Twin Peaks Tunnel, the 1917 film showing the construction of the San Francisco transportation landmark and development of the adjoining Westwood Park district, is now on-line. The short, documentary-style film – which was recently restored – can be viewed at www.archive.org/details/TwinPeaksTunnel1917.
Under the terms of a 2009 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, Bay Area film preservationists David Kiehn and Robert Byrne created a digitized copy of the historic 19-minute film and posted it to the Internet Archive, the San Francisco-based website and digital library of moving images, texts, audio, software and archived web pages.
Material on the Internet Archive is made freely available over the world wide web. There, Twin Peaks Tunnel can be viewed or even downloaded. The original 28mm copy of Twin Peaks Tunnel remains in the collection of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont. The museum also holds a 35mm preservation negative and two 35mm positive prints.
The NFPF preservation grant awarded the two local preservationists provided support to create the preservation master and the two access copies. Additoionally, films saved through NFPF programs are made accessible for on-site research and are seen more widely through screenings, exhibits, television broadcasts, and release on DVD.
The restored Twin Peaks Tunnel made it’s big screen debut at the Fremont museum on January 21. According to Kiehn, the film was greeted by “a large, enthusiastic audience.”
It’s next public screening takes place February 25, during the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum 11th anniversary event. Twin Peaks Tunnel will be shown along with four short Georges Méliès films and a feature, Scaramouche (1923, Metro), a classic story of adventure and romance set during the period of the French Revolution. Based on the novel by Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche was directed by Rex Ingram and stars Ramon Novarro and Alice Terry.
If anything, early films may be the closest we will ever come to time travel. One wonders, for instance, how many of the bearded, suited, cigar-smoking City officials shown in Twin Peaks Tunnel were born as long ago as the American Civil War? And here they are, alive in the Twentieth Century, captured on film.
Another brief passage in Twin Peaks Tunnel also illustrates this point. In one scene, an individual named Frank W. Gibbs is shown. He was placed in charge of thinning the forest in Westwood Park. On an inter-title card, Gibbs is described as the pioneer of the West Peaks District who – as it turns out – helped plant that very same forest forty years earlier: that, by my calculations, was around the same time that the first motion picture cameras were developed.
Thomas Gladysz is an arts journalist and independent film historian. He writes on various topics for various websites, blogs and the occasional print publication. Gladysz has lived in San Francisco since 1985. More at www.thomasgladysz.com
Comments