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Sep 12, 2019
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Sep 1, 2019
Around the World with H. T. C.
In response to my post of August 9, "Underground," archivist-historian and Orphans veteran Paul Spehr commented about early advocacy for underground storage for film preservation. He began working in the Library of Congress Motion Picture Section in 1958, retiring as assistant chief in 1993.
"In the early 1960s the LoC was presented with a collection of 35mm negatives of films shot by Herford Cowling for Burton Holmes for showing at the 1933 Chicago World Fair. Cowling had been a very early consultant on standards for storage of motion picture film --- going back to the 1920s and contributing to the establishment of the National Archives film archive in 1934-36. He was a very early advocate of stable cold temperature and RH.
One of his very early recommendations was use of caves when proper vault space wasn't available. He had access to a cave near Luray Caverns, Virginia and had kept his films there -- and they were in the best condition I ever experienced."
-- Paul Spehr, Orphan Film Symposium Facebook group, Aug. 10, 2019.
As it happens, Luray Caverns is only 40 miles from the bunkers that now house the Library of Congress National Audio Visual Conservation Center's film vaults in Culpeper, Virginia.One of his very early recommendations was use of caves when proper vault space wasn't available. He had access to a cave near Luray Caverns, Virginia and had kept his films there -- and they were in the best condition I ever experienced."
-- Paul Spehr, Orphan Film Symposium Facebook group, Aug. 10, 2019.
I was ignorant of Cowling's work, but an initial search of databases for his eminently searchable name reveals a remarkable career, both as a filmmaker who traveled the world and a preservation advocate who made a genuine contribution to film archiving. He shot hundreds of thousands of feet of film in the first four decades of his career. Some of it is archived, due to his work for government agencies. Much of it is scattered in private collections and archives. Some is identifiable (but not credited) in compilation films by others. Much of it does not appear to survive.
Herford Tynes Cowling (1890-1980) was born in (and died in) Virginia, traveling the world as a photographer, cinematographer, film director, producer -- and freemason! The book 10,000 Freemasons (Denslow, 1957) offers this bio: “Was chief photographer for U.S. Reclamation Service in 1906-1916 traveling extensively in U.S., Canada and Mexico. Headed cinematographic expedition to Formosa, Philippines, Indo-China, Siam, Tasmania, and South Sea islands, producing semi-educational [sic] movies in 1917. Was chief cinematographer for Paramount (Burton Holmes Travel Films). He has also been technical advisor for Eastman Kodak, official photographer of Century of Progress in Chicago, technical director for U.S. National Archives, Washington, chief of photographic services, Dept. of Labor. In 1922 was on expedition to East Africa, Uganda, Congo and The Sudan. Made movies in Tibet and was China war correspondent in 1924.”
---- Cowling at the camera, with Holmes in Japan, 1917.
© Burton Holmes Historical Collection.
---- Image from Singapore Film Locations Archive, sgfilmlocations.com
At the 2001 Orphan Film Symposium, Buckey Grimm's talk "Early Preservation Initiatives" included these additional details. In 1932, the Society of Motion Picture Engineers' first Committee on the Preservation of Film included Cowling, Carl Louis Gregory, and Terry Ramsaye. In 1934, the new Motion Picture Division of the U.S. National Archives hired Cowling. "Cowling’s expertise was well documented," Grimm reported. "His career began in 1910 as chief photographer for the Interior Department. In 1916, he made a series of travelogues called See America First for Metro Pictures, then was Technical Director for Eastman Teaching Films. He was a recognized expert in storage and handling of nitrate film." [Later published as “A History of Early Nitrate Testing and Storage, 1910-1945,” The Moving Image 1.2 (2001).]
After World War II, Colonel Cowling remained in the U.S. Army Air Force, working at the film lab, as "chief of the Division of Photography, Technical Intelligence of Air Material Command at Wright Field, Ohio," no less. (Motion Picture Herald, Nov. 9, 1946.) Twenty years after he gave Spehr the films stored in his Virginia cave, the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, became the very location used as the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center.
The veteran film expert joined the Society of American Archivists in 1948. He was also a source for Hermine Baumhofer's essay "Motion Pictures Become Federal Records," in The American Archivist (January 1952). She recounts his work with the Interior Department. "Between 1912 and 1915 all areas set aside as national parks were photographed, the filming and editing being done by Mr. Cowling." His See America First series, he told her, consisted of 52 one-reelers released by Metro and Gaumont, "the first Government film to be distributed in this manner" (20). Expect to read much more about such work as film historian Jennifer Peterson publishes her latest research about films from the National Park Service.
What of the materials Cowling gave to the Library of Congress? Its online catalog has entries for books, films, and photographs credited to Cowling. Only four items are listed as part of a "Cowling (Herford Tynes) Collection." As Paul Spehr correctly recalls, these are gifts from Cowling dated ca. 1962, and associated with the 1933-34 Chicago fair, aka the Century of Progress International Exposition.
- 1934: The World's Fair Black Forest / Burton Holmes Films (Kaufmann & Fabry Co., 1934) 16mm, 144 feet, ca. 4 mins.
- 1934--Villages of the World's Fair, 16mm, 140 feet
- A Century of Progress Exposition -- Indian village (Burton Holmes Films in assoc. with Herford T. Cowling, 1933) 16mm, 114 feet; 2 positive prints + duplicate negative.
However there are a couple dozen other films of 1933 the LoC catalog says Cowling made and/or donated. Most are from the Century of Progress Expo, such as The World a Million Years Ago, The Fair at Night, Sally Rand [fan dancer], Faith Bacon the Fan Dancer of Hollywood, The Fair from the Air, and Around the Fair with Burton Holmes no. 1 and no. 2. Copies of some of the Holmes Century of Progress films that Cowling shot are online. (His name is never on screen.) The Fair at Night (1933) is on travelfilmarchive's YouTube channel. Three versions of Wings of a Century are posted from Prelinger Archives, including this 39-minute cut.
