[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #18: Losing Ground

Released 1982 / Inducted 2020

This movie was almost lost to obscurity, initially lacking a wide US theatrical release and only achieving wider recognition decades later. Arthouse theaters and distributors at the time didn’t believe it could find an audience, and director/writer/producer Kathleen Collins often faced barriers over her race and gender. Collins’ daughter Nina returned to her mother’s work (described by magazine writer Abigail Bereola as “creating in a way that doesn’t allow for looking away from oneself”) for insight on their often-complicated relationship and fought to preserve her legacy, using the imagined stories to better know the real woman.

The final shots of Losing Ground were a surprise on first watch–lead character Sara Rogers experiences a major emotional realization, but the fallout is never shown. While acting in a student film which coincidentally mirrors her own life, she cries after knowing her marriage is likely too far gone. This is followed by an abrupt cut to credits. The major choices she makes afterward are left to the audience’s imagination. Sara’s an analytical philosophy professor who's currently studying ecstasy but has no idea how to personally experience it. The definition of ecstasy relevant here is that of escaping from the mundane environment to seemingly experience the supernatural or divine. The methods to achieve this altered state of consciousness vary: hallucinogens, mental illness, prayer and meditation from a variety of religions, even music and art.

Religious ecstasy may be one discussion point in Sara’s paper, but the movie is most concerned with ecstasy in relation to art (she argues a solely religion-based definition is too narrow). Her husband Victor is entranced with inspiration for his paintings in the world around him. It’s not about connecting with a religious presence greater than oneself, but it does create distance between him and everyone else. If one of the draws of ecstatic experience is going outside the familiar, being around an unfamiliar culture (Puerto Ricans specifically) provides that same sense of excitement for him. He loves the idea of having an affair with one of the women at their summer home neighborhood, but constantly gets annoyed over small things like her getting tired during a painting session or dancing with someone else at a gathering–whenever he’s reminded that she has a regular life outside of him. The story cautions against this type of constant detachment, of getting an abstract idea of what you want and thoughtlessly chasing it down. If what Victor wants was a person, he can get bothered by their complexities or outright ignore their own wants and feelings. This escalated to the point of him sexually assaulting his mistress–her feelings about this are largely left unexplored, but the event is what makes Sara unable to deny reality on how bad their marriage has gotten. Before that, Sara also claimed her husband loves her lack of chaos. She doesn’t say why her orderliness appeals to him, but my guess is that it’s a contrast to his own personality. When she goes away to act in a student film, he’s confused and irritated because that doesn’t match his idea of her. 

There’s a scene towards the end where Sara remarks that she hates the water after the other characters all jumped in the pool. Normally, that wouldn’t say much about a person, but in a narrative it was included to show she lacks the spontaneity to fully take the plunge. The drawbacks and insecurities surrounding her analytical personality never fully subside. Even in a world where psychics are implied to have real powers of premonition, she fails to achieve the altered state of consciousness–at least not in the same way it appeared in her studies.  The visuals and editing remain firmly tied to reality, unlike religious ecstasy in which people experience visions of their God, their perception of time slows down or stops, and they enter a state of trance or possession. However, even when Sara is at her most unfulfilled, the environments around her don’t reflect the same dull feeling. The colors tend towards bold saturation, from the red in the windows of Sara’s study to the purples and blues of her dress. Even the shots of greenery make the leaves look practically fluorescent. This communicates that these settings are worth experiencing and not something to need constant escape from. 

Collins disliked mythologizing people, whether it be herself, her characters, or the black racial identity as a whole. This shows in the script: despite Sara’s fascination with supernatural or religious phenomena, they’re always out of reach for her. She does change as a character anyway: finding independence from her husband through the acting job and standing up to him in a more serious way instead of playing it off as a joke while nothing truly changes. While both studying in books and acting in the film are an escape into fiction, the film offers her more direct tactile experience with the outside world (and the costar she’s attracted to). Sara will always think too much to experience a total break from reality. Instead, the narrative offers a different approach: fiction only partially removed from typical life which allows people to look at their worst problems from a different angle. She never totally transcended reality like the subjects of her research, nor did she overindulge in a type of ecstatic trance that cuts her off from understanding others like Victor does. As her real-life husband watches the filming, Sara’s character shoots her onscreen cheating husband and feels devastated about it. She doesn’t really kill anyone, but the scene still aids her in processing very real emotions of anger and betrayal. Her marriage as she knew it will never be the same, even as she’s discovered more of her own capabilities and ways to be fulfilled without him.

