(US/ France/USSR 1926-1945, 80 min., 35mm nitrate prints)
List of screenings:
- The Flute of Krishna
- The Lunch Hound
- Lights Out
- Advertising Snips
- A Wise Choice
- Know for Sure
- Juke Box Follies
- The Old Castle
- It Never Happened
- Birth of Life
- The Skeleton Dance
THE FLUTE OF KRISHNA
(US 1926, 6 min., 35mm nitrate print)
Choreographer: Martha Graham
Sets and Costumes: Norman Edwards
Cast: Robert Ross, Evelyn Sabin, Thelma Biracree, Betty MacDonald, Susan Vacanti
Production company: Eastman Kodak Company
Silent, Two-Color Kodachrome, 6 min. 15 sec. at 20 frames per second
English credits
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
In 1925, modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham accepted a teaching position at
Rochester’s Eastman School of Music at the invitation of Rouben Mamoulian, then the head of
the School of Dance and Dramatic Action. Over the course of her year-long tenure, Graham
choreographed a number of short dances with Eastman students, including the lyrical— albeit
Orientalist—romance, The Flute of Krishna. The dance is a version of traditional Indian Rasalila.
It depicts the flute-playing Hindu god Krishna, whose music beckons four women, including the
goddess Radha, with whom he is most in love.
First performed live at the Eastman Theatre on May 9, 1926, The Flute of Krishna was also
staged and filmed in the theater’s studio around the same time. This version was produced
collaboratively with Mamoulian and shot with an experimental Kodak color process,
“Kodachrome.” The Kodachrome two-color process was invented in 1913 by Kodak Research
Laboratory head John G. Capstaff and used a beam-splitter to simultaneously capture red and
green color records on alternating frames of a single strip of black-and-white camera film. From
this negative, release prints were made by exposing both sides of a double-coated stock with
their respective color record. After tanning to harden the exposed areas, the soft non-exposed
areas were dyed red-orange and blue-green, producing a final two-color image.
The Flute of Krishna documents a brief confluence between two artists in transition. Graham
would soon revolutionize the art of dance with her company and school. After his move to
Hollywood, Mamoulian would helm such classic films as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Queen
Christina (1933), and Becky Sharp (1935), the first feature shot entirely in three-strip
Technicolor. Even “Kodachrome,” later reapplied to Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky’s
separate reversal process, would become known the world over as the premier choice for small
gauge color film.
This print comes from the George Eastman Museum’s collection. It formed the basis of the
museum’s 1990 preservation, which replicated the Kodachrome palette on color print stock. The
primary challenge of this print is its many splices (27). The 0.95% shrinkage, however, is
relatively low for a near century-old print.
Kirk McDowell
THE LUNCH HOUND
(Walter Lantz, Clyde Geronimi, US 1927, 9 min., 35mm nitrate print)
Directors: Walter Lantz (animation), Clyde Geronimi (live action)
Production company: Bray Productions, Inc.
Silent, tinted, 9 min. 21 sec. at 22 frames per second
English intertitles
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Showcasing the chaotic, creative spirit of late silent-era animation, The Lunch Hound was
produced by the formative company Bray Productions as a part of their series Hot Dog Cartoons,
which featured the combative on-screen relationship between “animat-or” Walter Lantz and the
“animat-ed” character Pete the Pup. Like Lantz and Bray’s earlier Dinky Doodle series, the Hot
Dog Cartoons deftly combined animated material with live-action footage.
Popularized by Max Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell series (which began at Bray), the mingling of
live-action with drawn animation dates back to the early films of J. Stuart Blackton and Winsor
McCay. Bray’s Hot Dog Cartoons were cut from the same cloth, and frequently exploited the
boundary between the animated image and its creator. Most of The Lunch Hound—in which Pete
the Pup and Lantz each thwart the other’s attempts to rustle up food—uses parallel editing to
jump back and forth between Lantz’s live-action home and Pete’s animated world. The film’s
conclusion, however, includes some brief but impressive shots combining live action with
animation, a laborious and time-intensive process. First, 8-by-10-inch frame enlargements were
made from the original camera negative. These enlargements were then used as backgrounds
over which the animators drew, first on thin onionskin, then on transparent cels. The
backgrounds and clear overlays would then be rephotographed to create the final composite
images.