Here's the first Around the Fair film (1933). 8 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjOBS8Nw7Wk&t=
A minute of Sally Rand's nude fan dance is part of Streets of Paris (1933).
https://youtu.be/9nxUt9M2rVw?t=157
The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress (Jan. 1964) mentioned only that Cowling donated a "small collection of films made in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia in the 1920's" (62).
Other pieces are incompletely catalogued portions of Cowling's nonfiction travelogue work. Several are described curiously as "book," 16mm, such as
* [Kashmir] [Motion picture] [n.p.] Herford Tynes Cowling, 1923.
* An Indian Durbar [Motion picture] [n.p.] Burton Holmes Lectures, 1926, a silent 1,200 feet lecture version and a later, shorter sound version. "Shows the coronation of 'Maharaja Hari Singh of Kashmir,' March 1926."
A third version of the latter film circulates online, with a rare on-screen credit for Cowling, copyright by Eastman Kodak Co., 1927.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjv8NRgBJDE
As recently as this month, YouTubers continue reposting this footage of the "last maharajah," with comments about the political, religious, and military conflicts over Kashmir. (As I update this post on August 16, news outlets are reporting multiple casualties today in the disputed region following the Indian government's revoking the "special status" of Kashmir.)
Both Cowling's [Kashmir] and An Indian Durbar can be linked to fragments that survive elsewhere. Like other globetrotting camera operators of the era, Cowling shot footage that commercial newsreel services licensed or purchased. The University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections reference catalog lists Cowling as the camera operator for Fox newsreel footage originally described by a footage librarian as [Leopard] (three shots taken in 1923) and Coronation of the Maharajah of Kashmir (1926). Portions of both were used in theatrical newsreel releases that do not survive. In fact, the company hyped the footage in a puff piece by sales manager Fred Quimby: "Fox News Helps Educate the World," Exhibitors Herald, (Sep. 11, 1926). Without naming Cowling, he boasted of the newsreel's international reach, saying "a special emissary just emerged from the Vale of the Cashmere, near the Afghan border, where he succeeded in making pictures showing the almost fabulous and barbaric beauty and wealth of the land of the Maharajah of that distant spot." Other exclusive newsfilm from Cowling included 1924 coverage of warring factions within China.
Thus Cowling's images were widely seen even if he was not as well known as Burton Holmes.
A final note about the Library of Congress catalog's clues to Cowling's films, now orphaned or lost. The entry attributing Cowling as photographer is for 72 photographs on glass lantern slides from 1923. The assigned title is "[Tibet and Asian landscapes and people, includes mountain expeditions, travel on elephants, tiger hunting, Herford Tynes [sic] with dead tiger and posing with his camera]." These are described as unprocessed items in the Prints and Photographs Division, with the note: "Gift to MBRS [Motion Picture, Broadcasting, Recorded Sound] from Col. Cowling. Photographs are probably associated with the filming of Burton Holmes' To the Roof of the World in Tibet. This catalog record contains preliminary data."
The note is curious in that Holmes filmographies do not include this title, nor any about Tibet. The lone reference I have found to this title is from International Photographer, April 1933. A column by Herford Tynes Cowling, "Around the World, No. 1," features a page of his 1923 photos under the heading "To the Roof of the World in Tibet." Are some of these images also on the LoC lantern slides that have yet to be processed? Are these the only remnants of the companion motion picture? Was there a film by that title or was the footage only part of a Holmes travelogue lecture? (The George Eastman Museum houses a rediscovered Holmes collection acquired in 2004, listing 175 items. None mention Tibet or Kashmir.)
"This" 1923 venture "was the first moving picture expedition ever made into Tibet for the purpose of filming the people and customs of the country," Cowling claimed in 1933. He refers to "about one hundred thousand feet of film exposed which, incidentally, kept very well at the high, dry altitude" [in re: our subject of cold storage as film preservation]. "About four thousand still pictures were taken during the trip, all of which were developed en route."
Were these films the first ever shot in Tibet? Possibly. Certainly among the earliest. By the end of 1923, another American returned from Tibet with footage he secured under even more adventurous circumstances. In our next blog post, we will review the somewhat legendary career of scholar William McGovern and his only film, To Lhasa in Disguise, released in 1924, later lost, but refound and restored in 2015.
The online TibetFilmArchive.org, collected in New York by filmmaker and archivist Tenzin Phuntsog, lists only three pieces of extant film from the 1920s, and these are after 1923. In 1928, German scientist Wilhelm Filchner publicly showed some of the footage he shot during his 1925-28 stay in Tibet. His 1929 book, Om Mani Padme Hum [a Buddhist mantra]: Meine China- und Tibet-expedition 1925-8, claimed he shipped 20,000 meters of unprocessed film to Germany. (Was it the new 16mm format?)
Cowling commented in his 1933 account: "The people had never seen a motion picture and could only understand an ordinary photograph with considerable difficulty."
Such a description of a Westerner’s first encounter with non-Westerners’ first encounter with movies resembles similar accounts of the period. Cowling had been doing such work since the 1910s, but this 1923 expedition came only a year after the release of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. As Flaherty and Cowling acknowledged, the communities they photographed participated in the labor of chemically processing the films and photos as they were shot. Cowling describes hiring dozens of Tibetans who made possible his four-month trek through the mountains via yak. Thus the contradiction in his account that Tibetans "could only understand an ordinary photograph with considerable difficulty,” even though teams in his employ helped process thousands of photographs.
McGovern's account of his 1923 trip to Lhasa contradicts Cowling's. His popular book To Lhasa in Disguise reported the Dalai Lama's chief aid made a hobby of "amateur photography," decorating this room with family photos.
The LoC online catalog offers only one photograph.
The title assigned to it is [Lama with headdress and Caucasian man seated in front of nine boys and men, Tibet]. The "Caucasian" man is Cowling himself. Who took the photo? or is that a shutter release cable in his right hand?
