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).
