nfr-reviews

[nfr-reviews]

More Sources

Wikipedia page for "Newark Athlete" as linked above

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeyshines

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eadweard-Muybridge#ref253323

NFR Reviews #12: Newark Athlete

Released 1891 / Inducted 2010

Watch film here

Many early actuality films enticed viewers through increasingly varied imagery and notable people. Subjects of Thomas Edison’s film studio included a lineup of the era’s celebrities: boxers, dancers such as Carmencita, father of modern bodybuilding Eugen Sandow, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Travelog films, sometimes funded by railways, shot footage of scenic locations across the US and into Mexico, Hawaii, Japan, China, and Hong Kong. Major news events such as reenactments of the Spanish-American war and the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake were covered. There were even suggestive films of women for the appeal to horniness. But before all that, the National Film Registry’s oldest entry is comparatively ordinary: thirteen seconds of an athlete swinging clubs. Later films were oriented towards wide commercial appeal, but this one was an experiment with Edison’s new technology. 

Edison’s role in the invention of motion pictures has often been overstated. Centuries of inventors experimented with displaying a series of images at such a rapid-fire pace it gave the illusion of movement. 17th century magic lanterns functioned similarly to a slide projector backlit by kerosene lamps, while 1830s Stroboscopes made drawings appear to move when viewed through slits in a disc. The advent of photography in the mid-19th century opened further possibilities: Coleman Sellers’ 1860s Kinematoscope, which mounted photos on a wheel of paddles. Eadweard Muybridge’s 1870s Zoopraxiscope, an image projector inspired by a bet on whether a running horse takes all four hooves off the ground (they do, and Muybridge proved it by setting several cameras along a racetrack and using a string to set them off in quick succession as the horse ran past). Etienne-Jules Marey’s 1880s Chronophotographs, taken at a rate of 12 pictures per second by a camera he developed to better capture subjects in motion. William Friese-Greene, who designed a camera and widely displayed his films but struggled with film projection. Louis Aimé Le Prince, a contemporary of Edison’s who created the earliest motion picture footage on paper negatives in 1888. Both he and Edison experimented with celluloid film, but Prince disappeared in 1890 before he could complete his experiments. 

The earliest test films were the Monkeyshines trio from 1889-90, a failed attempt to film movies on cylinders similar to sound recordings of the time. Newark Athlete was a subsequent attempt at moviemaking with clearer image quality intended to be viewed on Edison’s Kinetoscope, a machine which was completed and previewed to audiences in 1891. A kinetoscope looks like a cabinet with an eyepiece mounted on top. After collecting a nickel from the viewer, the celluloid would pass between the lens and a lightbulb and roll by quickly enough to create a motion picture. While Edison received much of the credit, these inventions were primarily created by his staff, especially assistant William K. L. Dickson. Edison came up with the basic concept of a “kinetoscope” and provided employees with the pay and lab space, but Dickson was the one who designed and created the working machine. He and his team also invented the kinetograph, a camera which recorded the film through a mechanism that moved the celluloid quickly enough to produce exposures. 

Technological progress comes about through a mix of direct collaboration, like the employees who worked on the Kinetoscope, and similar ideas between unconnected people building off one another, like how Edison was influenced by Muybridge and Marey. The reality of patent law encourages people to instead pretend that progress comes through singular geniuses far ahead of anyone else. Patents on successful inventions can impact the livelihoods of inventors, not to mention their pride and sense of accomplishment. The law is supposed to prevent people from outright stealing someone’s invention and taking all the profit. Towards the end of William Dickson’s life, he mused that recently he’d been getting more credit for “my pioneer work at Edison’s–in producing the 1st film/present day cinema film…” He dated film samples sent to a relative several years earlier than their actual year of creation. It was speculated as an attempt to increase his importance to the origin of movies, as well as to establish when ideas were created in the eyes of patent law. Edison’s attempts to profit off his patents were more aggressive and had wider implications to the early film industry. He tried to patent the concept of a movie camera in itself, forcing competitors out of business. The Motion Picture Patents Company, in which Edison agreed to share patents amongst the nine largest film companies, was intended to be a solution to this. In practice, it smothered up-and-coming independent studios in copyright lawsuits and gave Edison more power than before. In 1915, the Sherman Antitrust Act put a stop to this through a court ruling that patents cannot be used “as a weapon to disable a rival contestant, or to drive him from the field.”

In the environment Newark Athlete was created in, it makes economic sense for inventors to cling to their ideas as unique. But this attitude harmed the medium as a whole when taken too far through Edison’s monopolistic strategies. In addition to the works that come out of them, the secondary value of smaller studios is to provide more competition and thus persuade the big players to do better. In comparison to later actuality films which depicted notable parts of history and culture, Newark Athlete is a simple test of what the Kinetoscope was capable of. It doesn’t represent the clear beginning of film, but it doesn’t have to. The National Film Registry doesn’t include non-American titles, including the work of people like Marey or Prince, so starting here makes some sense. However, its simplicity and debt to predecessors don’t prevent it from being a major innovation in its time with continued historical significance. 

Sources

https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/kinetoscope

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pickford-early-history-motion-pictures/

https://www.loc.gov/collections/edison-company-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/articles-and-essays/history-of-edison-motion-pictures/overview-of-the-edison-motion-pictures-by-genre/

https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/librarycollections/2014/12/02/william-kennedy-laurie-dickson-a-legacy-of-the-moving-image/

https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/william-dickson/

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/03/thomas-edison-the-unintentional-founder-of-hollywood/

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/origins-cinema-early-inventors-pioneers

https://lkouniv.ac.in/site/writereaddata/siteContent/202004260643328777nishi_films.pdf 

https://web.archive.org/web/20110514180127/http://www.kino.com/edison/d1.html

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #12: Newark Athlete

Released 1891 / Inducted 2010

Watch film here

Many early actuality films enticed viewers through increasingly varied imagery and notable people. Subjects of Thomas Edison’s film studio included a lineup of the era’s celebrities: boxers, dancers such as Carmencita, father of modern bodybuilding Eugen Sandow, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Travelog films, sometimes funded by railways, shot footage of scenic locations across the US and into Mexico, Hawaii, Japan, China, and Hong Kong. Major news events such as reenactments of the Spanish-American war and the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake were covered. There were even suggestive films of women for the appeal to horniness. But before all that, the National Film Registry’s oldest entry is comparatively ordinary: thirteen seconds of an athlete swinging clubs. Later films were oriented towards wide commercial appeal, but this one was an experiment with Edison’s new technology. 

Edison’s role in the invention of motion pictures has often been overstated. Centuries of inventors experimented with displaying a series of images at such a rapid-fire pace it gave the illusion of movement. 17th century magic lanterns functioned similarly to a slide projector backlit by kerosene lamps, while 1830s Stroboscopes made drawings appear to move when viewed through slits in a disc. The advent of photography in the mid-19th century opened further possibilities: Coleman Sellers’ 1860s Kinematoscope, which mounted photos on a wheel of paddles. Eadweard Muybridge’s 1870s Zoopraxiscope, an image projector inspired by a bet on whether a running horse takes all four hooves off the ground (they do, and Muybridge proved it by setting several cameras along a racetrack and using a string to set them off in quick succession as the horse ran past). Etienne-Jules Marey’s 1880s Chronophotographs, taken at a rate of 12 pictures per second by a camera he developed to better capture subjects in motion. William Friese-Greene, who designed a camera and widely displayed his films but struggled with film projection. Louis Aimé Le Prince, a contemporary of Edison’s who created the earliest motion picture footage on paper negatives in 1888. Both he and Edison experimented with celluloid film, but Prince disappeared in 1890 before he could complete his experiments. 

The earliest test films were the Monkeyshines trio from 1889-90, a failed attempt to film movies on cylinders similar to sound recordings of the time. Newark Athlete was a subsequent attempt at moviemaking with clearer image quality intended to be viewed on Edison’s Kinetoscope, a machine which was completed and previewed to audiences in 1891. A kinetoscope looks like a cabinet with an eyepiece mounted on top. After collecting a nickel from the viewer, the celluloid would pass between the lens and a lightbulb and roll by quickly enough to create a motion picture. While Edison received much of the credit, these inventions were primarily created by his staff, especially assistant William K. L. Dickson. Edison came up with the basic concept of a “kinetoscope” and provided employees with the pay and lab space, but Dickson was the one who designed and created the working machine. He and his team also invented the kinetograph, a camera which recorded the film through a mechanism that moved the celluloid quickly enough to produce exposures. 

Technological progress comes about through a mix of direct collaboration, like the employees who worked on the Kinetoscope, and similar ideas between unconnected people building off one another, like how Edison was influenced by Muybridge and Marey. The reality of patent law encourages people to instead pretend that progress comes through singular geniuses far ahead of anyone else. Patents on successful inventions can impact the livelihoods of inventors, not to mention their pride and sense of accomplishment. The law is supposed to prevent people from outright stealing someone’s invention and taking all the profit. Towards the end of William Dickson’s life, he mused that recently he’d been getting more credit for “my pioneer work at Edison’s–in producing the 1st film/present day cinema film…” He dated film samples sent to a relative several years earlier than their actual year of creation. It was speculated as an attempt to increase his importance to the origin of movies, as well as to establish when ideas were created in the eyes of patent law. Edison’s attempts to profit off his patents were more aggressive and had wider implications to the early film industry. He tried to patent the concept of a movie camera in itself, forcing competitors out of business. The Motion Picture Patents Company, in which Edison agreed to share patents amongst the nine largest film companies, was intended to be a solution to this. In practice, it smothered up-and-coming independent studios in copyright lawsuits and gave Edison more power than before. In 1915, the Sherman Antitrust Act put a stop to this through a court ruling that patents cannot be used “as a weapon to disable a rival contestant, or to drive him from the field.”