Sources

https://www.youtube.com/live/J-GwNd6xeOQ

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/religious-ecstasy

https://www.npr.org/2015/02/05/383564277/losing-ground-steps-forward-at-lincoln-center

http://web.archive.org/web/20250325003815/https://www.bkmag.com/2017/06/20/whatever-happened-to-kathleen-collins-book-film-more/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/kathleen-collins-losing-ground-film/

https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2020/08/07/kathleen-collins-losing-ground/

https://www.musicandliterature.org/reviews/2016/4/14/kathleen-collinss-losing-ground

https://www.anothergaze.com/expansive-territories-remembering-kathleen-collins-losing-ground-feminism-race/

https://chicagoreader.com/blogs/losing-ground-is-one-of-the-major-cinematic-rediscoveries-of-the-year/

https://www.vogue.com/article/kathleen-collins-filmmaker-career-daughter-nina-lorez-collins

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #17: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Released 1967 / Inducted 2017

It’s no surprise that this story has been adapted to a play with minimal alterations save for minor location shifts. The screenplay was originally created for the medium of film, but the limited setpieces and dialogue-heaviness give the movie a stage play vibe. The focus stays on the actors’ performances and the social commentary on interracial marriage. The central conflict is that the older generation (at least both fathers, the mothers come around much more quickly) see the country as it is and the younger couple sees an accepting potential future. The biggest objections stem more from obstacles the couple and their future children will face than negative opinions about fiances John and Joanna specifically. The relationship being considered taboo has causes going back centuries, with states enacting anti-miscegenation laws during slavery to maintain a clear caste separation between white and black people. White women getting with black men was even more upsetting than the other way around due to stereotypes of black men being sexually predatory. Emmett Till’s 1955 murder over supposedly whistling at a white woman would’ve been within living memory of both the film’s target audience and all the characters. The court case Loving v. Virginia struck down laws against interracial marriage across the US six months before the film released, but clearly after the screenplay was written since the marriage’s illegality in some states warrants a mention. The parents want to protect their children from the hardships of the world by managing their decisions, but their lack of support becomes one of the very obstacles they tried to avoid in the first place. The flaws in this mindset are thoroughly picked apart in monologues where the intended morals and themes are very unsubtle, and Joanna’s father has the most pronounced character arc culminating in a newfound support of the marriage.

The most prominent black character, John Prentice, has been criticized for being written as idealized and flawless. This was a choice by the creators to remove any valid reason why Joanna’s parents would object to the marriage and keep the focus on race relations. (If he did have flaws, would the parents be less willing to overlook them than in a white partner?) The risk of writing like this is how it may create static characters who lack interesting shortcomings because they’re ideal from the start, or become a tool to teach other characters a lesson. Prentice falls into this somewhat, with the majority of the story’s character growth focused on the couple’s parents, but he does have his own character arc. It’s a belated coming-of-age in which he learns to be firm in his convictions and life choices without being overly influenced by parental approval. The major ideological rupture culminates in one line: that he sees himself as a man, while his father sees himself as a colored man. This is part of the story’s resolution; the film agrees with John that this attitude could lead to progress and equality. This approach is typical of a “colorblind” way to analyze race relations. I’m reminded of the "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" Martin Luther King Jr. quote, which gets thrown around to support often-contradictory political stances. A key word here is “dream,” in that it’s a goal to strive towards and not a description of society as it exists. The latter definition is how his finance largely seems to navigate the world. 

Joanna’s parents attribute her lack of prejudice to how they raised her, even though their worldviews actually seem pretty different despite both falling under the umbrella of “liberal.” In her fiance’s words: “It’s not just that our color difference doesn’t matter to her, it’s that she doesn’t seem to think there is any difference.” On the metaphorical level, both her blitheness and the limited time she gives her parents to decide whether they’ll approve represents a youth culture changing at a breakneck pace at which older, set-in-their-ways generations struggle to keep up.  On the storytelling level, her actions increase narrative tension with a ticking clock. As a characterization choice, she’s a bit naive and oblivious as to when a situation would affect John differently due to racism, which could be explained by her carefree childhood in a liberal city. She initially fails to anticipate her parents having any problem with the marriage, only revealing she ever had reservations after everyone’s already met. Against John’s wishes, she drags his parents into the dinner too. Late into the movie, she still views her father’s behavior as “funny.” Unlike her parents, she experiences little character development or introspection, even though this tendency could get them into more trouble someday.

