Complete title: Autumn Fire: A Film Poem
Maker: Herman G. Weinberg
Original format: 35mm silent film 1.33:1
Featuring Erna Bergman and Willy Hildebrand
New music: Rodney Sauer

Weinberg's second personal film is a poetic evocation of an absent lover as imagined by the central female character, whom Weinberg loved and sought to marry. Very sophisticated editing adds to the misty cinematography. Happily, actress Erna Bergman accepted Weinberg's proposal soon after she saw the film. -Robert A. Haller

Autumn Fire demonstrates Weinberg's passion for cinema. Weinberg was an ardent cineaste whose infectious enthusiasms bled over into everything he did. In relationship to the early American avant-garde film, Weinberg coined the perfect phrase "a lover of cinema" to describe the professional and amateur film experimentalist working during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Later in 1968, Jonas Mekas would express his admiration that Weinberg "writes with so much love for the movies that you read and you go crazy thinking about where you are going to see those movies, and when." -Bruce Posner

Born in East Harlem, trained as a violinist, Herman G. Weinberg (1908-1983) led a silent film orchestra, then prepared subtitles for foreign films. In the 1930s he made films, and later reconstructed with stills, in book form, Von Stroheim's Greed and The Wedding March. For decades he wrote a column "Coffee, Brandy and Cigars." -Robert A. Haller