A neglected genre:
James Sibley Watson's
avant-garde industrial films
A neglected genre:J ames Sibley Watson s avant-garde indus trial films
Jan-Christopher Horak
I
n 1928 James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber
produced a short `amateur' film in Watson's father's
stable in Rochester, New York. To visualize
Edgar Allen Poe's famous tale, The Fall of the
House of Usher, they created a dazzling array of
superimpositions and distorted images through mirrors,
prisms and lenses. Watson stated at the time
that neither he nor Webber had read the Poe story in
ten or fifteen years, giving them the freedom to reimagine
it rather than slavishly illustrate the work.1
Soon to become the most widely seen American
avant-garde film of the era, The Fall of the House of
Usher was hailed by the Chairman of the National
Board ofReviewasthemostoutstandingcontribution
to the motion picture as an art form since The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari (1920).2
The film was screened both
theatrically and non-theatrically hundreds of times all
over the United States. The Amateur Cinema League
(ACL) bought a 16mm reduction print for its lending
library.3
While beginning pre-production in the spring
of 1930 on Lot in Sodom (1934), their next major
avant-garde work, Watson and Webber also initiated
at least three other projects: a narrative short with
dialogue, a local newsreel for Rochester, and an
`industriaľ for the Bausch & Lomb Company, The
Eyes of Science (1931). The last-named film would
havealmostasmuch ofanimpactonloversofcinema
as their first, remaining in constant distribution for
over a decade. As one writer commented retrospectively:
`Dr. Watson's name, as the producer of The
Fallof The House of Usher and ofThe Eyes of Science,
is outstanding in the entire world of amateur films'.4
One may ask, why discuss industrial film within
the context of the history of avant-garde cinema?
Formalist criticism has, of course, consistently defined
film art and aesthetics in opposition to film
genres that also serve utilitarian purposes. This splitting
of form from content excludes not only industrials
and other non-fiction forms from serious discussion,
but also constructs false dichotomies. If we return to
the avant-garde discourses of the 1920s and 1930s,
it becomes abundantly clear that contemporaries of
Watson and Webber eschewed distinctions between
ľart pour ľart and informational/documentary forms.
For example, two short films produced by Hans
Richter, which long ago entered the avant-garde film
canon, Inflation (1928) and Two-Penny Magic (1929),
were initially produced as a credited montage sequence
imbedded in a Ufa comedy and an advertising
film for a Cologne newspaper. Only decades later
were they screened by Richter and other curators as
independent avant-garde shorts. As a Dutch Filmliga
program noted in reference to Jan Moľs In the Kingdom
of Crystals (1928): `The difference between "art
film" and "science film," however useful otherwise, is
not relevant in this case, as we are as yet unclear
about where "art" begins and "science" ends'.5
While
not every industrial can be read as avant-garde,
certain industrials at the very least mimic the kind of
formal play that has defined the avant-garde, including
The Eyes of Science and Highlights and Shadows
(1937), James Sibley Watson's industrial for the Eastman
Kodak Company.
As research has continued over the last decFilm
History, Volume 20, pp. 35­48, 2008. Copyright  John Libbey Publishing
ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America
Jan-Christopher Horak is Acting Director of the Moving
Image Archive at UCLA, having previously directed
majorfilm archivesin Rochester, Munichand Universal
City. He has published widely on avant-garde cinema,
including Film und Foto der zwanziger Jahre (1979),
Lovers of Cinema (1995), and Making Images Move
(1997). Correspondence to: jchorak@ucla.edu
FILM HISTORY: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008 ­ p. 35
ade on early American avant-garde film (as well as
on such previously neglected genres as amateur
film, documentary, educational and medical film),
revisionist historians have ascertained that amateur
and avant-garde filmmakers were at the forefront of
all progressive and aesthetically ambitious filmmaking,
at least in the 1920s and 1930s, and that consequently
the borders between genres are not easily
drawn. While commercial cinema (i.e. the Hollywood
studio system) settled into a mode of production
controlled by professionals with relatively rigid normative
techniques, conventions and modes of address,
other genres developed outside this system
and were much more open to unconventional forms
and avant-garde initiatives.6
With the commercial
availability of 16mm film after 1923, amateurs also
began eagerly experimenting in virtually every genre.
One need only look at the 1933 Amateur Cinema
League's Ten Best list to realise the truth of this
assertion: it includes two travelogues (Century of
Progress, Glimpses of Rural Hungary), two industrials
(Ceramics, Mining Chrome Ore in New Caledonia), a
`photoplay' (Pipe Dreams), a medical film (Reparative
Operation for a Congenital Defect), an avant-garde
film (Mr. Motorboaťs Last Stand), a nature scenic
(Water), and an educational (Design).7
Cineastes
also moved freely between avant-garde film and
other endeavours: documentary, industrials, experimental
narrative, film criticism, film exhibition, painting
and photography. Watson and Webber, as
multi-tasking amateurs/professionals involved in
medicine, arts and literary criticism, publishing and
museum curatorship, are the standard, rather than
the exception. And while a number of scholars have
taken up the challenge to write about the connections
between avant-garde film and documentary or amateur
cinema, much industrial film production, whether
involving amateur avant-gardists or professionals,
remains terra incognita.
