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Reassessing Sidney Olcott: Irish-Canadian filmmaker

By Brian McIlroy.

[ Delivered at the Joint American Conference of Irish

Studies/Canadian Association of Irish Studies Conference,

University College, Dublin, Ireland, June 12th 2014.]

1. Intro

Advances in Early Cinema research have been substantial in the last twenty years, and developments in technology, whereby films once only available in archives to the few are now accessible to all via YouTube and other digital platforms, have begun to encourage a range of critical reassessments of specific filmmakers. One of the subjects due for a comprehensive reconsideration is the film actor, writer and director Sidney Olcott (1872-1949), born to Irish immigrant 2 parents in Toronto, Ontario. He is well known for his trips to

Ireland between 1910 and 1914 for the Kalem and Gene

Gauntier Feature Players companies. Perhaps his best-known

Irish work is the 1910 The Lad from Old Ireland. Olcott made silent features and shorts up to 1927, after which he retired, never actually making a “Talkie.” Despite the truncation of his career, he is widely credited with helping to advance the art of filmmaking, specifically in location shooting over studio work, and in developing narrative style along with professional preproduction planning. His work in Ireland has also been assessed recently with the release of Peter Flynn’s documentary on the “O’Kalems,” Blazing the Trail (2011).

Michel Derrien set up a website in 2009 on Olcott’s work and has uploaded some of his films. What I would like to explore in my research is whether we can broaden the frame of Olcott’s political interest in both Britain and Ireland by looking at his work as a whole. This is a daunting task, since some sources 3 claim he had over 175 directing credits, and many of these films have been lost. Nevertheless, we can, in addition to mining archival sources both written and visual, consider his wide-ranging work, such as Ben Hur (1907), From the Manger to the Cross (1912), Madame Butterfly (1915) and The Claw

(1927) around specific themes of race, identity, religion and colonialism which are also directly inflected in the films he made on Ireland. This preliminary discussion is part of the groundwork of a planned future bio-critical study of the director and his contexts. Such a study also can use his example as a way to grasp the industrial modes at work in the first thirty years of the film business. And, truth, be told, I am also flying the Canadian flag to some degree.

We’re probably all familiar in film history circles with Doug

Gomery and Richard C. Allen’s 1985 book entitled Film History:

Theory and Practice, and also the trend of New Cinema history 4 popularized by Richard Maltby and many others in the last decade. I think it fair to say that there are a range of methodological approaches that have been applied to see if we can capture the cinematic past in a comprehensible way.

Undoubtedly, these writers have been influential—Allen’s work prizes the value of local town, city and state case studies of cinematic practices, in part to prevent us generalizing from

New York or Los Angeles experiences. Maltby pushes us further to consider different kinds of evidence, from the bottom up, and this naturally places some emphasis on distribution and exhibition practices. Even though we live in an era of potential access to Big Data in a range of fields, we are stymied by poor filtering systems. In my own view, and this is dredging up a controversial high school history text, E.C. Carr’s

What is History?, it has always been thus for the historian, for he or she must first find relevant empirical data, and then choose selections to tell a story that become historical facts, 5 that is, facts to be noticed, written about and charged with explanatory power.

This turning of selected empirical facts into historical facts is often silently achieved, and is the historian’s claim to fame if it reorients the thinking in a given field. We would all be so lucky in our own work to achieve that status in Early cinema research. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the impact of new digital platforms and online access to early cinema. We all know that the state of extant silent films overall is poor, and that film historians must be open to constant revision of their generalizations. A new find of a can of film or new written records that might survive the vicissitudes of time could help to overturn previous thinking. While I have been persuaded by much of what Bobby Allen and Richard Maltby have argued in their efforts to displace the film texts themselves from film history, arguing instead for attention to be paid to the social 6 and business world of the film experience, I think an academic place still exists to try to blend these insights with the more traditional approach of bio-criticism and auteur study.

Unfortunately, our current reality is one of limited vision—at one level, if we focus on an early cinema filmmaker, we are fortunate if we can establish firmly what the oeuvre actually is and if we can see it. An excellent example is Sidney Olcott, the

Irish-Canadian filmmaker, who directed films from 1907 to

1927. The trajectory of his career is an impressive one, first starting out as an actor in Toronto’s amateur theatre, and by

1898 had moved to act in New York’s theatres and began to get bit parts for the American Mutoscope and Biograph company, before joining the new Kalem Company in 1907 for whom he worked for five years, before joining the Gene Gauntier Feature

Players company, and then in 1914 creating his own Sid Olcott

International Pictures. [SID Films] He later worked for a range 7 of production companies, though most notable of these was his work for Famous Players-Lasky, precursor of Paramount.

IMdb.com lists his directorial credits as no less than 188 films, though a great majority of these were shorts and some frankly unverifiable. He is a pioneer of sorts as his career coincides with the nickelodeon explosion and the gradual development of narrative style to what we see as classical narrative cinema.

He is one of those Canadian individuals, as Peter Morris in his work Embattled Shadows indicates, who had to go south to sustain a career in the arts and entertainment industry. Morris makes the point that without a thriving (read paying) theatre scene in Toronto at the turn of the 20th century, it was simply impossible for film companies to set up shop there without ready talent. New York was simply larger and better positioned.

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So, one reason to look at Olcott is the story of a Canadian made good. By the time he was forty in 1914, he was probably at the height of his popularity. We can gauge this by examining various snapshots of advertisements of his films in Canadian cities. In 1914, for example, in his hometown of Toronto, at least ten of his films appeared, compared to five in Montreal, and only one each in Winnipeg and Vancouver. Due south in

Seattle only two of his films were advertized. One might recast his popularity as being primarily that in Eastern Canadian provinces and US states.