The movie models what happens when a societal conflict becomes less abstract and more personal, and how various generations navigate prejudice instilled by ancestors centuries ago. It critiques the father characters’ defeatist attitudes which arose in an effort to protect their kids but ended up revealing bias within themselves. The colorblind attitude the film presents as an alternative, as exemplified by the younger generation, gets criticism of its own. "Colorblindness" sometimes gets invoked to ignore an injustice where one exists or avoid an uncomfortable dialogue. The movie is at least trying to have the tough conversations, even amongst people who consider themselves progressive and think they don’t have much more to learn. But choices like John being flawless or the presumption that racism will just evaporate once the younger generation gets into power instead of mutating into more subtle forms sanitizes the movie’s portrayal of the issues. A 2008 Fordham Law Review journal conducted interviews on interracial relationships and found the initial attitudes of John and Joanna’s father, such as some white people supporting them in theory but not actually thinking they’d work nor wanting one for themselves, still persisted decades after the film’s release. If there’s one thing I hope for the main couple in their future, it’s that they gain experience and perspective with age (especially Joanna) while holding onto a goal for a more equitable world and not becoming complacent.

Sources

https://www.theledger.com/story/news/2013/01/20/king-s-content-character-quote/8108157007/

https://www.broadwayworld.com/charlotte/article/GUESS-WHOS-COMING-TO-DINNER-to-be-Presented-at-Hendersonville-Theatre-20250129

https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/50624c5b-cc73-4dc5-a54f-73ec6587c019/content

https://midlandshistoricalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Dunne-1960s-America.pdf

https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4363&context=flr

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anna-Redei/publication/299646126_Cognition_and_stereotypes_in_Guess_Who_is_Coming_to_Dinner_A_semiotic_and_social_psychological_perspective/links/5703c79308aea09bb1a44d3f/Cognition-and-stereotypes-in-Guess-Who-is-Coming-to-Dinner-A-semiotic-and-social-psychological-perspective.pdf

https://intersections-journal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/1.-MR-article-1.pdf

Film as a reflection of society: interracial marriage and Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in late 1960s America by Katie Anderson

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #16: George Washington Carver at Tuskegee Institute

Released 1937 likely 1941 or 1942 / Inducted 2019

(The year was listed in the filmmaker’s donation letter and in this film’s Library of Congress entry as 1937, but the National Archives found some shots are of specific buildings, an elevator, and a plane that wouldn’t exist until 1941.)

Watch film here

We open on a wide shot of George Washington Carver, appearing small in the frame, staring up at a statue on a pedestal. It’s a physical monument to the legacy of Booker T. Washington, the institute’s first teacher who had died in 1915 and was one of the most prominent civil rights leaders of his day. Carver was concerned with his own legacy, believing everyone was obligated to “(leave) distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through” life. One method to spread information, including scientific knowledge in his chosen fields of botany and inventing, is to share it through as many avenues as possible. Carver was more selective, publicizing his findings through freely disseminated and simply written brochures but refusing to participate in the commercial film industry (he rarely agreed to be photographed either). The lack of visual record concerned the top brass at Tuskegee–his health was failing, and he’d ultimately pass away in 1943. Carver’s assistant convinced him to get in front of the camera, and Dr. C. Allen Alexander was brought on to shoot the film. Alexander was an amateur filmmaker disconnected from Hollywood, and shared similar experiences and values with Carver. Both worked closely with the most vulnerable members of society: Alexander treated people in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods during his medical training, while one of Carver’s goals was to help “the man farthest down.”

Much of the poses and situations were set up by Alexander. The earliest clips are small, mundane tasks that can be easily replicated by most viewers: reading, knitting, tending flowers in a garden, having meetings in his office. In a reflection of his many jobs throughout his Tuskegee tenure, the clips portray business and productivity even at his old age even as filming was spread over several days due to his health issues. The stone statues appearing in some shots are an unchanging monument, but Carver himself had to learn to adapt to change throughout his life and career. He initially planned for an art career in college, but both he and his teacher expressed doubts in the viability of a black man being a full-time painter. Instead, he felt God was calling him to improve black American lives through agriculture science. (He didn’t fully give up painting. Most of his art was destroyed in a fire, but several of his paintings are featured in the film.) Much of the South’s farmland was ravaged by nutrient depletion from overreliance on cotton. He wanted farming to be more sustainable, which entailed strategies like crop rotation and making use of indigenous wild plants such as plums. Despite personal differences, Carver’s philosophy on how to achieve racial equality mirrored that of Booker T. Washington: not fighting for direct political change, but gaining power through economic independence and having concrete contributions to industries. 

Even once he had a defined goal, his methods and attitudes needed refining. Initially, he was in near complete agreement with the prevailing agricultural wisdom of those who came before him, such as Seaman A. Knapp from the US Department of Agriculture. Much like other Progressive-era reformers, he underestimated the danger following black southern tenant farmers and assumed they were simply being pessimistic or paranoid about “cliques, clans, and plans…being originated to militate against them.” He had to adapt his instruction to fit the people he was educating and take their concerns–for example, the threat of lynching–more seriously. This included less emphasis on written record keeping due to either illiteracy or white creditors threatening people over discrepancies with their own records, especially in regards to the amount of money owed. In regards to other agricultural common knowledge, the latest farming equipment was too expensive, and landlords’ strict control of the land and its crops prevented many farms from true self-sufficiency. He’s remembered now as the peanut guy, but sometimes context gets lost or simplified; legumes got focus because they could both restore nitrogen to soil (cotton plants deplete these nutrients) and be useful enough in other markets like food or medicine. 

