Keaton feature, I stumbled across a cut-and-paste flyer. After a quick glance I pocketed it and, like most things I collect, forgot about it until a couple of weeks ago. What I had thought was a little showing of shorts actually was a four-day celebration of rare and obscure films from the Teens all the way through first two decades of the sound era, when many of the discarded silent stars continued to ply their trade in low-budget quickies.

Film historians tend to parrot the works of the giants, and deservingly so; Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd were pioneers in their art, their creative skill overcoming the shifts in societal taste. But at the same time, those historians often dismiss other comedians as pretenders or imitators, using their fall into obscurity as evidence. Most of these players are more heard about than seen, their work judged by a chosen few. The chance to actually judge these films on their own merits is a chance that doesn’t come too often.

I didn’t have time to attend all four days (I don’t think I would have survived 35 hours of slapstick, anyway), but by late Saturday morning, I was heading toward the Rosslyn Spectrum Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, for two showings.

The first began with the Keaton surprise--There's No Business Like No Business. Shortly before the festival, the organizers of Slapsticon uncovered this lost industrial film that Buster did late in his life for the long-gone Maremount auto parts company. Keaton has great fun as the hapless owner of a service station who keeps ignoring golden opportunities to help his customers and make some money. At one point, Buster opens the hood to see a smashed carburetor, a leaky radiator, and a burned out generator--not to mention the dinner roll serving as a head gasket. He gazes at the mechanized disaster with concern, pours a bit of water in the radiator, puts back the dinner roll, and sends the driver on his merry way! The acrobatic physicality of Buster’s silent work is absent here, but he aptly replaces it with quick, subtle visual gags that pile on, inducing giggles and at times outright laughter, such as when Buster joyfully bounces when his cash register begins spontaneously adding up.

Following Buster is the Queen of Silent Comedy herself, Mabel Normand. Mostly remembered today for either the scandals that derailed her career or as the frequent female costar for Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel was the silent era’s most gifted comedienne whose popularity led to several starring feature roles as well as many of her own shorts. Slapsticon obtained two Mabel Normand silents that bookend her career. The first, the 1914 Keystone comedy Hello Mabel, features a typically frenetic pace long on energy and short on logic. Mabel plays an apartment building phone operator who gets caught up in a comedy of misunderstandings between her, her boyfriend in the building, a flirtatious tenant, and his unforgiving wife. Broad and bawdy, Hello Mabel doesn’t cater to Normand’s talents, but she manages to stay afloat among the nonsense. The short is most notable for the plethora of future stars in cameo roles, including Charley Chase, Chester Conklin, Mack Swain, and Al St. John.

The second Mabel short is the five-reel version of her comeback film, Raggedy Rose (1926). After two scandals and several health problems brought on by hard living, Normand returned to the screen after three years away thanks to her good friend F. Richard Jones. Jones supervised the making of Raggedy Rose, even ghost-directing some scenes, while Richard Wallace and Stan Laurel shared the director’s chair. The film took months to reach theaters, as Pathe Studios rejected the feature several times before finally agreeing to handle a three-reel version late in 1926. The film was a huge success with critics and audiences, but Normand’s fragile health limited her to four more two-reelers before retiring from filmmaking. Graced with a talented supporting cast, Raggedy Rose is an era away from the Keystone short. Normand is like a hyperactive Lillian Gish while playing a poor young woman working for a junk dealer (Jewish comic Max Davidson, who had his own collection of shorts at Slapsticon). In a hilarious opening in which Mabel and Max use two cardboard cats to trick an affluent neighborhood to toss junk into the street, Rose is knocked senseless when a handsome millionaire throws his shoe at the faux kitties and accidentally hits her. A series of silly mischance leads a purposefully unconscious Rose being delivered to the millionaire’s doorstep to wait for a doctor. While Rose thinks she’s in the hospital (which is where she hoped to get a good meal), the millionaire’s gold-digging girlfriend and her mother conspire to get rid of her. Meanwhile, the butler has gone nuts. He thinks. Like many slapstick stories, what starts as a sweet comedy spins faster and faster into inanity, throwing logic out the window until Rose conks the millionaire on the head by accident. Normand’s performance, leaning more on her visual timing and quirky character than stunts, serves as the rubber cement to the increasingly illogical plot threads--the audience is too high on the fumes to notice the cracks. Unfortunately, bits of this five-reel version feel padded, while the print is missing some footage, especially most of the resolution after Rose realizes who she conked. Time ravages Rose in other ways, too: Some of the humor with the junk dealer feels anti-Semitic, a discomfort somewhat disfused by Davidson’s natural warmth.

