Tom Turk and Daffy
(Chuck Jones, US 1944, 7 min., 35mm nitrate, sound, three-color Technicolor)
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Apple Andy
(Dick Lundy, US 1946, 7 min., 35mm nitrate, sound, three-color Technicolor)
Print source: Library of Congress, Culpeper, VA
In the mid-1940s, Daffy Duck was metamorphosing. While early characterizations endowed the duck with an explosive, manic energy, director Chuck Jones began to rein in these screwball aspects during his Looney Tunes tenure, replacing them with human neuroses and insecurities. Jones later recalled Daffy as being “[the character] whose behavior I most clearly recognize and for whom I have the greatest affinity and understanding.”
Tom Turk and Daffy has a hunter-and-quarry setup (an evergreen Looney Tunes premise), previously employed to officially introduce Daffy in the 1937 film Porky’s Duck Hunt. This time Porky is instead after Tom Turk, a turkey, whom Daffy readily (and violently!) helps hide from the porcine predator. Tempted by Porky’s description of his dinner, Daffy betrays Tom Turk’s trust and soon finds himself at the wrong end of the pig’s musketoon. With its nonstop slapstick, Tom Turk and Daffy exemplifies the fever-pitch tempo of the Looney Tunes formula operating at full bore.
Born out of the American panda craze of the 1930s, Andy Panda was introduced to audiences as a cutesy baby bear in 1939’s Life Begins for Andy Panda. Walter Lantz had visited panda Su Lin soon after the bear’s arrival at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo, and his resulting sketches and footage formed the basis for the early Andy designs. In the mid-1940s, ex-Disney director Dick Lundy brought his ample experience to the panda, exchanging the character’s original childish qualities for a plucky agelessness à la Mickey Mouse.
Lundy’s distinctive affinity for dance is on display in Apple Andy, another tale of temptation, from the finger-wagging red apple crooner to the company of strut-kicking apple core Rockettes. Additionally, LaVerne Harding, one of the earliest female studio animators in the United States, gives a frolicsome personality to each of the angels, apples, and demons that populate the short. Unfortunately, despite the high technical quality of Apple Andy and many of the Lundy-Andy films, Andy was soon playing second fiddle to the Lantz studio’s rising star Woody Woodpecker, and his series would be put to rest in early 1949.
This print of Tom Turk and Daffy features a moderate number of splices (13), a small number of edge damages, and a shrinkage of 0.55%. Apple Andy has no splices and a shrinkage of 0.45%.
– Kirk McDowell
Imogene Coca Screen Test
(US 1936, 4 min., 35mm nitrate, sound, b/w)
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Imogene Coca never intended to be a comedian. A fixture of comedy television from the 1950s through the 1980s, Coca has had an acknowledged and plainly apparent influence on a generation of comedians, including Carol Burnett and Lily Tomlin. Her own entry into comedy, however, was completely accidental, born out of a cold theater and a borrowed coat.
During downtime while rehearsing for New Faces, a 1934 Broadway revue showcasing fresh talent, Coca and a few of her co-stars (including a pre-Hollywood Henry Fonda) began goofing around. Coca—having borrowed a large camel hair polo coat to weather the chilly Fulton theater—began imitating a dance step and swiftly turned it into a mock striptease. The routine caught the eye of the show’s director Leonard Sillman, who put it in the production as an interstitial act, much to Coca’s dismay. She had been hired as a dancer, not a comedian!
Despite her reluctance, audiences responded enthusiastically to the polo-coat hijinks, and the routine, which she would develop throughout her career, became a staple of Coca’s repertoire. She performed it in her first film short, Bashful Ballerina (1937); performed it for television on The Admiral Broadway Revue (1949); and was still performing it onstage well into her eighties, at the tail end of her career.
Imogene Coca’s strip act—like all humor, philosophers would suggest—works on incongruity. Coca appears to perform the familiar motions of a striptease, such as removing her undergarments, but by clinging to her enormous coat throughout, these traditionally titillating gestures are made ridiculous: they do not serve their purpose. Of course, the very idea of a “modest striptease” is oxymoronic, and Coca inhabits the contradiction brilliantly, giving many a suggestive wink between embarrassed facepalms and head shaking.
This short screen test, made for David O. Selznick in 1936, includes the earliest filmed version of the “modest striptease” act, as well as a song from New Faces of 1936, “Miss Mimsey,” which satirizes ballet, a frequent focal point of Coca’s comedy. The print features light scratches throughout, with 3 splices and a shrinkage level just over 1%. However, it poses no problems to projection. Although the test ends abruptly, it appears to be essentially complete.
