Evening Star Newspaper, October 18, 1931, Page 83

PART 7. Magasine WASHINGTON, D. C, OCTOBER 18, 1931, ——— The Sunday Stal 200 PAGES. — — —_— —_— A Film Record of Roosevelt By Piccing Together Bits of Old News Reel Films, a “Movie History” of This American Has Been Assembled—Difficulties of Obtaining Old Pictures Bring Out the Necessity for a National Film Library, Probably Located Here in Washington—Great V'alue of Historical Data. OR 30 years a certain Dutch gentleman and his predeces- sors in office took moving pic- tures of the Queen of Holland. They made records of the child Wilhelmina, the young girl and the Queen; there were scenes of her majesty laying corner stones, holding court, reviewing troops and receiving distinguished visitors, one of the latter being Theodore Roosevelt, during his European tour of 1910. This collection of films, as added to year by year, was jealously guarded by its makers, for they knew that no sin- gle item, if destroyed, could ever be duplicated. They looked forward to a time when all the ‘“shots” would be put together in proper sequence, edited, captioned and thus made into a continuous picture of history as it marches, a “document” far more vivid and convincing than any of the “Blue Books,” *“White Books” or “Green Books™ ever issued. But they were destined to bitter dis- appointment. During the war Holland, though supposedly neutral, was hard pressed. Money was scarce and so were raw materials. Bright-eyed “ef- ficiency” men looked around them. Film, they noted, contained silver nitrate, and also cellulose, both valu- able; the latter, for instance, could be used to make boot soles for soldiers. Presto. Though the official photog- rapher protested and wrung his hands, the collection which it had taken 30 years to gather was seized and in less than 30 days had been metamorphosed into footwear. Future scholars, search- ing for it, will be less successful than they would if looking for @inosaur eggs UT this tragedy happened, one says in Holland, far away and only vaguely important. Then let us come nearer home to a certain film storage vault on Long Island. This cavernous space is divided into dozens of private storage rooms where, ranged on shelves alorg the walls, are hundreds of cases of film. We have come here hoping to find, amid the dusty rows, a can which contains a record of certain events which took place on October 3, 1899, the day of Dewey's triumph- ant return from Manila. On that ex- ultant occasion a flickering picture was made of Theodore Roosevelt re- viewing the Dewey parade—the only moving picture ever taken of the Rough Rider while he was Governor of New York. Tracing the precious record to this vault has been a weary but exciting business, a breathless following of vague clues. Now we stand, flushed and hopeful, on the threshold of suc- cess. But alas, we are still in the po- sition of the miner who has been told with a magnificent gesture toward the Rockies, “Thar's gold in them thar hills.” Yes, but where? In which of the thousands of dusty cans is the bit of celluloid for which we are search- ing? The films stored here are so old that no list or catalogue can be found to guide us in--locating it. All we know is that the heavy metal containers are grouped according to the dates when their contents were taken, instead of ac- cording to subject matter, as are books in a library. The sad and the gay, the important and the trivial, are jumbled together here as demo- cratically as the bones of the dead. There are old comics — ludicrous pie-throwing episodes which it would be just as well for our great- grandchildren not to see if we do not want them to regard us as a generation of maniacs— and elbowing Charlie Chaplin and his famous trousers are important historical episodes in the adolescence of a nation. i To locate the can we seek requires hours, even days. of searching. Finally, though, we find it. We hold it tenderly in our hands as we take it to the light. We brush off the dust of decades which covers it. Breathless, eager, expectant, we open it. And as we do so there is-a small explosion. The air is full of yellow particles. At first we are frightened; then, trembling a little, we look inside the container. The film has disappeared; only yellow pow- der, nothing more, remains. That almost no concerted effort is being made to collect, arrange, edit and properly preserve current events films and make them available to scholars, as is done with other historical data, is a fact which the average Drawing by Joseph Simont fr.om one of the old Roosevelt films, BY MARY DAY WINN Author of “The Macadam Trail,” “4dam’s Rib” and several special stories for The Star’s Sunday Magazine. person will probably not believe. But it is true. When some explorer survives the horrors of the jungle and brings back pictures of hith- erto unknown ruins in South America, there is loud rejoicing among archeologists and histo- rians. Yet many of the same people who are so anxious to learn what our ancestors looked like and how the world appeared to their eyes remain unconcerned as many of the most vivid and intimate visual records of our own times are every day being thrown away, destroyed or allowed to disintegrate. Scholars who come after us will yearn for them just as passion- ately as we long to know what Shakespeare looked like as he went about his daily business —or, better still, to gaze on Helen's face when she welcomed distinguished foreigners—and one in particular—to Menelaus’ court. But such scholars will search in vain for many films of the early twentieth century; they will be gone beyond any chance of recovery. It is true that several big motion picture firms have recently bought up and used some old and valuable films in making up their