Most of Carver’s innovations never caught on with wider society (with exceptions, one being sweet potato flour which was used as a substitute for products made unavailable by World War II). Nor did he leave much in the way of precise research documentation. Nonetheless, Carver influenced later generations in their own research, who learned from his ideas but also adapted to new circumstances. Starting in the 1980s, NASA collaborated with Tuskegee for experiments on two of Carver’s favorite subjects: alternative uses of the peanut and sweet potato, this time to test their viability for space missions. Some of his viewpoints on farming can be applied to the present day, albeit in a less direct way than if he’d left more documentation. Where Carver noted nodules on legume roots caused by nitrogen-building bacteria, 21st-century scientists devoted over a thousand research articles to the chemical reactions, genetics, and physiology of root-bacteria symbiosis.

In the second half of Alexander's footage, Carver himself is less featured. The students, the next generation, take over as the camera focuses on a football game and the uniformed and synchronized-stepping marching band. The final moments offer a parallel to the opening shot of Carver at Washington’s statue, a continuation of a cycle. At his namesake museum, two younger women look up at a bust of Carver. Physical monuments or video footage are good ways to quickly introduce someone’s legacy. Alexander portrays Carver on-film in a way that emphasizes his drive to be useful while also capturing a time and place of the 1940s Tuskegee Institute where he worked. With scientific researchers, another way to continue a legacy is to understand the people before you, but also to question them and adapt their work to unique situations as Carver did while working with Southern farmers.

Sources

https://www.theledger.com/story/news/1999/08/02/university-sends-sweet-potatoes-to-space/26690666007/

https://www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/02/11/275330069/george-washington-carver-the-black-history-monthiest-of-them-all

https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2018/06/14/now-showing-george-washington-carver-on-kodachrome/

https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/carver.html#carver-and-washington

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=96120a37621f88f9a47ffaf217efeffdc5173965#page=58

https://www.nal.usda.gov/exhibits/ipd/carver/exhibits/show/bulletins/carver

https://www.kpl.gov/local-history/kalamazoo-history/biographies/alexander-dr-c-allen/

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(21)01644-4.pdf

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #15: Applause

Released 1929 / Inducted 2006

Watch film here

Her character Kitty Darling is late 30s minimum, but Helen Morgan was only 29 when she starred as a middle-aged burlesque star whose driving conflict is being washed-up and out of time to accomplish any semblance of a successful Broadway career. She’s doomed from the minute she gives birth and her coworkers form a line around her in a shot resembling people staring at a body at a funeral viewing. Burlesque, or at least the American variation of it seen in the movie, was a type of variety show encompassing parodies of either the upper class or “high art,” circus acts, minstrelsy, musical numbers, and sexualized performance art. Its sister industry, vaudeville, declined in the 1920s due to talent poaching and competition for audience attention from movie theaters. Over the course of its history, especially in the 1910s and '20s, burlesque relied more and more on sex appeal and revealing striptease outfits to draw in crowds. Stage runways, as seen in the movie, came about in the early 20th century so the audience could look at the performers up close. Modern “neo-burlesque” revivals retain the sexuality but attempt to re-emphasize the social commentary and comedy elements while being more inclusive of different ages and body types. The movie details a situation where use of sex appeal for profit generation instead of self-expression results in a narrow youth-obsessed beauty standard. This contributes to both Kitty being thrown to the side and her daughter (possibly because young people are perceived as easier to manipulate) being preyed on by older men.

Much of the narrative tension revolves around whether Kitty’s teenage daughter April will meet a similarly tragic fate in show business. Her presence creates conflict in her daughter’s coming-of-age process despite how she desperately wants the best for her. Normally, this character type would be a domineering force who views her offspring not as a separate human but a chance to vicariously live out her lost youth and failed ambitions. They don’t go that route; instead the main manipulator is Kitty’s boyfriend. She’s a victim of his abuse, but is also so caught up in the fantasy of a happy family she fails to notice him lusting after her daughter. With all the instability in her career and relationships, she struggles to be stable enough to give April the support she needs. It’s often April who’s second-guessing her own major life choices to emotionally support her mother, such as when she rethinks getting married after her mom’s career falls apart because she’s scared for her well-being. Even the sound design argues April shouldn’t follow her mother’s path of trying to make it in the big city. It conveys a chaotic but mechanical and impersonal landscape with its clangs, crashes, and car horns. She may be surrounded by crowds when arriving in New York for the first time, but most people are wrapped up in their own lives or only out to exploit her. The sounds chosen to overlay Kitty’s overdose scene are machinery noise from outside the window (possibly construction work or cars revving) preceded by a ticking clock. 