– Kirk McDowell
Selznick Home Movie
(Unknown, US 1944, 8 min., 35mm nitrate, silent, b/w)
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
There are few home movies on nitrocellulose film stock—and for good reason. The home-movie industry was predicated on its use of non-flammable “safety” film, for there was serious concern about the flammability of celluloid, especially celluloid in the hands of amateurs. As early as 1912, in a letter to Thomas Edison regarding his Home Kinetoscope, George Eastman wrote that “the furnishing of cellulose nitrate for such a purpose would be wholly indefensible and reprehensible.” Kodak’s 16mm safety film system introduced in 1923—and the 8mm system that followed in 1932—effectively democratized filmmaking for middle-class families, making home movies a feasible (and safe) endeavor for more people than ever before.
If anyone were to film their home movies on 35mm nitrate stock, however, it was David O. Selznick. As a producer of large-scale, lavish cinematic works, it is perhaps not surprising that Selznick chose to film his personal life with the same film gauge used for his features. In contrast to his professional filmmaking focus on historical events and exotic settings, the Selznick home movies depict the usual, quotidian home movie subjects: birthdays, holidays, and vacations.
This film captures a children’s party (possibly Danny Selznick’s 8th birthday) at the Selznicks’ Summit Drive residence in Beverly Hills, likely in spring or summer 1944. Children participate in a number of yard games (including cornhole, an egg-and-spoon race, a feather float contest, and an unshelled “peanut hunt”), while the adults congregate nearby under a covered porch. Irene Mayer Selznick was reportedly a lifelong fan of games, and her readiness to facilitate the day’s activities is clearly apparent. David O. Selznick, seated at a porch table, is visible making notes, perhaps related to Spellbound, which went into production in early July. As this was filmed one year before David and Irene would separate over his affair with starlet Jennifer Jones, viewers may also read connubial tension in the archetypical home-movie images. Although Irene maintained she was unaware of David’s affair until he confessed in early 1945, the relationship had been common knowledge in Hollywood for some time.
With one splice and a low shrinkage rating of 0.62%, this print has perhaps the best condition of any film in this year’s Nitrate Picture Show.
– Kirk McDowell
Kreise
[Circles]
(Oskar Fischinger, Germany 1933–1934, 2 min., 35mm nitrate, sound, Gasparcolor)
Print source: Library of Congress, Culpeper, VA
Komposition in Blau
[Composition in Blue]
(Oskar Fischinger, Germany 1935, 4 min., 35mm nitrate, sound, Gasparcolor)
Print source: Library of Congress, Culpeper, VA
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Oskar Fischinger was undoubtedly the most celebrated creator of abstract films. His “visual music” shorts were widely distributed all over the world and often outshined the features they accompanied. Fischinger’s “studies” demonstrated combinations of shifting, delicate curves moving through space (“dancing lines,” as critics dubbed them), as well as simple geometric shapes either fully illuminated or partially immersed in shadow, which provided a distinct textural quality to the images.
One of the reasons behind the popularity of Fischinger’s films is his choice of musical accompaniment: light jazz and classical hits, such as opera overtures or Brahms’s Hungarian Dances. It was a deliberate commitment to aesthetic accessibility. Fischinger was convinced that, sooner or later, abstract cinema would supersede narrative film, so he strove—patiently and non-aggressively—to get the audience accustomed to this cinema of tomorrow. Indeed, many great filmmakers of the next generation were lured into avant-garde precisely by Fischinger’s energetic oeuvre; among them Alexandre Alexeieff, Mary Ellen Bute, Karel Dodal and Irena Dodalová, Len Lye, and Norman McLaren.
Fischinger enthusiastically embraced the arrival of color and was instrumental in the development of Gasparcolor—Europe’s vibrant answer to Technicolor. His Kreise is considered the first theatrically distributed Gasparcolor film. Like many avant-garde filmmakers, he made a living creating commercials (Kreise was initially released as an ad for... an ad agency, Tolirag), but every now and then, he carved out time to work on a pure experiment. Of those, Komposition in Blau, with its innovative combination of graphic and three-dimensional animation, has always stood out.
In the mid-1930s, the avant-garde was proclaimed “degenerate art” in Fischinger’s native Germany, and he immigrated to the US, where some of his most significant films would be created with support from what is now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Guggenheim acquired a substantial collection of Fischinger’s works; eventually the nitrate prints, including these two, were transferred to the Library of Congress. Kreise and Komposition in Blau show a similar shrinkage range of 0.3% to 1.2%. While the former is in excellent condition, the latter contains 17 splices and a fair amount of edge damage.