Although Bray would continue to make educational films, the Hot Dog Cartoons would prove to
be the last series the company produced before its theatrical animation department shuttered in
1927, due largely to the uncertainty and plummeting rental rates brought on by the popularity of
sound films. Lantz, who had become heavily involved in directing and producing Bray’s
animated shorts, ventured west to Hollywood, where he would find lasting fame creating the
beloved Woody Woodpecker series. While many of these later sound films are classics in their
own right, the silent cartoons Lantz made at Bray, with all their unbridled, anarchic energy,
deserve a second look.
This print of The Lunch Hound on 1925–1926 AGFA stock features light perforation damage
throughout, as well as substantial scratches on the base and a somewhat high shrinkage
measurement of 1.15%.
Kirk McDowell
LIGHTS OUT
(Eddie Donnelly, US 1942, 6 min., 35mm nitrate print)
Director: Eddie Donnelly
Writer: John Foster
Producer: Paul Terry
Music: Philip A. Scheib
Production company: Terrytoons
Distribution company: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation
Sound, Technicolor, 6 min.
English language
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Of all the mid-twentieth century American animation studios, Terrytoons—once described by
founder Paul Terry himself as the Woolworth’s to Disney’s Tiffany’s—was arguably the most
proficient, producing competent, if not groundbreaking, cartoon shorts at a steady pace for over
forty years. Among the many characters Terry and his team created, some remain household
names (Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle) while others have largely been forgotten (Fanny
Zilch, Dinky Duck). Although Gandy Goose may fall in the latter category, in the 1940s he was
one of Terrytoons’ most popular characters.
Gandy Goose was created by cartoonist and Terrytoons director John Foster in 1938. With its
black feathers and elongated neck, the character’s early design may have been a response to
Warner Bros.’ newly-created Daffy Duck. But where Daffy spoke with a sputtering lisp, Gandy
(voiced first by Arthur Kay, then by Tom Morrison) was a broad parody of actor and comedian
Ed Wynn, whom Kay had worked with on the stage. Likewise, Gandy’s surly partner, Sourpuss
the Cat, was performed to sound like the gravel-voiced Jimmy Durante.
Lights Out utilizes one of the series’ common narrative formulas: Gandy and Sourpuss fall
asleep, dream of adventures in fantastical environments, then eventually wake up to argue. This
plot allowed many Gandy cartoons to explore interesting or exotic settings while turning a blind
eye to the demands of logic. In the case of Lights Out, a bedtime reading-induced nightmare
gives rise to a haunted house, Technicolor ghosts, and the “crackpot” Mrs. Jones.
Spooky resonances aside, the title phrase “lights out” would be recognized by wartime audiences
as a reminder to help foil air raids by keeping lights off at night. By 1942, animation studios
were contributing to the American war effort, producing training films (like Warner Bros.’
Private Snafu series), advertising war bonds, and featuring the war in the plots of their cartoons.
For its part, Lights Out peppers its dream plot with wartime references and situates the frame
story in a boot camp.
This original release print is a recent donation to the George Eastman Museum by film collector
and photographer Jeff Sumberg. It features small sections of edge and perforation damage and is
quite oily. The shrinkage, however, is a very manageable 0.60%.
Kirk McDowell
ADVERTISING SNIPES
(US 1939-1940, 2 min., 35mm nitrate print)
[Halloween Fun Fest] (US, 1939)
Production company: Filmack Trailer Company [?]
Sound, tinted, 49 sec.
English titles
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
A Wise Choice (US, 1940)
Sponsor: Chevrolet
Production company: Jam Handy Organization
Sound; Technicolor, tinted; 1 min.