The final two shorts of the program feature a lesser known comedian and another known more for his decades-long work in sound. The first, the 1924 independent Wedding Belles, stars Monty Banks, who looks for all the world like a pudgy, erstwhile playboy version of The Tramp. Banks, however, is completely upstaged by his main costar: Pal the Dog. In Wedding Belles, Monty’s girlfriend believes that the strange dog in his apartment (snuck in by a neighbor hiding it from the landlady) is from another woman and demands that he get rid of the it. Only the dog likes Monty, and no matter what he does, the dog keeps outsmarting him. Banks’ standard performance pales next to Pal, whose timing and personally is creepily humanistic and provide the vast majority of the laughs.

The final short, on the other hand, is about the funniest silent short I have ever seen. Small wonder when the young star is Edward Everett Horton, who would become a well-regarded character actor in film and television, including his work as the narrator of the Fractured Fairy Tales segments of Rocky and Bullwinkle and as Chief Roaring Chicken in F Troop. Horton got his start as a silent comedian in the 1920s, even getting his own brief series under Harold Lloyd’s production company. Dad’s Choice is one of those films, and Horton’s character--an erstwhile young suitor of a wealthy man’s daughter--easily could have been played by Lloyd himself. But I actually prefer Horton’s laid-back, put-upon turn over Lloyd’s usual driving ambition. Horton is extremely likeable as he first keeps bumbling across a battle-axe store customer again and again and then mistakes the bodyguard as his girlfriend’s father. The best bits come when Horton thinks the father is the gardener and asks for help in eloping with the girlfriend. Dad actually goes along for the ride, relishing every minute. Unlike other slapstick shorts, Dad’s Choice never leaves the realm of believability, even when employing the typical plot devise of misunderstandings. In fact, that could describe the whole film: tired comical tactics revived by whimsical tension, excellent timing, and some unexpected character turns. Horton’s two foils drive the film, allowing the lead to deliver an understated, reactionary performance. The battle-axe, who becomes a living running joke, is essayed by Elinor Vanderveer, whose stony facial expressions are gags by themselves. Otis Harlan, meanwhile, creates a gruff but loveable father whose own behavior becomes unpredictable. Sadly, neither actor had much of a career outside of bit parts, but both help Horton carry this little unknown short to heightened hilarity that matches anything Keaton or Chaplin have done. When Harlan can make a modern audience erupt in laugher by simply jogging across a driveway, you know he’s doing something wonderful.

A short intermission later, during which I started a new collectable hobby, and its time to discover perhaps the best-kept secret of silent film comedy: Charley Chase.

A mixture of John Cleese and Weird Al Yankovic, Chase began his career as a director at the famous Hal Roach Studios under his real name, Charles Parrott. He helped usher Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy to fame and directed many of the early comedian stars before replacing Harold Lloyd in front of the Roach camera. Charley Chase was born, and he became the studio’s most popular money-maker of the 1920s, continuing to make shorts after the sound era arrived. He embraced the new technology, altering his playboy persona to something more flaky and directing his own starring shorts well into the 1930s. He even appeared in a couple of features, one of which was the Laurel and Hardy vehicle Sons of the Desert. Unfortunately, Chase died from a heart attack in 1940, before his sound career would take hold.