– Peter Bagrov
Berliner Stilleben
[Berlin Still Life]
(László Moholy-Nagy, Germany 1926–1932, 10 min. at 20 frames per sec., 35mm nitrate, silent, b/w)
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Upon moving to Berlin in 1920, the Hungarian-born artist László Moholy-Nagy was inspired by the city’s vibrant art scene, which had become an epicenter of culture in the aftermath of World War I. Moholy-Nagy had been building a portfolio of drawings and paintings that ranged from Expressionist portraits to Modernist abstract and geometric illustrations. In the next few years, he became deeply influenced by Soviet Constructivism and expanded his practice to include sculpture, design, printmaking, photography, and filmmaking.
Moholy-Nagy first developed an idea for a city film with his 1922 graphic print, Dynamik der Gross-Stadt. As a concept storyboard, the illustration provides insight into his thoughts about the cinema as an art capable of evoking the spontaneous bustle of a modern city. Shortly afterward, in 1923, Moholy-Nagy received an invitation from Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus, the revolutionary German design school that Gropius founded in 1919. While at the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy became an influential presence through his teaching of Vorkurs, the mandatory introductory design course within the Bauhaus curriculum.
In the latter part of the 1920s, having established himself as a Bauhaus instructor and multidisciplinary artist, Moholy-Nagy began making a group of films that included Berliner Stilleben. Forgoing the anchor of a tripod, his hand-held camera was kept buoyant as he recorded impressions of Weimar-era Berlin street life. Among the notable locations visited is the Meyers Hof, Berlin’s massive tenement complex erected in 1874. Moholy-Nagy shows the structure’s hierarchy of numbered sections that served as descending levels of class barriers for the residents. Within these social observations, he included sequences of playing children, laborers at work, and a street performer singing along with her gramophone. Before leaving Germany in 1934, Moholy-Nagy completed a trio of socially conscious city documentaries that also includes Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (1929) and Gross-Stadt Zigeuner (1932).
This is the artist’s original workprint on different stocks (Agfa, Lignose, and Zeiss Ikon), with cement splices present at every shot change, many of them slightly misaligned vertically. All this, and a shrinkage range from 0.5% to 1.3%, make this print particularly challenging for a projectionist.
– Gordon Nelson
Footage of Atomic Blast at Nagasaki
(Walter Goodman and Lawrence Johnston, US 1945, 3 min., 35mm nitrate, silent, Technicolor dye transfer print from 16mm Kodachrome film)
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
In 1898, Bolesław Matuszewski, the first advocate for the creation of film archives, described the medium’s potential to be “not only a historic document, but a piece of history, a history that has not vanished and needs no genie to resuscitate it.” Indeed, one of film’s first and most potent powers is to capture the phenomena of history as it happens—a power illustrated dramatically by the footage taken at the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
Filming the Nagasaki bombing was assigned to Project Alberta’s Aerial Observation Team, a small unit of the larger Manhattan Project substructure responsible for measuring the atomic bombs from instrumentation aircrafts. A high-speed 16mm Wollensak Fastax camera was onboard the B-29 bomber The Great Artiste, but due to human error it could not be implemented. Thus, the sole existing film record of the bombing comes from a consumer camera—a Bell and Howell Filmo—loaded with 16mm Kodachrome film and shot by Lawrence Johnston and Walter Goodman from the rear compartment of The Great Artiste.
In the vivid hues of Kodachrome, the film documents the initial explosion and the rising mushroom cloud, described by a witness aboard The Great Artiste as “a giant mountain of jumbled rainbows, in travail,” and containing “all the colors of the rainbow... that color was death.” What is not visible from the bird’s-eye view footage is the immeasurable devastation the bomb caused on the ground. At least 75,000 people were killed in the immediate blast, almost all of them civilians; incalculable more died of radiation-caused cancers in the years that followed. Although both Japanese and American film crews captured the ruined city and its people in the immediate aftermath, the vast majority of that extensive footage was confiscated by the United States government and remained classified and consequently unseen for decades.
This is a fairly rare case of a 35mm Technicolor nitrate print enlarged from a 16mm Kodachrome safety element. With a 1945 edge code, it was likely made for exhibition to service members soon after the bombing. It was donated to the George Eastman Museum in 1956 by Dr. Kenneth Mees, longtime director of the Kodak Research Laboratory, whose staff were directly involved in the Manhattan Project. The print features a relatively low shrinkage measurement of 0.84% and contains no splices.