English language
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
For most of the nitrate era, audiences received a lot more for the price of a ticket than a single
feature. B-pictures, cartoons, newsreels, and advertisements were all part of the standard
program, as were theatrical snipes. Snipes—short film clips produced for movie theaters—served
several functions: relaying theater housekeeping notices (“No smoking”); announcing program
sections (“Our Feature Presentation”); and advertising upcoming events (“Starts Tuesday!”). A
number of companies produced snipes, such as the Filmack Trailer Company, the National
Screen Service, and Pike Productions. Although they were made for utilitarian purposes, some
later snipes achieved a level of renown, especially Filmack’s Let’s All Go to the Lobby and the
National Screen Service’s series of “Astro Daters.”
The brief [Halloween Fun Fest] promotes an upcoming holiday event aimed at children, and is
an important record of the “spook show”—a twentieth century moviegoing practice that
combined films and live theatrics. This snipe also demonstrates the functionality of the form:
after the message “Plus this giant screen show….” exhibitors would splice in the name of
whatever film had been programmed for the event, allowing the snipe to be customized and
reused.
A Wise Choice is a short Technicolor advertisement that encourages buying used cars “from your
local Chevrolet dealer.” It was part of an ad campaign that followed the same nuclear family as
they used their 1940 Chevrolet in a variety of situations, and all films in the series were produced
by the Detroit-based Jam Handy Organization. Founded by the eponymous Olympic athlete, Jam
Handy was a leading producer of sponsored and industrial films in the United States. The agency
created much of Chevrolet’s most memorable advertising, including A Great New Star (1952)
featuring Dinah Shore, which popularized the song “See the USA in Your Chevrolet.”
Both films are recent donations to the Eastman Museum: [Halloween Fun Fest] by the Chicago
Film Society in 2022, and A Wise Choice by Jeff Sumberg in 2023. Apart from a high shrinkage
measurement of 1.25%, [Halloween Fun Fest] is in good condition, exhibiting only light travel
scratches and dirt. A Wise Choice has a manageable 0.70% shrinkage for most of its length, but
briefly jumps to 1.08% during the green-tinted end title.
Kirk McDowell
KNOW FOR SURE
(Lewis Milestone, US 1941, 21 min., 35mm nitrate print)
Director: Lewis Milestone
Writer: John Sutherland
Producer: Darryl F. Zanuck
Cast: Shepperd Strudwick, Samuel S. Hinds, J. Carrol Naish, Tim Holt, Ward Bond, Joseph
Crehan, Etta McDaniel, Edwin Maxwell, Francis Pierlot
Sponsor: United States Public Health Service
Production company: Research Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation
Sound, b/w, 21 min.
English language
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
In 1936, newly appointed US Surgeon General Dr. Thomas Parran initiated a campaign to
eradicate venereal disease. Although the Venereal Disease Division of the United States Public
Health Service (PHS) had existed since World War I, national priorities had shifted during the
interwar period, in part due to lack of funding. By the late 1930s, a new war loomed on the
horizon, and concern had grown among medical authorities that rampant VD could jeopardize
the efforts of the military, related industries, and civil defense organizations. Parran’s strategy for
combating VD—syphilis in particular— included advocating free testing before marriage, timely
treatment of the disease, and identification of sexual partners of affected individuals.
The cornerstone of Parran’s plan was public education, and the PHS began producing short films
to support this mission. In the spring of 1941, the organization partnered with the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to produce Know for Sure at Twentieth Century-Fox studios.
With professional direction by Lewis Milestone and a cast of familiar faces, including Samuel S.
Hinds, Ward Bond, Tim Holt, and Etta MacDaniel, it had no shortage of slick Hollywood luster.
Because the actors and filmmakers were donating their labor—and receiving no on-screen credit
for their trouble—the two-reel short was completed for a total cost of just $15,000.
As a piece of didactic cinema, Know for Sure argues for prompt, proper medical attention by
highlighting the variety of individuals VD can affect: a father whose child is stillborn due to
undiagnosed syphilis; a young man who contracts the disease from a sex worker; and an older
man who ruins his health by trusting a fraudulent doctor.
Although such emphasis on risk reduction and testing distinguishes this short from more
exploitative VD films, it was similarly exhibited. Initially screened for male defense workers, the
film’s graphic nudity would have been removed before exhibition to female and mixed
audiences.
This print has likely been censored, as the nudity has been excised. Several instances of
perforation and edge tears in the first reel have been repaired, and shrinkage is at 1.15%. The
1941 edge code indicates that this is an original release print, and the rich visual quality of the
image supports this.