In the environment Newark Athlete was created in, it makes economic sense for inventors to cling to their ideas as unique. But this attitude harmed the medium as a whole when taken too far through Edison’s monopolistic strategies. In addition to the works that come out of them, the secondary value of smaller studios is to provide more competition and thus persuade the big players to do better. In comparison to later actuality films which depicted notable parts of history and culture, Newark Athlete is a simple test of what the Kinetoscope was capable of. It doesn’t represent the clear beginning of film, but it doesn’t have to. The National Film Registry doesn’t include non-American titles, including the work of people like Marey or Prince, so starting here makes some sense. However, its simplicity and debt to predecessors don’t prevent it from being a major innovation in its time with continued historical significance. 

Sources

https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/kinetoscope

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pickford-early-history-motion-pictures/

https://www.loc.gov/collections/edison-company-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/articles-and-essays/history-of-edison-motion-pictures/overview-of-the-edison-motion-pictures-by-genre/

https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/librarycollections/2014/12/02/william-kennedy-laurie-dickson-a-legacy-of-the-moving-image/

https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/william-dickson/

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/03/thomas-edison-the-unintentional-founder-of-hollywood/

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/origins-cinema-early-inventors-pioneers

https://lkouniv.ac.in/site/writereaddata/siteContent/202004260643328777nishi_films.pdf 

https://web.archive.org/web/20110514180127/http://www.kino.com/edison/d1.html

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #11: The Fall of the House of Usher

Released 1928 / Inducted 2000

Watch film here

The House of Usher, as in the physical building, is just as much a character as the humans. Between Edgar Allen Poe’s short story and James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber’s 1928 avant-garde short film adaptation, the two houses are fundamentally different characters in all but their tendency to drive inhabitants to mental instability. The original house has a sense of clutter and heaviness. The last remaining Usher family members are trapped in memories of a seemingly glorious past, painfully surrounded by reminders of the loss of fortune like armorial trophies, tapestries, books, musical instruments, and furniture that’s “profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered.” The story’s climax parallels a fictitious medieval knights-and-dragons story of uncomplicated heroism with the messier tragedy of Roderick’s sister Madeline appearing after being buried alive and the deaths of both characters. Despite Roderick romanticizing the past, it’s hinted that the seeds of the family’s downfall have been present for some time, leading to inevitable catastrophe. Roderick’s illness is described as a “family evil.” There’s something off about the family tree, with the Usher name being passed on through a direct line of descent with no other siblings branching off into a thriving family, possibly implying incestuous intermarriage. Even the “Mad Trist” book, representing a fascination with a medieval brand of chivalry set apart from modern life, is derided by the narrator as hacky, unoriginal, and unworthy of Roderick’s intelligence. This history has destroyed any chance of Roderick and Madeline’s happiness and stability, but the former finds allure in its more prosperous times anyway because he has no way to escape and move on. 

The 1928 adaptation is an interesting experiment: the filmmakers hadn’t read the story in years, so they could prioritize the mood over recreating minute plot details. What they remembered, over all else, was the breakdown in reality and declining mental states of the characters. The filmmakers throw out several camera tricks, usually repeating the same images over and over in rhythmic succession: panning up an endless warping flight of stairs, the twins’ images being mirrored into duplicate and triplicate, the word BEAT spelled out in floating letters to imply a sound effect. It’s been argued as a surrealist film due to its goal of disorienting the viewer through a funhouse-mirror view of reality, as well as its repetitive but chaotic imagery expressing the side of the characters’ thoughts untouched by reason or denial in the name of self-protection. Abstract images such as floating coffins appear overlaid in the same shots as the characters, highlighting impending doom despite efforts to keep living as normal. Repeated shots of a hammer striking at something and hitting the floor are present after Madeline’s burial, and later on Roderick mimes the motion of hitting a hammer over and over even as the object is absent. It symbolizes his complicity and guilt in burying his sister alive, even as he refuses to admit it to himself. This imagery may be a metaphorical picture of the characters’ mental state or, as theorized in the story, the house itself having a unique sentience and negative influence on its residents.

The approach of adapting a vague years-ago memory of a story means that this version misses not just minor details but some major themes as well. 1928’s house is geometric and hyper-stylized, making no attempt to hide its true identity as a movie set. It was influenced by German expressionist films like 1921’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Another factor in its aesthetic was the film’s status as an amateur production with Webber painting the sets and installing them in the barn behind Watson’s house. Objects in the house, numerous in the story, are kept to the bare minimum. The cinematography also points in an avant-garde direction, as usage of elaborate camera distortions to represent mental illness was common in French experimental film of the era. It’s significant that the faux-medieval book in the original is reproduced here as a blank-paged book the traveler, a friend of Roderick’s and narrator of the story, flips through. Both book and film feature characters in stasis, trapped in a hostile environment, but the book traps the characters in a deteriorating past while the film traps them in a comparatively blank present stripped of history or context.

Everything about the film’s construction embraces modernity, from the invocation of movements like expressionism and surrealism to the sparse set design to the then-contemporary hairstyles and makeup. Further experimentation comes from the lack of silent film intertitles which would traditionally deliver dialogue–words appear as sound effects floating next to the characters and world and appearing in the otherwise empty book pages. The upside of this approach is that it’s effective in creating a disorienting atmosphere. The original dilapidated old house felt more grounded in reality and thus more familiar, while the film twists locations into something more irrational and nightmarish. There’s a lot of creativity and willingness to test the typical conventions of film here. The downside is that I’m not sure the choice in source material best plays to Watson and Webber’s strengths and artistic influences. The tragedy of Roderick Usher is that he has no happy present or future and is stuck lionizing his dysfunctional family’s wealthy past, even though the seeds of the downfall had been present since before he was born. The film directors fully embrace the artistic expressions of their own contemporary present to create a disorienting picture of an unstable mental state, but much of the themes I found interesting about the original story are absent. Its unusual approach to adaptation and avant-garde camera work were experiments worth trying, even if not every choice sticks the landing.

Sources

https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/10-great-german-expressionist-films

https://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1972103.htm

https://ia801409.us.archive.org/21/items/ghohor064_2212_librivox/ghohor064_fallofusher_poe_kl_128kb.mp3

https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/fall_house_usher.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_the_House_of_Usher

A neglected genre: James Sibley Watson's avant-garde industrial films by Jan-Christopher Horak (if link doesn’t work search the title/author in google scholar)

https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Fall-of-the-House-of-Usher

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=c63b43d5d103a2f3e2d8e374aa308155803ca1ed#page=168

https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/5503/1/Scholl_2018_James_Sibley_Watsons_The_Fall_of_the_House_of_Usher.docx

The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe, 1983 compilation book edited by Tam Mossman

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #10: Eve's Bayou

Released 1997 / Inducted 2018

The Batiste family’s ancestors are never seen, but their presence is felt. The family story, at least as far as the film tells us, began when an enslaved woman saved the life of her owner. They had sixteen kids and he gave her the property where the lead characters live. The system of slavery was designed so people’s fates were completely at the hands of others who treated them like dehumanized property. At first, this framing may seem like an odd softening of a serious issue into a romance. But that may be an intentional introduction to the film's themes: the main family appears exemplary to the community and tries to hide major flaws despite the cracks becoming increasingly impossible to ignore. Director Kasi Lemmons was also inspired by the unique laws of Louisiana–due to its status as a former French colony, the state allowed free people of color to attain citizenship as early as the 1700s and for slaves to buy freedom. 

Various characters turn to divination to change their fate, but there’s the question of predestination versus free will hanging over them that parallels their mundane lives. Roz, mother of the child protagonist Eve, plays the upper-class 60s wife role complete with lipstick and dresses, but is forced to keep up appearances despite her husband’s cheating. She locks her kids in the house for weeks because her sister-in-law received an unclear vision of a child dying in a bus accident. The family’s future sight is when the movie drops the is-it-supernatural-or-mundane game the hardest, as they’re too accurate to be coincidence. I think the random neighborhood kid dying instead of Eve or her siblings would’ve happened regardless of whether Roz kept them all on house arrest. She was unable to prevent or change the vision; she got lucky that everyone merely misinterpreted what the vision meant. Louis, the husband, is given more agency and benefit of the doubt in his community through his successful career as a doctor. Accordingly, the narrative gives him more responsibility for his actions. When Eve tries to indirectly kill him with voodoo over an abuse allegation, he’s murdered shortly afterwards. Eve’s narration, though, suggests she didn't cause him inevitable death. In the opening, she describes “the summer I killed my father.” It’s an easy grab at suspense: making a shocking statement (confession to murder in this case, but some variation on “the night I died…” is common in media too) and usually later revealing it as less shocking and more nuanced. In the closing monologue, the phrase has changed to “the summer my father said good night.” This refers to Louis being threatened with murder by an angry husband if he so much as speaks to the woman with whom he’d been having an affair again. The good-night was directed at said woman, so the other man made good on the threat to kill. Roz doesn’t escape fate but that fate is kinder than she expected, while Louis is doomed by his own choice. At least that’s how I interpret it. The film provides few clear-cut answers by design.

The ambiguity extends to the film’s central conflict: whether Louis sexually assaulted Eve’s older sister or if she lied about it. Both sides are similarly filmed except the events themselves–nothing in the cinematography clearly gives away who’s right. The film forces the audience to make their own judgements similar to how they would for most real-life allegations. Especially in the eras before ubiquitous phone cameras, if a famous person or someone one personally knows is accused of a crime, bystanders often have to rely on conflicting testimonies of those involved. If not for a more meta form of memory-holing, one character would’ve witnessed the event and known the truth. An uncle, Tommy, was a nonverbal disabled man who was unable to communicate what happened between Louis and Cicely–but only in the director’s cut. For the theatrical cut (the one I watched), he was CGI’d out of scenes because a financier didn’t want him in the movie. Crew members even wore “Where’s Tommy?” shirts depicting an empty wheelchair. This executive decision, implicitly or otherwise, paints disability as something uncomfortable to be hidden from screens. It also compromises Lemmons’ depiction of a close family; the character was based on her great-uncle, and lived in the Batiste house instead of being put out of sight in an institution somewhere. Ironically, the film characters also attempt to rewrite truths about their family (though bad behavior like Louis' infidelity is very different from someone being disabled, both things are sometimes hidden away and viewed as unpalatable) and it doesn’t work out for them. 