More important, what happened to the 20 hours of footage he shot in Kashmir and Tibet? and is there a film called To the Roof of the World in Tibet that might survive under different titles or within later film compilations?
The best photographic evidence comes from the International Photographer piece and his more contemporary account in American Cinematographer (Feb. 1924), "Photographing the Roof of the World," by "Herford Tynes Cowling, A.S.C." The first page of this is missing from the online copy, but the Long Island University Post library digitized its microfilm copy. Here is some of the photo-documentation of H. T. C. at work with his 35mm Akeley movie camera.
"I believe I have secured the only existing films of this nature."
He contributed another short piece, "How the Pandita [Buddhist spiritual leader] Was Photographed," American Cinematographer (April 1925). He describes how Tibetan and Kashmiri workers helped him set up the movie camera and introduced him to the Pandita who gave permission to film people.
Pages harvested from lantern.mediahist.org.
According to the Exhibitors Herald, the 1923 Tibetan expedition was facilitated by Hari Singh, who "later commissioned Cowling to officially photograph his coronation" in Kashmir -- "though it was to rest only in Sir Hari's private archives" ("Fame of A.S.C. Spreads," Sep. 4, 1926). Cowling published his own accounts of the coronation film as an elaborate work for hire. (“A Modern Ruler in the Vale of Kashmir,” New York Times, Feb. 27, 1927; “A Washingtonian Grinds the Camera as India Crowns a New Ruler in a Pageant Costing Millions,” Washington Post, Sep. 16, 1934.)
He'd taken other camera commissions, filming, for example, an elaborate 1924 hunting expedition in Nepal and India for the wealthy "Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Morden of Chicago." The New York Times and many others ran rotogravure spreads of Cowling's stills, including this one of him "photographing the slaughter of the tigers from the back of an elephant."
Rotogravure Picture Section, New York Times, June 29, 1924.
He published his account in "Around the World, No. 2: Filming a Tiger Shoot in India," International Photographer (May 1933). The column ran for six issues, then was reworked for a series in the Washington Post Magazine in 1934.
The question remains: what became of the motion-picture film he recorded on these trips?
His writings do not address the issue.
For most of the 1920s, Cowling traveled the globe, shooting for Holmes for seven years (1917-1923) and then for his own Round-the-World Travel Pictures. American Cinematographer often mentioned the travels of the American Society of Cinematographers member, who upon his return in 1929 served on the journal's advisory board.
When his globetrotting ended, Cowling returned to Virginia and federal employment in D.C. as a technical consultant on motion pictures (and microfilm) for the National Archives, National Parks Service, Bureau of the Census, the military, and other government bodies.
Returning to the relevance to orphan films about climate and migration: Even during his active shooting years he published technical advice about how film needed to be treated in cold and hot climates. See his article "Film Care in the Tropics," for example, in the August 1927 issue of Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers. That so much of his shooting took place in diverse geographies, recording landscapes, mountains, glaciers, rivers, islands, and jungles makes these films prime examples of how we might re-examine newsfilm, travelogues, and their unedited footage for what they captured of these places a century ago.
American and European travel films of that era are often noted now for their "bad" anthropology, xenophobic commentary, and photographic othering of people filmed in non-Western parts of the globe. Without Cowling's theatrical releases to examine, we cannot fairly analyze them. Certainly his brief written comments in trade journals and the press often resort to the word strange (and sometimes worse) to characterize the people and places he encountered in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Pacific islands. He never claims cultural expertise or anthropological mission. He was seeking spectacular scenes for American movie audiences, he says. His writings are often sympathetic to his subjects, expressing admiration for traditional or ancient cultural practices he observes. Cowling writes without judgment about the polyandry (he uses the word) and female-led communities he saw in Tibet.
Without trying to make the case for Cowling as an exceptional filmmaker or sensitive ethnographer, we might conclude by noting his public protest over Hollywood abuse of travelogue footage. He licensed his footage of Tibet and India for use in the RKO release India Speaks (1933), which lists him as one of three photographers in the credits. The movie intercuts genuine location footage shot by Cowling and others with fictional scenes staged in Hollywood, all narrated by travel writer and adventurer Richard Halliburton. The exploitation film presents India as a land of ritualized sin, orgies, crime, and violence. Cowling strongly objected to its misrepresentations. "They have taken scenes made in Burma, Java, Sumatra and other places and put them in Tibet and India with no regard for geographic truth." They took his tiger footage and "faked a fight between a lion and a tiger." He complained to the Federal Trade Commission, the Hays Office, and newspaper reviewers. ("Film Fakers," International Photographer, June 1933.) But the movie enjoyed wide release -- except in England and India, where exhibitors refused to show it. A FilmIndia editorial complaining about misrepresentation of Indians in RKO's new Gunga Din (1939) recalled the rejection of India Speaks on the subcontinent, while "the rest of the world – the white world to be accurate – received the picture with enthusiasm," and "got through the American ‘keyhole’ a cock-eyed peep of India and her 'natives.'"
Can Cowling's footage of Tibet, Kashmir, and India be seen in India Speaks? It has long been listed as a lost film. But . . . just three months ago the Travel Film Archive, a footage licensing company, quietly posted 55 minutes from India Speaks. The 1933 release ran 78 minutes. TFA founder Patrick Montgomery, veteran of archival film collecting and licensing, bought 35mm prints of both Africa Speaks (1931) and India Speaks on eBay. A 1941 RKO reissue version, The Bride of Buddha, 63 minutes, survives as a nitrate print at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
Indeed many of the shots of Tibetan locations, ceremonies, and lamaseries mirror the stills published as "To the Roof of the World in Tibet" (above). Perhaps Cowling disseminated these in April 1933 precisely because the Hollywood movie that desecrated his handsome footage was released that same month.
Other scenes in India Speaks match Cowling pictures of the 1926 coronation in Kashmir. Compare, for instance, this frame from India Speaks (left) to a Cowling photograph (right) the Washington Post (Sep. 15, 1934) used to promote his article about the coronation.
