In the previous post about the teaser/trailer that Courtney Stephens created for Orphans 2020, I noted her source materials had their own interesting orphan stories. News about the schedule for the late May symposium — Orphans Online — will be posted here in a few days. Meanwhile, a consideration of the short fragments used in the teaser sets up the issues we will be examining in depth — and suggests how neglected films can provoke thinking about water, climate, and migration.
The uncanny footage called If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt? — outtakes (Fox Movietone News, 1929) is our emblematic film. It succinctly announces the three themes. Water inundating the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty. Water from melting polar ice, no less. Melting due to a hypothetical climate change that would cause global warming. Public discourse on these issues and terms arose in the 1970s, but here’s evidence of their dawn in 1929. We’ll hear more about this unreleased footage in a presentation researched by NYU Cinema Studies students Shiyang Jiang, Zhen Lai, and Zoe Yang. For the occasion, Greg Wilsbacher at the University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections completed a new scan of the archival nitrate, which he will share as part of Orphans Online. We’ll see all ten minutes. (You can watch the footage on MIRC’s DVR, a version made by digitizing the videotape to which the film was first telecined. But the new 2k scan is stunning.)
Of course the statue first called Liberty Enlightening the World also signifies our third theme, migration, having become a symbol of immigration even before it was dedicated in 1886. Conspicuously, its meaning was contested in recent months by an acting head of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announcing new restrictions on immigration. (“Give me your tired and your poor – who can stand on their own two feet. . . .”) By contrast, in December 2019 the Librarian of Congress named the Edison actuality Emigrants [i.e. immigrants] Landing at Ellis Island (1903) to the National Film Registry.
A much less familiar film Stephens found for the teaser is Wild Fowl in Slow Motion, which dates from 1947. She uses two shots of migrating birds in flight (an American white pelican and Canada goose). Here’s the surviving portion from the indispensable Prelinger Archives (via AV Geeks).
The end credit is for Hawley-Lord, Inc., a New York-based producer-distributor of color films of “outdoor subjects” in 16mm and 8mm. The usual sources on educational films add that a company called Sterling Films released it. Only a record in WorldCat.org identified the director and photographer as Richard Borden. WorldCat identifies no libraries holding Wild Fowl in Slow Motion but lists a running time of 10 minutes for a 16mm print (in Kodachrome). The Prelinger copy runs 6:50 and is indeed missing opening titles. WorldCat names only one other film by Hawley-Lord, with a quintessentially “outdoorsman” title: Tie Your Own Flies (1948, director, Charles M. Wetzell [Wetzel]; photographer, George T. Richards. Kodachrome). However more than 600 titles are cataloged as Sterling Educational Films releases, ranging from 1945 to 2017. Sterling distributed a very wide variety of material, from Laurence Olivier’s feature Henry V (1944) to Paul Killiam’s 1965 condensation of D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm (1922), from Japan’s Geography (1962) to the race relations film Immigrant from America (1970).
While Educational Screen (June 1947) assessed that Wild Fowl in Slow Motion, from “an aesthetic viewpoint,” would interest high schoolers and “men’s clubs,” Educational Film Guide (1951) offered an opinion more likely shared by latter-day viewers: “With such excellent photography, it is unfortunate that the commentary is so pedestrian, even irritating at times in its lack of relationship to the pictures.”
Richard Borden himself had a far more interesting and lengthy career that took him from educational films to the mainstream of American film and television. A 1999 obituary in the Boston Globe revealed much. From the modest beginnings of Wild Fowl in Slow Motion, he went on to be hailed as “probably the world’s foremost bird photographer,” in a 1964 segment of The Wonderful World of Disney TV series. Borden contributed to Disney’s award-winning nature documentaries The Living Desert (1953) and The Vanishing Prairie (1954). In 1951 he was interviewed on Boston television between Red Sox baseball games. “I showed some duck film taken with the camera gun, which I invented.” From there his company was hired to film other teams and World Series games. Borden Productions and Sterling syndicated thirty 15-minute films for television in the series Wonders of the Wild (1954-55).
By happy accident, in trying to identify the maker of the slow-motion Wild Fowl film of 1947, I first hit upon the wrong person, but one worth knowing about. Richard E. Bishop (1887-1975) was also featured in a 1948 film about using a camera-gun to make slow-motion films of wild fowl. The Oddball Films stock footage website featured a three-minute video labeled “clip/12567_wildlife_photographer” (since removed).
The source was not identified but described this way.
