Scenes of the City: The Production and Preservation History of Films from the George Amberg and Robert Gessner Papers

April 2020
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Apr 28, 2020 by Michael Grant in Barbara Goldsmith Preservation and Conservation Department

In Fall 2007, the Media Preservation Unit received nine cans of 35mm film elements from the George Amberg and Robert Gessner Papers (MC.199), a collection housed in the New York University Archives. In total, the cans contained 82 bundles of film, each comprised of short lengths tightly wound together and wrapped in paper slips with vaguely descriptive handwritten labels.

original paper labels (George Amberg and Robert Gessner Papers, MC.199)

The films, shot in striking black and white, appeared to be actuality footage of mid-20th New York City. All were under 100 feet in length, and most much shorter — projected, the majority of these scenes would be less than a minute in duration. From 2007-2008, five student workers from the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program inspected and rehoused the films, splicing the films from each bundle together onto cores, one core per bundle, with a length of “slug” leader inserted between each length of film. (“Slug” is a section of blank film used to replace missing picture frames, or for spacing between multiple pieces of film built up into a single reel.) The labels were transcribed into a spreadsheet, and further research was attempted with the information gleaned from them. The phrase “Around Town” appeared on many of the labels, and this was taken to be perhaps the title of the film for which this footage was shot; unfortunately, no film by that name could be found with any connection to Amberg and Gessner, or matching the approximate dates and character of the content. Without further information about the films’ provenance or potential rights holders, future uses of the films seemed elusive. From that time until the present, they were stored in the Media Preservation Unit’s media vault, a tantalizing oddity without a clear identity or use.

In early 2018, the Media Preservation Unit obtained a Lasergraphics ScanStation film scanner and, over the course of the following year, developed workflows and standards for in-house film scanning projects. Due to their convenient location in our department’s vault, their obvious aesthetic value, and faculty interest from Professor Dan Streible (due to the connection to NYU Cinema Studies pioneers Amberg and Gessner,) the collection was selected as a test case for applying these new scanning practices.

In preparation to scan the films, we reinspected them and found a couple of common issues that needed to be addressed prior to scanning. First, some sections were accidentally spliced together head-to-head or tail-to-tail, which we corrected so that we could run the reels continuously through the scanner. Additionally, we found that when the student workers built up the reels a decade ago, they did not always count the perforations on the leader. Standard 35mm movie film has four perfs per frame, so if you insert slug between two lengths of film, you need to make sure that the leader is cut in multiples of four perforations; otherwise, a frame line will appear in the middle of the second segment. In order to scan each reel continuously, we had to count the perfs on each slug and cut out sections of slug to bring them down to the nearest multiple of 4. This can be seen in the illustration below:

Film with miscounted slug leader

Illustration showing film with corrected slug, and consequently correct frameline

Film with corrected slug leader

An early discovery in the process of scanning was that several shots contained identifying slates, indicating that the film was produced by “Affiliated Film Producers Inc”, directed by “Van Dyke” and shot by “Leacock”. We tentatively assumed that this referred to the documentarians Willard van Dyke and Richard Leacock, and a passage in (Richard) Leacock’s book, The Feeling of Being There: A Filmmaker’s Memoir, confirmed that he and (Willard) Van Dyke worked together at Affiliated in the early 1950s. This placed the Amberg/Gessner association into a less clear light, but rather increased the excitement about the footage: we could always see that the images were lovely, but now they were no less than lovely images shot by Ricky Leacock for an unknown film by Willard Van Dyke! This was amazing!

The Van Dyke/Leacock slate, followed by amazing footage of building construction
(MC.199, ref285) This reel, like many in the collection, consists of several (nine) small
pieces of film, not in order; this clip is digitally reconstructed in sequence.

As we scanned, we found relatively little by way of concrete clues as to the film’s identity, but we found a lot of amazing footage of 1950s NYC. Chinatown, MoMA, the 7 coming into Queensboro Plaza… but there’s no use in my just listing things, this is the part where I get to show you some footage! And find even more at the bottom of this post!