Kirk McDowell
JUKE-BOX FOLLIES
(US 1945, 10 min., 35mm nitrate print)
Producer: W. Merle Connell
Production company: Quality Pictures Co.
Sound, tinted, 10 min.
English language
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Despite its long history on the stages of Victorian England and the United States, burlesque
arrived late to cinema. Enterprising producers and exhibitors were shooting and screening
burlesque shorts as early as 1930, but because theatrically exhibited exploitation films had to
mask any salaciousness in the guise of education, direct displays of sexuality were forced to
reach audiences through other channels.
In the case of burlesque, this other channel was the peepshow, which exhibited films through a
single viewer coin-operated machine. One prominent example was the Panoram “musical
jukebox,” which could be converted into a peepshow by replacing the device’s large display
screen with a more private one-viewer “peep front.” By the end of the Second World War,
however, attitudes toward sex had loosened, and burlesque films began to be shown in cinemas
as well.
Quality Pictures, a small studio on Santa Monica Boulevard run by producer-director W. Merle
Connell, was one of the preeminent companies putting out burlesque films for the peepshow and
theatrical markets. Connell filmed Los Angeles burlesque dancers in short, two-to-three-minute
performances and packaged the segments as single-reel compilations, producing twenty-five of
these by 1947. Keeping a hand in the peepshow market, Quality also bought and sold Panorams
and converted them for a fee. By the 1950s, Quality had begun focusing on narrative films as
well; the Quality Pictures studio was even used for several Ed Wood movies, including Plan 9
from Outer Space (1959).
Juke-Box Follies is typical of Quality’s postwar burlesque output. The one-reel film contains five
short performances: two comic songs and three dances which, with their strong exoticism, were
clearly aimed at returning servicemen. Although burlesque films were being shown in theaters,
there was still significant resistance to their exhibition, as a headline in Motion Picture Herald
from November 17, 1945 attests: “CHICAGO CENSOR APPROVES ALL BUT FIVE IN
MONTH.” Juke-Box Follies was among these five titles rejected by the Chicago police board (of
the 107 examined).
This print was struck on Kodak’s pre-tinted “Rose Doree” Sonochrome film base in 1947. Apart
from some scratches on the base and light edge roughness, the print is in great projectable shape
with no splices and 0.70% shrinkage.
Kirk McDowell
LE VIEUX CHĂTEAU [The Old Castle]
(Henri Cerutti, France 1935, 3 min., 35mm nitrate print)
Director: Henri Cerutti
based on a song by Mireille and Jean Nohain performed by Pills and Tabet
Sound, b/w, 3 min.
French language, electronic English subtitles
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Little is known about illustrator, animator, and film director Henri Cerutti (1911–1968?). He is
mostly recognized for his film poster illustrations. Active in France from the 1930s to the mid-
1960s, his artist’s signature appears on posters for such films as Jean Renoir’s Toni (1935) and
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear, 1953). But Cerutti also
specialized in the production of illustrated songs, and he directed at least a dozen short films
within the same period. Most of his extant shorts are preserved in France, but a nitrate print of Le
vieux château was rediscovered recently within the collections of the George Eastman Museum.
Le vieux château is a rather unique film. This animated short illustrates a 1932 hit song by the
famous French singer-songwriter duo Mireille (Mireille Hartuch) and Jean Nohain, interpreted
by two equally popular chansonniers, Pills and Tabet (Jacques Pills and Georges Tabet). The
soundtrack offers an interesting glimpse into the revival of traditional French songwriting in the
1930s, which was partially initiated by Mireille and Nohain themselves. As with Charles Trenet’s
songs a few years later, the lyrics focused more on little anecdotes of everyday life. “Le vieux
château” is about an old castle with its resident ghosts and rats as big as pigs and even elephants,
which a young man inherits from his uncle instead of the money he was hoping to receive.
