A postscript to the post about Anke Mebold’s screening of An Atlantic Voyage, the multicolored, silent-era compilation of travelogues from the early twentieth century, produced by ?? in the year ??.
The Orphans Online program listing calls this stand-alone segment Envoi & Bon Voyage!
An excited sentiment that required the rare exclamation point. In addition to including a film literally about a ship carrying travelers on a touristic voyage, the session was a cheerful, celebratory ending to the four days of screenings and talks that characterize all the Orphan Film Symposiums heretofore. The term envoi is a rare one in English prose. I saw this usage for the first time in the table of contents of the 1985 book The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. After 7 voluminous parts and 626 pages comes a simple entry, Envoi. I had to look it up. Concluding words. A final stanza. A dedication. An afterword. A poetic final touch. This is what An Atlantic Voyage seemed to be as it wrapped up four days with some 80 presenters and dozens of films. As I discussed in this International Archives Day post, the film rhymed with the symposium’s opening piece, If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt? (1929). Both evoked the Water, Climate, and Migration themes. The encore for the Statue of Liberty was a pleasing note, an envoi.
In The Classical Hollywood Cinema, the envoi (pages 627-28) consists only of a portion of short speeches made at a banquet of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers in New York, October 22, 1930 [Journal of the SMPE 16.2 (1931 ): 236-37]. MPPDA president Will Hays introduces three guests. Paul Gulick, publicity director at Universal Studios, tells the engineers who caused the sound “revolution” in the movie business, “you don’t look revolutionary to me.” Soviet Revolution celebrant Sergei Eisenstein advises Hollywood that a “university or high school of motion pictures” would advance “research on the artistic side,” and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was a step in that direction. Segue to “Mr. John Wayne,” star of 1930’s The Big Trail, who gets the last word: “I hope everything is going to be ‘ok’ with sound.” The envoi relishes the collision of opposites: Eisenstein Meets John Wayne, refereed by the Hays Office.
The near absurdity of the occasion is reminiscent of another moment, documented in newsreel outtakes, when Will Hays also presided at a Fox Studio ceremony, in January 1928. Dedicating a new building on the Fox lot that would host writers for the new talkies, Hays was present when house director John Ford stepped forward and robustly welcomed “Leon Trotsky of the Soviet Republic!” to the studio. 
The assembled Fox players seem confused, particularly when a goateed figure comes to the Movietone microphone and addresses the filmgoing audience in Russian, with no translation. Spoiler: the faux Trotsky was promoting Raoul Walsh’s The Red Dance (1928), set in the Russian revolution. He graces the cover of The Moving Image (Spring 2009), an issue on Orphan Films, with essays derived from presentations at the 2008 Orphan Film Symposium. The footage is viewable at the University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections DVR (“Dedication of ‘Park Row'” — outtakes). Storyboarded and transcribed footage here.
The CHC envoi passage with Hays-Eisenstein-Wayne is allowed to speak for itself. Unspoken is that a month earlier, September 17, 1930, Eisenstein gave a notable talk at an Academy symposium on “wide film,” held at the Fox studio. Sergei Mikhailovich referenced Walsh and Wayne’s The Big Trail, then about to be released as a Fox Grandeurvision 70mm film, with 2.1:1 aspect radio. He warned about a “passive horizontalism” in widescreen cinema aesthetics, arguing for a consideration of verticality.
A version of his talk was published in the film journal Close Up (March and June 1931) under the title “The Dinamic Square,” and later more widely read as “The Dynamic Square” in Film Essays and a Lecture (1968, 1970), edited by Jay Leyda.
Questions about S.M.E.’s argument aside — how is the Academy aspect ratio of 1.33:1 a square? and how is a square vertical? — one wonders how the gentlemen of the Hollywood technical professions responded to the provocative words of the Russian director speaking to them in English about “all the possibilities of vertical, upright composition.”
It is my purpose to defend the cause of . . . compositional possibilities exiled from the light of the screen. It is my desire to intone the hymn of the male, the strong, the virile, active, vertical composition! . . .
I am not anxious to enter into the dark phallic [!] and sexual ancestry of the vertical shape as symbol of growth, strength, or power. It would be too easy and possibly too offensive for many a delicate hearer!
Was this received with some shock? or did it get a men’s club kind of laugh? were any of the SMPE brotherhood aware of the Soviet visitor’s sexual orientation? Perhaps a subject for Orphans 2022.
If this envoi about another envoi seems to digress too far, we in fact end with the return of leitmotifs established in An Atlantic Voyage: Von Hamburg zu den Niagarafällen mit dem Schnelldampfer Kaiser Wilhelm II. On September 17, 1929, exactly one year before Eisenstein spoke at the wide film symposium, Fox Grandeurvision’s 70mm format made its debut as a Fox Movietone newsreel program. At the Gaiety Theater in New York, it opened with scenes of Niagara Falls and footage of SS Leviathan, the transatlantic ocean liner launched from Hamburg in 1914 as Vaterland (until seized in wartime by the US Navy in 1917 and renamed). More satisfying still for the Orphan Film Symposium 2020 farewell, Fox newsreel cinematographers returned to New York Harbor with 70mm film and recorded the Statue of Liberty.