Finding other Cowling films will take time, but now we know that some of his most widely seen cinematography is no longer lost.
Watching India Speaks confirms why Cowling was so displeased with how his images were appropriated and exploited.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do059VMWWQA
"The striking posters and exploitation material" boasted of in RKO's trade promotion further reveal how lurid and sexualized the images of India were.
. -- Motion Picture Herald, May 27, 1933."'Horrific' Film About India," ran the Times of India headline of April 11, 1948, when the American producer re-applied fifteen years later to London censors to permit exhibition of his self-described "horrific" documentary. (Reference provided by Navnidhi Sharma, who in a fortunate convergence is writing a dissertation on "a history of encounters between Indian cinema and China.")
-- Dan Streible
(updated Aug. 23, 2019, originally published at https://wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/2019/08/14/undergroundps).
Notes
• Michael R. Pitts, RKO Radio Pictures Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films, 1929-1956 (McFarland, 2015) well describes the history of India Speaks, but deems it a lost film (as do Wikipedia and IMDb at the moment).
• While in China, Cowling was interviewed about his Tibet shoot and Nepal tiger hunt. (“With the Movie Camera in Farthest Tibet,” North-China Herald and Supreme Court, Oct. 4, 1924.) He also recounted events in his own article, “In Tibet, Strange Land of Beauty and Ignorance, Women Rule 'The Roof of the World,’” Washington Post, Oct. 7, 1934. Upon returning to North America, he told of filming conflicts among Chinese military cliques, particularly those commanded by generals Wu Peifu and Feng Yuxiang in September-October 1924. ("Pictured Actual Fighting Along Chinese Battle Fronts with 8,000 Feet of Camera Film; H. T. Cowling Had Thrilling Experiences While Watching Chinese Factions in Warfare," Victoria [BC] Daily Times, Nov. 18, 1924.)
• The Travel Film Archive offers two other short films about Tibet, which could possibly include Cowling footage. The Unknown World, "an expedition in the 1930's [?] to see the Dalai Lama" in Lhasa, Tibet. The title is another unknown one. The end credit, "A General Film Productions Corp. Picture," identifies this as a post-WWII nontheatrical edition for television. "Adapted by Tom Terriss" refers to the host of a film and radio travel series, Vagabond Adventures (1927-34), who developed postwar television content. I have found no evidence of a title The Unknown World in distribution in the 30s; much of the footage appears to be from the 1920s. Easier to verify is the travelogue Tibet: Land of Isolation (FitzPatrick Pictures, 1934), an MGM theatrical release. Although contemporary with India Speaks, most of the FitzPatrick footage appears distinctive. (Historian Peter H. Hansen assays: "Although it is unclear where the film was shot, the soundtrack is more Chinese than Tibetan in inspiration. . . a visual catalogue of many Western myths about Tibet." Hansen makes this indispensable 2001 essay “Tibetan Horizon: Tibet and the Cinema in the Early Twentieth Century" available for free download.)
• The Travel Film Archive lists 2,851 digital video items in its collection. Only one, An Indian Durbar (1926), is credited to Cowling.
• Where do TFA films come from? The website calls them "a collection of travelogues and educational and industrial films" shot on film between 1900 and 1970. Stock footage entrepreneur Patrick Montgomery began building this and other thematic collections in 2007. Previously he created Archive Films, for a time the largest U.S. stock footage company until acquired by Kodak's The Image Bank in 1997 (which in turn was purchased by Getty Images in 1999).
Aug 14, 2019
Cowling's Roof of the World
In response to my previous post, "Underground," archivist-historian and Orphans veteran Paul Spehr sent a Facebook comment about early advocacy for underground storage for film preservation.
"In the early 1960s the LoC was presented with a collection of 35mm negatives of films shot by Herford Cowling for Burton Holmes for showing at the 1933 Chicago World Fair. Cowling had been a very early consultant on standards for storage of motion picture film --- going back to the 1920s and contributing to the establishment of the National Archives film archive in 1934-36. He was a very early advocate of stable cold temperature and RH.
One of his very early recommendations was use of caves when proper vault space wasn't available. He had access to a cave near Luray Caverns, Virginia and had kept his films there -- and they were in the best condition I ever experienced."
-- Paul Spehr, Orphan Film Symposium Facebook group, Aug. 10, 2019.
As it happens, Luray Caverns is 40 miles from the bunkers that now house the LoC National Audio Visual Conservation Center's film vaults in Culpeper, Virginia.
Herford Tynes Cowling (1890-1980) was born (and died) in Virginia but traveled the world as a photographer, cinematographer, film director, producer -- and freemason! The book 10,000 Freemasons (William R. Denslow, 1957) offers this bio: “Was chief photographer for U.S. Reclamation Service in 1906-1916 traveling extensively in U.S., Canada and Mexico. Headed cinematographic expedition to Formosa, Philippines, Indo-China, Siam, Tasmania, and South Sea islands, producing semi-educational [sic] movies in 1917. Was chief cinematographer for Paramount (Burton Holmes Travel Films). He has also been technical advisor for Eastman Kodak, official photographer of Century of Progress in Chicago, technical director for U.S. National Archives, Washington, chief of photographic services, Dept. of Labor. In 1922 was on expedition to East Africa, Uganda, Congo and The Sudan. Made movies in Tibet and was China war correspondent in 1924.”
---- Image from Singapore Film Locations Archive, sgfilmlocations.comAt the 2001 Orphan Film Symposium, Buckey Grimm's talk "Early Preservation Initiatives" included further details. In 1932, the Society of Motion Picture Engineers' first Committee on the Preservation of Film included Cowling, Carl Louis Gregory, and Terry Ramsaye. In 1934, the new Motion Picture Division of the U.S. National Archives hired Cowling. "Cowling’s expertise was well documented," Grimm reported. "His career began in 1910 as chief photographer for the Interior Department. In 1916, he made a series of travelogues called See America First for Metro Pictures, then was Technical Director for Eastman Teaching Films. He was a recognized expert in storage and handling of nitrate film."