Another reason to consider Olcott is to draw attention to his work with Kalem. Many accounts rightly make the case of

Kalem’s importance as the company, albeit small, that defined itself primarily as delivering on-location film topics. Much is made by critics of the trips Olcott made to Ireland and the 9

Middle East to produce both exotic and familiar scenes (at least to Irish immigrants) in his films for audiences in North

America. He also made films in England and Germany and shot film aboard the ships he was travelling on. His work for Kalem encompassed what we would probably call documentary travelogues—most likely a simple economical use of foreign footage shot. He was instrumental in setting up regular use of film units in warmer climes for Kalem in Jacksonville, Florida and in California.

Perhaps we should not be surprised as Canadians that this story of Kalem venturing far and wide often omits their first foreign locations—here in Canada in 1909-11. Morris mentions nine Kalem films, probably directed by Olcott, with endearing titles and not so endearing subject matter. The Cattle Thieves,

Trappers and Indians in Canada, Her Indian Mother, The

Canadian Moonshiners, The Perversity of Fate, and Fighting the 10

Iroquois in Canada are some of the titles. An emphasis on scenery, Mounted police, first nations people, and a rugged lifestyle figured largely in these works. While we have text descriptions or capsule reviews of these films, only two of them seem to exist in some form in the archives—Trappers and

Indians in Canada in Ottawa at the National Archives and His

Indian Mother in Washington at the Library of Congress. Thus we are denied the possibility of painting a full picture of

Olcott’s early directorial work and his representation of

Canada to its southern neighbour. Unfortunately, no clear evidence yet that I’ve seen links the Canadian shot films to

Olcott, but it would be odd for Kalem not to make use of their leading Canadian born director.

A third reason to consider Olcott is to see whether his extant work during that twenty-year period of film directing reveals developments or not in film technique and style. Just because 11 the films got longer, and the plots more involved, does not necessarily mean changes in other areas are evident. Kevin

Brownlow, although interviewed in the Peter Flynn O’Kalems documentary, has written elsewhere that Olcott was “arguably the dullest director of the silent era.” That’s a broad claim, and perhaps unfairly underestimates the challenge of moving from one- reelers to six reeler films, from the notion of casual players who also did the stunts and even carpentry to professionalized practices. We can detect in the Olcott filmography in this transitional period before the norm of 5 or

6 reelers, his originating of serial work: he and Gauntier began a series of films around The Girl Spy—a female military scout whose quick thinking and toughness are celebrated. This series periodically appeared over a number of years. Shelly Stamp has written at length about these serial heroines, and Olcott’s work is at the centre of this phenomenon. So, it is fair to say, as a thesis that Olcott’s practice as a filmmaker moved from a 12 collaborative model to more formal director-cameraman, and director-star models, and on to producer lead models by the end of his career. It’s not fully linear, but it does make him representative of the era’s emerging dominant modes of production.

A fourth reason to try to develop some analysis of Olcott’s work is that he did work with major stars of the era, including

Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri,

George Arliss and Richard Barthelmess. After the great success with working with Gene Gauntier, he had a more difficult time with fellow Torontonian Mary Pickford, who wanted Olcott replaced while directing Madame Butterfly in 1915, though she worked again with him in 1916 with Poor Little Peppina.

Nothing if not adventurous, Pickford thus plays Japanese, and then Italian. Charles Foster in the sadly academically undocumented Stardust and Shadows: Canadians in early 13

Hollywood (2000) tells a most unusual story of William

Randolph Hearst scouring the country for Olcott in 1922. The director had separated from his wife for a year and appeared to be drinking himself into an early grave in a seedy part of

New York. Hearst apparently got him sober and Olcott restarted his career by directing Hearst’s wife Marion Davies in the film Little Old New York (1923).

In terms of Olcott’s style, Brownlow has a point. There are infrequent dramatic close-ups, no cross-cutting montage, and no deep character psychology that one might grant Griffith’s heroes and heroines. One is too consciously aware of Olcott’s theatrical background. His proscenium style perhaps is too boring, though he does seem adept at using the depth of his film stage, often having characters appear dimly in the background and who walk towards the audience, gradually looming large. One notices this in From the Manger to the Cross when Jesus slowly makes his way towards a group of would-be 14

Christians. So, his films are not flat in presentation, but rather reveal clever choreography; His cinematographer uses only a few pans of the camera in the whole Jesus film. The fact that

From the Manger to the Cross made huge profits is undoubtedly due to the subject matter, but also the performances are deeply serious and the miracles are well mounted. A curious sidenote is that Frank Marion released the film without credits, and though this has been framed by some writers as an act of spite because of an argument over money between the producer and the director and cast, it might also have been simply a great marketing decision—Marion understanding that encouraging the willing suspension of disbelief is exactly what audiences— religious or not-- wanted from the film.

And, finally, there’s a constant interest in empire and its discontents that runs throughout Olcott’s work—the Romans in Ben Hur and From the Manger to the cross, the British in the 15 many Irish films between 1910 and 1914, a time when Ireland had not achieved its independence, the rising American Empire as suggested by Madame Butterfly, as well as the displaced

British empire in Africa as depicted in Olcott’s final film The

Claw. So, in addition to his work with Gene Gauntier and the

Irish O’Kalem films, there are a number of ways into Olcott’s career and his achievements, and one hopes with further research we can place his contribution within all these competing aspects, both methodological and historical. The

Irish Canadian Toronto boy who made good.