Below is an updated and expanded version of an item I first posted on this blog in 2009. It served as a Welcome to the Nonfiction Film History course when I co-taught it with Jonathan Kahana, then part of the NYU Cinema Studies faculty. We began the course with director Robert Flaherty's Moana, screening a 16mm print from the Museum of Modern Art circulating collection. (You'll note Professor Kahana, now at the University of California Santa Cruz, is the editor of the tome we are reading in this course, The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism, 2016). One obvious reason to begin our course with this film was the widely cited fact that one of the earliest uses of the word documentary to refer to such films appeared in critic John Grierson's review of it.
"Of course Moana, being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth, has documentary value. . . " The Moviegoer [John Grierson], "Flaherty's Poetic Moana," New York Sun, February 8, 1926. Two of the major figures in documentary film historiography, Flaherty and Grierson, are thus linked in what is too often thought of as a moment of birth. The mythos and the facts we must sort out. Kahana's book reprints the short review for us. The Reader also helps undo the mythology of Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) being a "first," reprinting, for example, "Movies of Eskimo Life Win Much Appreciation," a Toronto newspaper account of Flaherty screening footage he shot in the Arctic -- in 1915.
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| New York Times, Feb. 7, 1926, sec. 7, p. 4. |
Here's the New York Times advertisement for the New York City premiere of Moana at the Rialto, Paramount's movie palace (nearly 2,000 seats) in the Theater District. This is where Grierson likely saw the film.
As with most actual case histories, the specifics of a film's conditions of reception prove surprising, or at least underexamined. The Rialto showed Flaherty's movie with a short film called 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 commercial, industrial, and local shoots for hire.
What would the Evening Graphic's "screen tests" have looked like? We don't know. The films are not known to survive. It is an especially rich example to consider. The Graphic (1924-1932) was a paradigm of the era's tabloid journalism, filled with sensationalism and, for our special interest, "composographs." These were composite photographs altered to illustrate salacious topical stories and gossip. (See Bob Stepno's "The Evening Graphic's Tabloid Reality.") 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, 1926, eight days after the 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 magazine 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
It's dated March 17, 1927.
I've no idea why these Italian gents chose to pose for a composograph on St. Patrick's Day.
p.p.s.
Update 2017: Making "distinctions between documentary and fiction irrelevant."
Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum recently posted to his website his discerning response to the Kino-Lorber release of a digitally restored edition of a 1981 sound edition of Moana. He also posts the above New York Times ad. As usual with J.R., this is a richly informed essay that takes on the historical issues of documentary. He concludes by quoting another important figure in thinking about the relationship between cinema and the real.
As André Bazin wrote in 1952, “There is no way of completely understanding the art of Flaherty, Renoir, Vigo, and especially Chaplin unless we try to discover beforehand what particular kind of tenderness, of sensual or sentimental affection, they reflect. In my opinion, the cinema more than any other art is particularly bound up with love.” He might have added that Renoir and Vigo share with Flaherty a capacity for making the usual distinctions between documentary and fiction irrelevant.
-- Jonathan Rosenbaum, "The Warmth and Artifice of Moana," June 20, 2017, www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2017/06/the-warmth-and-artifice-of-moana. Originally published in Artforum.
p.p.p.s. Six Test Runs of Moana (1925)
Another healthy reassessment of the reception of this film could be had by considering the details documented in the industry journal Moving Picture World. In "Six Test Runs of Moana Give a Line on Best Methods of Exploiting the Film," the December 12, 1925, issue details and illustrates how Paramount Theaters let local exhibitors determine how to sell the picture, called Moana of the South Seas, to their audiences. Rather than figuring out things in New York City, Paramount went to Poughkeepsie! And to places far from the cultural capitals of Manhattan and Hollywood: Asheville, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; Jacksonville, Florida; Lincoln, Nebraska; and the Rialto Theatre in Pueblo, Colorado.
Accessing these kinds of primary sources of film history is how new historiographies can be researched and written.
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All images from "Selling the Picture to the Public: Six Test Runs of Moana Give a Line on Best Methods of Exploiting the Film," MPW, December 12, 1925.