After World War II, Colonel Cowling remained in the U.S. Air Force, working at the film lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio -- the very location that became the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center in 1981. The veteran filmmaker joined the Society of American Archivists in 1948. He was also a source for Hermine M. Baumhofer's essay "Motion Pictures Become Federal Records," in The American Archivist (January 1952). She recounts his work with the Interior Department. "Between 1912 and 1915 all areas set aside as national parks were photographed, the filming and editing being done by Mr. Cowling." His See America First series, he told her, were 52 one-reelers released by Metro and Gaumont, "the first Government film to be distributed in this manner" (20). Expect to read much more about this as film historian Jennifer Peterson publishes her latest research about films from the National Park Service.
What of the materials Cowling gave to the Library of Congress? Its online catalog has entries for books, films, and photographs credited to Cowling. Only four items are listed as part of a "Cowling (Herford Tynes) Collection." As Paul Spehr correctly recalls, these are gifts from Cowling dated ca. 1962, and associated with the 1933-34 Chicago fair, aka the Century of Progress International Exposition.
- 1934: The World's Fair Black Forest / Burton Holmes Films (Kaufmann & Fabry Co., 1934) 16mm, 144 feet, ca. 4 mins.
- 1934--Villages of the World's Fair, 16mm, 140 feet
- A Century of Progress Exposition -- Indian village (Burton Holmes Films in assoc. with Herford T. Cowling, 1933) 16mm, 114 feet; 2 positive prints + duplicate negative.
However there are a couple dozen other films the LoC catalog says Cowling made and/or donated. Most are from the Century of Progress Expo, such as The World a Million Years Ago, The Fair at Night, Sally Rand [fan dancer], Faith Bacon the Fan Dancer of Hollywood, The Fair from the Air, and Around the Fair with Burton Holmes no. 1 and no. 2.
The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress (January 1964) mentioned only that Cowling donated a "small collection of films made in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia in the 1920's" (62).
Other pieces are incompletely catalogued portions of Cowling's nonfiction travelogue work. Several are described curiously as "book," 16mm, such as
* [Kashmir] [Motion picture] [n.p.] Herford Tynes Cowling, 1923.
* An Indian Durbar [Motion picture] [n.p.] Burton Holmes Lectures, 1926, a silent 1,200 feet lecture version and a later, shorter sound version. "Shows the coronation of 'Maharaja Hari Singh of Kashmir,' March 1926."
Both of those can be linked to fragments that survive elsewhere. Like other globetrotting camera operators of the era, Cowling shot footage that commercial newsreel services purchased. The University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections reference catalog lists Cowling as the camera operator for Fox newsreel footage described originally as [Leopard] (three shots taken in 1923) and Coronation of the Maharajah of Kashmir (June 10, 1926). Portions of both were used in theatrical newsreel releases. In fact, the company hyped the footage in a puff piece by sales manager Fred C. Quimby: "Fox News Helps Educate the World," Exhibitors Herald, (September 11, 1926). Without naming Cowling, he boasted of his newsreel's international reach, saying "a special emissary just emerged from the Vale of the Cashmere, near the Afghan border, where he succeeded in making pictures showing the almost fabulous and barbaric beauty and wealth of the land of the Maharajah of that distant spot." Cowling's images were widely seen even if he was not as well known as Burton Holmes.
A final note about the Library of Congress catalog's clues to Cowling's films, now orphaned or lost. The entry attributing Cowling as photographer is for 72 photographs on glass lantern slides from 1923. The assigned title is "[Tibet and Asian landscapes and people, includes mountain expeditions, travel on elephants, tiger hunting, Herford Tynes with dead tiger and posing with his camera]." These are described as unprocessed items in the Prints and Photographs Division, with the note: "Gift to MBRS [Motion Picture, Broadcasting, Recorded Sound] from Col. Cowling. Photographs are probably associated with the filming of Burton Holmes' To the Roof of the World in Tibet. This catalog record contains preliminary data."
The note is curious in that Holmes filmographies do not include this title. The lone reference I have found is from International Photographer, April 1933. A column authored by Herford Tynes Cowling, "Around the World," No. 1, features a page of his ten-year-old photos under the heading "To the Roof of the World in Tibet." Are some of these images also on the LoC lantern slides that have yet to be processed? Are these the only remnants of the companion motion picture? Was there a film by that title or was the footage only part of Holmes or Cowling travelogue lecture?
"This was the first moving picture expedition ever made into Tibet for the purpose of filming the people and customs of the country," Cowling claimed in 1933. He refers to "about one hundred thousand feet of film exposed which, incidentally, kept very well at the high, dry altitude" [in re: our subject of cold storage as film preservation]. "About four thousand still pictures were taken during the trip, all of which were developed en route." He adds "The people had never seen a motion picture and could only understand an ordinary photograph with considerable difficulty."
Such a description of a Westerner’s first encounter with non-Westerners’ first encounter with movies resembles similar accounts of the period. Cowling had been doing such work since the 1910s, but this 1923 expedition came only a year after the release of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. As Flaherty and Cowling acknowledged, the communities they photographed participated in the labor of processing the films as they were shot. Cowling describes hiring dozens of Tibetans who made possible his four-month trek through the mountains. Thus the contradiction in his account that Tibetans "could only understand an ordinary photograph with considerable difficulty,” even though teams in his employ helped process 100,000 feet of 35mm motion-picture film and 4,000 still photographs.
The LoC online catalog offers only one photograph.
The title assigned to it is [Lama with headdress and Caucasian man seated in front of nine boys and men, Tibet]. The "Caucasian" man appears to be Cowling himself. So who took the photo? or is that a shutter release cable in his right hand?
More important, what happened to the 20 hours of footage he claims to have shot in Kashmir and Tibet? and is there a film called To the Roof of the World in Tibet that might survive under different titles or within later film compilations?