If her mother represents one potential future, another option arises when April falls in love with a sailor who wants to take her back to his Wisconsin farm. The narrative positions settling down and marriage as the safest option for its central women, implying Kitty’s life would’ve been better if, instead of focusing on an independent career, she’d taken up a marriage offer from a coworker who instead disappears from the narrative after the timeskip of April’s childhood in the convent. This life path has risks in its own right, especially since April is 17-18 and considering a marriage to a man she’s known for less than a week. To be fair, there are some interesting ideas raised by the romantic subplot. It gives April a chance to exercise agency. Most of her circumstances have been decided for her, but this is one she made herself–not her mother, not the convent nuns and their peaceful but sheltered environment, and definitely not the abusive potential father-in-law. The scene where she breaks off the engagement and he leaves on a train is also very well-done. It captures the clarity regarding a previously tough decision that arrives precisely after you’ve seemingly irreversibly chosen wrong. I think it’s because she has some semblance of control over this potential relationship that she nearly self-sabotages it. Her mother’s life is falling apart, and April's plan to abandon him to stay with Kitty feels like the only action she can do even if it’s not even helpful or what Kitty wanted. However, the sailor's initial proposal falls flat for me when he singlehandedly decides to marry her or else he’ll jump off a high building. The actors play it as joking banter not meant to be taken super literally, but he’s still prioritizing his own wants over her feelings even if he’s not directly forcing her into anything. In some genres, it’s easier to suspend disbelief about instant romances; fairy tale adaptations, for example, don’t need to be scrutinized according to real-world logic. But in a setting grounded in reality and often cynical, it comes off as her knowing show business will make her miserable and rushing into this as an escape attempt.

The large mechanized city, and especially show business, are portrayed as so fast-moving it’s inevitable people will get left in the dust. The obvious example is Kitty running out of time to succeed in her career, which hampers her mental health and ability to support April despite having more moral integrity than most “stage mother” characters. This also complicates April’s journey of coming of age and deciding what she wants in life. She avoids a stage career, which was her mother’s wish even if she never got to see it happen. The other option was asserting her agency and marrying a man that could make her happy and who she genuinely likes, even if they’ve known each other for a short time and some aspects of the romance subplot have aged poorly. She manages to do the best she can with the circumstances given, leaving her future uncertain but not an unambiguous tragedy like her mother’s.

Sources

https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2013-10-18/applause-1929

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/great-directors/mamoulian/

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-strange-case-of-rouben-mamoulian/

https://soar.suny.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.12648/14533/4001_theresa.oquinn.pdf?sequence=1

https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/neo-burlesque-just-booty-shaking-55359/

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/cteq/applause/

https://sites.arizona.edu/vaudeville/burlesque-the-other-side-of-vaudeville-by-sidney-pullen/

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/846009/pdf

Toil Beneath the Footlights: The Spectacle of Female Suffering and the Rise of Comedy by Desirée J. Garcia

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #14: The Italian

Released 1915 / Inducted 1991

Watch film here

While the characterization of protagonist Beppo Donneti leans into negative Italian stereotypes of the time, like an inability to control strong emotions and a predilection to violent crime, they aren’t shown as inherent traits but as reactions to extreme trauma and the isolation that stems from prejudice. Structures of authority fail him at every turn. Cops are unsympathetic from the moment they come onscreen, tearing up his testimony of getting mugged in the street. His landlord initially seems friendly and is willing to offer him money and charity, but only sees him as a potential voter to increase his friend’s political power. He also refuses to help him when his baby’s life depends on something as small as pasteurized milk, despite certainly having the money to do so. He only cared about how he can personally benefit from people he has power over and became indifferent to their suffering otherwise. Real-life Italian immigrants found community not in powerful outsiders but in “Little Italy” neighborhoods. People could navigate a new country with others who shared their religious practices, language, and food. In some regions of the US, these two influences clashed. For example, Michigan’s Ford Motor Company emphasized the self-made man in their film productions and moved employees away from ethnic communities and towards generalized working-class neighborhoods near Ford plants for the sake of cultural assimilation. His minimum wage of five dollars per day was high for the time, but the full $5 was contingent on “character requirements” like taking Americanization classes (if you were a recent immigrant) or not having a wife working outside the home. The politician in The Italian is representative of how authority figures, of which Ford provides a real-life mirror, may do nice things for their employees or constituents but are insufficient for all a person’s community needs due to the transactional power dynamic. 