Eve isn’t ruled by visions of the future, but neither can her powers of sight be dismissed as made-up and ignorable. When she tries to retrieve her sisters’ memories, she fails to unearth clear answers. Unlike future sight which is more fantastical and thus more accurate in the film, looking to the past proves murky. Studies have shown that real memories can be manipulated by suggestion or emotional state at the time of remembrance, making eyewitness testimonies of crime unreliable. Cicely herself is unsure about her own memory after a time, possibly from replaying it so many times it starts to twist and shift. That being said, I also don’t want to write her stated perspective off as lying; she clearly shows trauma symptoms and “But the child was the one instigating everything!” is a convenient explanation a predator might make. The best use of Eve’s power isn’t investigating the facts, but rather connecting with her sisters’ feelings. She matures through a deeper understanding of Cicely, in contrast to earlier scenes where she argues with her or gets jealous about parental favoritism. Kids don’t generally have the power to be arbiters of justice, but comforting her sister during a traumatic time is a more realistic action she can take. She has a different relationship with the supernatural and future-sight than either parent does. Eve still has to make her own decisions, and chooses to believe her sister when she throws a letter detailing her fathers’ retelling of events into the river. Her powers act as an influence and a guiding hand, but she must decide how to use them to mature and push forward into the future. 

Sources

https://www.afi.com/news/afi-movie-club-eves-bayou/

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/09/eves-bayou-movie-25th-anniversary

https://www.rogerebert.com/festivals/ebertfest-2016-kasi-lemmons-presents-a-directors-cut-of-eves-bayou

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7971-eve-s-bayou-the-gift-of-sight

Kristi McKim on Eve's Bayou in Screening American Independent Film (if that link doesn’t work just put the title and author into google scholar, it’ll show up)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt4cgnbm.11

https://theclassicjournal.uga.edu/index.php/2022/12/01/is-memory-reliable/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4679162/

[nfr-reviews]

More Sources

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_Capistrano

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mark_of_Zorro_(film)

https://librivox.org/the-curse-of-capistrano-by-johnston-mcculley/

https://dailybruin.com/2010/10/06/examining_the_evolution_of_the_words_rake_and_fop

https://www.proquest.com/openview/dee1349787fab4229a2aad8cb6f505f2/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark_of_Zorro_(1920_film)

NFR Reviews #9: The Mark of Zorro

Released 1920 / Inducted 2015

Watch film here

Douglas Fairbanks was an established star before adopting a pseudonym to co-write the screenplay adapting Johnston McCulley’s pulp novel The Curse of Capistrano. The period piece adventure film was a change in pace–his prior work fell into the romance or comedy genres and he worried audiences were losing interest. The Mark of Zorro stars Fairbanks as Zorro, a masked vigilante who swordfights racists and corrupt politicians to attain justice. His actual identity, revealed to the audience well before the other characters know, is Don Diego Vega. For maximum dramatic irony, he’s the opposite of Zorro. The book character has a litany of bad traits: he’s lazy and aimless, he doesn’t stand up for those around him, he makes it clear to a prospective love interest he’s only pursuing her out of obligation to his father. The movie adds a running joke where he tries mediocre shadow puppetry and basic magic tricks, making him seem even less dignified and unpleasantly childish when combined with the other negative qualities.

Zorro doesn’t have superpowers in the typical sense, relying on sword fighting and trickery to win no matter how outnumbered he is. He’s almost a mythic figure, albeit less serious and more slapstick-heavy than his book counterpart. To him, his opponents aren’t even worth taking seriously. He’s an early example of the superhero template, especially in his dual identity. The concept of a masked avenger posing as a playboy inspired Bob Kane in the creation of Batman and alter ego Bruce Wayne, as did Fairbanks’ catapulting-off-the-walls stunts. I don’t think either McCulley or Fairbanks intended this, but I wonder if some tiny part of Don Diego’s lifelessness and fatigue is a genuine result of spending all night getting in fights and horseback chase sequences. Zorro looks like he takes so much energy to maintain that there’s nothing left for his civilian persona. Andrew Williams defines the fop, of which said civilian persona is an example, as an old stock character defined by “demasculinized representation and obtuse misunderstanding of the normative codes of social behavior.” Some of this trope comes from making fun of rich people–they’re the ones who can afford to dress in high fashion, avoid tough physical labor, and use their wealth to smooth over ineptitude in social situations. Some of the trope just boils down to “men who deviate too much from gender roles are weak.” 

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many industrialized and urban jobs required less outdoor physical labor than the cowboy or frontiersman archetypes of generations past. This fueled a cultural anxiety over whether men were becoming too weak, which was one factor in why pulp adventure heroes gained popularity (Though with trends, there’s always more than one factor, some of which are much simpler stuff like “Swordfights are cool!”). Zorro fits some of this trend–his “feminine” qualities are only excused by the narrative because it’s a deliberate misdirection. His stories are set in a romanticized 19th-century Spanish California defined by “its warmth, its romance, its peaceful beauties,” providing escapism from modern industrialized society. However, the focus on justice for the oppressed and the villains being the Spanish colonial establishment sets it apart from the frontier "manifest destiny" narratives of that are more oriented around conquering and subjugation. Fairbanks took inspiration from Mexican outlaws resisting oppression during the US takeover of California. McCulley’s inspirations when writing the book aren’t known, but Zorro has similarities with outlaws like Tiburcio Vásquez and Joaquin Murrieta, who fought against violence committed against Mexicans in the years following the California Gold Rush. (Elements of these legends are difficult to verify. In Murrieta’s case it’s unclear if he even existed, but the story of his brother and wife being murdered by Americans was reflected in the real killings of hundreds of Mexicans in the 19th and early 20th centuries.) Don Diego’s wealthy upbringing in a prominent family puts him closer in background to Vásquez than the Murrieta legend. 

Vega’s extreme wealth and status, often referred to as “good blood,” might’ve been another instance of irony, as he runs in the same circles as the men he fights against. The story operates under a noblesse-oblige view of justice: essentially, that wealth comes with responsibility to uplift the well-being of the less fortunate. The 1835 novel The Lily of the Valley portrays the term as from a bygone medieval age, while author Alexis de Tocqueville expressed roughly the same sentiment while feeling the Industrial Revolution-era “new rich” were abusing their privilege over workers. While superheroes’ powers are sci-fi or fantastical rather than monetary, the sentiment is echoed in the genre: “with great power comes great responsibility” was popularized by Spider-Man comics. The film contrasts Zorro against villainous politicians and military types who abuse their power to get away with beating natives, falsely accusing priests of crimes, and acting entitled to women’s bodies and affections. Despite all that, the film doesn’t expect justice to always look noble, polite, and respectable. Zorro appears as a bandit who gets a death threat for “frightening children and insulting women” while the people he’s actually insulting do much worse. The film’s noblesse-oblige perspective has some drawbacks, though. It lets some aspects of the established social order go unquestioned (for example, why every indigenous person is a servant) as long as the people at the top aren’t being total assholes about it. 

The Mark of Zorro is a throwback to a place and time that would’ve seemed exotic to many viewers, and there’s a bit of paternalism and “back when men were men” attitudes that come out of this. But the premise of a man who fights injustice against the oppressed and looks cool doing it still holds up. Even though the character isn’t quite as high-profile today, there’s a reason the story was influential to the action and superhero genres.

Sources

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/chiricu.1.1.11?seq=1

https://silentfilm.org/the-mark-of-zorro

https://millstonenews.com/noblesse-oblige/

https://www.learningtogive.org/resources/noblesse-oblige

https://thestacks.libaac.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/da53aefc-2e41-44f1-a68c-8dc4890f8c2f/content

https://scholarship.rollins.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=as_facpub

https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/617579/8/Superhero%20and%20%20Identities%20an%20introduction%20final%20dec%2023%202013%20(7).pdf

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/ghostbusters-top-gun-enter-national-849092/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_great_power_comes_great_responsibility

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #9: The Mark of Zorro

Released 1920 / Inducted 2015

Watch film here

Douglas Fairbanks was an established star before adopting a pseudonym to co-write the screenplay adapting Johnston McCulley’s pulp novel The Curse of Capistrano. The period piece adventure film was a change in pace–his prior work fell into the romance or comedy genres and he worried audiences were losing interest. The Mark of Zorro stars Fairbanks as Zorro, a masked vigilante who swordfights racists and corrupt politicians to attain justice. His actual identity, revealed to the audience well before the other characters know, is Don Diego Vega. For maximum dramatic irony, he’s the opposite of Zorro. The book character has a litany of bad traits: he’s lazy and aimless, he doesn’t stand up for those around him, he makes it clear to a prospective love interest he’s only pursuing her out of obligation to his father. The movie adds a running joke where he tries mediocre shadow puppetry and basic magic tricks, making him seem even less dignified and unpleasantly childish when combined with the other negative qualities.

Zorro doesn’t have superpowers in the typical sense, relying on sword fighting and trickery to win no matter how outnumbered he is. He’s almost a mythic figure, albeit less serious and more slapstick-heavy than his book counterpart. To him, his opponents aren’t even worth taking seriously. He’s an early example of the superhero template, especially in his dual identity. The concept of a masked avenger posing as a playboy inspired Bob Kane in the creation of Batman and alter ego Bruce Wayne, as did Fairbanks’ catapulting-off-the-walls stunts. I don’t think either McCulley or Fairbanks intended this, but I wonder if some tiny part of Don Diego’s lifelessness and fatigue is a genuine result of spending all night getting in fights and horseback chase sequences. Zorro looks like he takes so much energy to maintain that there’s nothing left for his civilian persona. Andrew Williams defines the fop, of which said civilian persona is an example, as an old stock character defined by “demasculinized representation and obtuse misunderstanding of the normative codes of social behavior.” Some of this trope comes from making fun of rich people–they’re the ones who can afford to dress in high fashion, avoid tough physical labor, and use their wealth to smooth over ineptitude in social situations. Some of the trope just boils down to “men who deviate too much from gender roles are weak.” 