For its “Chasing Charley Chase” program, Slapsticon obtained five silent and sound shorts, including a fragment of his lost feature sound debut Modern Love. Because of a technical problem (namely, the film was upside down and backwards), the first short is a sound one: His Silent Racket, directed by Chase in 1933. Chase plays a sap conned into buying interest in a failing dry cleaning business. When the local protection racket leaves a mysteriously ticking package that Chase tries to deliver to his partner, the pace finally begins to pick up, dropping gag after gag until the denouncement, when the “bomb expert” drops the package in a tub of gasoline. When the explosion's smoke clears, all of the staggering cops are suddenly wearing the dresses from the delivery truck. Yeah, it didn’t make too much sense then, either. Until the absurdity kicks in, the short is pretty predictable but buoyed by some nice throwaway gags. Chase actually feels drowned in the goings on.

Not so with his most famous short, the silent classic Movie Night (1929). His last silent comedy, Chase plays a husband and father who attempts to take his family (including his wife’s brother, who was staying with them “until he was old enough to be hung”) to the movies. Mishap after mishap occurs--from his young daughter’s reoccurring and contagious hiccups to a misplayed scam to get a child’s ticket. Chase is at his best here, giving a textured character that goes beyond the one-note heroes of most silent shorts; his frustration and reactions recall Cleese’s best work. The funniest bits feature Chase’s little girl, played by Edith Fellows, who kindly torments her screen father with an unpracticed innocence. The print used for this showing was the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s restoration, which returned several previously lost sequences to the middle of the short.

Hopefully, restoration will return a complete Modern Love (1929) to audiences as well. During the transitional years between silent and sound, Chase was loaned out to Universal to replace another actor in this marriage comedy. A hybrid sound–silent feature, most of Modern Love has been lost, with surviving elements spread across various different celluloid formats. Universal, the same studio that dumped their silent library into the San Francisco Bay in the 1940s, is attempting to construct a complete print, but until then, Slapsticon obtained reels 3 and 4 of the silent version. Dropped into the middle of an obviously complicated story is a bit bewildering, but what’s most evident is Chase’s easy charisma in full force, and he delivers an engaging performance as the frustrated “secret” husband. Most comedians relied on personas to sell their films, but based on these reels and Movie Night, Chase appears to have delivered something richer, allowing for more complex, character-driven comedies that expand the humor beyond the basic setup, gag, and pratfall.

That ability served Chase well when he finally started making his own sound pictures. While audiences of that transitional era frightened filmmakers into movies of wall-to-wall dialogue, Chase understood how to balance the new talkie-driven stories with his visual gags. One of his earliest sound shorts is Crazy Feet, made in the same year as Modern Love. Unlike the hybrid film, the footage for Crazy Feet is intact--except for a soundtrack. Made as a talkie, the original sound elements have been lost. Yet, outside of opening setup, the film still works wonderfully as a silent. Chase pretends (badly) to be a chorus dancer to be near company star Thelma Todd, who was at the beginning of her career. Todd and Chase did several shorts together, and their chemistry glows in a climatic, wildly prancing dance number that will have Monty Python fans doing whiplash double-takes.

The last short brings Chase’s career retrospective to a close. In The Nightshirt Bandit (1938), Chase plays a new criminology professor who discovers that he’s a sleepwalking kleptomaniac and frantically tries to recover some stolen money in a girl’s dormitory. Chase’s screen persona has been fully transformed to a meek and awkward caricature, a far cry from the deeper, more assured roles he played before. Part of the problem is that the film is directed by Jules White, notorious for his obvious and loud slapstick. Chase, however, handles the predictable violence with aplomb, delivering the short’s best lines and stunts and squeezing entertainment from a leaden stone.