Perhaps to ramp up the tension when the tragedy starts, Beppo is left to fend for himself during the lowest moments of his life despite having people who care about him. On the boat to America, a crowd dances to lift their spirits, but Beppo is set apart, left standing still and consumed by thoughts of his wife back in Italy. He’s not physically alone much when he settles in the US, and his neighbors form a similar community to the real Little Italies. They dote on the couple at their wedding and the birth of their son, celebrating during the happy times. But from a story perspective, they’re a throng of unnamed background or side characters the audience knows little about, making them seem less close to the main family than they’re implied to be in-universe. They’re not bad people, and occasionally help in small ways when things go wrong, they just have their own responsibilities and struggles like the protagonist does. Beppo’s neighbors have a less self-interested relationship with him than a politician or landlord, genuinely wanting to form a thriving community, but the narrative places them as peripheral to the plot. This is so they don’t become an easy solution to the tragedies late in the movie. They can’t prevent him from contemplating an extreme action like killing the child of the landlord whose inaction indirectly caused Beppo’s son’s death. He only calls off the plan because the wealthy child reminds him of his own son.

His wife and son are actually prominent characters, but also depend on him more than the other way around. The infant is completely at the mercy of adults around him for obvious reasons, but his wife Annette depends on him for more socially constructed ones. Both the narrative and the society she lives in takes for granted that the wife stays home and cares for children while the husband is the working breadwinner. It’s never contemplated as a possibility that she would be able to pay for the milk, putting the onus on her husband to do it from his own wages. His responsibilities became overwhelming, the odds too stacked against him, and the death of his baby even more of a crushing blow due to how preventable it was. After getting the money for the milk stolen, he can’t bring himself to go inside his house and face them.

The distance between Beppo and the other characters sets up his anger and grief to explain his contemplation of violence, but the framing device distances him, as well as real people who’ve had similar experiences of prejudice, from the audience in a way that undercuts itself. The opening and closing scenes depict a comfortable man in possession of a nice house, nice clothes, and a nonzero amount of leisure time who reads a book and dreams himself into the main story (he and Beppo are played by the same actor). You could argue it’s supposed to be a breather from the dark storylines to come, but the Italy-set parts of the movie that focus on comedy, escapist landscapes, and romantic rivalry already fill that function. The more plausible explanation is that movie studios wanted to appeal to both working-class immigrants and the middle class audience viewed as more “respectable” to maximize ticket sales. Once the action moves to New York, the film is meant to be a realistic (if heightened by melodrama) social problem story with much less focus on escapism. Emphasizing that this story is in fact fictional might prevent audiences from getting too uncomfortable or depressed, but it lessens the rest of the film’s urgency and tragedy. But at the end of the day, it’s a small part of the movie so it doesn’t erase or ruin the entire thing. Beppo experiences different types of community and lack thereof: authority figures fail him due to greed or prejudice, his neighbors are sympathetic but not major characters, and his family is depicted as heavily reliant on him. All this culminates into a snowballing series of tragedies which will take a huge amount of strength and support for anyone to recover from, if he ever can.

Sources

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-story-of-henry-fords-5-a-day-wages-its-not-what-you-think/

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/232015151.pdf

https://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1999/3/99.03.06/2

Black hands and white hearts: Italian immigrants as ‘urban racial types’ in early American film culture by Giorgio Bertellini 

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/A8188E40DDA25381A8C84638E566879B/S0021875821000542a.pdf/div-class-title-making-americans-spectacular-nationalism-americanization-and-silent-film-div.pdf

https://www.transatlantic-cultures.org/en/catalog/imigrantes-em-nova-iorque

https://umassdtorch.com/2019/03/07/life-as-an-italian-american-through-the-eyes-of-1915s-the-italian/

Italian-Americans’ Contested Whiteness in Early Cinematic Melodrama by Valerio Coladonato

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #13: Multiple SIDosis

Released 1970 / Inducted 2000

Watch film here

In some ways, this short film is a throwback by a middle-aged man remembering a past career that never quite panned out, down to the old-fashioned opening music resembling a carousel organ. The first segment, which runs a bit overlong in my opinion, depicts a Christmas morning, a holiday whose popular conception is tied to reminiscing with family and sharing traditions. While the depiction of creator Sid Laverents being gifted a sound recorder by his wife is most likely scripted, it calls to mind a common form of amateur filmmaking: the home movie. In 1923, Eastman Kodak launched the 16mm film format (the name referencing the width of the film itself). Compared to the 35mm format used by professionals, 16mm cameras were smaller, cheaper, and more mobile. Advertising for this type of camera emphasized ease of use for the average consumer who lacked specialized knowledge, and also the creation of private, domestic films of happy life events. While the first part sticks to what was expected of amateur filmmaking, the second part deviates into something else completely.

