Somme documentaries, and others.

The actuality films we saw today did not include one called The Haverstraw Tunnel, made by the American Mutoscope Co. in 1897. Gunning mentions it as the phantom ride film that inspired a newspaper reviewer to grasp for words to describe this new experience, in which "an unseen energy swallows space." Charles Musser's The Emergence of Cinema says it was by far the company's most popular film. I've never seen the film and don't know that it's available on any DVD collection. (One copy, at least, is held by the British Film Institute's National Film and Television Archive, an institution that built a grand film preservation infrastructure, then rather abruptly stopped doing active preservation work. BFI and its masters prioritized working with films that could turn a profit when released on video. So don't look for the BFI Haverstraw Tunnel any time soon.)

I wanted to share the picture here, a photo taken of cinematographer (mutographer?) Billy Bitzer, a key figure in early cinema, though best known as D. W. Griffith's cameraman. This image has been reprinted many times, including as the colorized cover of Musser and Leyda's book Before Hollywood (1987). It would seem to be a still photo documenting the making of Haverstraw Tunnel, which was shot entirely from a camera mounted on the cowcatcher of a train. The photo credit in the book (Museum of Modern Art) says only Bitzer, ca. 1898. So it could have been taken on any number of shoots that Bitzer did while taking locomotives literally from coast to coast in the late 1890s.

Apparently the spectatorial sensation of watching The Haverstraw Tunnel was caused by a combination of the view from the front of the train (i.e., no train visible on screen, unlike what we watched today) and the effect of seeing the train enter and exit a darkened tunnel. The village of Haverstraw, NY, was a stop on the New York Central Railroad West Shore Line -- and the NYCR and other train companies allowed Bitzer and crew to use their trains, even providing cameras and cameramen their own train cars, gratis.

-- dan.streible@nyu.edu

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-- Dan Streible

the creative treatment & actuality of MOANA

Here's the New York Times advertisement (Feb. 7, 1926) for the premiere of Moana.

I like the fact that it's showing with Evening Graphic's Sales Girls' Screen Tests. Local screen tests, shot in 35mm and shown in theaters before feature films, were another nonfiction form not uncommon in 1926. (For an account of similar screen tests made in Georgia and South Carolina in that same year, read “Itinerant Filmmakers and Amateur Casts: A Homemade ‘Our Gang,’ 1926,” Film History 15.2 (2003): 177-92.) Such films were not shot by Hollywood studios, but by cinematographers who made their living doing commerical, industrial, and local shoots for hire.

What would the Evening Graphic's "screen tests" have looked like? It is an especially rich example to consider. The Graphic (1924-1932) was a protoype of the modern tabloid, filled with sensationalism and, for our special interest, "composographs." These were composite photographs altered to illustrate salacious news stories. Many depicted nude or nearly-nude figures. Here's one that ran a few months after the Moana ad (which has its own semi-nude depictions).



It's a faked photograph of movie idol Rudolph Valentino on the surgeon's table. Rudy died on August 23, eight days after surgery.

Bernarr Macfadden, a popular physical culture guru, published the Graphic, though it was just one arm of his publishing empire. In addition to Physical Culture magazine, he sold the pioneering film fan 'zine, Photoplay, and the best-selling newsstand pub of its day, True Story, and its spin-off True Romances (which of course, being a 'true' magazine, published fiction).

All of which I point out to underscore a historical fact: Moana or Nanook of the North or any other nonfiction film of the time did not appear as new, insightful flashes of reality or truth, suddenly opening moviegoers' eyes. No, Moana appeared amid hundreds of other graphic, photographic, and cinematographic representations of the real. Some were proclaimed as 'true,' 'real,' or even 'documentary,' but others were not so proclaimed, even though they might have been easily categorized as 'nonfiction.'

-- dan.streible@nyu.edu


p.s. Here, incidentally, is the Evening Graphic's photo -- excuse me, composograph -- of Rudolph Valentino meeting Enrico Caruso in heaven (March 17, 1927 -- I've no idea why these Italian gents chose to pose for a composograph on St. Patrick's Day).