Rare Thanhouser films screen Sunday on Mount Pony

The grandson of an esoteric, industrious film pioneer celebrates the 100th anniversary of his family’s creative legacy at a special Sunday matinee of silent shorts in the theater on Mount Pony.

The Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation hosts Ned Thanhouser at the free public screening at 2 p.m. of rare movies from The Thanhouser Co., founded 1909.

Established in New Rochelle, N.Y., the studio made an impressive 1,086 films in its brief nine-year history, according to Thanhouser, president of Oregon-based Thanhouser Film Preservation Inc.

“Edwin and Gertrude Thanhouser were the first to head an American film studio with a background in theater,” he said of his grandparents.

“Thanhouser films were acclaimed by reviewers for their story content, photography and artistic quality.”

But of the more than 1,000 movies made, only 198 prints are known to exist.

Sadly, said George Willeman, nitrate vault manager at the Packard Campus, early film was quite disposable.

“At the time, it was just product, and once a product was done, you go on, you move on to your next product,” he said. “When the film was done in theaters and all the prints came back, they would destroy them all — and the negative.”

Fortunately for movie history, some Thanhouser prints survived, stashed away by theater managers far from the New York studio, or passed on by itinerant showmen who traveled the country showing films out of the back of wagons, Willeman said.

“All of them came from private collectors,” he added of what’s left. “Sometimes they are from children of the original showmen.”

Temperature-controlled nitrate vaults inside Mount Pony house 52 original Thanhouser materials, many of which were meticulously restored by LOC staffers.

Rudimentary and yet somehow magically hypnotic a century later, Thanhouser movies were mostly made for entertainment, though some titles touched on social issues like child labor or elder care.

“The company is known for the quality of their films,” Willeman said. “They are notably better produced than a lot of them.”

In fact, he thinks Thanhouser’s stuff was better than Thomas Edison’s.

Hearing that would certainly have made the film company’s founders happy, as Thanhouser was one of the “independent” studios that helped lead the rebellion against Edison’s Motion Picture Patent Trust monopoly, Ned Thanhouser said.

Bantering with colleagues in an LOC lab the other day, Rob Stone, curator of the moving images section, took it further.

“I would contend you have a better percentage of movies from 1909 being good than 2009,” he said. “There’s nothing I want to watch at the movie theater.”

And yet silent movies like the ones made by Thanhouser continue to have a following.

Thanhouser supposes that has to do with nostalgia — people rediscovering their family history and what life was like 100 years ago. He said he gets several e-mails a month from descendants of folks whose ancestors worked for the Thanhouser Co., asking for information, movies or pictures in which they can see their relatives.

“There is also a renewed interest by the academic community to study the films and stories from this era as a window into the social, moral and political trends representative of the culture,” Thanhouser said.

In other words, it’s history.

“The Evidence of the Film,” for example, is considered a historical document for its portrayal of an early film room. In 2001, the LOC deemed it “culturally significant” and placed it on the National Film Registry.

That means it’s worth saving.

Amazingly, it was only rediscovered in 1999, and like most Thanhouser prints is one of a kind.

Willeman likes “The Evidence of the Film” because he says it’s one of the first movies to use movies as a plot device. It’s about a young girl, a film cutter at a studio, who exonerates her little brother, accused of a crime, by paying attention to her work.

Thanhouser’s “Their One Love” from 1915, a Civil War melodrama starring twin sisters Madeline and Marion Fairbanks, is worth a watch as well because it’s reportedly the first fiction film to fully realize the technology of night photography.

The scene with bombs bursting in air is quite electrifying in that context. It was one of several movies made in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, released soon after D.W. Griffith’s controversial “Birth of a Nation.”

“Their One Love” won’t show Sunday on Mount Pony but is available on one of several DVD sets put out by Thanhouser Co. Film Preservation, formed in 1995 by Ned Thanhouser to do as its name implies.

Thanhouser, at the special Culpeper program, will provide a brief illustrated lecture about the history of his family’s film studio and its role in the early motion picture business. He will then introduce six films made between 1910 and 1915.

House musician Andrew Simpson will accompany on piano.

A hundred years from now, Thanhouser felt, his ancestors’ films would be remembered, in part, because of its redistribution on DVD. He views them as providing “yet another view into this fascinating period in American film history.”

For LOC nitrate film specialist Larry Smith, “They’re interesting just because it’s rare they survive.”