Laverents had played theaters and busked in the street as a one-man-band vaudeville performer. By roughly 1929, he aspired to make it in New York City. The city had a wealth of entertainment options which made it difficult for individual performers to stand out, and he was especially unable to compete with the recently introduced synchronized sound films. With the Depression on the horizon, he had to take any available job such as sales or dishwashing. Unlike some vaudevillians which found success transferring to film, his early work did not succeed in finding a wide audience in the public space of mainstream entertainment. By the 1960s, he was employed as an engineer at Convair, a part of the aircraft industry. When discussing his vaudeville past with coworkers, he was prompted to fix his instruments and recreate the act. This was the reason his 1964 film One Man Band exists. 

Made years later, Multiple SIDosis is a higher-tech riff on the same concept. Laverents heavily edits and plans out how to perform every instrument and vocalization of the 1910s Felix Arndt novelty ragtime song “Nola.” If this film had nothing going for it except nostalgia, it wouldn’t have gotten the same amount of later recognition. His ambition was to make the cinematic equivalent of Les Paul and Mary Ford’s multitrack recordings, in which they would record on the tape, play it back, and record it again so it sounded as if they were harmonizing against themselves. The number of different onscreen Sids increases throughout the film, peaking at eleven. The look of the film was created through a complex system of mattes. With each take, parts of the camera were blocked off save for a hole where one part of the song would be filmed. Then, he would record the next part on film through double exposures until all takes were completed. Since the whole thing was filmed in-camera without help from an optical printer, one mistake would throw off the entire enterprise. 

In 1960, movie writer Jonas Mekas predicted a total collapse of barriers between amateur and professional film in the future. This never fully came to be, but Laverents’ work offers a unique perspective on how amateurism shifted over the decades. He exhibited films to fellow members at the San Diego Amateur Movie Club, finding a community with likeminded interests. Many similar clubs faced difficulty with the advent of video, which existed in some form since at least the mid-60s with 1965’s Sony Portapak but really proliferated in the late 1980s. Video was supposed to make moviemaking more accessible, but many club members found the editing prohibitively complicated in comparison to cutting up film strips, especially once computer editing came around. Neither Laverents or the San Diego club quit here, though. The club lasted until the early 2000s, while Laverents continued making films into the same decade. By this time, younger generations were utilizing digital video, which offered similar visual quality to professional cameras, and desktop editing software such as Final Cut Premiere, Adobe Premiere, and i-Movie. (Also Windows Movie Maker, not that anyone would mistake my school projects on that software for a professional project). 

Social media became a route for amateur filmmakers to gain a higher visibility than ever before, especially YouTube, which launched four years before Sid Laverents’ 2009 death at age 100. Traditional media outlets exerted heavy influence over smaller creators through copyright claiming unauthorized remixes of their material, uploading officially sanctioned videos that compete with amateurs, and collecting user data for targeted advertising in new ways that didn’t exist in the era of pre-internet film clubs. Despite still-existing barriers and disparities in resources between studios and individuals, amateur filmmakers still make unique and creative art distinct from what the professionals are doing. Half the theater kids on that site unintentionally echo Multiple SIDosis in their own music videos, both in the editing structure and the general attitude of earnestness and sincerity.

This one’s a collaboration of two people instead of a one-man-band, but they still deploy similar person-harmonizing-with-himself techniques.

While Multiple SIDosis may not be among the most historically significant or well-known films on the registry, it’s a novelty that required a lot of technical expertise and innovation on less resources than the major studios had. Even if Laverents failed to “make it big” in entertainment in his youth, his recollections on that time ended up foreshadowing much later generations of amateur creators.

Sources

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/multiple-sidosis-and-disneyland-dream-two-amateur-masterpieces-1-180949236/

https://www.centerforhomemovies.org/other-histories/essays/multiple-sidosis-melinda-stone/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/im-short-not-stupid-presents-multiple-sidosis-456/

https://amianet.org/wp-content/uploads/Resources-Oral-History-Laverents-2006-1.pdf

https://cinema.usc.edu/archivedassets/098/15844.pdf

https://www.amateurcinema.org/index.php/filmmaker/s.-n.-laverents

[nfr-reviews]

Sources (cont.)