Cerutti’s adaptation of the song is lively and beautifully animated. Playing with contrast lighting,
superimpositions, and cubist forms—all rather unusual for the period—he uses puppetry and
stop-motion to animate his paper figures. The film was first exhibited in 1935 at the third Venice
Film Festival and appears to have been a success; it is referenced in contemporary French and
international trade press. Le vieux château was acquired for distribution in the United States by
Lenauer International Films Inc. alongside six other films, including Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante
(1934). Until the early 1940s it showed up in art houses throughout the country accompanying a
wide range of foreign films, from Willi Forst and Anthony Asquith’s Unfinished Symphony
(1934) and Jacques Feyder’s Carnival in Flanders (1935), to Emilio Gómez Muriel and Fred
Zinnemann’s Redes (1936).
Despite some light warpage and edge creases, as well as a moderate amount of oil present
throughout, this 1937 print is in good projectable shape with a manageable 0.95% shrinkage.
Clara Auclair
IT NEVER HAPPENED [Tomato Is Another Day, Tomato’s Another Day]
(James Sibley Watson, US 1934, 7 min., 35mm nitrate print)
Director: J. S. Watson Jr.
Writer: Alec Wilder
Producer: J. S. Watson Jr.
Cinematographer: J. S. Watson Jr.
Cast: Jack Lee, Frances Alexander Miller
Sound, b/w, 7 min.
English language
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Trained as a physician, James Sibley Watson Jr. became a philanthropist, publisher (in the 1920s
he co-owned and co-edited one of the most important modernist literary magazines, The Dial),
and filmmaker. Today he is best known for the experimental short films The Fall of the House of
Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933), both co-directed with Melville Webber—two seminal
works of the so-called First American Film Avant-Garde. His industrial films The Eyes of
Science (1930, co-directed with Webber) and Highlights and Shadows (1938, co-directed with
Ken Edwards) were also received with great enthusiasm, as were his pioneering experiments in
X-ray cinematography.
The fine line between amateur and avant-garde filmmaking is particularly thin in Watson’s case.
In spite of the international success of Usher and Lot, he was reluctant to share with the general
public some of the absurdist comedies he made to entertain friends. It Never Happened (or
Tomato Is Another Day, the title Watson preferred) was a rare exception. Watson detested the
“talkies,” and his friend, composer Alec Wilder, who provided screenplays for most of those
surrealist vignettes, wrote a script in which all spoken lines were redundant (“I must be going,”
says the character after he leaves the room) and loaded with puns, the worse the better. The
film’s one and only public screening took place at the Boston Fine Arts Theatre in 1934, and
even got a review in The Christian Science Monitor, though an explicitly negative one. “The
people came to complain,” recalled Wason. “They thought it was a matter of, you know, mass
dementia of some sort.” Viewed today, it seems very modern. Film scholar Jan-Christopher
Horak, who rediscovered the film in the 1990s, considers it to be “a unique example of Dadaist
aesthetics in early sound cinema: a minimalist and virtually expressionless acting style on a
claustrophobic set characterizes the melodramatic love triangle.” This definition would have
probably amused and surprised the authors—but that doesn’t mean that Horak is wrong.
A native Rochesterian, Watson spent most of his life in his hometown. Not surprisingly, he
developed a good relationship with James Card, the founder of the Eastman Museum’s film
collection, and the bulk of Watson’s prints and negatives ended up at the museum. That included
the original print of It Never Happened. It has only 3 splices, a modest number of scratches, and
a fairly high shrinkage of 1.37%.
Peter Bagrov
ZAROZHDENIE ZHIZNI [Birth of Life, Birth and Regeneration, Death and Regeneration]
(Vsevolod Pudovkin, USSR 1930, 6 min., 35mm nitrate print)
Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin
Cinematographer: Grigory Kabalov
Production company: Mezhrabpomfilm
Silent, b/w, 6 min. at 24 frames per second
English credits
Print source: British Film Institute, London, UK
In the summer of 1930, Vsevolod Pudovkin became obsessed with the challenge of capturing on
screen “the complex yet definitive rhythm” of rain, and the mowing of “wet, rank grass, which,
as it was cut away beneath, slowly gave down on to the ground in a supple movement impossible
to describe.” He came up with an idea of a “close-up in time.” “When the director shoots a scene,
he changes the position of the camera […] according to the subject of his concentration of the
spectator’s attention […]. This is the way he controls the spatial construction of the scene. Why
should he not do precisely the same with the temporal? Why should not a given detail be
momentarily emphasized by retarding it on the screen, and rendering it by this means particularly
outstanding and unprecedentedly clear? Was not the rain beating on the stone of the windowsill,
the grass falling to the ground retarded, in relation to me, by my sharpened attention?”