Before the lights come up, Chase teaches me a simple truth: While the popular legend is that the silent clowns couldn’t adapt to the sound era, the reality is that audiences simply were no longer interested in their shtick. The silent comedians, discarded in favor of the screwball and farce, really didn't lose any of their ingenuity when handed talkie projects, but under the pressure to quench the public's fascination with the new technology, the clowns were reduced to cheap programmers where their "outdated" act wouldn't lose money. The irony is that these bargain-basement oddities are far more timeless than many of the successful talkie films of those days. For every Thin Man, dozens of comedies that didn’t know when to shut up filled theaters, delighting audiences with the gimmick of gab. Gimmicks eventually fade, though, exposing the technology as vapid technique. Meanwhile, the slapstick artisans continued making movies they knew worked; people simply had forgotten. Forgotten like much of the silent era, thrown away like precious canisters in a metropolitan bay.

Only today, two generations and nearly a century later, do we realize what may have been lost. Slapstick was only a part of the beginnings of cinema, but it is the one that most people understand. Laughter is contagious, and silent laughter is universal, scaling the barricade of language to infect us all. Through slapstick, people can begin to understand the unique gift of the silents--storytelling that reaches beyond culture and language. All film is emotional. Sit in a theater and laugh with an audience, cry with strangers. During first days of cinema, a movie could play anywhere in the world and connect. Without translation, a German film could play in America, while its American counterpart could tour Europe and Asia. The stories were understood, with no spoken explanation. Only the silents could do that.

That entire era of film, the era that forged the one true communal art of the modern age, is gone. Silenced. Not every film will be recovered, not every star will be rediscovered. But what those movies gave us should never be forgotten, and laughter is the best place to start.

Maryland Film Festival '07, Day 2: Trippy Temp

Just got back, so this is a placeholder post until I have time and alertness to write something more substantial.

Man in the Dark--This year's traditional 3-D film actually beat House of Wax as the first studio, two-projector movie...by a day or two. A potboiler with some nice depth of field and 3-D effects, wonky movie science, and "snappy" one-liners that provided more entertainment than the film itself. Just a fun time.

Syndromes and a Century--Storytelling without a story. A highly visual film that follows a number of characters in a rural army base, and then suddenly switches to an urban, sterile hospital setting with the same characters going through the same plot swings, but from different perspectives. Still not sure what it was all about, but genuinely affect still.

Animation Shorts--11 short films of varying styles, tone, and techniques. The first was the funniest: "Ujbaz Izbeneki Has Lost His Soul" is a claymation work about a young man showing up in hell after losing his soul because, well, he loses things. Much to the devil's distress, Ujbaz is still losing things....The worst was "The Ballad of Mary Slade," a generally well-done short about the tragic downfall of a young woman as retold by the insects who have come to, um, consume her. Too gruesome for my taste. Overall, a solid selection with one very powerful work ("Everything Will Be OK") and only one music video to be found (a problem that has developed from past festivals).

Golden Days--A behind-the-scenes documentary about the experience of The Damnwells, a self-made indie band who signs a major record deal with Epic, spends a year waiting for the recorded album to come out, and then gets dropped without a release. Far from a VH-1 Behind the Music special, Golden Days features no cataclysmic climax featuring tragedic or excess; instead, the film shows a band still discovering who they are and how they've grown stronger from the experience rather than unravel from it. The final scene shows The Damnwells performing on stage, opening for and then performing with The Fray, another indie act Epic kept and promoted to two million dollar sales. The Fray insisted on keeping The Damnwells as their opening act; "we're fans." It's refreshing to see a music documentary where the music does pull the band through.

That's all for now. More detail later.

Maryland Film Festival '07, Day 1: Of Changes, Wanted or Not

Prelude

On this morning, a workday morning, I awoke at my normal 6 a.m., stumbled down the hallway, fed the finches, shuffled into the bath, and got as far as turning the hot water knob before realizing that the first screening at the Maryland Film Festival didn’t start until the early afternoon. I suddenly had time.

So, I commenced to lose track of it.

I ran some errands. I puttered around the house. I paid my mortgage, restocked my CDs and DVDs, and e-mailed a very special welder of the latest cattle prods. Then, while reading some online news sites, I looked down at my computer clock: 11:15 a.m. No problem; the first movie didn’t start until 1:30, and although it takes me at least an hour to get to the Charles Theatre, I still could leave at noon and be there in plenty of time. I just needed to clean up first....

