"Plot Is Never the First Thing That Comes to Mind": A Conversation with MoMA's Dave Kehr

by Kyle Westphal

Museum of Modern Art / Films Stills Archive

Ernst Lubitsch’s first American feature, Rosita, premiered ninety-five years ago, but hasn’t been much seen since. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival will be presenting the West Coast premiere of a new 4K DCP restoration from the Museum of Modern Art on Friday, June 1. I recently spoke to Dave Kehr, Curator of Film at MoMA, about the new restoration, his lifelong love of all things Lubitsch, and upcoming preservation projects. This interview has been lightly edited for space and clarity.

KW: You studied and wrote about Lubitsch long before you came to MoMA. Can you talk about your experience over the course of your life seeing these films, especially the silents?

DK: The first time I saw a substantial number of the Lubitsch silents was at the Berlin Film Festival in the ‘80s and they had a number of copies from the European archives, including a copy of Rosita, which came, as I discovered later, from the one that Eileen Bowser had repatriated from Russia to MoMA. And following FIAF protocols in those days, MoMA made several prints and distributed them to the Cinémathèque française and a few other archives around Europe. 

That version was extremely unrestored and I remember thinking at the time, “Hey, this is a pretty good movie. I wonder why it has fallen to such disuse.”

Eventually I discovered that Pickford had turned against it—for reasons that are still somewhat mysterious, even after the research I’ve done—and, of course, allowed it to more or less deteriorate, except for the one reel that she liked. She didn’t renew the copyright and just pretended that it didn’t exist. For a long time, it was in bad odor and people did not work on it. The nitrate that had come from Russia was in terrible condition. It looks like it had been a dupe from the German release print. It had Russian intertitles, severe damages, lots of scratches, lots of sprocket issues.

When it arrived at MoMA, it was in miserable condition. It just seemed like the best thing anyone could do was make a photochemical copy. It was never going to get any better. But it turns out that we now have amazing tools available through the digital realm. We’ve been working on it for about four years. We’ve gone through several generations of software and eventually got to the point where it is quite respectable. It’s obviously never going to be perfect, but it’s night and day from that very sad piece of nitrate that arrived all those years ago.

KW: How did it go over in Venice?

DK: In Venice, it was a tremendous success. It was called the pre-opening event at the Venice Film Festival last September, and Gillian Anderson conducted an Italian orchestra with a reconstruction of the score, which is just magnificent, just one of the most beautiful scores for a silent film that I’ve ever encountered. Very sophisticated. Enhanced the film magnificently. We recorded the score and hope to marry it to the DCP one day if we can clear the rights, but that’s something we’re working on. We hope to make it available with the music eventually.

KW: I haven’t seen the film myself. I tried to book it a number of years ago, and at that time the only print that was generally circulating was Rusty Casselton’s 16mm dupe from MoMA’s dupe --

DK: That was something he managed to steal. I don’t think it was stolen from MoMA, as it turns out. I’ve heard he managed to get it from the Cinémathèque française somehow. He made up his own English intertitles and stuck them on there. That’s the version you can still find on Internet Archive, for example, which is beyond horrible. Don’t bother. There’s no reason to watch that anymore. It’s so much better now.

KW: I’m anxious to see it in San Francisco. When I saw a lot of those Lubitsch silents in college, in a series put together by Kathy Geier, it was in 16mm prints from Murray Glass. No one was importing the restored European versions. So I saw old dupes of Deception—the American release version of Anna Boleyn—which is, in some sense, more historically important, as it’s the version that made his American reputation and allowed him to come to Hollywood.

In the case of Rosita, I literally booked the Rusty Casselton print from him a month before he died. At that time, I wasn’t as plugged in with film collectors. I was asking, ‘How come this print hasn’t shown up yet?’ and then found out it was not coming.

DK: Glad we could finally provide it. It’s worth waiting for. It’s much better.

Photo courtesy Jeffrey Vance

KW: Was the impetus behind the restoration purely that there was new technology that could hide the decomposition and some of the other flaws? I know you’ve restored the intertitles as well …

DK: It was a couple of things. It turned out that the Academy had found a copy of an early draft of the screenplay. At first, when we found that we were very excited. We thought, now we have all the English intertitles. Not that easy! Big differences between that draft and the final film. Lots of stuff missing from there. Lots of TBDs.