The slow-motion technique existed since the birth of cinema, but Pudovkin wanted to
incorporate it in the editing construction. He combined shots of rain and mowing filmed at a
wide range of frame rates, interspersing normal speed—24 frames per second—with 45, 125, and
even 200 fps, just as one would alternate long takes with close-ups. He went on to film soil
exhausted by drought, grass and vegetables emerging from underground, as well as explosions
(or rather implosions, since they were shown in reverse) compressed into a point, symbolizing
the birth of a nucleus.
Pudovkin screened the resulting experimental reel for many audiences before finding a place for
it in his next feature, A Simple Case (1930). The film, one of the most interesting in Pudovkin’s
career, was met with bewilderment in the Soviet Union as well as abroad. When shown at the
Film Society in London in 1933, John Grierson, a devoted adherent of the Soviet avant-garde,
called it “undoubtedly the most important failure of all in the period of experiment.” The Birth
and Regeneration sequence, however, left an indelible mark in the memory of all those who saw
it, particularly the British filmmakers; it is likely it continued to be screened on its own until the
reel was sent to the National Film Library (now the British Film Institute) in 1942.
The print is in remarkable condition, aside from 1.1%-1.2% shrinkage, which is not particularly
high for a ninety-four-year-old element.
Peter Bagrov
THE SKELETON DANCE
(Walt Disney, US 1929, 6 min., 35mm nitrate print)
Director: Walt Disney
Animation: Ub Iwerks
Music: Carl Stalling
Production company: Walt Disney Productions
Distribution company: Columbia Pictures
Sound, b/w, 6 min. English language
Print source: Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Despite being among Disney’s most enduring cartoon shorts, and the first installment in Silly
Symphonies, The Skeleton Dance began its life modestly. In late 1928, musical director and
composer Carl Stalling proposed a template for a new series combining music and dance. “Carl’s
idea of the ‘Skeleton Dance’ for a Musical Novelty has been growing on me,” wrote Walt to
animator Ub Iwerks. “I think it has dandy possibilities.”
Iwerks took on the animation almost single-handedly; besides the opening sequence, which was
animated by Les Clark and Wilfred Jackson, he painstakingly drew every frame in January and
early February 1929. Although the film was animated in California, music and sound were
recorded in New York, as Disney did not yet own its own recording studio.
After months of searching for a venue willing to show the film, Disney secured a June 10, 1929,
premiere at LA’s Carthay Circle Theater, where The Skeleton Dance played with F.W. Murnau’s
now-lost feature Four Devils (1928). A second screening at the opening of San Francisco’s Fox
Theater quickly followed. The response was positive and gave credence to Disney’s confidence
in the film. In August, a contract was drawn up with Columbia Pictures, which guaranteed
distribution for The Skeleton Dance and future Silly Symphonies.
Although The Skeleton Dance signaled new possibilities for Disney and for animated film in
general, the skeleton dance—or Danse Macabre—was anything but novel. Originally an allegory
popular during the late medieval period, it found a place in Victorian stage traditions and
vaudeville before being incorporated into films. Disney’s version updates the classic form by
including such modern steps as the Charleston and the Black Bottom. This mixing of “high” and
“low” musical and dance forms would come to exemplify the Silly Symphony model, which
frequently juxtaposed all manner of material from the musical canon.
This print was created by the Museum of Modern Art in 1937 (through a duplicate negative)
from a safety diacetate print sent by Disney. As that safety print was likely struck off the original
camera negative, the image quality of the nitrate is strong. It has a somewhat high shrinkage
level of 1.05%. For comparison, we will also screen a diacetate print from MoMA ‘s collection,
made from the same dupe negative in 1943, with a shrinkage range of 0.8% -0.95%.
Kirk McDowell