And as I stepped back into the bath, my phone rang; a freelancer for a major project had an urgent question. I quickly answered, and because she’s a former coworker, we gabbed some more, catching up. Feelin’ good, I hung up, cleaned up, and finally got to the car.

It’s 12:15, and I still have to pick up some cash. By the time I finally get on the road, I’ve got one hour to make the movies.

This happens every year. Every. Year.

American Fork

With independent filmmaking, projects are connected, and one success can birth lesser-known but worthy siblings. Producer Jeremy Coon helped writer/director/star Jared Hess create the cult fave Napoleon Dynamite three years ago. Coon and much of that film’s crew then helped make Napoleon first assistant director Tim Skousen’s own work, The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang, which features a cameo by Hess and showed at the MFF last year. One of the main actors of that effort, Hubbel Palmer, then wrote and starred in another Coon production--American Fork.

Like Napoleon Dynamite, American Fork centers on the travails of a gentle lost soul. In this case, Tracey Orbison is an overweight grocery clerk who writes (good) poetry in his notebook while irking out a life in a dead-end town. Living at home with his depressed mother and stuffed-animal-loving sister, Tracey is stuck in a cycle of trying to loose weight and failing at passing the driver’s license exam. Then, one day, he attends a play at the urging of his well-meaning boss (Bruce McGill). There, overbaked actor Truman Hope (William Baldwin, in a delicious turn) dazzles Tracey with his bad acting, and Tracey quickly signs up for Hope’s class. But when Hope eventually lets Tracey down, our hero decides to become a mentor for the teenaged hooligan friends of new coworker Kendis. Bad decision, but before it ends, Tracey finds redemption, accomplishment, and, most importantly, a sense of peace, told wonderfully in a poem.

Although American Fork shares Napoleon Dynamite’s themes and character-based humor, it avoids the episodic nature and greater absurdist minimalism of its predecessor. Instead, as written by Palmer and directed by Chris Bowman, American Folk remains a very human film, despite some goofy sequences and outlandish jokes. Palmer’s performance, propelled by his melodious voice, anchors the picture, creating a believable axis around which the story orbits. The result is a compelling little comedy where the humor accents the characters, allowing the more saccharine touches to become genuine and smoothing over some predictable plot points. Some bits, especially in the middle where Tracey hooks up with Kendis’s crew, stretch the balance between the off-the-wall humor and human fable, but Tracey’s climatic poem makes all forgivable.

Just the perfect kind of little picture to start the festival.

After the film, Palmer and Bowman answered questions from the audience, revealing that American Fork was shot in the town in Utah where Palmer grew up and based the story. Many of the basic situations that Tracey found himself in were inspired by Palmer’s life, which probably is how the story discovered its more affecting traits.

Intermission

After the screening, I had an hour to kill. I found out two things.

One: Don’t buy a S’mores Crepe unless they give you a plate. Two handi-wipes and countless napkins still didn’t clean up the mess (and wound up with a sticky spot on my nose). In sucking down the tasty concoction before it wound up in a puddle in my lap, I felt like Tracey during one of his stress-fueled gorges. Next time, I'll stick (groan) with my butterscotch crepe.

The crepe place has been next to the Charles Theater for a few years now, but it's expanded a bit to include a small eating and waiting area. No tables, but a nice shelf-style bar along the window, with a cushioned bench seat running along back wall just behind it. I'm off in the corner, frantically wiping off the marshmallow and chocolate into the trash can, when I happen to glance at the side wall next to me. There's a door, which I assume leads to the playhouse next door, but surrounding it and covering the wall are keys--dozens and dozens of keys hanging each on their own hook, running from floor to ceiling. Behind me, a customer discovers that the keys are the idea of the owner's art student son. I'm too busy staring at it, smiling at its simplicity.

