Welcome to the blog for the NYU Cinema Studies course, Nonfiction Film History (CINE-GT 2307), Fall 2013.
Below is a sample blog entry, written by Dan Streible in response to a screening of the film 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 a Graphic composograph 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 publication 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 "documentary" or "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, composographic, and cinematographic representations of the real (and un-real; see below). 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 his paisan, the singer Enrico Caruso (d. 1921), in heaven. (Note the date of publication is March 17, 1927. I've no idea why these Italian gents chose to pose on St. Patrick's Day).
We could of course simply call this image an illustration, rather than a photograph or some hybrid of photo format. The general point, however, is that the distinction between the photographically real and its opposite has always been a difficult one to make. That was true in the mid-nineteenth century, when photography was new. It was true in the early days of cinematography. It was true at the height of moviegoing in the mid-to-late 1920s. And it is of course true now, when digital technology has both the ability to capture the material world with a fidelity never before seen, and the ability to fabricate images that meld/morph/blend/blur the boundaries between the phenomenologically real and the mediated worlds of CGI and CG audio.#megalodon
#sharkweek
#fauxnews
#foxnews