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many industrialized and urban jobs required less outdoor physical labor than the cowboy or frontiersman archetypes of generations past. This fueled a cultural anxiety over whether men were becoming too weak, which was one factor in why pulp adventure heroes gained popularity (Though with trends, there’s always more than one factor, some of which are much simpler stuff like “Swordfights are cool!”). Zorro fits some of this trend–his “feminine” qualities are only excused by the narrative because it’s a deliberate misdirection. His stories are set in a romanticized 19th-century Spanish California defined by “its warmth, its romance, its peaceful beauties,” providing escapism from modern industrialized society. However, the focus on justice for the oppressed and the villains being the Spanish colonial establishment sets it apart from the frontier "manifest destiny" narratives of that are more oriented around conquering and subjugation. Fairbanks took inspiration from Mexican outlaws resisting oppression during the US takeover of California. McCulley’s inspirations when writing the book aren’t known, but Zorro has similarities with outlaws like Tiburcio Vásquez and Joaquin Murrieta, who fought against violence committed against Mexicans in the years following the California Gold Rush. (Elements of these legends are difficult to verify. In Murrieta’s case it’s unclear if he even existed, but the story of his brother and wife being murdered by Americans was reflected in the real killings of hundreds of Mexicans in the 19th and early 20th centuries.) Don Diego’s wealthy upbringing in a prominent family puts him closer in background to Vásquez than the Murrieta legend. 

Vega’s extreme wealth and status, often referred to as “good blood,” might’ve been another instance of irony, as he runs in the same circles as the men he fights against. The story operates under a noblesse-oblige view of justice: essentially, that wealth comes with responsibility to uplift the well-being of the less fortunate. The 1835 novel The Lily of the Valley portrays the term as from a bygone medieval age, while author Alexis de Tocqueville expressed roughly the same sentiment while feeling the Industrial Revolution-era “new rich” were abusing their privilege over workers. While superheroes’ powers are sci-fi or fantastical rather than monetary, the sentiment is echoed in the genre: “with great power comes great responsibility” was popularized by Spider-Man comics. The film contrasts Zorro against villainous politicians and military types who abuse their power to get away with beating natives, falsely accusing priests of crimes, and acting entitled to women’s bodies and affections. Despite all that, the film doesn’t expect justice to always look noble, polite, and respectable. Zorro appears as a bandit who gets a death threat for “frightening children and insulting women” while the people he’s actually insulting do much worse. The film’s noblesse-oblige perspective has some drawbacks, though. It lets some aspects of the established social order go unquestioned (for example, why every indigenous person is a servant) as long as the people at the top aren’t being total assholes about it. 

The Mark of Zorro is a throwback to a place and time that would’ve seemed exotic to many viewers, and there’s a bit of paternalism and “back when men were men” attitudes that come out of this. But the premise of a man who fights injustice against the oppressed and looks cool doing it still holds up. Even though the character isn’t quite as high-profile today, there’s a reason the story was influential to the action and superhero genres.

Sources

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/chiricu.1.1.11?seq=1

https://silentfilm.org/the-mark-of-zorro

https://millstonenews.com/noblesse-oblige/

https://www.learningtogive.org/resources/noblesse-oblige

https://thestacks.libaac.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/da53aefc-2e41-44f1-a68c-8dc4890f8c2f/content

https://scholarship.rollins.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=as_facpub

https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/617579/8/Superhero%20and%20%20Identities%20an%20introduction%20final%20dec%2023%202013%20(7).pdf

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/ghostbusters-top-gun-enter-national-849092/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_great_power_comes_great_responsibility

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #8: Little Nemo

Or: Winsor McCay, The Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and his Moving Comics

Released 1911 / Inducted 2009

Watch film here

Despite the title cards’ grand claims of Winsor McCay being the first artist to make drawings move on film, Little Nemo follows the lead of earlier experiments in the nascent animation medium. 1906’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces and 1908’s Fantasmagorie feature live-action hands drawing out characters, who would then move into comedic and often-surreal animated sequences. The advent of film gave artists new tools to more convincingly bring drawn fantasy worlds to life beyond nineteenth-century magic lanterns that projected a moving image onto a wall. Little Nemo stretches the “real world” framing device into the majority of the film’s runtime, and all of it communicates the same amount of plot information as just showing the artist’s hands ready to sketch. Its actual purpose is something else: aside from showing in a tongue-in-cheek way how much effort went into the film’s production, which comprised several thousand drawings, it builds suspense in the audience’s heads as to what well-known comic characters would look like in motion. 

McCay’s comic Little Nemo in Slumberland was a natural choice for his first attempt at animation. Like many of the earliest cartoons, it contrasts reality and fantasy. While the cartoons begin with an artist drawing them, Little Nemo strips end with protagonist Nemo waking up, the preceding fantastical adventures the result of dreaming. In McCay’s various live performances, he included himself as part of the act. His career began with him rejecting business college in favor of working in dime museums. Sometimes the draw was the art and caricatures themselves; other times the novelty of watching someone draw extremely quickly was the element on display. These museums were where he met his wife Maude Lenore Defour–she was fourteen at the time, and McCay’s birth year is disputed but he was at least in his twenties–and they later eloped without parental approval. Essayist Jeet Heer notes the situation as an example of “his tropism towards youthful escape.” It’s a darker consequence of the same qualities found in much of his art. Later on, he turned to making comic strips for newspapers. In 1903, he began work at the New York Herald, and “Little Nemo” began appearing in 1905. McCay and Defour’s son Robert was the inspiration for the titular character. McCay was also involved in vaudeville; one of his acts was a version of this film without the live-action segments. 

Plot twists and fan theories that highlight the fictionality of a story, usually in the form of “it was all a dream/hallucination,” can get contentious very easily. Audiences know stories aren’t actually happening, so adding a second layer of unreality can detach people too much and prevent them from caring about the stakes or characters. Bad versions of this trope make the preceding story feel pointless. Little Nemo gets away with it because both comic and cartoon adaptation prioritize innovation in visuals over plot or character. The short film ups the ante beyond the novelty of seeing drawings move, looking more fluid and polished than its predecessors. One version had coloration done by hand, giving the drawings a watercolor feel that enhances the fantastical tone. Its source material featured similar creativity, including lengthening comic panels to convey scale (usually of elaborate architecture) and breaking the fourth wall through jokes like having characters eat the panel line or falling down because the artist didn’t draw the floor. It’s typically interesting to look at, even though Nemo as a character is somewhat of a blank slate everyman and the audience knows there’s no chance of him being in any real danger.

In addition, the “all a dream” plot device forms the main theme of the work, not a plot twist invalidating an unrelated story. I prefer the earliest comic strips for being better at conveying an actual dream, even though the format would’ve gotten stale eventually if it was never changed. The plot is Nemo being summoned to Slumberland as the princess’ playmate, but something always takes a nightmarish turn culminating in him waking up before he reaches her, mimicking how storylines in dreams cut off before the best part. Adults in the real world are quick to berate or threaten a spanking at worst, and are well-meaning but oblivious to Nemo’s inner life at best. After Nemo finally reaches the princess, other segments of the strip are more serialized and conventional adventure stories in the vein of Oz or Wonderland. It reads more like something kids would come up with during the daytime than a dream. 

The cartoon adapts the parts where Nemo is in control of situations and getting what he wants, while the comic also has many instances of him being pushed around by unexplainable forces beyond his control. In one scene, supporting characters Flip (antagonist turned annoying friend) and Impie (racist caricature of Africans, the film is actually tamer than the cannibal jokes in the comic) get their car blown up while Nemo and the princess ride off in a dragon’s mouth. The dragon references the part of the comic where he first meets her after countless failed attempts. The segments of McCay having ideas dismissed as preposterous and dropping drawing paper all over the floor function as the setup, so the animated segments have to act as the payoff of his earlier labor. There are multiple instances highlighting the artificiality of it all: the comic’s fantasy world is all a dream and the animated characters are the result of a bet between live-action artists. The innovation in visuals and understanding of setup and payoff prevent the film from disengaging its audience. 

Sources

https://www.britannica.com/biography/J-Stuart-Blackton

https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Nemo_(1911_film)

https://daily.jstor.org/the-cutting-edge-cartoons-of-winsor-mccay/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26444003?mag=the-cutting-edge-cartoons-of-winsor-mccay&seq=1

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20687319

https://sllib.org/winsor-mccays-timeline/

https://archive.org/details/LittleNemo1905-1914ByWinsorMccay/page/n1/mode/2up

https://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/case-studies/476.html

 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377352865_Critical_humor_From_cartoons_to_cinematographic_animations

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #7: The Endless Summer

Released 1966 / Inducted 2002

Surfing momentarily took over pop culture in the first half of the 1960s. Post-WWII experimentation with new materials like resin, fiberglass, and later foam made more maneuverable, easier-to-produce surfboards. Media production followed suit. The music charts featured surf-rock artists like the Beach Boys and Dick Dale, while movies like 1959’s Gidget, 1961’s Elvis vehicle Blue Hawaii, and several following beach party movies used the sport as a selling point. It wasn't difficult to see the appeal: a combination of idyllic beach scenes, a sense of freedom, and a little bit of thrill and danger. 