cur- rent National Advertisers Series. This, how- ever, is not a solution of the problem from the historian’s point of view. A continuous visual story of the country would require continual scholarly research, time and money to collect from all available sources and the historian’s ability to patch these together in a coherent narrative. What is really needed, in the opinion of those who have made a careful study of the question, is a central bureau, probably in Washington, such as the Library of Congress, with an appropria- tion for buying important reels from any one who takes them and a staff capable of arrang. - ing and editing these films into a running his- tory. So far this has not been done with any de- gree of- thoroughness for any historical period except that of the Roosevelt administrations. An unedited collection of pictures of President Wilson has been made by a private individual; a collection showing American relief work in Europe has been gathered together by Presi- dent Hoover and presented to Leland Stanford, and the Government War College houses a col- lection of pictures made since 1914 by the Signal Corps. Except for the already men- tioned editing, under various headings, of the current events pictures that are taken by some of the big companies, there the story ends. That the hand-shaking, broad-toothed smile and very active activities of “Teddy” have been so well preserved and will be on his birth- day, October 27, available for private show- ings in schools, colleges and clubs all over the country is due to the vision and inde- fatigable energy of Miss Caroline Gene try, a little woman who has made vhd collecting and editing of historical films her life work. The story of how, financed by the Roosevelt Memorial Assoclation, she has gathered the films of the former President is a tale of frustrations, obstacles overcome and tireless search which compares wi‘na the treasure hunts of old. The tasg took her seven years to accomplisih and carried her to many countries, The difficulties she encountered reve~l how great is the necessity that som:- thing be done about the matter before it is too late. The principal historical films of current events are those being taken by the newsreel companies. Befora being shown these are usually cut to fit time limitations and several une related subjects are used for each issue. When the company has fine ished exhibiting such a hodge-podgz=, it is filed under the date of releasec, Sometimes the discarded part is kept, more often it is destroyed. To this main source of historical films may b+ added those taken by a few private in- dividuals (lecturers such as the late Dwight Elmendorf), a fairly large number being taken by the Signal Corps of the Army and a sprinkling of propagarda films being made hy the Department of Agriculture, the Reclamation Service and the Departe ments of Health, Labor and Corie merce. The big commercial companics, such as Pathe, International, Metro, Universal, Fox and Paramount, keep their own film libraries, but some of the smaller companies do not. The most accessible film collections are those belonging to commercial film libraries and to individuals who buy odd lots in the hope of reselling bits to the big producers who may find themselves needing a few feet of sole diers marching off to war, of riot, deluge, fire, shipwreck or traffic on Fifth avenue. TO retrieve, from these scatter~d scraps of celluloig. enough to produce principal events in the pub life of President Roosevelt was a ta requiring endless patience and r- sourcefulness. Both of these qualitics Miss Gentry possesses in abundance, together with the schalar's enthusiasm for the preservation of original sources —an enthusiasm duplicated hardly, anywhere in the motion picture ine dustry. Before Miss Gentry began to collect the Roosevelt films she had many years of experience in scenario work. During the war she was with the Division of Films in the Depari« ment of Public Information, helping to get out “The Motion Picture Maga- zine”—a weekly newsreel issued by the Government—and she was on the mo- tion picture section of Secretary, Lane’s Americanization Committee, formed at the end of the war to teach higher ideals of citizenship to our for- eign population, As a result of these activities, she conceived the idea of showing Amer- icanization films to immigrants in the steerage of ships in order to give them a truer, more helpful idea of the country they were adopting than they had perhaps received from Hollywood studios. This Idea, combined with a plan for entertainment films on ships, she carried to the Shipping Board. They were impressed with it, and as a result she found herself assistant manager of a United States Shipping Board Motion Picture Bureau. Her enthusiasm for instructing the immigrants, however, was never allowed to take form, and the scheme of using pictures as light entertainment to distract the attention of the traveling public from the fact that American boats could not serve liquor was not a success. Meanwhile, Miss Gentry had been working to further what had for many years been her chief enthusiasm—the collecting of old films, and new ones as they were taken, into a contin- uous history of the United States. Such a his- tory, she believed, should be centered around the activities of our Presidents, partly because these men are central figures, and partly because such personalizing of events would add to the interest. She" tried, on several occasions, ¢to get a Government appropriation for this work, but Congress could not be made to see its ime portance. Our legislators had appropriated $1,500,000 for the Vollbehr collection of fif« teentth century books to place in the Cone gressional Library, but would not give end .