An old man is seen wearing a suit jacket and hat, taking photographs with a large camera shaped like a rifle (gun) and pressing a trigger. He shoots wild fowl in slow motion, flying and splashing water near a forest of trees. The man films game birds and a mallard in flight and landing. He also sees a flock of Canadian geese and fowl running on the water. Another bird flies over its reflection in the water. Next to a running film reel, the photographer draws a picture of a duck with colored pencils and later paints.
The Oddball clip features a familiar-sounding narrator in conventional Hollywood mode. With some additional research, I was able to identify it as a segment from a 1948 edition of the series of shorts Unusual Occupations. Produced by Jerry Fairbanks (Scientific Films), narrated by Ken Carpenter, and distributed by Paramount, the theatrical series ran from 1937 to 1949.
Indeed Bishop used high-speed cinematography (128 frames per second) primarily as an aid in his artwork, creating popular series of wildlife images (ducks above all) rendered as paintings, drawings, etchings, glassware, and (yes, Fargo like) duck stamps. Of course photographic technology had aided the artistic representation of birds and other animals since the 1870s, advanced by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey with his chronophotographic gun.
Like Richard Borden, Richard Bishop (an engineer) developed his own motion-picture camera to facilitate his work. That same year, he illustrated the book Prairie Wings: Pen And Camera Flight Studies (1947) for documentary filmmaker and industrialist Edgar M. Queeny (M for Monsanto, subject of a 2004 Orphan Film Symposium presentation by Amy J. Staples). In 1950, Bishop was part of the American Museum of Natural History Museum’s Queeny African Expedition, which featured his wildlife footage in the museum’s film The Pagan Sudan (1952).
Bishop and Borden were conservationists. Wild Fowl in Slow Motion makes conservation a direct appeal in its narration about migrating water birds. Throughout the twentieth century many such makers of industrial, sponsored, educational, nontheatrical, and other nonfiction films documented the movement of human beings and other animals across the world. It is this unintended collective and its enormous body of under-examined film work that keeps twenty-first century researchers, archivists, and media makers ever busy. Small revelations such as Wild Fowl in Slow Motion and uncanny gems like the outtakes from If the Antarctic Ice Caps Should Melt continue to invigorate the orphan film project, even amid the current Troubles and our concerns about the planet we inhabit. ♦
Envoi
Here’s a hasty, loopy home-made video homage to our bird photographers.
Muybridge’s ostrich and cockatoo (1887) meet an excerpt from the film Pennsylvania Looks Ahead (1940) made for the U of Penn Bicentennial Committee by the industrial film firm De Frenes and Company.
The name of cinematographer Joseph De Frenes is not well known, but he collaborated with notable leaders in nonfiction film history. Discovered by travelogue maestro Burton Holmes in Italy, De Frenes moved to London and became the leading camera operator for Charles Urban. For the Urban-African Expedition of 1906-08, he shot more than 50 films across the continent. In 1911, he and Urban led the ambitious Kinemacolor recordings in Delhi, India, documenting the lavish ceremonies and coronation of King George V as emperor of India (e.g., With Our King and Queen, 1912). While in Pennsylvania to set up the Kinemacolor Company of America, De Frenes went to work for the pioneering film lecturer Lyman Howe. His livelihood was otherwise made in decades of industrial filmmaking for hire.
These credits give an idea of how broad the field of sponsored films was. Each has the De_Frenes name on it in some form.
Striking Tires (B.F. Goodrich, 1920) Bosworth, DeFrenes, and Felton (BDF);
A Movie Trip Through Filmland (1921) directed by Joseph DeFrenes, produced by Bosworth, DeFrenes & Co. Made in cooperation with Eastman Kodak, documenting how celluloid film was manufactured at Kodak Park in Rochester, New York. Restored by George Eastman Museum.
(French-language version streams here: Un voyage à travers le pays du film.)
Some Impressions on the Subject of Thrift (BDF, 1924) by cartoonist Paul M. Felton; the film might not survive, but this continuity sheet was part of the copyright deposit.
Later productions came from his DeFrenes Studio in Philadelphia, including Goodbye, Mr. Germ and They Do Come Back (National Tuberculosis Association, 1940), best known today because directed by B-movie auteur Edgar G. Ulmer. The brand continued into the 1960s until merging with the Calvin Company, among the largest makers of industrial, educational, and advertising films.
For mor on De Frenes, see Arthur Edwin Krows, “Motion Pictures Not for Theatres,” Educational Screen, June 1940; and Luke McKernan’s 2013 book Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925, which includes a photograph of De Frenes on the cover [front right].)
Photo: McKernan Collection.
Also see the rich companion website, charlesurban.com.