Despite all that, director Bruce Brown struggled to find distributors for this low-budget movie due to perceived lack of mainstream appeal. It was a hit on its first screenings in Wichita, Kansas, but distributors weren’t sure about it until after a successful run at Kip’s Bay Theater in New York City. It set itself apart from other films cashing in on the trend. Other surf films were more commercialized and focused more on hedonism and romance subplots than the athleticism of the sport itself, its creators often having little direct surfing experience. Many early-60s beach party movies leaned towards clean-cut characters with parent-generation-approved behaviors and values despite a lack of onscreen adult supervision, starring teen idols like Fabian and Frankie Avalon. This one had a niche target audience of other surfers, to be exhibited at surf clubs, placing it in the subgenre of “pure” surf movies. Other surf media portrayed California as an object of escapist desire filled with bright colors and suntans; this one has the state as an overcrowded locale with an inconvenient winter season. This sets up the central concept: surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August leave California to travel around the world, following the summer season through Africa, Australia, and the Pacific Islands to find the perfect wave.

The Endless Summer does share one quality with all the surf exploitation movies and music: its intention to be seen as young and hip. Thanks to the postwar economy and baby boom, the mid-60s had an abundance of young people with disposable income. It gained traction in the mainstream despite its niche roots, which the director attributed to a desire for innocence and escapism during the Vietnam era. Another big factor is how the movie makes you feel like you’re an accepted member of a cool, trendy club. Bruce Brown’s narration offers a fresh distinction from the average documentary narrator. He positions himself as the viewer’s buddy and not a teacher or authority figure by peppering the script with jokes. He refers to himself by saying things like “he’s the only surfer I’ve ever seen do this,” aiming for the specificity and relatability of his personal experiences instead of having the narrator be a detached, objective presence. Due to its origin as silent footage screened in clubs with Brown adding live commentary, the official script and music recordings were added after the fact. He’s the sole voice heard through the majority of the film’s runtime. Instead of hearing either the surfers or natives speaking on camera, Brown often-jokingly recreates interactions and voice impressions in a similar manner to retelling old stories with a friend. The repetition of “You should’ve been here yesterday” in the Australia section, referring to how the best waves always happen the day before a surfer arrives, gives the audience the feeling of being let in on an inside joke. 

As soon as the two surfers arrive in Senegal, waves breaking outside their hotel are accompanied with a narrative of unconquered wilderness, complete with waves no surfer had ever ridden or perhaps even seen. In the Ghana section, comedy is mined from the locals being clueless about surfing. There’s jokes about Africans potentially attacking over violations of unknown religious taboos or spearing the surfers, too. The film claims the American surfers were the ones to introduce surfing to the area and no one else had seen anything like it. The film later admits the fishermen's canoes weren’t so different, albeit intended more as practical tools for work than a sport. Surfing developed in Polynesia, and was introduced to the US through Hawaii. It held major spiritual significance, and the best surfing spots were reserved for royalty. However, similar wave-riding practices developed independently throughout Africa, with one account dating back to the 1640s in what’s now Ghana. They used canoes, yes, but also 12-foot longboards and smaller boards of 3 to 5 feet in length. Onscreen, the surfers have little issue sharing their knowledge with the kids and appear to get along with them. However, the additional in-film framing and narration portrays them as an “other.” The narrative is of Americans who have the means and leisure time to travel the world versus some countries they visited whose ways of life that haven’t changed in millennia and are more tied to daily labor such as fishing. Many elements in modern surf culture did originate in Polynesia–equipment innovations like the long, narrow olo board, surf forecasting, and techniques of trimming across the wave face being some of them. However, the concept of using a board to ride waves for fun and sport developed across most warm-water coastal cultures, including Ghana.

The perfect surfing spot contains a finite amount of space. In the mid-1960s, Surfer magazine began keeping some spots secret so tourist overflow wouldn’t ruin the experience. Author Matt Warshaw suggested journeys to far-flung locations were less about new discoveries and more about getting away from crowds. The Endless Summer team found the perfect wave in South Africa, a country they previously noted as having long stretches of uninhabited space. Like many subcultures, surfing enthusiasts formed in-groups and out-groups. Endless Summer takes steps to define its own identity through who it wants audiences to identify with and who is used as a point of comparison. Its breezy sense of humor twists the traditional documentary format away from “narrator as objective teacher” into “friends joking around.” It captured a youth culture of the time that was distinct from their parents’ mores in a more naturalistic way than the commercialized offerings of big studios. Unfortunately, it also makes comparisons by flattening other countries into unexplored wilderness areas filled with primitive people. The movie’s methods of identity-forming are strongest when the subculture defines itself as who they are, not who they aren’t. A film lacks the limited space of real surf spots, and this one found a wide audience outside niche surf clubs by making viewers feel like they’re included in the club, whether they've ever surfed themselves or not.

Sources

https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/617596/1/Endless%20summer%201%20Nov%2004.pdf

https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/617593/1/surf%20rhetoric%20in%20british%20magazines.pdf

https://lagunaartmuseum.org/exhibitions/surf-culture-the-art-history-of-surfing/

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/37438736.pdf

https://www.surfertoday.com/surfing/things-you-didnt-know-about-the-endless-summer

https://www.surfer.com/news/africans-surfed-long-before-bruce-brown-showed-up

https://www.fairobserver.com/history/how-ancient-polynesians-conquered-the-pacific-on-their-surfboards/#

https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/clip/the-endless-summer-defined-surf-culture-on-its-own-terms

https://www.theinertia.com/surf/where-was-surfing-actually-born-a-look-at-the-origins-of-wave-riding/

https://www.surfertoday.com/surfing/hawaiian-words-every-surfer-should-know

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Endless_Summer (Tumblr link limit strikes again)

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #6: The Hitch-Hiker

Released 1953 / Inducted 1998

Watch film here

William Cook had only received the death penalty for kidnapping and killing six people while hitchhiking across several states a year before this dramatization of his crimes went to screens. Despite the name change to “Emmett Myers”, the inspiration was obvious: even down to details like his leather jacket and paralyzed right eye. The film bases its plot and protagonists on his final victims: two men who were held prisoner for eight days and forced to drive into the Mexican town of Santa Rosalie, upon which the local police chief recognized and arrested Cook. Similarities to the earlier victims’ stories crop up too despite not being the focus of the adaptation. Cook’s first victim was an auto mechanic who escaped from the trunk of a car, while in the film one of the two protagonists is a mechanic despite the real-life equivalents being variously described as hunters or prospectors. He also killed a family of five, including three young children, and dumped their bodies in a well. While the children’s deaths were excised due to the Production Code’s objections to depiction of recent crime, the well reappears as a similar mine shaft during one of Myers’ threats to the protagonists as he drops a can down to illustrate how deep it runs. 

The Hitch-Hiker was a change of pace for director Ida Lupino, born of a desire to expand her range. A historically significant aspect of it was the rarity of a female director in Hollywood–she was the only woman in the Director’s Guild of America in the early 50s. She began her career as an actress and co-founded production company Filmways with her husband Collier Young, but always wanted to direct. Her opportunity to do so only came when director Elmer Clifton had heart trouble early into production on 1949’s Not Wanted and she filled in. Several films followed, which were categorized as “women’s pictures” and covered tough topics like the stigma of unwed mothers, polio, and rape. Hitch-Hiker was a shift from social commentary to suspense, and also from women-focused stories to one about men. Specifically, the contrast between a violent man and the ordinary but comfortable protagonists.

The morbid fascination with true crime was present in 1950s audiences and continues into today’s media. The appetite to package recent tragedies for the entertainment of strangers has many causes; one being curiosity as to what conditions and mentalities drive people to kill. This focus on the killer’s motivations has the potential to end up glorifying them or centering their perspective over the victims. While Myers’ worldview and past experiences are thematically important, most of the runtime stays focused on the suspenseful situations in the present, not backstory. We never see where the characters came from or where the protagonists go home to, only the unfamiliar environments of the road. Their life beyond the car is kept to a few hints of dialogue. The film also does a decent balancing act between making the killer a credible threat to keep audiences invested in the stakes without being a nigh-infallible super genius. Myers initially seems composed and feigns authority by barking orders in a similar manner to a cop pulling someone over, but also there’s a whole monologue about how he’s a pathetic loser without his gun. 

So what are the characters’ worldviews, exactly? The real William Cook experienced his mother dying, his father abandoning him in a mine, and a stint in the Missouri State Penitentiary by age 21. The fictional character was similarly abandoned by family and lacked healthy support systems in his life. He has the “I suffered so everyone else should suffer too” mindset. The world is cruel and individualistic to him, so he ends up adding more cruelty and distrust. The Detroit Free Press observed that the film also doubled as a warning to drivers against picking up hitchhikers and recommended its viewing to everyone who takes to the road. Killing people who picked him up from the side of the road serves to punish trust and altruism, casting those qualities as naive and soft. While he did the most significant damage to the lives he directly ended, he must’ve made life harder for anyone else who genuinely needed help getting somewhere and weren’t planning to murder the driver. 

In the case of leads Roy Collins and Gilbert Bowen, their most important key to survival wasn’t any action heroics. They’re average everymen, which maybe doesn’t make them the most interesting characters to watch but contributes to the suspense by making audiences think how a normal person like them would react in a terrifying situation. Most of the detective work is done by faraway authorities sitting comfortably in offices. Their best attempt at escape ends in one man hurting himself while the other jeopardizes his own chance of freedom to help his friend. They don’t take drastic action until the rather abrupt climax after the cops have already shown up, wherein they throw a few punches and smack the gun out of his hand. Their actual most prominent quality is their loyalty and willingness to rely on each other, as they help one another even when it’d be more beneficial for one to leave the other behind for a better chance of escaping. They last long enough to get rescued out of a mix of luck and the same traits Emmett Myers derides as soft. 

