Whilst Making A Post Yesterday,

about Buster Keaton and early cinema,

I came across the amazing story of W. Frank Brinton, so why is Brinton involved and connected with films? in the southern and eastern part of Iowa sits the town of Washington, population 7,424, Washington’s State Theatre, formerly an opera house, showed its first motion picture to an astounded crowd on May 14, 1897, making it, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, “the oldest continuously operating cinema theatre in the world.” between the end of the Civil War and the Great Crash of 1929, tens of thousands of “opera houses” were built across the country, including hundreds in the state of Iowa alone, rather than staging full-blown operas, they mostly served as community cultural centres where local groups and guilds could convene and travelling actors, singers, orators, musicians, magicians and the like could stage a show, Washington’s State Theatre was one of the earliest to show motion pictures on a regular basis, this was almost entirely due to the brilliant and enterprising W. Frank Brinton, and a film has been made of the man who saved the films and memorabilia that Brinton had collected, titled Saving Brinton, 

in 1897, Frank and his wife, Indiana, transformed Washington’s opera house into a thriving cinema where films played to sold-out houses, their success was so great that they decided to take it on the road, the Brinton Entertainment Co. travelled from Minnesota to Texas projecting light through hundreds of early films from as far away as Europe and the Middle East, as well as hand-painted “magic lantern slides,” dazzling audiences who had never seen such wonders, local and travelling musicians were hired to accompany the films, making them anything but silent, and by all accounts, they were a great success, at the height of their business, such shows could bring in more than $100 a day, about $2,500 in 2017 dollars, Frank died in 1919 and eventually the entire Brinton collection, including the early films, hundreds of slides, catalogues, handbills, ledgers, posters and the original hand-cranked projector used by Frank and Indiana, was locked away in an Iowa basement, forgotten to the world,

enter Michael Zahs, a gentle man with a long, wispy beard, now in his 70s with the air and appearance of a latter-day Walt Whitman, Zahs, who calls himself a “saver” rather than a “collector,” discovered the Brinton collection at an estate sale back in 1981, much of it in boxes labelled “Brinton crap.” despite the labelling, he immediately recognised the artistic and historical significance of the collection, and that was the problem, it was a big collection and needed a lot of room, much to his wife’s dismay, He knew He had to find a curator and spread the word to film historians and museums, His search ended a few years ago, when curators at the University of Iowa Libraries learned of the collection, one of Zahs’ stipulations was that the entire Brinton collection remain the property of the people of Iowa, in 2014, that stipulation was agreed upon, and Zahs gifted the entire collection to the University of Iowa Libraries, Special Collections, where it is being catalogued, preserved and digitised, and will eventually be available in its entirety for public viewing and scholarly research, throughout Saving Brinton, which took 4 years to produce, the documentarians highlight the painstaking process of restoring these films; the results are spectacular, among the 130 films are early masterpieces by Auguste and Louis Lumière, Ferdinand Zecca, and Segundo de Chomón, many of them meticulously hand-painted, frame by frame, in brilliant colours, 

but by far the greatest find has been the two lost Méliès films: The Triple-Headed Lady (1901) and The Wonderful Rose Tree (1904), both are stunning examples of Méliès surreal narratives and use of stop-action to create some of the first “special effects.” the earlier Méliès film features prominently in Saving Brinton, but the latter, The Wonderful Rose Tree was restored so recently that it didn’t make the final cut of the documentary and so will have its world premiere in a few days time on Oct. 7 at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy, above is a short trailer for the film, Saving Brinton,

and amongst the collection I found this, other than it being shot in Thailand I could not find any other details of it, also I should say that most of the film from the middle to a few frames at the end have degraded so much, I am guessing they can not be restored, but it goes to show the breath of the Brinton archive, what a wonderful find, not about the money, but pure film history.