The best photographic evidence comes from both the International Photographer piece and the more contemporary account in American Cinematographer (February 1924), "Photographing the Roof of the World," by "Herford Tynes Cowling, A.S.C." The first page of this is missing from the digitized copy I accessed and the images are of low resolution. But here is some of the photo-documentation of H. T. C. at work.
"I believe I have secured the only existing films of this nature."
Pages harvested from lantern.mediahist.org.
According to the Exhibitors Herald, the Tibetan expedition was made possible by Sir Hari Singh, who "later commissioned Cowling to officially photograph his coronation" in Kashmir -- "though it was to rest only in Sir Hari's private archives." ("Fame of A.S.C. Spreads," Sep. 4, 1926.")
Jul 25, 2019
Daguerreotype of Earth's moon (1840)
Sharing. In this month during which so much media archiving has helped public memory of the 50th anniversary of earthlings visiting their moon.
"Daguerreotype of Earth's moon" (1840)
attributed to John W. Draper
2.75 x 3.25 inches
University Archives, Bobst Library, NYU
2.75 x 3.25 inches
University Archives, Bobst Library, NYU
The Orphans in Space DVD (2012) cover image comes from the Draper Family Collection, housed in the New York University Archives. The collection includes celestial photographs taken by John William Draper (1811-1882) and his son Henry Draper (1837-1882). Both were physicians, professors of chemistry, and amateur but innovative photographers.
The photograph derives from a 3.25" x 2.75" daguerreotype of the moon made by the father, probably on March 26, 1840. A newly-appointed professor at what was then named the University of the City of New-York, the elder Draper created the image from the rooftop of the university's main building on Washington Square (less than a block from where the collection now resides, in NYU's Bobst Library). Alongside its observatory, the rooftop featured a glass-enclosed photographic studio, where Draper and fellow faculty member Samuel F. B. Morse made some of the earliest daguerreotype portraits that year.
Rather than the first photograph of the moon taken, this image is the earliest one among those known to survive. As early as 1837, photologist John W. Draper experimented with the effects of light (including moonlight) on salted paper. In 1838-39, after Louis Daguerre invented his method of fixing photographic images on metal plates, French astronomers asked their countryman to record the moon, but his attempts failed to maintain focus as the satellite moved during his long exposure times. When knowledge of daguerreotypy reached New York, Draper used a camera literally made from a cigar box to render at least two images of the moon during the winter of 1839-40. The first, "about one-sixth of an inch in diameter," was overexposed, the silver iodide on the copper plate turning black. The second, "nearly an inch" in diameter, fixed the light of a waning gibbous moon. Draper called it "deficient in sharpness" and "confused," although the "position of the darker spots on the surface of the luminary was distinct" in this "stain."
"I placed a flat gas-burner (bat’s-wing) in a magic lantern, and received the image of one of the grotesque transparencies, on a plate three inches square: in half an hour, a very fair representation was obtained."
("Remarks on the Daguerreotype," American Repertory of Arts, Sciences, and Manufactures, July 1840, 401-4. Reproduced here.)
On March 23, 1840, Draper reported this limited success to the New York Lyceum of Natural History. Three nights later he recorded a last-quarter moon (i.e., a visible half moon), the positive image mirror-reversed by his telescope. This detailed daguerreotype became the source from which many copies derived. So many digital copies of this 1840 image now populate the internet, subject to so many manipulations of photographic variables, that it is difficult to discern that each derives from the same source. Some reverse the image horizontally, vertically, or both. Others switch the positive-negative values. Still others reproduce the later water-damaged daguerreotype plate; others the plate after its 1960s cleaning and restoration. Digital enhancements and alterations abound. Adding to the confusion of images, son Henry Draper became a prolific astrophotographer. After building an observatory at his home in 1860, he took more than a thousand images of the moon, and later the sun, planets, comets, and stars. These were reprinted in both the popular press and scientific literature, as well as on lantern slides, stereographs, and other formats.
The provenance of the 1840 John W. Draper daguerreotype is difficult to trace. From the beginning, the scientist himself re-photographed his own photographs. "There is no difficulty in making copies of Daguerreotype pictures of any size," he wrote. In the winter of 1839-40, "I made many copies of my more fortunate proofs . . . copying views on very minute plates, with a very minute camera." Later, these were enlarged "to any required size, by means of a stationery apparatus." What became of these daguerreotypes of daguerreotypes? In what ways did subsequent reproduction technologies alter the look of the original?
In 1960, some daguerreotypes were rediscovered amid a miscellany of Draper material, stored in the attic of Gould Memorial Library at NYU's University Heights campus in the Bronx. Before an extended loan to the Smithsonian in 1962, the NYU Photo Bureau made a copy photograph, which bears a confusing label: "First known photograph of the moon was taken by John W. Draper ca. 1839-40. The spots in this photo are caused by mold and water damage on the original daguerreotype, which apparently [?] no longer exists." Since 1993, when the moon photographs returned to the University Archives, experts have concluded that the daguerreotype seen here is most likely that taken by John Draper in 1840.
If so, its survival as an object happened against the odds. The senior Dr. Draper saw much of his work destroyed by an 1844 fire. Another devastating fire in 1866 obliterated the University Medical College, of which he was president. In addition to Draper's own papers and apparatus, the invaluable collections of the Lyceum of Natural History, which NYU had taken in, were completely consumed by the flames. After the fire, the New York Evening Post, recognizing the need to protect museums and archives, wrote on May 25: "What we want in New York is a great fire-proof building, sufficiently capacious to afford shelter to all the societies which possess valuable collections.”
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Dan Streible, with research contributions from Ashley Sena-Levine, Simon Baatz, Nancy Cricco [university archivist], Howard McManus, Len Walle, Deborah Jean Warner, and Gregory Wick. Special acknowledgement for Walter Forsberg, who willed the Orphans in Space DVD into being and who brought the Draper moon photograph to my attention in the first place. The medium-resolution digital copy of the framed daguerreotype is my amateur snapshot taken with an iPhone 4 when Nancy Cricco showed the original to us in 2011.
