Some Creative Treatments of Actuality: MOANA and the Evening Graphic's Sales Girls Screen Tests

A blog for the Fall 2017 NYU Cinema Studies course Nonfiction Film History.

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.

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

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

DONT LOOK BACK only rates #10

from Facebook . . .  .

Ondi Timoner

Options for this story

"The Guardian calls DIG! the #1 Music Film of All Time. Wow. It's a fun list too. Good ideas in here for your holiday 

viewing:)   

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/dec/20/top-10-music-movies

Bruno on Timoner (and Timoner on Bruno!)

A very nice turn:  the author of the previous post, our own Mr. Christopher Bruno, published this new and in-depth piece 

THE FILMMAKER IS PRESENT:  AUTHORIAL IMMERSION AND INTERVENTION IN THE FILMS OF ONDI TIMONER

on his website, Considering Film:  http://consideringfilm.com/2013/12/19/ondi-timoner/   

And then Ms. Timoner put it on her Facebook page.

And her friends like it. And not just with thumbs-up icons. But with Comments: "amazing," "lovely," "good shit." 

Congratulations, C.B.

On Content and Context

by Christopher Bruno

Among the very first packet of readings we were assigned were two pieces written by Terry Ramsaye for the Christian Science Monitor in 1922, "The Status of Non-Fiction Films" and "Non-Fiction Film as Propoganda."  These pieces -- or, rather, my copies of them -- are unique among my Nonfiction Film History readings in that they are relatively littered with marginalia.  I usually content myself with a highlighter, but in the case of these readings, I was equally liberal with a red pen.  Part of it, no doubt, was that classes hadn't even begun yet and I was chomping on the bit to return to academia with fervor, having allowed seven years to pass between by undergraduate and graduate studies.  But a bigger part of it was that I had found gaping holes in Ramsaye's argument and leaps of logic that I couldn't abide.  If ten percent of my final grade was to be participation, my socially anxious and normally silent self could easily earn most of it discussing these two pieces alone.

Among my hastily scribbled notes were documentation? alongside Ramsaye's unsupported -- yet, surely, not entirely false -- assertion that "there are in most audiences patrons whose major interest is in the non-fiction subjects."  Regarding Ramsaye's dismissal of the "star system" as "the simplest tool in the hands of the film salesman," I wrote presumptive and judgmental.  And when Ramsaye surmised that "This preponderance of the dramatic picture is undoubtedly out of any proportion to the real taste of the public [as] indicated by the increasingly wide circulation of non-fiction book and periodicals," I wondered, Can such deductions be made across art forms?  I took great umbrage with Ramsaye's dismissal of dramatic pictures as mere products of the star-based system of selling movies not only because of its bias and reductivism, but also because he neglected to posit what was to me and my red pen an obvious potential solution: What if stars were then involved in the producing and promotion of non-fiction works?

Ramsaye went on to make generalizations about the scant budget theaters allotted for nonfiction works ("usually less than 7 per cent... frequently less than 5 per cent") in relation to the screen time they occupied ("25 per cent") but made no concessions or considerations for the relative costs incurred in the production of a dramatic feature versus those of a nonfiction feature.  Ramsaye is also presumptive about audience tastes, insisting that the preponderance of "dramatic features and 'comedies'" in many theaters is a product solely of the curatorial discretion of theater owners without any statistics to support his argument or consideration given to the tenets of supply-and-demand.

At the bottom of the page, I wrote, The last paragraph opens the issue up from distribution to production, however the author neither synthesizes the two, nor offers any elaboration upon the effect of a presumed overhaul of the non-fiction film production industry.  While Ramsaye gently poked at these concerns in his next essay, he did so only through the rubric of "special interests seeking propaganda media."  He asserts, with implied consternation, that "To a remarkable extent scenic, travel, and 'educational' pictures are vehicles for propaganda," to which my marginalia countered, Is this good or bad?  Connotative vs. Denotative.  And indeed, though he uses it frequently throughout the piece, "films of fact" remains a loose term, and the use of word "wholesome" implies a propagandistic intent on the author's behalf as well.

When it came time to discuss these pieces in class, however, I remained silent.  Historically, anything I was assigned to read by a professor carried with it an air of authority; though we were asked to question and to engage with the material, what we were given was ultimately fact.  One of the reasons I left my job as a high school teacher and abandoned my initial undergraduate pursuit of teacher certification was that I, to a great degree, believe in the lecture format and in the authority of the professor.  A great deal of reform has gone on in the education field as of late which favors group and hands-on learning, and the adoption of these techniques was, in my estimation, detrimental to my efficacy as an educator.  I, for better or for worse, still steadfastly believe that rote learning is in many cases the best way to receive and retain information.  In a recent piece for The Atlantic ("Don't Give Up on the Lecture"), Abigail Walthausen argues that too much student-led discussion can be distracting and lead to misinformed dissemination of content.  I've always liked a professor who tells me explicitly what they want and who exhibits authority through both lecture and through the readings he or she assigns.

One of the biggest steps in shifting my manner of academic application from undergraduate to graduate level has been in learning to process the meta-textual signifiers of any work under discussion.  I remained silent about Ramsaye's works not because I suddenly thought my points were wrong, but because it was immediately apparent that the limitations and the perspectives of the time in which the articles were written was under observation as much, if not more so, than the articles themselves.  It seemed superfluous and misguided to perseverate upon these textual errors once they were exposed as being endemic of the surrounding cultural climate.  I was already accustomed to accounting for these kinds of qualifiers within films, but I had learned to do so through critical written work; it required an exponential expansion of my focus to accommodate critiquing the critique in such a manner.

This has been my greatest takeaway from this class: that fully contextualizing these works is a Sisyphean task that continually raises as many questions as it answers, if not more.  Even when arguments and observations seemed self-evident to the point of obviousness -- as, I often felt, much of Jennifer Lynn Peterson's introduction to her book Education in the School of Dreams was, for example -- it became ultimately apparent that nothing about these works or their study can be taken for granted.  A retrospective review of the syllabus yields a litany of roads not taken, of works both great and small, each with more to say than can ever be told.