We found some other sources, including the German censorship records, which had all the German intertitles in it. The Swedish censorship records, which seem to have been translated from the German. The original music cue sheet, which Gillian Anderson used later to reconstructed the score. Rather tantalizingly, the cue sheets gave the first two or three words of intertitles that were otherwise missing.

Peter Williamson, our chief preservation officer here, came up with a huge find with an Australian newspaper that actually quoted a few lines, including the climatic line of the film, which is just a beautiful piece of Hanns Kräly prose that no one could have recreated or reimagined.

It fell to me to collate all of these sources, massage them together, fill in a few gaps, and come up with something as authentic as we possibly could, with the things we had to fill in clearly identified. It’s as close to the American release as we seem likely to get at this point, unless another print turns up somewhere.

KW: Did the Pickford reel still have the American titles?

DK: It definitely did, and that gave us the graphic style that we copied to recreate the rest of the intertitles. We had a terrific artist who copied the typography very closely. We fudged a little in creating the art titles by lifting backgrounds in some shots, removing the people, and putting the expository titles over those images. We lifted the credits from a number of posters, using the graphic design of the posters.

There was an unusual amount of interpretation required on this one, but I think we did it as responsibly as could be done while providing a reasonable facsimile of the film and providing an entertaining experience for the audience.

KW: You’re balancing an idea of what the American version was with a version that audiences actually saw, at least the Russian audience. It’s ragged and not the domestic version, but it doesn’t have any modern interpolations.

A few weeks ago at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, we ran a copy of Curtiz’s A Million Bid, which the Library of Congress has in a 35mm print derived from the Italian release version. Even that presented something of a dilemma. We still had to go back and tweak the English translation prepared from a transcript of the Italian titles, which were themselves translated from the original English titles. We couldn’t trust every detail: how much of this is a flourish added for the Italian release versus an authentic translation of the original? But when presenting it, we also wanted to remind people that this Italian version is all that survives—and all that survives authentically. Even if it’s not the domestic release, it’s still legitimate.

So, with Rosita, you have the dupe neg of the Russian version --

Photo courtesy Jeffrey Vance

DK: Oh, we scanned that. It’s totally preserved. It’s not going anywhere. That’s available for scholars who want to see it. That’s not being suppressed.

KW: But ethically, you feel comfortable with the version you collated from all these different sources?

DK: Well, yeah, sure. We’ve identified the stuff we’ve interpolated. I don’t know what else we could do there. I think it’s important to present a movie that an audience will be able to enjoy without footnotes. I hope we’ve achieved that.

As you know, a lot of silent films that we know have been cobbled together from many disparate sources. We’re being totally upfront about this. Not to point fingers, but there are lots of [other silent films] where the current editions are extremely dubious.

KW: There are also Lubitsch films where the American version as we have it is pretty misshapen. I know MoMA has also been working on Forbidden Paradise, which I’ve only seen in a version at the Eastman Museum derived from the same material, which is missing the first reel, if I’m not mistaken.

DK: Well, that version was copied from our material. We have two Czech prints that have different content. We just finished that a couple weeks ago and it turned out very well. By comparing the two Czech prints, we were able to get about 90% of the film back. There are still a couple of scenes missing, which we had to bridge with some intertitles, but it is now a complete and coherent film, in a way that it wasn’t before. We did have a list of the complete intertitles for that, so there was no problem reconstructing those.

KW: I’d always been intrigued by that film, because it’s the only Lubitsch film that [documentarian and film historian] Paul Rotha liked. You wouldn’t necessarily think of him as a critic very sympathetic to Lubitsch’s work.

DK: [Laughs]

KW: Then I saw one of those Czech prints, which, on its own, was pretty incoherent. But given its reception and contemporary reputation, it was pretty difficult to see what I was missing.

DK: I don’t know what Rotha would’ve been responding to. You’ve seen the remake, right? It was remade as A Royal Scandal by Otto Preminger.

KW: I haven’t.

DK: It was a Lubitsch project that he was too ill to actually shoot. The plot is very similar. I don’t think you would have any surprises, plot-wise, from Forbidden Paradise, but plot is never the first thing that comes to mind when you’re thinking of Lubitsch. It is full of wonderfully Lubitschian moments, with a very good performance from Pola Negri. Some long takes with her, which I don’t remember seeing in other films, where she’s moving through a series of emotions very fluidly and very expressively. He really got her in a way that I think her other American directors probably did not. She seems much less of a caricature, far more an emotionally nuanced and complex portrayal.