The broad strokes of the film largely occurred the same as in real life, but one departure was to to make the characters more enmeshed in mainstream middle-class life through their jobs than prospectors probably were in real life. It conforms to a narrow status-quo idea on what a respectable, normal person was expected to look and act like. However, the choice makes sense with the story Lupino’s trying to tell. It heightens the contrast between them and the killer since Emmett Myers is on the fringes of society, both by circumstance and later by his own choice. I guess the intention was that having them rely on communities in their normal lives foreshadows their ability to rely on and trust one another in a life-threatening situation instead of backstabbing each other. The film is competently constructed, generating suspenseful situations out of a tiny budget through its vast isolated desert setting and close-ups that make the car feel tiny and claustrophobic. I think other people will enjoy this more than I did; crime thrillers have never been one of my favorite genres and that impacted my watching experience. But one of the benefits of writing these is watching things outside my comfort zone, and I can see how the film is a significant entry in the suspense genre.

Sources

https://www.life.com/people/billy-cockeyed-cook-portrait-of-an-american-spree-killer/

https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/78138/the-hitch-hiker#articles-reviews?articleId=78324

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/great-directors/ida-lupino/

https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/hitch_hiker.pdf

https://www.unc.edu/posts/2024/01/11/why-are-we-fascinated-by-true-crime/

https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1071&context=mktguht

https://www.newspapers.com/article/detroit-free-press-the-hitch-hiker/71908822/

[nfr-reviews]

Here's the rest of the sources. Tumblr wouldn't let me post that many links in the original post.

https://www.mildlypleased.com/2020/07/criterion-month-day-1-nanook-of-the-north/

https://www.afi.com/news/nanook-of-the-north-afi-catalog-spotlight/ 

https://www.queensu.ca/indigenous/ways-knowing/terminology-guide

NFR Reviews #5: Nanook of the North

Released 1922 / Inducted 1989

Watch film here

Director Robert Flaherty first came into contact with the Canadian Inuit through a series of prospecting expeditions funded by Sir William Mackenzie to size up the area’s potential for building railroads and mineral mines. His first attempt at a film on the Inuit ended in the negative burning up and him disregarding the surviving copy as bad and boring. The solution was to make a single composite character to illustrate an entire way of life that existed in the arctic landscapes east of the Hudson Bay. The original attempt failed due to lack of focus. Focusing on one person, or even one family, gives a feature-length film a consistent throughline for audiences to follow and connect to. However, constructing a character to represent a whole ethnic group runs the risk of the director’s biases getting in the way of responsible documentary filmmaking. 

The harsh conditions in which Nanook lives are almost as much a character as the people. The opening shot is of ice floes bobbing in water, and the final scene is a three-way edit between wind blowing over stark white plains, the family sleeping in an igloo, and snow-encrusted dogs guarding outside. According to the images on film, the lives of Nanook and his family are dominated by hard work to attain the basic needs of food and shelter. Several scenes are dedicated to hunting walrus, fish, seal, and fox; one sequence is the building of an igloo. Revillon Freres, a trading company who’d been active in the fur business since the 19th century, sponsored this movie! After the film, Nanook’s image was used in marketing to sell products disparate as rental cars, phonographs, and refrigerators. One Stillwell Auto Delivery car ad drew a comparison dividing him from the audience: “he can’t step into an auto and enjoy the wonderful scenery and boulevards of our Southland. But you can!’’ Allakariallak (Nanook’s real name) died two years after the film was released. Initial reports indicated starvation as the cause of death, but it was later revealed as tuberculosis, possibly brought by foreigners such as Flaherty.

The details of the hunt are where Flaherty starts veering off from truth. The Inuit had incorporated modern technology like rifles and boat motors into their lives by 1922, but the film’s version exclusively shows traditional methods of harpoons, spears, and paddles. In filming the walrus hunt scene, hunters begged Flaherty to use a rifle to help them, but he refused and kept the camera rolling until they killed the animal using older tools. This pattern bleeds into the non-hunting scenes. Film Nanook is amazed by a gramophone and bites into a record, while the real person already knew what it was. The outfits are outdated as well. The Inuit are portrayed as museum pieces frozen in time and unaffected by other cultures around them. Flaherty believed white men had pushed Inuit culture to near extinction, but didn’t put any examples of that in the movie in an attempt to save a vanishing culture he admired. He claimed to avoid the subject matter of the fur trade in order to have Revillon Freres as sponsor without an egregious conflict of interest. However, fur traders do appear in one scene to give Nanook’s child castor oil and show him the gramophone. 

Shaomik Inukpuk, manager of the town where the movie was filmed, found value in the sequences as education for both younger generations of the community and outsiders who knew nothing about the Inuit. It shows how things have changed in the last century, especially regarding the more nomadic lifestyles and colder climates of the past. Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq, while creating a soundtrack for the film, had mixed feelings: embarrassment and frustration with dated stereotypes, but also pride in seeing her ancestors’ resilience. In my opinion, showing traditional hunting methods isn’t an issue on its own, but showing both ways of hunting or even adding the full context in intertitles would’ve given audiences a more truthful portrayal. 

Its major innovations in documentary filmmaking also put the film into an uncanny valley by today’s standards: not intended to be a fictional film but too staged and manipulated to be a documentary, even down to the main character's name being changed. Possible reasons for the change from Allakariallak to Nanook included "nanuq" meaning “bear” and fitting a heroic hunter, a tribute to the practice of the Inuit nicknaming white people, or simply to make the title more marketable to white moviegoers. Much of nonfiction filmmaking’s earliest years consisted of pointing the camera at people or places and interfering as little as possible. Nanook evolved from the travelogue, a type of actuality showing foreign locations for audiences to vicariously experience without spending money on a vacation. While possibly not the first feature-length documentary, it proved the format could be a box-office hit. 

Flaherty included elements of fiction filmmaking into his documentary: a structured piece with a main character and side characters. There’s also the symbolism of one character representing a variety of Inuit with whom Flaherty interacted instead of being a single person. The “plot” is a mix of daily life and the conflict of survival in a desolate environment. Director bias was probably inevitable on some level. Even deciding what to film and what to edit into a movie creates a layer of it. The Nanook character had several different influences shaping what he’d be in the final film. The Inuit participants often watched footage and provided suggestions, but the film was also impacted by Flaherty’s own opinions and the pressure to create something widely marketable to non-Inuit audiences. Flaherty defended the inaccuracies by claiming “one often has to distort a thing in order to capture its true spirit.” However, the distortions form a pattern to portray the subjects as simplistic and unaware of technological change. In 1922, other parts of the world didn’t know much about the Inuit. While the film acted as an awareness-raiser, its lack of context and staged images had more power over audiences and spread misconceptions. Alternative and varied portrayals, especially ones that gave the Inuit more creative control, were harder to access in mainstream media. Nanook of the North popularized a then-unique structure for nonfiction moviemaking that blended in elements of fictional film to give viewers one focus character to get invested in. However, it was also necessary for the medium to innovate past this to avoid making the same mistakes. 

Sources

https://www.documentary.org/feature/100-year-stain-nanook-north

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/42-nanook-of-the-north

https://www.catalystplanet.com/travel-and-social-action-stories/the-first-documentary-or-an-utter-falsehood-nanook-of-the-north

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nanook_of_the_North

https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/inukjuak-celebrates-nanook-of-the-norths-100th-anniversary/

https://www.abdn.ac.uk/staffpages/uploads/enl333/Marcus_2006a.pdf

https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/767ccb7a-5093-4619-b2c5-41962dad8be7/content

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+story+of+Revillon+Freres.-a0468851961

https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/inuk-throat-singer-tanya-tagaq-on-reclaiming-nanook-of-the-north-1.2508581

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #5: Nanook of the North

Released 1922 / Inducted 1989

Watch film here

Director Robert Flaherty first came into contact with the Canadian Inuit through a series of prospecting expeditions funded by Sir William Mackenzie to size up the area’s potential for building railroads and mineral mines. His first attempt at a film on the Inuit ended in the negative burning up and him disregarding the surviving copy as bad and boring. The solution was to make a single composite character to illustrate an entire way of life that existed in the arctic landscapes east of the Hudson Bay. The original attempt failed due to lack of focus. Focusing on one person, or even one family, gives a feature-length film a consistent throughline for audiences to follow and connect to. However, constructing a character to represent a whole ethnic group runs the risk of the director’s biases getting in the way of responsible documentary filmmaking. 

The harsh conditions in which Nanook lives are almost as much a character as the people. The opening shot is of ice floes bobbing in water, and the final scene is a three-way edit between wind blowing over stark white plains, the family sleeping in an igloo, and snow-encrusted dogs guarding outside. According to the images on film, the lives of Nanook and his family are dominated by hard work to attain the basic needs of food and shelter. Several scenes are dedicated to hunting walrus, fish, seal, and fox; one sequence is the building of an igloo. Revillon Freres, a trading company who’d been active in the fur business since the 19th century, sponsored this movie! After the film, Nanook’s image was used in marketing to sell products disparate as rental cars, phonographs, and refrigerators. One Stillwell Auto Delivery car ad drew a comparison dividing him from the audience: “he can’t step into an auto and enjoy the wonderful scenery and boulevards of our Southland. But you can!’’ Allakariallak (Nanook’s real name) died two years after the film was released. Initial reports indicated starvation as the cause of death, but it was later revealed as tuberculosis, possibly brought by foreigners such as Flaherty.

The details of the hunt are where Flaherty starts veering off from truth. The Inuit had incorporated modern technology like rifles and boat motors into their lives by 1922, but the film’s version exclusively shows traditional methods of harpoons, spears, and paddles. In filming the walrus hunt scene, hunters begged Flaherty to use a rifle to help them, but he refused and kept the camera rolling until they killed the animal using older tools. This pattern bleeds into the non-hunting scenes. Film Nanook is amazed by a gramophone and bites into a record, while the real person already knew what it was. The outfits are outdated as well. The Inuit are portrayed as museum pieces frozen in time and unaffected by other cultures around them. Flaherty believed white men had pushed Inuit culture to near extinction, but didn’t put any examples of that in the movie in an attempt to save a vanishing culture he admired. He claimed to avoid the subject matter of the fur trade in order to have Revillon Freres as sponsor without an egregious conflict of interest. However, fur traders do appear in one scene to give Nanook’s child castor oil and show him the gramophone. 

