Green Planet Films announces the 2022 restoration of the silent film The Church with an Overshot Wheel (1920) based on the O. Henry short story with the same title.
The 21-minute film is one of only two of 94 O. Henry films, produced by Vitagraph, known to survive1. It was restored by The Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles with funding by Green Planet Films which worked with the internationally acclaimed silent film composer Donald Sosin to create the musical score.
Joseph Byron Totten owned a farmhouse film studio in Voluntown, Connecticut from 1915-1924, known as Studio Farm where he produced and directed nearly 30 films.
Silent film or cinema muto used by the world-renowned Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy, has an allure which, by 21st century standards, is an anomalous one with its focus on “what’s missing”. That would be its trademark wordlessness which came to an end in 1927 when Al Jolson spoke the first words in the film “The Jazz Singer.”2 Furthermore, The Church with an Overshot Wheel adds a “who’s missing” plot, creating the “twist” which America’s most famous short story writer is known for. “I always tell them that the unusual is the ordinary rather than the unexpected,” said O. Henry in an undated interview.3
Filmed 19 miles north of the Connecticut shoreline in bucolic Voluntown, Connecticut, silent film’s trademark “wordlessness” captures the expressivity of silent cinema in this tender story of a father and daughter reunited by chance, hope and their infinite imaginations after she is abducted.
Silent film aficionados appreciate silent film’s reliance on the “whole body” to express emotions as well as the use of intertitles, the printed cards which appear periodically between scenes to add information, and the work of silent film composers who compose scores for the films. “So we might better say that silent cinema was wordless without being soundless,” according to Jane M. Gaines, a Professor of Film at Columbia University.4
The curious history of Studio Farm, named after the firefighters who put out the blaze caused by the highly combustible nitrate film stored on the Connecticut property, was purchased by the New York City director, producer, playwright, and actor Joseph Byron Totten who produced nearly 30 films for Essanay Film MFG Co and Vitagraph Co. of America, originally based in Brooklyn, considered America’s first great motion picture studio, which was later folded into what would become the Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone.
On February 1, 1917, Vitagraph entered into a six-year contract with publisher Doubleday Page & Company and the heirs of author William Sidney Porter to adapt 94 O. Henry stories into two-reel shorts and a few longer features. Totten directed four of the O. Henry stories. “The Church with the Overshot Wheel,” is one of the two surviving of these 94 — the other is “A Philistine in Bohemia.” (held by the George Eastman Museum).
Today, only 20% of silent films have survived, while only 50% of sound films have.5
“Believe it or not, for nine years early in the 20th century, Hollywood films were made in Voluntown,” wrote Richard Curland in 2013. There, Totten built a darkroom, his own scenery for films, many of which were Westerns, surrounded by the pastoral backdrop provided by a small working farm with large animals. City scenes were filmed 11 miles away in Westerly, Rhode Island. Men and women walked the distance to work as extras at Studio Farm given the absence of public transportation and the sparsity of cars. Additionally, New London’s historic Old Town Mill was the site of the church featured in the film.
100 years ago, in the early 20th century, modernity as we know it today, began to look recognizable in cultural industries. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, for example, was a pivotal, iconic moment in time that unleashed modern art as we know it today while the nascent film industry in the United States, which began on the east coast before it migrated to Hollywood, grew incrementally, albeit relatively swiftly, with technologies that eclipsed silent film. In the early 21st century, the art form continues to fascinate and transform new audiences with its contribution as a source of our collective, living memory, a reason to cherish it for the ages.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Erish, Andrew A. (2021). Vitagraph: America’s First Greet Motion Picture Studio. Page 151.
- Curland, R. I. (2013, June 16). Historically Speaking: Silent movies were filmed in Voluntown. The Bulletin. Retrieved October 12, 2021, from https://www.norwichbulletin.com/story/opinion/columns/2013/06/16/historically-speaking-silent-movies-were/45136559007/.
- Text of record of O. Henry's voice, text, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth139311/: accessed September 8, 2022), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.
- Gaines, Jane M. (2013) Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspective. Edited by Monica Dall’Asta, Victoria Duckett, Lucia Tralli. page 289. Published by the Department of Arts, University of Bologna in association with the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne and Women and Film History International.
- Film, the Living Record of our Memory (2021). Curland, R. I.