Slide show at 2014 Orphan Film Symposium, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.
Downloadable. Booklet (40 pages) for the two-DVD set Orphans in Space: Forgotten Films from the Final Frontier (NYU Orphan Film Project, 2012). Produced and edited by Walter Forsberg, Alice Moscoso, Dan Streible, and Jonah Volk. Booklet design by Kramer O'Neill.
Jul 2, 2019
Orphans in China -- - “影展与城市” 国际论坛
Orphan films in China?
Many, of course! So at last the Orphan Film Symposium visits China.
Xiamen University invited me to talk about the symposium-as-festival (“Screening Orphan Films: Why and How?”) and to screen a sample of shorts at this week's two-part conference on festivals and archives. Most of the other works presented here also fit within the orphan rubric. We saw a variety of previously neglected, forgotten, obscure, seldom-seen, or undistributed titles: ethnographic films, a found-footage remix, video art appropriation, a propaganda drama about comradeship among Chinese and North Korean soldiers during the Korean War, home movies from Taiwan, indie Malaysian movies, and restorations of feature films from Singapore, Mexico, the Philippines, and Thailand.
How did we get here?
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| Professors Li Xiaohong (Deputy Dean of Humanities) & Ray Jiing, 井迎瑞. |
Our generous host Prof. Li and her impressive students from the Department of Film and Drama took this commemorative photograph on day one and delivered laminated copies to each of us the next day.
Part 2 (June 30 - July 3) addressed Film Archives and Film Restoration, with a new set of presenters, led by Dr. Jiing, assembling again on the beautiful campus. MIAP Director Juana Suárez and I were the fortunate two who got to present at both, with Dina Iordanova (St. Andrews U), Hee Wai Siam (Nanyang Technological U), and Nitin Govil (University of Southern California) participating in both as well.
p.s. Special thanks to XMU student, 华莱士 Young, my translator, problem-solver, and fellow basketball fan.
Also, it must be noted that the XMU student team of Alice, Shiyang, and Young all gave up what should have been their first day off to make sure I got through the emergency room process.
(Total out-of-pocket cost for emergency room visit, doctor's exam, lab tests, and medications: about $50 USD for this non-citizen.)
Most attendees were Xiamen University faculty and students, working alongside invited artists, archivists, programmers, and researchers from across China and southeast Asia -- Yunnan, Guizhou, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines. Others came from North America, Europe, and Australia, including Jan-Christopher Horak (UCLA Film and Television Archive), Howard Besser (NYU), Bono Olgado (U of California, Irvine), Miao Song (Concordia U, Montreal), and Kirsten Stevens (U of Melbourne).
We learned about the histories and practices of film festivals including the Hong Kong IFF (from Roger Garcia), Singapore IFF (Yuni Hadi), Southeast Asian FF (Sangjoon Lee), Canada China IFF (Song Miao), Japanese festivals (Ma Ran), Latin American preservation festivals (Juana Suárez), and Taiwan's Women Make Waves (Huang Yu-Shan) and Golden Harvest Award and Short Film Festival (Ming-Yeh Rawnsley).
The fact that China's Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival has located to Xiamen this year* was a key reason the university organized the forum on this theme. We heard from Professor Li about the founder of the Golden Rooster Awards, and from Zheng Guoqing (Xiamen U) about Taipei's Golden Horse Awards and Festival. Other topics analyzed included the marketing of festivals (Liao Gene-Fon, Taiwan U of Arts), "cities of film" (Zhang Aigong, XMU), film collecting (Zhang Jin, China Film Archive) and Lin Liang-wen (Taiwan U of Arts), and Home Movie Day (Hsieh Yu-en, Film Collectors’ Museum).
Media art and ethnographic filmmaking were given particular attention, with screenings of the Chinese-language works Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (Wang Bo & Pan Lu, 2017) Kawa People (Tan Leshui, 1958; introduced by the filmmaker’s son), and Tail After Those Old Photos (Chen Xueli, 2015). Yunnan was also well represented by Tan, Chen, media artist Li Xin, and film rescuer Xiong Libo. They were joined by Wei Wei (Guizhou Minzu U) on the Miao series of ethnographic films from the 1970s.
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Each section of the conference ended with a visit to the XMU Film Archive Studies Center, located on the top floor of the library on the larger Xiang'an campus. Shiyang Jiang led our tour of the archive. A new film scanner sits alongside an acre of projectors and old film cans -- displayed to remind us of the noted cultural heritage site, the Terracotta Army of Xi'an. There's also a lecture room set up with working 35mm projectors on the floor, which were used to good effect.
• Lino Brocka's Maynila, sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag / Manila in the Claws of Light (Philippines, 1975), a 2013 restoration by the World Cinema Foundation, introduced by Benedict Salazar Olgado, former director of the National Film Archives of the Philippines.
We learned about the histories and practices of film festivals including the Hong Kong IFF (from Roger Garcia), Singapore IFF (Yuni Hadi), Southeast Asian FF (Sangjoon Lee), Canada China IFF (Song Miao), Japanese festivals (Ma Ran), Latin American preservation festivals (Juana Suárez), and Taiwan's Women Make Waves (Huang Yu-Shan) and Golden Harvest Award and Short Film Festival (Ming-Yeh Rawnsley).
The fact that China's Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival has located to Xiamen this year* was a key reason the university organized the forum on this theme. We heard from Professor Li about the founder of the Golden Rooster Awards, and from Zheng Guoqing (Xiamen U) about Taipei's Golden Horse Awards and Festival. Other topics analyzed included the marketing of festivals (Liao Gene-Fon, Taiwan U of Arts), "cities of film" (Zhang Aigong, XMU), film collecting (Zhang Jin, China Film Archive) and Lin Liang-wen (Taiwan U of Arts), and Home Movie Day (Hsieh Yu-en, Film Collectors’ Museum).
