Here’s the full US NARA reel (4:26) excerpted in Bill Morrison’s Sunken Films, debuted at the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium. The NARA YouTube channel published this in 2015, with the assigned title S.S. Lusitania Leaves New York City on Last Voyage. No head title is on the film itself.
The archival record does not identify the original source of the footage. NARA catalogs it as Historical Film, No. 1221.
Who shot it? The paper work from the deposit of elements in 1936 is scanned into the catalog record. The War Department memoranda and Signal Corps Photo Lab records contain internal changes and corrections. Initially, the material was misdated as 1916, named the ship as a U.S. vessel, and a passenger as writer “Elbert Hubert.” The corrected details about author Hubbard and the Cunard steamship in 1915 made it into the record, although the film print chose to omit the year that the May 1st footage was shot.
The catalog title for Historical Film 1221 uses a variation on the three titles typed into the 1936 records:
“U.S. Lusitania Leaves New York City on Last Voyage,”
“S.S. LUSITANIA leaving New York on last voyage,”
“U.S. LUSITANIA Leaves N.Y. City on Last Voyage.”
To his credit, Bill Morrison uses a more correct descriptive title: RMS Lusitania Leaves New York City on Last Voyage, May 1, 1915. Officially, Britain’s Lusitania was designated a Royal Mail Ship.
The intertitles in the footage may have originated with the 1936 lab work. The memo from Major M. E. Gillette instructed the laboratory: “Reduce titles to tell-tale length.” The shot list designates 6 of these tell-tale titles as “T.T.T.” — a fun and curious abbreviation I’d not seen before. (Although the informal term appears in earlier literature, Tell-Tale Title entered library science terminology with S. R. Ranganathan’s influential Classified Catalogue Code in 1934. “Title that discloses the subject of the work.”)
Although the Signal Corps and National Archives do not identify the newsreel footage, the source is certainly the Hearst-Selig newsreel service.
Another place casual viewers are likely to see this 1915 footage of Lusitania is the YouTube channel of Guy Jones. Since 2015, Jones has been taking historical film footage harvested online, then enhancing and altering it for contemporary eyes and ears. In 2018, the channel posted the NARA footage with the annotation “Slowed down/worked on footage and added in sound for ambiance.”
Numerous YouTubers are making a cottage industry out of this practice, taking historical film recordings (especially silent-era footage) and artificially “up-ressing” files, changing (“correcting”) speeds, and making more obvious interventions — adding sound effects, music, and color.
All of which contrasts with what has made Bill Morrison’s treatment of archival footage admired by archivists, historians, and others. Rather than seeking to make “old film” look “better” he finds powerful images and trusts them to do their work, without alteration. Other than occasional speed adjustments, Morrison’s films respect the integrity of originals.
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