– Kirk McDowell
El día que me quieras
[The Day That You Love Me]
(fragment)
(John Reinhardt, US 1935, 4 min., 35mm nitrate, sound, b/w)
Print source: Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken, Buenos Aires, Argentina
In Argentina, when you want to say that someone is the absolute best, you say, “es Gardel.” The phrase needs no explanation on the Río de la Plata. Carlos Gardel (1890–1935) was not merely the king of tango: he was, and remains, the measure of all greatness. Born in France and raised in the Abasto neighborhood of Buenos Aires, he transformed the tango from a disreputable dance-hall genre into the defining popular art form of a continent. His baritone voice was a phenomenon of nature: intimate, theatrical, heartbreaking. Together with his lyricist Alfredo Le Pera, he wrote songs that entire generations learned before they learned to read. Uruguay claims him too, and both countries are right to fight over him: some glories cannot belong to just one nation.
On June 24, 1935, Gardel was killed when his plane collided with another aircraft on an airstrip in Medellín. He was forty-four. El día que me quieras was the last film Gardel completed, shot at Paramount’s Astoria Studios in Queens and released in Havana in July 1935, weeks after his death. Gardel called it his finest work. On set, a twelve-year-old Astor Piazzolla—the future composer who would transform the tango—charmed his way into a cameo as a newspaper boy. Gardel wanted to bring the kid on his Latin American tour; his father said no. That refusal kept Piazzolla off the plane in Medellín. The two poles of tango, its origin and its revolution, had met briefly on a film set in Queens.
This fragment features a single musical number—“Guitarra, guitarra mía,” a serenade to the guitar, Gardel’s constant companion—extracted and mounted for independent exhibition. This was a common practice: exhibitors across Latin America acquired such isolated songs from Gardel’s films to screen in small venues. These clips circulated separately, often outlasting the features they came from. Relics of a stardom built as much on the voice as on the face, they are evidence of a pre-television media economy that moved images across borders in ways we are only beginning to document.
This print on 1938 Canadian Kodak stock demonstrates a large number of scratches—a sign of its active screening life. The shrinkage range of 0.9% to 0.95%, though, makes it safely projectable.
– Paula Félix-Didier
Uppbrott
[Departure, The Open Road]
(Arne Sucksdorff, Sweden 1948, 8 min., 35mm nitrate, sound, b/w)
Print source: Taide-Ja Kulttuuriviraston (KUVI), Helsinki, Finland
Though praised by the likes of Siegfried Kracauer, André Bazin, and Jean-Luc Godard, Swedish filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff is barely mentioned in most histories of the documentary film, let alone cinema in general. Film scholar Scott Mackenzie has a few thoughts as to why. First, the long, chilly shadow Ingmar Bergman cast across the international scene effectively occludes most other post-WWII Swedish filmmakers, as “Bergman came to stand in for all Swedish cinema.” Second, the “nature film”—Sucksdorff’s true métier—has been routinely dismissed as merely descriptive, if not amateurish. Third, Sucksdorff’s mode—a poetic, at times experimental hybrid of actuality and expressionistic fiction—was at odds with the concurrent enthusiasm for Direct Cinema, which prized fly-on-the-wall observation and “objectivity.” Whatever the reasons, Sucksdorff’s elision is unfortunate, as he is simply one of Sweden’s great filmmakers.
Trained first as a painter in Germany, where a tendency toward expressionism took root, Sucksdorff found acclaim as a photographer before turning to filmmaking. With the support of the short film production unit at Svensk Filmindustri he developed his highly personal documentary style, which he refined in a series of films focusing on the dramatic doings of wildlife, whether it be the rather harrowing lives of Baltic seabirds in the 1944 short Trut!, or the travails of woodland creatures in the feature-length Det stora äventyret (1953), which includes an extraordinary POV shot of death as experienced by a mortally wounded fox.
Sucksdorff trained his eye on human habitats as well, and in 1949 he won an Academy Award (the first Swede to do so) for his portrait of Stockholm, Människor i stad [Symphony of a City] (1947, screened at the 2018 Nitrate Picture Show), one of the last great “city films” and surely among the most beautiful. Uppbrott is a supplement of sorts: beneath Stockholm’s eastern Årsta Bridge, a Romani group’s departure is delayed when a car won’t start. While the engine is repaired, the men play cards, the women dance, and a sense of tradition in thrall to modernity becomes palpable. It is short and simple, but an excellent example of Sucksdorff’s unique hybrid style: when the dawn is announced by flowers unfolding via time-lapse photography, the effect is akin to shock.
With only two splices, intact perforations, and a shrinkage range of 0.77%–0.87%, this print is in fantastic shape.