Shaomik Inukpuk, manager of the town where the movie was filmed, found value in the sequences as education for both younger generations of the community and outsiders who knew nothing about the Inuit. It shows how things have changed in the last century, especially regarding the more nomadic lifestyles and colder climates of the past. Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq, while creating a soundtrack for the film, had mixed feelings: embarrassment and frustration with dated stereotypes, but also pride in seeing her ancestors’ resilience. In my opinion, showing traditional hunting methods isn’t an issue on its own, but showing both ways of hunting or even adding the full context in intertitles would’ve given audiences a more truthful portrayal. 

Its major innovations in documentary filmmaking also put the film into an uncanny valley by today’s standards: not intended to be a fictional film but too staged and manipulated to be a documentary, even down to the main character's name being changed. Possible reasons for the change from Allakariallak to Nanook included "nanuq" meaning “bear” and fitting a heroic hunter, a tribute to the practice of the Inuit nicknaming white people, or simply to make the title more marketable to white moviegoers. Much of nonfiction filmmaking’s earliest years consisted of pointing the camera at people or places and interfering as little as possible. Nanook evolved from the travelogue, a type of actuality showing foreign locations for audiences to vicariously experience without spending money on a vacation. While possibly not the first feature-length documentary, it proved the format could be a box-office hit. 

Flaherty included elements of fiction filmmaking into his documentary: a structured piece with a main character and side characters. There’s also the symbolism of one character representing a variety of Inuit with whom Flaherty interacted instead of being a single person. The “plot” is a mix of daily life and the conflict of survival in a desolate environment. Director bias was probably inevitable on some level. Even deciding what to film and what to edit into a movie creates a layer of it. The Nanook character had several different influences shaping what he’d be in the final film. The Inuit participants often watched footage and provided suggestions, but the film was also impacted by Flaherty’s own opinions and the pressure to create something widely marketable to non-Inuit audiences. Flaherty defended the inaccuracies by claiming “one often has to distort a thing in order to capture its true spirit.” However, the distortions form a pattern to portray the subjects as simplistic and unaware of technological change. In 1922, other parts of the world didn’t know much about the Inuit. While the film acted as an awareness-raiser, its lack of context and staged images had more power over audiences and spread misconceptions. Alternative and varied portrayals, especially ones that gave the Inuit more creative control, were harder to access in mainstream media. Nanook of the North popularized a then-unique structure for nonfiction moviemaking that blended in elements of fictional film to give viewers one focus character to get invested in. However, it was also necessary for the medium to innovate past this to avoid making the same mistakes. 

Sources

https://www.documentary.org/feature/100-year-stain-nanook-north

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/42-nanook-of-the-north

https://www.catalystplanet.com/travel-and-social-action-stories/the-first-documentary-or-an-utter-falsehood-nanook-of-the-north

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nanook_of_the_North

https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/inukjuak-celebrates-nanook-of-the-norths-100th-anniversary/

https://www.abdn.ac.uk/staffpages/uploads/enl333/Marcus_2006a.pdf

https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/767ccb7a-5093-4619-b2c5-41962dad8be7/content

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+story+of+Revillon+Freres.-a0468851961

https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/inuk-throat-singer-tanya-tagaq-on-reclaiming-nanook-of-the-north-1.2508581

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #4: San Francisco Earthquake & Fire: April 18, 1906

Released 1906 / Inducted 2005

Watch film here

There’s a clear progression here, a gradual tone shift that begins around the four-minute mark. At first, the camera pans slowly over the razing of giant destroyed walls and billowing clouds of smoke that sometimes obscure half the frame. When people appear, they’re either far in the distance or hurrying offscreen as soon as they can. By the end, people are the camera’s main focus, not an accidental scattered presence. They eat together in the streets and pose with mugs of some drink, fill the streets with horse-drawn carriages (complete with a joke about those newfangled automobiles), overstuff themselves into trollies, and pack boats as refugees to Oakland. 

The land that became San Francisco sits atop the San Andreas Fault, the meeting point of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. Earthquakes are inevitable whenever a lateral motion between the plates occurs. On April 18, 1906 at 5:12 AM, an earthquake was felt from Oregon to south of Los Angeles. The quake is tied to San Francisco in collective memory due to the three-day fire it caused. There were roughly 3,000 deaths and 225,000 left homeless. A central tension of both the film and wider earthquake recovery was whether to downplay the extent of the damage for the sake of the economy or to share the full knowledge in order to improve long-term safety. 

The film’s vast isolation gives way to a cramped togetherness that almost resembles normality–at least until a title card shows soldiers stationed outside the bank with a shoot-to-kill order in the event of looting. Their presence communicates that the normal operations of law and order are prevailing over the chaos of the earthquake, people’s life savings protected. Military, police, and firefighters provided the city with relief at rapid speed, tearing down buildings to prevent fire spread after destroyed water mains prevented typical firefighting methods. The “kill looters'' order was issued by the mayor, Eugene Schmitz, despite him not having the authority to declare martial law and thus suspend normal operations of civil law (that authority fell to the California governor or US president). Confusion ensued over which forms of laws were even in effect. Due process fell to the wayside. Homeowners retrieving their own belongings and people seeking help were mistaken for looters, including one instance of a man being shot exiting his own home. Authors writing about the disaster chose to emphasize the city’s quick recovery and portrayed the military as saviors, but their presence brought both relief from earthquake-caused fires and civilian deaths from gunfire.

San Francisco’s leadership downplayed the severity of the disaster on multiple occasions. They undercounted death rates to the point where the San Francisco Bulletin’s editor joked that the death count of sunstroke during a typical East Coast summer killed more people than the earthquake. Their quick rebuild didn’t implement as many long-term earthquake safety measures as there could have been, only adding new regulations if they didn’t cost too much time or money. They minimized the earthquake in favor of calling the disaster “fire-based” because fires can start anywhere but San Francisco’s propensity for earthquakes might scare off investors. Even after the earthquake, city officials didn’t declare a 1907 plague outbreak a public health emergency and antagonized the Board of Health until Edward Taylor became mayor and took action against the disease. This was to protect the still-ongoing economic recovery. 

Which reveals the reason for doing this: the city was a key hub of business in the western US, and their leaving would cost the city desperately needed money and jobs. However, not all San Franciscans had the same chance to take advantage of economic opportunities or even post-earthquake emergency services. Working class people, who lived in crowded wooden housing, were hit the hardest by the quake and fire. Chinese people were segregated, generally unable to find work outside Chinatown, and scapegoated as disease carriers before the quake. After the quake, they were frequently relocated away from white survivors by officials and barred from relief efforts. 

Despite efforts to downplay the disaster, scientific research laid groundwork for future generations of earthquake safety policy. The governor appointed a State Earthquake Investigation Commission, the first government-backed earthquake investigation in the US. Their 1908 final report contained extensive coverage of seismographic records, photos and maps of damaged locations, and explanations of how building construction and underlying soil/rock type affected how damaged buildings became. It was still being cited in earthquake safety proposals a century later. Measurements from triangulation surveys (showing how much angles changed in fixed lines on the ground) lead to the development of the elastic rebound theory. The US Geological Survey defines the theory as “how the earth's crust gradually and elastically distorts with accumulating plate motion until it is suddenly returned to its undistorted state by rapid slip along a fault, releasing the years of accumulated strain and, in the process, generating seismic waves that produce shaking.” The idea of fault ruptures creating earthquakes instead of the other way around only gained wide acceptance after the 1906 quake research. Generations of scientists built on knowledge shared in the wake of 1906. Predicting the timing of future earthquakes is still imprecise, but experts can tell which areas will be hit hardest by fault rupturing. Engineering, zoning, and building codes are all influenced by this data to protect from future disasters the best they can. 

So where does the film fit into all this? The people-focused sections, especially the bit about troubles vanishing at mealtime and the shots of bustling horse-drawn carriages add to the "extremely quick recovery” narrative that the government was also projecting. The film avoids the most egregious crisis-downplaying, though. There’s no effort to hide the fact that an earthquake occurred and not just a fire. They do mention Chinese people in this while discussing refugees who had to leave belongings behind; they refer to them as an offensive term, but don't engage in the scapegoating rampant among residents at the time. The coverage isn’t super detailed, but it was more comprehensive than many of its filmic predecessors. Nonfiction filmmaking up to this point was dominated by actualities, which were rarely over two minutes long and lacked editing or structure. This film’s edited intertitles attempt to educate viewers, add context for the images, and give specific names to places like Market Street and St. Patrick’s Church. Nowadays, many more in-depth sources are available who utilize information discovered after this film was released. The film functions as one of those Registry entries where its greatest importance comes not from narrative or filmmaking craft but from needing to preserve footage of a major historical event. At the time, while somewhat playing into the dominant “we’re fine, we swear” narratives, it offered a decent overview of the topic to viewers far away from the damage.

Sources

https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/san-francisco-earthquake-and-fire.pdf

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/events/1906calif/18april/revolution.php

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/events/1906calif/18april/

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/why-are-there-so-many-earthquakes-and-faults-western-united-states

https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/actuality

https://hazards.colorado.edu/uploads/observer/2006/may06/may06.pdf

https://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-de-demographie-historique-2010-2-page-217.htm?contenu=article

https://escholarship.org/content/qt00f913xm/qt00f913xm_noSplash_2a0a8269463659626adcab8d09b6366f.pdf?t=p0tadq

https://www.nps.gov/prsf/learn/historyculture/1906-earthquake-law-enforcement.htm

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #3: It

Released 1927 / Inducted 2001

Watch film here

In a meta moment, this film includes a scene where Elinor Glyn, author of the source material, cameos as herself and explains the thesis of the movie. “It” is a charisma people either possess or don’t–if you try too hard to reach it, you’ve already lost. It’s sex appeal, but more than that too, defined as self-confidence and lack of self-consciousness without tipping into emotional frostiness. The slang predates both Glyn’s novel and this movie, originating in the early 20th century, but the film brought the term to newfound heights of popularity.