Footage depicting trains on the 7 line coming into Queensboro Plaza.
(MC.199, ref572-104, 572-099, 575-107, 572-102)

Street scenes in Chinatown
(MC.199, ref654-221, 655-222)

The Museum of Modern Art, cannily luring patrons with the promise of AIR CONDITIONED GALLERIES
(MC.199, 542-33, 526-003, 537-024, 537-022, 537-021, 537-025, 537-022, 537-026, 537-023)

Pedestrians walking near the United Nations
(MC.199, 545-36, 545-43, 545-39, 545-42, 545-40, 545-38, 545-42, 526-005, 545-41, 545-37, 545-44)

Late in the scanning process, our student worker Danielle Calle (who performed the scanning and slug adjustments on many of the films) sent some stills to Professor Streible, knowing of his interest in the collection. By a remarkable stroke of luck, he recognized some of them from a film he had seen in an incomplete version at the Library of Congress. That film was entitled New York University, directed by Van Dyke, and commissioned by the NYU Alumni Association. We reviewed a digital copy of the LOC film, and found that a great deal of the footage—indeed, nearly all of the NYC location shots!—were present in the Amberg Gessner films. Streible subsequently shared with us some notes that he had on New York University, including one that “[former MIAP student] Jonah Volk found files at NARA, documenting that New York University was distributed by the U.S. Information Agency [and] translated into multiple languages.”

With that in mind, we searched the National Archives’s catalog and found at least three copies of the film held there. The head of our unit, Kim Tarr, put in a request with NARA to have the film scanned, and we received a copy last month, which confirmed all. The shots in the Amberg Gessner films tally quite precisely with the location shots in New York University, which was indeed directed by Willard Van Dyke, shot by Richard Leacock, produced by Affiliated Film Producers for the NYU Alumni Federation, and distributed by the United States Information Service. At last, a positive identification!

Decades later, Van Dyke and Leacock had little good to say about the work they were doing at this period in their careers. Of the years after World War II, Van Dyke lamented that:

With McCarthy engaged in a witch hunt, anything that was not chauvinistically patriotic was considered communist. I wound up making films on mental health, marriage, and courtship, things of that kind. … I think of myself as an artist who, for a long period, prostituted or forgot or neglected the qualities that I had as an artist. And those were lost years.
[Conversations with Willard Van Dyke, dir. Amalie R. Rothschild, 1981. Distributed by New Day Films. Available on Kanopy.]

Leacock, who was at that time nearer the beginning of his career than the end, reflected on it with more humor:

In 1950 I went to work with Affiliated Films (we sometimes called it Afflicted Films) and we made public information “Documentary” films for the Department of State, Industrial films for industry and Mental Health films for the Mental Health Film Board. To this day it is not clear to me who looked at these films. The form now was scripted films with a lot of dialogue. At first we went to “real” places and used “real” people to act the written parts. They were not very good at it. The same problem that we had in Louisiana. So, we started using actors and that seemed better. But again, we couldn’t afford very good actors…. we had discovered a new form, the soap-opera! We were making grade-Z fiction films. And it was like a miniature Hollywood location shoot. Tons of heavy equipment moved into “real” homes in order to systematically destroy what we had set out to record.
[“Life on the Other Side of the Moon”, Richard Leacock, 1990. https://bit.ly/2XZhoux]

New York University certainly answers to that description. Its acted scenes are corny, and as a piece it is an interesting relic of its time, but it is only what you would expect: a recruiting film for NYU. But the discovery of the actuality footage shot on location for New York University, removed from the context of the film itself, reveals something of the value of non-narrative location shots. As Thom Andersen argued in Los Angeles Plays Itself, “if we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for their documentary revelations.” Indeed, it may be that New York University offers little to expand one’s consciousness (though its principal argument is that studying at NYU will do just that), but the raw footage shot for it, which now comprises the “Amberg Gessner” films, goes much further in documenting the sights and textures of the city in 1952!

Postscript: When this post was already complete, a curious coincidence emerged: On tapes from the Flaherty Film Seminar, also held by NYU Special Collections, George Amberg discusses his efforts in the early 1960s to preserve all of the unused footage from Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story, also shot by Leacock. That effort was explicitly motivated by an interest in studying the filmmaker’s process, which makes more sense with Louisiana Story—generally recognized as a masterpiece—than for New York University. Still, one could apply the same methodology to the NYU film as an academic exercise, and the coincidence is certainly remarkable!

Pedestrians Crossing the Street
(MC.199, ref563)