Film center offers rare glimpse of three early silent films
By Bob Hicks
The Oregonian, May 2, 1997

Give an ambitious child poverty and you might create a millionaire. Take away a person's sight and listen to her sense of sound intensify. Art, like life, is often shaped not by abundance but by want. Picasso erases until only the essential line is left.  Count Basie leaves large holes between his piano holes, making them mean all the more when they arrive.
Silent films, those remarkable and mostly forgotten wonders from the early years of the 20th century, also triumphed by taking away. 
Without language (except for an occasional title card or maybe a close-up of a newspaper headline in an actor's hands) the silents created movies that were sometimes far dreamier and more hypnotic than the flashier, more sophisticated films that arrived with the age of sound. 
At their best, the silents approached the pure fluidity of music, and they created their own expressionism, an exaggerated dancelike style of acting that was closer to the grand gestures of opera than to the naturalistic style of modern dialogue movies.  Looked at now, three-quarters of a century after their heyday, they can seem quaint, sentimental and rudimentary. But if you can slip into their world they often open up, taking on an interest that is aesthetic as well as historical. 
On Sunday night, the Northwest Film Center offers a rare look at three early silents, all from the Thanhouser studio, which made about 1,000 films between 1909 and 1917. Based in New Rochelle, N.Y., the studio closed up shop when the rest of the industry headed west for the brave new world of Hollywood. 
Edwin W. (Ned) Thanhouser, grandson of the studio's founder, will introduce the films. Andrew Crow, who composed and performed the music for three new video collections of Thanhouser silents, will provide live accompaniment.
The evening's centerpiece is 1912's "The Cry of the Children," a sentimental but hard-hitting expose about child labor that runs almost a half-hour.  Featuring the studio's child star Marie Eline, it offers stark visual counterpoints to an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem decrying the industrial age's callous use of child workers.
Thanhouser, a marketing executive at Intel in the Portland area, has been on what he calls a 10-year mission to reclaim the works of his grandfather's studio, contacting archives and collectors around the world.  So far he's collected about 120 of the studio's 1,000 Films - a fair record considering that more than 70 percent of all films made before 1920 have disappeared.  "I try to do something on this project every day," he says.
Early this year he produced a three-video set of Thanhouser Classics, including The Cry of the Children" and such other fascinations as a 1911 "Cinderella" and a 1912 "Dr.  Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Still, a big screen is best - and on Sunday night, the past will roll again.

THE THANHOUSER COLLECTION
WHAT:  An evening of silent films from one of the earliest studios, which made about 1,000 films between 1909 and 1917.  Ned Thanhouser, grandson of the studio's founder, will introduce the films and give a 20-minute slide lecture.
FEATURED FILMS: "The Cry of the Children" (released April 30,1912), "The Little Girt Next Door" (Nov. 1, 1912), "Shep's Race With Death" (Nov. 1, 1914)
FAMILY TIPS: Not zingy enough for most kids, but others might find themselves curious about what early movies were like.  The material is sentimental, and the idea of children suffering and dying might bother younger kids, but it's all G-rated in terms of explicitness.
RATED: Unrated; perhaps PG for death scenes.
RUNNING TIME: About 80 minutes
PLAYING AT:  Northwest Film Center, Berg Swann Auditorium, Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave.
WHEN: 7 p.m. Sunday
THANHOUSER ON VIDEO: Three volumes of Thanhouser Classics were released early this year, ranging from 10-minute one-reelers to a 67-minute full-length feature, "The World and the Woman" (1916).$24.95 each; $69.95 set. Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc., 705 N.W. Albemarle Terrace, Portland, Ore. 97210.  Fax 1-503-223-3733.
THANHOUSER WEB SITE: http://www.thanhouser.org