Media art and ethnographic filmmaking were given particular attention, with screenings of the Chinese-language works Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (Wang Bo & Pan Lu, 2017) Kawa People (Tan Leshui, 1958; introduced by the filmmaker’s son), and Tail After Those Old Photos (Chen Xueli, 2015). Yunnan was also well represented by Tan, Chen, media artist Li Xin, and film rescuer Xiong Libo. They were joined by Wei Wei (Guizhou Minzu U) on the Miao series of ethnographic films from the 1970s.
----
Each section of the conference ended with a visit to the XMU Film Archive Studies Center, located on the top floor of the library on the larger Xiang'an campus. Shiyang Jiang led our tour of the archive. A new film scanner sits alongside an acre of projectors and old film cans -- displayed to remind us of the noted cultural heritage site, the Terracotta Army of Xi'an. There's also a lecture room set up with working 35mm projectors on the floor, which were used to good effect.
 |
| Shiyang Jiang of the XMU film archive will be entering the NYU MIAP master's program. |
 |
| Photos and videos by Dan Streible, June 27, 2019. |
Ray Jiing's Archivist's Code of Ethics on display in Chinese concludes with a paragraph about the English terms "orphan films" and "public domain." Shiyang translated.
A special treat concluded the visit: projection of a 35mm print from the Military Collection, nothing less than a reel from Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time Redux (1994/2008).
The evening screenings on the giant screen of the 700-seat theater were especially memorable. These included
• Chris Horak introduced UCLA restorations of the handsome Enamorada (Emilio Fernandez, Mexico, 1946), shot by Gabriel Figueroa, starring Maria Félix & Pedro Almendáriz; and, from Hollywood, the odd 1929 Best Picture nominee Alibi (sound version)
• Man with a Movie Camera: The Participatory Global Remake (1929/2017), January 19, 2017 edition; introduced by Howard Besser as an example of database cinema and our forum theme of cities.
• Lino Brocka's Maynila, sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag / Manila in the Claws of Light (Philippines, 1975), a 2013 restoration by the World Cinema Foundation, introduced by Benedict Salazar Olgado, former director of the National Film Archives of the Philippines.
• The fabulous martial arts flick 血指环 / Ring of Fury (Singapore, 1973), restored by the Asian Film Archive, with Cineric Portual solving the serious mold and color fading problems; introduced by Karen Chan.
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| The before-and-after demo for Ring of Fury is more striking than most. |
• Santi-Vina (Thavi Na Bangchang, Thailand, 1954)
Introduced by Sanchai Chotirosseranee of Film Archive (Public Organization), Thailand; restoration from the BFI National Archive's 35mm nitrate release print. The first Thai color feature film -- and such colors!
My orphan shorts (small films screened on the small screen) included [Elsa and Albert Einstein at Warner Bros.- First National Studio] (US, 1931); the amateur production Na odnoi zemle / On the Same Earth (USSR, 1976); and the particularly well-received 轻骑姑娘 / Light Cavalry Girls (China, 1980) from the University of South Carolina's Chinese Film Collection. This Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio production by Shen Jie highlights the Chinese army’s Bayi Women Light Motorcycle Team. The XMU students were particularly intrigued by this anomalous experimental documentary. (My thanks to the researchers who rediscovered these three films: Becca Bender and Maria Vinogradova, as well as Zoe Meng Jiang, Yongli Li, and Lydia Pappas.) I was also able to screen clips from my forthcoming annotated, on-line filmography of 50 terms for newsreel elements, including the item that serves as the frontispiece for the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium -- If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt? -- outtakes (Fox Movietone News, 1929).
Special recognition here for artist-curator Qin Dao and his presentation on the Guangzhou City cinematheque "On Kino." Here's a quintessential icon of orphan films in China, as seen on the Facebook page.
My gratitude to the Xiamen University team for the hospitality all week. They gave us access to the famous local cuisine, a tour of Gulang Island (UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site), and extraordinarily friendly attention to every detail.
Don't be surprised if there is another forum next year.
-- Dan Streible
p.s. Special thanks to XMU student, 华莱士 Young, my translator, problem-solver, and fellow basketball fan.
Also, it must be noted that the XMU student team of Alice, Shiyang, and Young all gave up what should have been their first day off to make sure I got through the emergency room process.
(Total out-of-pocket cost for emergency room visit, doctor's exam, lab tests, and medications: about $50 USD for this non-citizen.)
_______________________________________
* Rebecca Davis, “Xiamen Woos Film Industry, Becomes New Home of Golden Rooster Festival,” Variety, June 16, 2019.
Jun 6, 2019
Orphans - Radicals - NOW!
Gentle colleagues:
“At last the day has came!”
Official greetings from the OFS, NYU, and our host ÖFM.
If you have registered for the special edition of the NYU Orphan Film Symposium – RADICALS – at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, you already what needs be known about our schedule. But attached here is a plain-text version of the program, along with the PDF that Jurij Meden sent us previously.
At the entrance to the Filmmuseum, you and all visitors will find a paper version of the program sitting at the ticket counter. Starting at 3:00 pm today (Thursday, June 6), you can officially register by picking up your name badge (required to get you in to all the events).
Thursday evening consists of the 7:00 pm screening of restored Dutch experimental films from Eye Filmmuseum, followed by an 8:30 Orphans-Radicals reception in the lobby, and concluding at 9:30 pm with a very short screening and convivial introductions.
Friday and Saturday presentations begin at 9:30 am. (Doors open at 8:30 am; with coffee/croissant discount at the museum.) Lunches and coffee breaks catered for us.
Thanks to all of you who have come from far and near to be part of this special Orphans gathering. Looking forward to it all.
Truly,
Dan Streible
NYU Orphan Film Symposium
Jurij Meden,
Kurator, Austrian Film Museum
Michael Loebenstein
Director, Austrian Film Museum
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