Exhibit, screening celebrate Ithaca Silent Movie Month

The city of Ithaca's role in early filmmaking history -- and Cornell's part of that story -- will be celebrated this fall during Homecoming Weekend and through October. In October 1912 the first scenes were filmed -- of a Cornell/Penn State football game -- for what became Theodore Wharton's first silent film shot in Ithaca, "Football Days at Cornell."

"Cornell in the Movies! 1912-1920: Presented by the Ithaca Motion Picture Project" will be offered Sept. 22 at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts accompanied by live music by composer Mary Lorson. Additionally, IMPP's "Pratfalls & Paramours," one piece of a multipart exhibit designed by Todd Zwigard, B.Arch. '82, will be installed in the Schwartz Center lobby throughout Homecoming Weekend and during most of October.

Two years after that first Wharton film, Theodore Wharton and his brother, Leopold, established a movie studio, Wharton Inc., in Renwick Park (now known as Stewart Park) on the southern shores of Cayuga Lake in Ithaca. For six years, the Wharton studio thrived while hundreds of silent serial episodes and feature movies -- such as "Patria," "The Romance of Elaine," "The Mysteries of Myra" and "The Great White Trail" -- were filmed and produced in Ithaca.

Cornell's campus and Ithaca's gorges were favored filming locations for many of these movies; the diverse landscape provided dramatic natural settings for silent movies filled with romance, exploits and danger. It was common for students to serve as extras, often in large crowd scenes, or as assistants.

Cornell was "a very important part of the Whartons' inspiration to create a movie studio in Ithaca in 1914," says Constance Bruce, co-founder of IMPP, a nonprofit organization dedicated to celebrating and preserving Central New York's silent movie history. Earlier this year, Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick '09 signed a proclamation declaring October as Ithaca Silent Movie Month.

"Pratfalls & Paramours" is just one portion of the eight-part multimedia exhibition "Romance, Exploits & Peril: When Movies Were Made in Ithaca," designed by Zwigard and the Ithaca marketing and design firm Art & Anthropology and written by Julie Simmons Lynch.

"My primary focus in the design of these exhibits is to engage the viewer in a theatrical way, bringing this unique local story to life and making it memorable," Zwigard says. "The materials and details used are meant to recall the beautiful utility of stage sets and rigging."

Other parts of the IMPP exhibit will be on display throughout the month of October at multiple Ithaca locations.

IMPP, in partnership with the city of Ithaca, is applying for state funding to turn the former Wharton silent movie studio building at Stewart Park into an Ithaca silent movie museum. Zwigard has already created concept design renderings and interior layouts as part of the grant application. The concept designs for the museum and the plaza adjacent to the building have been incorporated into the Stewart Park Rehabilitation Action Plan, produced by Ithaca landscape architect Rick Manning '87.

Bruce hopes that as Cornellians and Ithacans learn more about the region's role in silent movie history, they may discover that a grandparent or great-grandparent appeared in a Wharton movie as an extra or worked as an assistant to the Whartons or other filmmakers who made movies in Ithaca a century ago. IMPP plans to create a permanent exhibition featuring photographs, letters and memorabilia about moviemaking in the region for the proposed museum. Personal accounts of working on a Wharton movie documented in writing or photographs will, of course, enliven the exhibition, she says, but may also provide valuable information about silent movie production.

"Creating a museum is a tremendous opportunity for that personal history to find its way into the bigger story of Ithaca and the Whartons' legacy as pioneers in the movie industry," she says.

Media Contact

Joe Schwartz