A silent comedy filmed in New Hampshire more than a century ago was recently found in Japan, and plans have been set to show the film in early November in the state where it was created.
Van-ar-chy, a 1919 film starring the US entertainer and film-maker Billy B Van, was rediscovered by Kohei Okita, a film student in Sendai, Japan. While researching early cinema related to the word “anarchy”, Okita bought several old film reels at an antique store in Japan and found the comedy starring Van, whom he did not recognize, according to a Van-ar-chy news release.
Internet searching then connected Okita with John Tariot, a Van archivist. Tariot identified the comedy as Van-ar-chy, one of Van’s films made in New Hampshire in the communities of Newport and Sunapee.
Van, who lived from 1870 to 1950, began his career performing on Broadway and in vaudeville before turning to film-making. He later founded the Equity Motion Picture Company and opened a studio in Georges Mills, New Hampshire, where he produced silent comedies filmed around the Lake Sunapee area.
The news release about Van-ar-chy highlighted the importance of Okita’s discovery, saying: “Its survival is significant on two fronts. Van-ar-chy preserves the work of a little-known early American film company at a time when much of silent cinema has been lost. But it is also a piece of local history captured in motion: its scenes preserve glimpses of the streets, landscapes, buildings, and people of Newport and Sunapee in 1919.”
The film was scheduled to be shown on 1 November at the Newport Opera House as part of a program organized by the historical societies of there and Sunapee. Plans also called for the program to include Where Are Your Husbands? – another Van comedy that was rediscovered in 2017 in the collections of the Library of Congress.
“We aren’t just seeing where Billy B Van made movies,” Tariot said in a statement in the news release. “We’re seeing the world in which he made them.
“Two films have now turned up in places no one expected to find them,” he continued.
“There are still Billy B Van films missing, and there may be more sitting unidentified in archives or private collections somewhere. The search goes on.”
