The Ways of Water
(Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corp., 1971)
16mm, color, sound, 13 min.
Cinematographer: Les Blank
Provided with permission from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. (c)1971 by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Thanks to Rachael Stoeltje, Director of Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive, the symposium was able to screen a high-quality digital copy of this exceptional work, made from a 16mm print from IU’s large collection of distribution prints of educational films. Film Digitization Specialist Carmel Curtis did the scanning. Further, due to Stoeltje’s work with Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., the rights holder granted permission to keep The Ways of Water streaming as part of Orphans Online for six months. Further still, she agreed on short notice to join the symposium on camera to introduce the film.
Our first day, dedicated to Water, concluded with this quiet beautiful work.
https://vimeo.com/420926918
Provided with permission from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. (c)1971
by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
My note for the 2011 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar screening:
From its founding in 1943, Encyclopaedia Britannica Films developed a reputation for making classroom films of quality. Working on its nearly one thousand productions were some exceptional documentary filmmakers. Some, such as John Barnes and Tom Smith, spent much of their careers at EBF. Others, such as Haskell Wexler, experienced Britannica’s educational filmmaking as a training ground. Still others took on freelance contract work for the company when their own film financing was lacking. Such was the case with Les Blank, who did extensive camera work on this film.
The Ways of Water was made with the Earth Science Curriculum Project and the Environmental Studies Project of the American Geological Institute. A study of the water cycle on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, the narrator-less, poetic film is enriched by Blank’s characteristically graceful and fluid camera movements. Its musical soundtrack was created using an analog synthesizer.
With Les Blank as guest artist at the Flaherty Seminar I programmed, I wanted to show this little-known short. The filmmaker himself did not have a copy, but when he came to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh in 1997, faculty member Doug Heil showed the 16mm print he owned. Fourteen years later, he loaned it for the Flaherty screening. When the opening title appeared on screen, some seminarians groaned upon seeing the Britannica brand, presuming a boring educational film would follow. But The Ways of Water won them over, with loud cheers when the name Les Blank appeared in the closing credits.
Widely seen throughout American schools for three generations, prints of EB productions were sold and rented to schools by the thousands. Despite this former ubiquity, finding copies of particular titles is more difficult than one might presume.
Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive has changed all that. For a decade now IU has been a leader in matters of media preservation, digitization, and active use of materials other institutions saw as obsolete, especially 16mm educational films. The university had historically been a distribution hub for these. Slates identifying prints from the’s university’s Audio-Visual Center can still be found on copies, including of course those scanned by IULMIA.
As Stoeltje reported at the symposium, in the last 3 years, IU’s mass digitization project has scanned no less than 17,862 films. Of those 1,806 are Encyclopaedia Britannica titles (of which 579 are confirmed to be in the public domain).
Some stream only for users with IU IDs. Others are now viewable for all. The current list of streaming titles approaches 2,000, dating back to 1927. A search for “britannica” yields 57 films.
And among those, as it happens, one in eight are about water:
City Water Supply (1946), What Makes Rain? (1946), The Water Cycle (1946), Ground Water (1947), Arteries of Life (1948), Your Friend the Water: Clean or Dirty (1950), Water and What It Does (1962).
[For an extended version of this post, see More Ways of Water via IULMIA, June 10, 2020.]