– Ken Fox
Speaking of Animals: A Musical Way
(Lou Lilly, US 1945, 9 min., 35mm nitrate, sound, b/w)
Print source: Library of Congress, Culpeper, VA
One of the oddest film series from a demonstrated purveyor of oddities, Speaking of Animals was the capstone in producer Jerry Fairbanks’ trifecta of short-subject series at Paramount, following Popular Science and Unusual Occupations (highlighted in last year’s Nitrate Picture Show program). Unlike the earlier series, Speaking of Animals did not purport to educate or document as it entertained; rather, it had one unabashedly gimmicky purpose: to superimpose animations of talking mouths onto live-action footage of animals and make them say humorous things.
The series originated with legendary animator Tex Avery during his stint at Warner Bros., where he had directed a series of cartoon travelogue parodies with jokey narration and wisecracking animals. Since the gags were largely verbal rather than visual, Avery wondered if it were possible to use live-action footage of the animals and animation overlays for only their mouths, which could be then synced to the dialog. Despite the success of a subsequent proof of concept, producer Leon Schlesinger refused to let Avery develop the idea, and temporarily fired him when their disagreement led to an out-and-out argument. Undaunted, Tex took the pitch to Jerry Fairbanks at Paramount, who ran with it immediately. After only three episodes, however, the two had their own falling out. Avery sold his interest in the series to Fairbanks and left.
At Fairbanks’ studio, animation department head Anna Osborn oversaw the mouth animation, which was married with the live-action animal footage via Fairbanks’ patented “Duoplane” process. Wildly popular, Speaking of Animals ran for a decade, spanning fifty episodes and garnering two short subject Oscars and a Scientific and Technical Academy Award nomination for the Duoplane process. Though the jokes may not land as riotously as they did in the 1940s, the series’ successful utilization of an innovative gimmick led the way for future live action-animation hybrids, and it remains a fascinating curiosity today.
Although this print of A Musical Way from the Speaking of Animals series features a low shrinkage of 0.65%, there were a number of perforation and edge damages that required dedicated intervention before projection could take place. Most significantly, each of the print’s nine splices were offset, meaning the edges of the film were not aligned when they were joined.
– Kirk McDowell
Inspirace
[Inspiration]
(Karel Zeman, Czechoslovakia 1949, 12 min., 35mm nitrate, sound, Agfacolor)
Print source: Taide-Ja Kulttuuriviraston (KUVI), Helsinki, Finland
Inspirace by Karel Zeman is an early film from the “Golden Age of Czech Animation,” an outstanding movement in world cinema which took place from the mid-1940s until 1989. Zeman played a central role, along with two generations of Czech master animators that included Jiří Trnka, Hermína Týrlová, and Jan Švankmajer.
Following the first phase of his career in advertising in the South of France, Zeman moved to the Moravian region of Czechoslovakia in 1939, the same year the area was annexed by the Nazis. During this period of oppression and war, Zeman secured a position with Krátký film Zlín, a major Moravian producer of industrial, advertising, and promotional films. While under German control during the war, Krátký film Zlín shifted to producing animated and short films for children, which enabled a group of animators, including Zeman, to hone their craft.
After the war, Zeman spent his first decade as an animation director, working frequently with wooden puppet characters. With Inspirace, he expanded his material challenges to include glass figures. An opening title card dedicates the film to Czech glassmakers who “transform the hard mass of glass into magical images of their poetic imaginations.” The film’s delicate figurines were designed by Czech glass artist and teacher Jaroslav Brychta, who sent assistants to help Zeman with an animation process that required multiple articulated parts, some of which had to be reheated and reshaped during production. The animated section of the film emerges from the daydream of a young live-action glassmaker who gazes upon a water droplet from behind a rain-soaked window. Within the tiny water droplet world, the glassmaker’s fantasy becomes a commedia dell’arte tale, with Columbine transforming from a flower into an agile ice dancer, and Pierrot the clown entering as a floating dandelion seed. Zeman’s direction exploits the translucent and liquid qualities of glass to bring the miniature enchanted world of ice and water to life.
Inspirace was filmed in Agfacolor, a monopack process developed in Germany as a cheaper alternative to Technicolor. Unfortunately, Agfa stock proved to be extremely unstable, and the delicate colors tend to turn pink or red. This is the first Agfacolor print we are screening at NPS, and, quite remarkably, it doesn’t show any fading. It has a shrinkage range of 0.95%–1.15%.
– Gordon Nelson
This screening is free for passholders of the sold-out 10th Nitrate Picture Show. A limited number of single-screening tickets may be available for purchase in person at the Dryden Theatre box office on a rush-line basis. Rush tickets will be sold only if seats remain after the film’s spoken introduction has begun.