KW: I think she gives a good performance in Barbed Wire, but as far as her other American films, I would tend to agree with you.

So, as far other Lubitsch restorations, I know MoMA has done several over the decades. Lady Windermere’s Fan, Rosita, now Forbidden Paradise. Are there any others that --

DK: Marriage Circle is also ours. We have excellent versions of both Marriage Circle and Lady Windermere, which is just magnificent. Perfect print of a perfect movie.

KW: Are there any other non-Lubitsch projects MoMA is working on that you can discuss?

DK: We’ve got quite a bit these days. We’re just embarking on the 1925 Stella Dallas by Henry King. We have a nitrate print that Iris Barry acquired from Goldwyn in the ‘30s, which is by far the best material on that. We’re expecting very good results on that.

KW: I think I’ve seen the previous preservation from MoMA that’s just a black-and-white 35 safety.

DK: That was made for the Circulating Film Library, but it’s ’70s technology. So, we’re able to go back to the nitrate and scan it, so, clearly, it’s much improved image quality. As far as new footage, no. But much better image than anything that’s been around before. It’s just incomparable.

We will have a new batch of John Collins films, which we’ll be premiering at Pordenone, I hope. He’s the Edison director who died young, but the stuff we do have by him is strikingly modern, also Langian in its use of geometry. Very interesting director. We had a bunch of those from our extensive Edison collection. Motivated by the great Collins show that Pordenone put on a few years ago, we decided to go back and finish the other ones that we had. So that’s a half dozen right there. Always working on something.

Museum of Modern Art / Film Stills Archive

KW: It’s striking in speaking with you, as someone who was a critic before he was a curator. Because when speaking with other archivists, the critical film-historical connection—“Oh, there are these Langian compositions in John Collins films of the nineteen-teens”—is not something I often hear. I’m just curious how you navigate between those two worlds, one in which you were already very established and one which was much newer for you.

DK: Well, I wouldn’t claim to be an archivist. That’s a whole science, of which I know virtually nothing. But I have a pretty good grasp of film history and some analytical ability. I’m drawn to things that I like, that I think benefit from an upgrade.

MoMA has a pretty amazing collection—it’s by no stretch the largest in the world, but it’s remarkably high quality in that it was the first [American archive], and MoMA has the best copies of a great number of important movies. It’s a nice opportunity now that digital now has come along. We can go back to the nitrate in many cases, and the results are much, much better than the photochemical stuff that was done in the ’70s.

We’ve been working with Fox lately to scan a lot of our Fox titles, including a nice new version of 7th Heaven. It’s much, much better than the one that’s commercially available, which still comes from the same print, the only known nitrate print, which is ours. Basically, it’s a wet gate scan, which they were never able to do before. A lot of the scratches and dirt has vanished from that. It looks tremendously, tremendously better. That will also start making the rounds. It will be opening our Fox series in a few weeks, and then available as DCP for anyone who wants to show it thereafter.

KW: Are there any discoveries from that Fox series that you didn’t know about before you came to MoMA?

DK: Well, it’s certainly been gratifying to get in there and poke around. We have a few things in the upcoming series that haven’t been shown much. I don’t know if they’re masterpieces, but it’s a really fun bunch of crazy comedies from the early ‘30s. One called Rackety Rax by Alfred Werker, with Victor McLaglen as a gangster who takes over a college football team. Trick for Trick, which is a very strange movie by Hamilton McFadden and William Cameron Menzies about a pair of magicians who are having a feud, with lots of crazy Menzies effects, nutsy optical stuff. Stuff that just is never shown.

A couple of Mary Astor films popped up, both by Irving Cummings, who was a more interesting director in the silent era than he was making those garish musicals at Fox later on. And, of course, the William K. Howard films, which I think are the real rediscovery of the Fox holdings here. We have a couple more of those in the works. We’ll be doing a couple more of those—one called Scotland Yard and another called Surrender. Those should be ready later this year as well.

KW: Has your sense of Howard’s career improved since you arrived at MoMA?

DK: Sure, yeah. Some of the Howard films have been around in bad bootlegs that do not allow you to appreciate how radical he was stylistically. Extreme deep focus stuff, extreme long take stuff.

