Live piano accompaniment by Philip C. Carli. Harry Carey was one of the best known and best loved (by the public and by his co-workers) actors in Hollywood. From his earliest silent films for D.W. Griffith at Biograph, to his star status in Hollywood as a western hero and then B series star, Carey brought warmth, humanity, and a natural ease to film acting. Roaring Rails is a post-WWI story set in the Pacific Northwest with Carey starring as an Army veteran returning to his former life as a railroad engineer. Thrown into the middle of a trouble-plagued town and the unscrupulous business interests that run it, Carey, in true heroic fashion, saves the day. Filmed well before CGI was ever dreamt of, Carey, his train, and his fellow actors brave the film’s set piece: a real and raging forest fire. George Eastman House preserved a Dutch language 35mm tinted nitrate print of Roaring Rails and then restored the English intertitles with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts / American Film Institute and the National Film Preservation Foundation. Presented by Caroline Yeager, assistant curator, Moving Image Department.
Through the selection, manipulation, and reproduction of existing printed materials, Erica Baum creates a poetry of word and image that inspires close looking and close reading.