The romantic comedy stars Betty Lou, a working-class department store worker who nonetheless lives in a “fashionable downtown suburb.” She finagles her way onto expensive clubs and yachts, cuts up plain dresses into party attire, and lays atop her boss’ desk, gaining access with sheer belief that she deserves to be in those spaces as much as those born to wealth. She uses the hapless and trying-too-hard Monty to further her romantic pursuit of department store boss Cyrus Waltham (Ironically, I found the former more entertaining than the actual male lead. Waltham is meant to be the straight man to Betty Lou’s brashness and humor, but he has little appeal besides being rich and powerful). 

The film hinges on the strength of lead actress Clara Bow’s performance. Like her character, she was born into poverty, living in a tenement slum before attaining fame by winning a magazine contest at 16. Audiences found her relatable and engaging due to her naturalistic acting style, energy, and comic timing. Unlike her character, her job consisted of a gargantuan amount of effort and not charisma alone. She was an established star when this film was released, acting in 15 different movies in 1925 alone. She was overworked by studios to the point of needing large amounts of pills to wake up in the morning and sleep at night. 

Even more than the idea of effortless charm, the fantasy the movie presents is being so irresistible that social barriers like class and gender break down to accommodate you. The “It” factor isn’t a party trick, it’s a tool. It’s true that the baby subplot is mostly used to set up a third-act miscommunication trope ubiquitous in romance media to this day. It’s still compelling to see Betty Lou put her reputation on the line to defend a friend who’s a single mother and successfully prevent her baby from being taken away. Hooking up with your boss is a terrible idea in real life, but Betty Lou succeeding in romancing a much wealthier man is another example of using her charisma and resourcefulness to rise above her station. 

Subsequent decades led to the meaning of It Girl changing for the worse, becoming another type of barrier. Shortly before retiring from acting at age 28, Bow herself rejected the term and wanted to be considered a serious actress instead. By the 1990s, there were expectations to be an It Girl: rich, skinny, conventionally attractive, socialite, famous for being famous. One socialite of that era, Tara Palmer-Tonkinson, valued “character and wit” over academic knowledge but struggled nonetheless with the media pigeonholing her as “beauty rather than brains.” She stayed out of politics, believing her place in the celebrity sphere to be strictly entertainment. The It Girl (and occasionally It Boy) reverberates through the decades, becoming attached to a myriad of different faces. While the label came with admiration and power, it imposed new limitations and implied a level of effortlessness that, in Bow’s case at least, hid the reality of studio exploitation. 

Sources

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/It_(film)

https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/it.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_girl

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20141222-who-was-the-original-it-girl

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-38918918

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #2: The House in the Middle

Released 1954 / Inducted 2001

Watch film here

There were two versions of this Cold War-era Federal Civil Defense Association film produced, one in 1953 and a color remake in 1954; the latter is the one inducted by the registry. Three model houses have an atomic bomb set off over their roofs; the titular “house in the middle” is protected by a coat of paint and a clean yard while its insufficiently tidy neighbors burn down. The 1953 original drops the empty-desert nuclear test footage and leaves, but the remake is twice as long and spends its extra runtime on making it personal to the audience (the shots of real towns after the opening credits, the kids picking up trash, the narrator asking you which house YOU live in). The Library of Congress’ essay has multiple theories on what the underlying purpose of this is (besides selling paint). One was that the white-painted suburban homes act as a class signifier to separate the intended audience from people in the “slums.” House maintenance costs money, after all. Money that paint salesmen wanted you to spend on them.

A branch of the US government produced this, but the sponsor for the 1954 version was…the National Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association trade group. The film fails to disclose this and lets them hide behind a fake bureau name. Even after that blow to its credibility, there seems to be a grain of truth in there somewhere. Filling your yard with tons of trash, dead leaves, and rotting wood will actually increase flammability, and people can’t shelter in their homes from fallout if their house burns down. “Pick up trash in your neighborhood” would be a nice message if not for the atomic-survival angle making it weird. 

The other theory was that giving people a concrete action to take makes them feel better when they’re powerless to prevent a possible armageddon. Other people, instead of painting houses, took a very different action in response to the proliferation of atomic bombs. The film’s house test footage was taken at the Nevada Test Site, a frequent target of anti-nuclear protests since the early 1950s. One 1992 demonstration was prompted by the Western Shoshone tribe and led to over 500 arrests. The tribe granted the US government passage through their territory in 1893, but underground nuclear testing was not part of the agreement. The Shoshone people living near the site had a cancer rate 42 percent higher than the national average. Underground nuclear testing ended in 1992, but the government uses the site for subcritical testing and research/development purposes to this day. If nuclear war had ensued (or were to ensue), the effects would be catastrophic. Climate change caused by chemicals and soot in the atmosphere, compromised medical facilities, cancer and lowered disease resistance from radioactive fallout– all are issues no amount of tidying up our living rooms could fully solve.

Sources

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-08/in-1954-americans-were-told-to-paint-their-houses-to-increase-their-chances-of-surviving-an-atomic-bomb

https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/nevada-test-site/

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1992/10/12/At-least-530-people-demonstrating-at-a-Nevada-nuclear/9295718862400/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Test_Site

https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/house_in_middle.pdf

https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2015/03/the-cold-war-meets-commerce-the-houses-in-the-middle/ 

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/devastating-effects-of-nuclear-weapons-war/

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #1: Rose Hobart

Released 1936 / Inducted 2001

Watch film here

The National Film Registry exists because of a 1980s controversy over Turner Entertainment Co. colorizing black-and-white films for TV airings. Lighting, costumes, set design, and makeup on these movies were optimized for black and white, so adding color made those visual choices less effective. Some of the Hollywood personnel testifying against colorization to the Senate in 1987 had a different complaint entirely–Sidney Pollack claimed that “...the fundamental issue is not how good (colorization technology) is” and “it is morally unacceptable to alter the product of a person’s creative life without that person’s permission.” Congress’ response was to require labels on colorized movies and to create the National Film Registry, a big list of culturally significant American films intended to preserve them. The early years were dominated by mainstream Old Hollywood-era films, the ones most likely to get colorized. Later, the focus turned to a more general goal of film preservation.

I’m not shocked that Rose Hobart, Joseph Cornell’s fancam avant-garde collage film, is on the registry, but the irony is palpable. It’s an early example of remix culture, chopping up the 1931 adventure drama East of Borneo to 20 minutes, mostly shots of the lead actress he was obsessed with. It added color to the black-and-white (originally a blue tint over the entire screen, but Cornell wanted a later 1968 preservation copy to have a purple tint). Some shots, such as the drop of water falling into a pool, weren’t from East of Borneo at all, their origins unclear. Cornell was a film collector who owned fragments of film and labeled them things like “Wonderful shots of birds.” When you change someone else’s creation, what’s the line between a hack job and a new piece of art?

Is the difference changing a bad movie instead of the most adulated films in the American canon? Rose Hobart is a more compelling watch than the film it draws its footage from. Sound films were in their infancy in 1931, and the new technology required a learning curve. Cameras were placed inside boxes to prevent microphones from recording their whirring noises; even moving the cameras too much created unwanted noise. This meant early talkies lacked the complex cinematography of the later silent era. While these problems were mitigated by 1930 thanks to quieter cameras and new microphone technology, the dialogue in East of Borneo is slow and stilted by modern standards. The thin plot and depiction of Southeast Asians don't hold up at all either.

Cornell thought sound films were a creative wasteland, and the few meaningful moments or actors’ performances were the ones that most emulated the silent era. His alterations included cutting the dialogue, adding a soundtrack of Brazilian samba records, and slowing down the film speed from typical sound-film pace to the 16-18 frames per second typical of silent films. It’s no surprise that the scene of Hobart cradling and petting a monkey gets to play out relatively uncut (he cuts the ending where said monkey gets eaten by a tiger though). The original scene has dialogue, but it’s superfluous; the character’s compassion and curiosity towards the animal is clear with no spoken words at all.  The inferiority of sound film is a take that almost no living person believes anymore because the shift happened nearly a century ago. Art being different from the way things were done in his formative years (Cornell was born in 1903) doesn’t always detract from quality. But there's sadness when a unique medium like silent film dies out, when it goes from a thriving part of culture to fragmented memories. 

The film connects the memory of a bygone age with a common manifestation of memory: the dream. The “dreamlike” descriptor is apt, as the film strips away any plot structure and context. The clips are out of order, slow-flowing but occasionally punctured by rapid-fire changing images. It does to film what my brain does to familiar locations in a dream: the architecture is shifting by the moment, warped, combined with parts of random other buildings.

Hobart’s feelings and experiences on East of Borneo are known to history, and they involved 18-hour shifts and sharing sets with live alligators and snakes. This inspired her to agitate for better working conditions, for which she was eventually blacklisted when the House Un-American Activities Committee accused her of communism. Her feelings on Cornell, however, are not as clear, as they never met. I don’t know if she’d be flattered or unsettled. However, the one thing I can’t accuse his movie of is being too close to the original. Maybe that’s what sets this alteration of other people’s art apart from colorizations of classic films. It’s not the same movie but with worse lighting decisions, so it frees itself of living in the original’s shadows. There’s little chance audiences will believe the altered version is how the movie was originally filmed. This film on that registry may seem a contradiction. A second contradiction is how an artist this apprehensive about changes in moviemaking technology inadvertently rebukes the argument that changing someone else’s art to make a new piece is always immoral and damaging.

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