Two: The Maryland Film Festival has grown even from last year. Usually, the majority of the films are screened at the Charles Theatre’s five screens, with an odd showing at another theater nearby. This year, they have three additional screens--one at the MICA center and two just across the bridge at the University of Baltimore, where my next film was showing. 'Course, I didn't notice that until I actually looked at the ticket 20 minutes before the movie started.

Every. Year.

I wander a bit, meeting a statue of Edgar Allen Poe--looking for all the world like an inebriated Lincoln holding a ciggie--when I finally notice the UB Student Center across the street and climb the glass-enclosed stairwell to its fifth floor theater. Where the main screening room at the Charles was nearly pitch dark, the center’s theater is completely white and modern, except for a pure parquet floor and a low wood stage below the small hanging screen. From a cavern to an art gallery, only this one has one picture....

Time and Tide

In 2002, two filmmakers joined a group of 60 New Zealanders returning to their homeland of Tuvalu, a small Pacific Island nation that achieved notoriety for selling their international Internet domain of “.tv” to a start-up dotcom company for $50 million. Many have never seen the island, and even the oldest have not returned since leaving 15 years before.

What they find is a communal culture struggling with its newfound Western capitalism. The capital town is overwhelmed with people and trash, and the rising sea is rapidly overwhelming what little land the island holds.

Despite its themes of globalization and global warming, Time and Tide is a humanistic documentary about cultures as well. The film interviews both the visitors and residents, discovering how Tuvalu has experienced firsthand the effects of change. Some of the visitors ride to one’s childhood home, only to find that it’s become a massive trash heap because Tuvalu has no other place to put it. Residents talk about losing Tuvalu’s tradition of sharing while establishing an economy to raise money to send their children elsewhere for schooling. Two weeks before they leave, the visitors take a trip to an inlet island, where they find happiness in a more traditional settlement. Until some realize that the lagoon used to be their own village, on dry land less than two decades before.

Without a pulpit, Time and Tide instead preaches with the people living through the experience. Humor and joy is mixed with an undercurrent of dread about Tuvalu’s future, and the message is obvious that this little country’s future could be ours as well. The message is quiet, but sent with more finality and honesty than anything Al Gore could deliver.

Fortunately, the film will not be restricted to festivals. The directors Julie Bayer and Josh Salzman said that Time and Tide will be shown on PBS this month. Needless to say, I recommend it.

Missed Today: Bobcat Goldthwait’s raunchy comedy and third film Sleeping Dogs Lie, presented by John Waters.

Maryland Film Festival '07: Preview

This Friday, a personal, annual tradition will be reprised: For three days, I’ll attend the Maryland Film Festival in Baltimore, seeing a hodgepodge of little-seen independent features, off-the-wall short films, cult cinema, and the occasional documentary. As a self-proclaimed film nut, my yearly pilgrimage (well, driving back and forth on I-70 each morning) is something I probably should have done sooner.

Back in 2001, I first learned of the existence of the "MFF," which, like me, was nearly new to the festival circuit. Begun in 1999, the festival was housed entirely at the Charles Theatre, a restored movie house in the revitalizing art district across the railroad gridwork of Penn Station. Originally a cable car barn and later a ballroom, the 108-year-old, brown-brick building with two-story arched glass windows was gutted and expanded to five movie screens plus a little lobby. The festival was small, giving special emphasis to Baltimore filmmakers and the city’s reputation as a purveyor of strange cinema.

In other words, just my size.

By a month, I missed the 2001 festival--which featured such works as The American Astronaut, Four Dogs Playing Poker, Bill Plympton’s latest feature Mutant Aliens, the documentary Mr. Smithereen Goes to Washington, and the cult horror gore classic 2000 Maniacs (shown at the Bengies Drive-In and featuring a panel discussion with its director Herschell Gordon Lewis)--but I made plans for the following year, even though my life and work had completely changed by that point. On the early afternoon of May 3, I stepped into the Charles to see my first truly independent film, a movie with no distributor or bright financial future, made only because its creators coerced its existence against all common sense. The film was Body Drop Asphalt, a South Korean Jekyll-and-Hyde of a romantic comedy that first tried my patience and then propelled me on a visual, pop musical feast. I’ve been hooked ever since.

