Seymour Stern: American Film Critic, Guardian and Prophet

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Filmmaker R.A. Haller and Stern, 1972

Afterwards, we would frequently bump into each other at one screening or another.

At the Museum of Modern Art, he had his special place in the rear of the theatre where, he felt the screen image was just right.

From this vantage he could study the audience and their reactions. His ever-present pocket flashlight would frequently come out to enable him to jot down some notes in one of his pads.

The one thing that always stood out was the way that Stern listened. He would never miss any sort of a Griffith revival and inevitably he would be found within the crowds.

Setting up camera position on America, 1924

Once, after the end of AMERICA, I spotted him and made my way towards him only to be rebuffed by his eyes and general demeanor which conveyed to me, "Stay away now; I am listening."

I learned of Stern's death several months after it had happened. It was as I was reading an article in Variety that a passing reference alluded to Stern's passing and its relevance to a project that someone was trying to mount on the subject of Griffith at Biograph.   Not unlike what I was trying to package as a filmmaker for a multi-part mini-series for television. I found it impossible to accept this incidental mention as fact but a call to the Chelsea verified the sad truth.

THE STERN PAPERS

In the twenty years since Stern's passing, I have been graciously given permission by Griffith Stern, Seymour's son, and the rest of the Stern family to edit a series of books on the life and activities of this most singular and fascinating historian.

It has not been an easy task, delving into this man's multitudinous areas of interest and activity.

In dealing with Griffith, it would be simpler: there was enough material available on the man to enable certain judgments to be made in regards to him. On the subject of Stern, however, it was a case of starting, literally, from scratch. In researching an individual, it's easy to lay out the technical data and plot the development of the artist but quite another matter to break past the emotional barrier that Stern drew so carefully around himself.

With regard to this research, the sheer comprehensiveness of the Stern holdings simplified certain area that would be impossible to assemble in any other source. Represented were almost every major newspaper event regarding WWII, hundreds of magazines, pamphlets and political tracts, a nearly complete file of Life magazines and hundreds of scripts, souvenir programs, posters and press kits from the classics and obscurities alike. There was also a wealth of research data, unpublished articles and theoretical essays on Griffith as well as the Soviet cinema of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, and most importantly, the all-inclusive file of correspondence with the famous as well as the obscure, covering the important as well as the trivial, all of which added up to a picture of Seymour Stern as has yet not been discovered.

My work in this undertaking was greatly aided by Griffith Stern, who had devoted much time to organizing the Stern materials at the National Film Archives of Canada in Ottawa. Following his methodical layout of the materials, we assembled the articles in chronological order and prepared a master bibliography.

From this beginning came the layout of the structure that would show Stern as being, not only the ultimate Griffith enthusiast, but a consummate cinematic theoretician whose developed works on film aesthetics as an art form should have been made available to the world decades before.