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

https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/all-about-16mm

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=92c5fb0ac8a6a4a692d92286d0c6718b374a9e9b#page=204

[nfr-reviews]

NFR Reviews #13: Multiple SIDosis

Released 1970 / Inducted 2000

Watch film here

In some ways, this short film is a throwback by a middle-aged man remembering a past career that never quite panned out, down to the old-fashioned opening music resembling a carousel organ. The first segment, which runs a bit overlong in my opinion, depicts a Christmas morning, a holiday whose popular conception is tied to reminiscing with family and sharing traditions. While the depiction of creator Sid Laverents being gifted a sound recorder by his wife is most likely scripted, it calls to mind a common form of amateur filmmaking: the home movie. In 1923, Eastman Kodak launched the 16mm film format (the name referencing the width of the film itself). Compared to the 35mm format used by professionals, 16mm cameras were smaller, cheaper, and more mobile. Advertising for this type of camera emphasized ease of use for the average consumer who lacked specialized knowledge, and also the creation of private, domestic films of happy life events. While the first part sticks to what was expected of amateur filmmaking, the second part deviates into something else completely.

Laverents had played theaters and busked in the street as a one-man-band vaudeville performer. By roughly 1929, he aspired to make it in New York City. The city had a wealth of entertainment options which made it difficult for individual performers to stand out, and he was especially unable to compete with the recently introduced synchronized sound films. With the Depression on the horizon, he had to take any available job such as sales or dishwashing. Unlike some vaudevillians which found success transferring to film, his early work did not succeed in finding a wide audience in the public space of mainstream entertainment. By the 1960s, he was employed as an engineer at Convair, a part of the aircraft industry. When discussing his vaudeville past with coworkers, he was prompted to fix his instruments and recreate the act. This was the reason his 1964 film One Man Band exists. 

Made years later, Multiple SIDosis is a higher-tech riff on the same concept. Laverents heavily edits and plans out how to perform every instrument and vocalization of the 1910s Felix Arndt novelty ragtime song “Nola.” If this film had nothing going for it except nostalgia, it wouldn’t have gotten the same amount of later recognition. His ambition was to make the cinematic equivalent of Les Paul and Mary Ford’s multitrack recordings, in which they would record on the tape, play it back, and record it again so it sounded as if they were harmonizing against themselves. The number of different onscreen Sids increases throughout the film, peaking at eleven. The look of the film was created through a complex system of mattes. With each take, parts of the camera were blocked off save for a hole where one part of the song would be filmed. Then, he would record the next part on film through double exposures until all takes were completed. Since the whole thing was filmed in-camera without help from an optical printer, one mistake would throw off the entire enterprise. 

In 1960, movie writer Jonas Mekas predicted a total collapse of barriers between amateur and professional film in the future. This never fully came to be, but Laverents’ work offers a unique perspective on how amateurism shifted over the decades. He exhibited films to fellow members at the San Diego Amateur Movie Club, finding a community with likeminded interests. Many similar clubs faced difficulty with the advent of video, which existed in some form since at least the mid-60s with 1965’s Sony Portapak but really proliferated in the late 1980s. Video was supposed to make moviemaking more accessible, but many club members found the editing prohibitively complicated in comparison to cutting up film strips, especially once computer editing came around. Neither Laverents or the San Diego club quit here, though. The club lasted until the early 2000s, while Laverents continued making films into the same decade. By this time, younger generations were utilizing digital video, which offered similar visual quality to professional cameras, and desktop editing software such as Final Cut Premiere, Adobe Premiere, and i-Movie. (Also Windows Movie Maker, not that anyone would mistake my school projects on that software for a professional project). 

Social media became a route for amateur filmmakers to gain a higher visibility than ever before, especially YouTube, which launched four years before Sid Laverents’ 2009 death at age 100. Traditional media outlets exerted heavy influence over smaller creators through copyright claiming unauthorized remixes of their material, uploading officially sanctioned videos that compete with amateurs, and collecting user data for targeted advertising in new ways that didn’t exist in the era of pre-internet film clubs. Despite still-existing barriers and disparities in resources between studios and individuals, amateur filmmakers still make unique and creative art distinct from what the professionals are doing. Half the theater kids on that site unintentionally echo Multiple SIDosis in their own music videos, both in the editing structure and the general attitude of earnestness and sincerity.

This one’s a collaboration of two people instead of a one-man-band, but they still deploy similar person-harmonizing-with-himself techniques.

While Multiple SIDosis may not be among the most historically significant or well-known films on the registry, it’s a novelty that required a lot of technical expertise and innovation on less resources than the major studios had. Even if Laverents failed to “make it big” in entertainment in his youth, his recollections on that time ended up foreshadowing much later generations of amateur creators.

Sources

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/multiple-sidosis-and-disneyland-dream-two-amateur-masterpieces-1-180949236/

https://www.centerforhomemovies.org/other-histories/essays/multiple-sidosis-melinda-stone/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/im-short-not-stupid-presents-multiple-sidosis-456/

https://amianet.org/wp-content/uploads/Resources-Oral-History-Laverents-2006-1.pdf

https://cinema.usc.edu/archivedassets/098/15844.pdf

https://www.amateurcinema.org/index.php/filmmaker/s.-n.-laverents

[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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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