Everyone, especially Pauline Kael, claims that The Power and the Glory was a huge influence on Citizen Kane because of the Preston Sturges script; I would say it was a huge influence on Citizen Kane for William K. Howard’s direction, which was brilliant. It makes extensive use of the kind of effects that Welles would be using later on. No proof that he saw it, but the family resemblance is very powerful.

Museum of Modern Art / Film Stills Archive

KW: Of course, some people were onto William K. Howard before either of us. William K. Everson named himself after William K. Howard!

DK: Well, yes, he was a great favorite of William K.’s, and you can go back and read all of Bill’s program notes on the NYU site. I mean, I like different things about Howard than he did, but yeah, certainly I first knew about William K. Howard because of William K. Everson.

KW: Do you have The Red Dance in that series, too?

DK: We do. That’s an older restoration, one that I showed in Bologna a few years ago as part of a Raoul Walsh series but again, a terrific film. We’re working on another silent Walsh called The Loves of Carmen with McLaglen and Dolores del Rio. That’s just getting started, so it’ll probably be a year or so before that’s ready to go.

We always have a huge backload of Tom Mix movies, which people love. We have two more of those ready to come out. That Fox collection is just amazing. Again, it’s all thanks to Eileen Bowser, who saved it when the studio was ready to dump it in the 1970s.

KW: With the Fox collection, you’re very fortunate to have a studio that is now committed to seeing it restored and preserved in the highest quality.

But with a film like Rosita, which is public domain, you don’t have that kind of commercial, institutional support. How does MoMA go about funding projects like that?

DK: Well, I think every project is different. We do have a small endowment here, the Celeste Bartos Preservation Fund, but for most things, we have to raise outside funding.

Rosita was done thanks to the Louis B. Mayer Foundation, with a substantial contribution from the Film Foundation and Celeste Bartos. Fox has generously funded a lot of the re-scans of the Fox material. Film Foundation was very helpful for William K. Howard’s Transatlantic, which was a very difficult project. Took a lot of reassembling of several different prints. Made that possible in a way that we would not have been able to do internally.

It’s an eternal search for funding—sometimes you find it, sometimes you have to wait a little longer. But if someone is passionate about something, there are ways of finding the financing to do it.

KW: How do you deal, on a day-to-day level, with the legacy of working at America’s oldest film archive? As you say, you often have projects that might have been done already in the ’60s and ’70s, dry gate. You can go back and balance projects that need more attention with ones that haven’t seen the light of the projector in a while.

DK: I don’t think there’s anything systematic about that. We certainly have a lot of nitrate that hasn’t been printed that we need to take care of. We have preservation negative on most of it, but there are things like the Herbert Kline documentaries that we did last year. These were films that we got from Herbert Kline himself and the Museum did not choose to work on those for a long time. But people’s interests change. We were able to get Lights Out in Europe done and we’re hoping to get Crisis done soon. Those are both really remarkable films about the history of America’s entry into World War II, which is an ongoing subject of interest.

We have the Biograph Collection. Still a lot of work that needs to be done there. We’re hoping to get a major effort going on that fairly soon. Some new funders have appeared, and with any luck, we’ll be able to start approaching that systematically. Again, we have the original printing negatives on virtually everything that Iris Barry acquired in 1939 from Biograph. So, we will produce editions of the Griffith films far beyond what anyone has ever seen before.

KW: I know in some cases you’re going back to film, or at least scanning and going back to a film-out negatives. In others, it’s just DCP. How do you balance those kinds of decisions as a curator?

DK: I would say funding is a major part of that. It’s always good to have a film-out if you can afford it, but it adds a huge amount to the budget—between $20,000 to $30,000 for a project. If our funders are interested in handling that, of course, we’d want to do a film-out on everything. Not always possible. We hope to do that eventually, but it may not be the first round of work that we do on something.

I wish we had more DCPS. I wish we were able to scan more, because there are fewer and fewer outlets that can show reel-to-reel archival film. We always want our stuff to be seen as widely as possible.

KW: I hope you’re able to and that there’s more interest in the more obscure corners of film history that you and I are both excited about. I hope there’s an audience.

DK: People will show it. That’s a whole ’nother question. If you don’t circulate the stuff, no one’s going to know they’re not seeing it.