The Maryland Film Festival and its relatives around the country give a special gift to audiences: They provide an outlet for the real artistic film, one ill-made for profit. No where else can you see short films in vibrant abundance, nor will you see many of these features on the big screen anytime soon. To me, the festival is the chance to see something unusual, unexpected, and individualistic, and then meet the people behind the creation. Every year, Baltimorean cult giant John Waters presents a fringe film of his liking, while actors, directors, and producers attend others’ showings over the weekend in addition to their own presentations. They, too, are film fans.

This year’s festival is an odd one: Short of some truly standout features, I originally thought it was going to be an off year. The now-traditional Saturday 3-D and Sunday silent with the Alloy Orchestra still are intact, but the Comedy Shorts program--guaranteed worthwhile entertainment--is weirdly absent. Yet, my own schedule still boosts nine planned viewings, with a couple of others possibly in the offing given budget and ambition. My choices:

Friday

American Fork (2007). A gentle and naive grocery store clerk enrolls in an acting class, which in turn inspires him to mentor his dead-end friends. Things, however, take an unexpected, dark turn. A black comedy co-starring William Baldwin as the overdone acting class instructor and produced by Jeremy Coon of Napoleon Dynamite and The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang.

Time and Tide (2006). A somewhat short documentary about two friends who return to their indigenous homeland of the Pacific Ocean island nation of Tuvalu.

Saturday

Man in the Dark (1953). This year’s 3-D film was the first to use processed-projected background plates, creating an unusual depth-of-field. The film is best known for its roller coaster climax, finishing off a noir story of a former gangster who agrees to undergo experimental brain surgery to erase his criminal tendencies. Unfortunately, his former colleagues want one very important piece of information from him that he no longer knows, and they’ll stop at nothing to get it....

Syndromes and a Century (2006). A highly-acclaimed Thai film featuring two stories of courtship and love in two different time-periods, one inspired by the story of the director’s parents. The film, however, apparently an emotionally visual experience in addition to gentle, quiet storytelling. Can’t wait.

Animated Shorts. One of the two short programs I see every festival. This year’s feature 12 shorts, none of which I’ve read about, because I enjoy seeing these things unscathed by preparation. Usually, an eclectic mix of style, technique, and tone.

Golden Days (2006). A fly-on-the-wall documentary about a self-made indie band nearly torn apart by the major record label deal they somehow manage to land.

Sunday

Nosferatu (1922). The Alloy Orchestra, a three-man musical ensemble using an “outrageous assemblage of peculiar objects,” has created new scores for more than 20 silent films. Since the 2003 festival, the Alloy Orchestra performs one of their pieces with the film in question every Sunday morning. This year, the silent classic is F.W. Murnau’s classic vampire film. I’m normally not a fan of horror, but I adore the silent German Impressionistic filmmaking, and Murnau’s Sunrise (shown at the Charles before with the Alloy) and The Last Laugh are part of my home collection. Some films you just have to see, regardless of personal taste.

Domino Effect Shorts. With the absence of the Comedy Shorts program, I’m left with parsing out what I might like from the creatively-titled, but telling little program descriptions. This one features “a dark yet playful ensemble of highly visual shorts.” Really, that’s all they tell us outside of the basic plot descriptions.

Sound and Vision Shorts. Nearly music video more than film, these five shorts should be a fun and exhilarating way to end the festival, especially with a musical tribute to the Atari 2600. (!)

Despite my previous stillborn attempts, I hope to drop in each evening with a report of the day’s films and other activities. Unheralded, unpredictable, and otherwise, the Maryland Film Festival is a once-a-year chance to see once-in-a-lifetime cinema, and it’s long past time I shared it.