Europe is not exotic; nor is Africa.

First, today, Feb 5, is Rick Prelinger’s birthday.
Second, here are the titles of the short pieces we screened on Feb 4.

The three from the Exotic Europe DVD:

[The Most Beautiful Water Falls of the Eastern Alps]
Die schönsten Wasserfälle der Ostalpen (Germany, ca. 1905-1910)
Santa-Lucia (Italy, ca. 1910)
Le Port de Barcelone (France, 1913)

I notice that a library cataloguer describes the collection thusly: “Short documentaries showing various scenic areas of Europe with emphasis on tourism and modes of transportation.”

The full dope on the DVD is this:
Exotic Europe: Journeys into Early Cinema (1905-1925)
(Berlin: FHTW, 2000) with booklet in Dutch, German, and English.

Contributing institutions:
• FHTW, Fachhochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft (Berlin), in English called the University of Applied Sciences
• the Nederlands Filmmuseum (Amsterdam)
• the Cinema Museum (London), a homeless charitable institution with a great collection
• and the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv (Germany’s federal archive)

Here’s where the Filmmuseum sells the DVD.

Other exotica on the disc:
How They Make Cheese in Holland (France 1909)
Durch die Vogesen (Germany 1911)
Rapallo (Italy 1912)
Industria del sughero in Francia (Italy 1913)
Hungarian Folklore (France ca. 1913)
Seebilder aus Swinemünde (Germany ca. 1913)
The "Lago Maggiore" Picturesque (ca. 1913)
Sarajewo, die Hauptstadt von Bosnien (ca. 1915)
Frauenarbeit vor 1920 (Germany 1917)
Cheddar (1920)
In the West of England (UK 1921)
Seebäder in der Vendée (ca. 1925)

About other items on our syllabus:
We did not watch Cities of Other Lands: Bucharest, Rumania (ca. 1919), figuring you got your fill of xenophobia. We will watch this parody of travelogues: “Seeing the World”: Part One, A Visit to New York, N.Y., by Rudy Burckhardt (1937, 10 min.).

I had hoped we would be able to compare
Introduction to Haiti, Mary Darling, U.S. Office of Inter-American Affairs (1942, 9 min.) to Haiti, Rudy Burckhardt (1938, 10 min.). But we’ll not have time. You can watch Mary Darling’s film on-line. (Notice how much more often women filmmakers turn up in this non-Hollywood world than they do in classical Hollywood cinema? More unwritten history.)

Final note: Watch this before Feb 11.
South American Medley: Brazil,
National Geographic (1948, 10 min.).

National Geographic is too important for us to pass it by. We’ll briefly examine NG’s on-line database, which can be used to access its “stock footage” library.