In fact, audiences for industrials at one point
rivaled any Hollywood film, whether shown theatrically
or non-theatrically. Henry Clay Gipson reports
the following numbers of screenings per annum for
industrials produced by United States Steel: 2,000
(1928), 3,931 (1929), 7,383 (1930), 10,331 (1931),
22,614 (1937), 17,147 (1939) and 6,669 (1945).8
According
to another source, Alcoa Company's theatrical
industrial, Unfinished Rainbow (1940), was seen
by more than 50 million Americans, thus outdrawing
Gone With the Wind (1939), while a whopping 57
million persons saw Weyerhaeuser's Green Harvest.9
No one knows exactly how many industrials have
been produced in the U.S.A.
Industrials, possibly more than most genres,
have suffered from `bad objecť status among intellectuals
concerned with cinema, primarily because
they were simply considered a product of corporate
public relations and, therefore, of little interest. Definitions
of non-fiction film by Richard Meran Barsam,
Erik Barnouw and Jack Ellis include not the briefest
mention of industrials, even while giving nods to
travelogues and educational films, before moving on
to the documentary canon: Flaherty, Vertov, Grierson,
Ivens, etc.10
Whether from a Marxist or an enlightened
capitalist perspective, writers assumed a
priori that the ideological function of industrial and
advertising films was to create a favourable social
climate for the unfolding of capitaľs power and the
creation of consumers and consumer markets, making
them totally uninteresting as either aesthetic or
socio-historical objects. From that point of view, industrials
seemed to have little to say that one didn't
already know. Apart from several `how to books',
often written by practitioners in the field, no critical
study of industrials has been published, although
Anthony Slide's book on non-theatrical film at least
includes a production history of industrial film.11
Even
while the New Historicism in Film Studies began
reading other documents of corporate culture
against the grain, industrial films have eluded examination.
Similarly, social and political historians
seemed to neglect industrial films as historical evidence,
although makers of historical documentaries
Fig. 1.
Highlights and
Shadows (1937).
Directed by
James Sibley
Watson. [Frame
enlargement from
35mm print,
Motion Picture
Department
Collection George
Eastman
House.]
FILM HISTORY: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008 ­ p. 36
36 FILM HISTORY Vol. 20 Issue 1 (2008) Jan-Christopher Horak
have increasingly turned to industrials for visual evidence
and illustration, albeit often without critically
highlighting their ideological sources.
No other genre of film has been as sorely
neglected by the academic and archival communities,
resulting in the destruction of vast quantities of
material. Had it not been for a few farsighted individuals,
such as Rick Prelinger, even more of the physical
history of American industrial film production would
have gone missing.12
Over the past fifty years, major
corporations trashed their film archives, as well as
their production records or business records with
sub-contractors who produced industrials. Within the
public film archives, industrials, usually in 16mm,
were thought to be either non-archival or `jusť projection
prints. While renewed interest in industrials
may spur progress, the fact is that at present extremely
few surviving industrials have been archivally
preserved, entailing new pre-print materials and projection
prints. In academia, industrial or informational
films were considered propaganda or merely educational,
not having the cultural cache of either Hollywood
or film art. Non-existent reference works
complicated both archival and academic progress in
researching industrial film production. Attempting as
an archivist to identify film prints of industrials with
missing or incomplete credits or, as an academic, to
write about a particular producer of industrials, was
pioneering work, given the almost total absence of
reference works for industrials and other sponsored
films. The non-theatrical 16mm educational film catalogues
published by Penn State University, Indiana
University, and others in the 1960s and 1970s, were
among the few sources available, both for actual film
materials and filmographic data.
However, the landscape may be changing.
The National Film Preservation Board has begun a
major project with Rick Prelinger to produce a handbook,
Industrial and Institutional Films: A Field Guide,
which will finally allow historians to get a glimpse of
the depth and breath of industrial and sponsored film
production, capturing over a thousand titles with
descriptors.13
In conjunction with the announcement
of this project, the `Orphan Film Symposium' in Columbia,
South Carolina, focused in March 2006 on
industrial and sponsored films. As Donald Crafton
noted in his presentation at the symposium, industrials,
sponsored and institutional films offer a heretofore
unmined field for film scholars, extremely rich in
intellectual content. The sheer vastness of the subject,
penetrating history, economics, sociology, political
science, technology, science, education,
media, medicine, intellectual history and aesthetics,
guarantees that serious inquiry may yield seismic
changes to film and media studies.
As a product of culture at a particular moment
in time, industrials expose the real and hidden agenFig.
2. The Eyes of Science (1930). Directed by James Sibley Watson and Melvill
Webber.
Fig. 3. Highlights and Shadows (1937). Directed by James Sibley Watson.
[Frame enlargements from 35mm print, Motion Picture Department Collection ­ George
Eastman House.]
FILM HISTORY: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008 ­ p. 37
A neglected genre: James Sibley Watson's avant-garde industrial films FILM HISTORY Vol. 20 Issue 1 (2008) 37
das of power, the fissures and conflicts within the
system that produces them. At another level, the
production of desire through industrials was articulated
for and addressed to a desiring and consuming
public. Industrials reproduce, whether literally or
symbolically, the collective imaginary, possibly much
more concretely than Hollywood features. One big
question that remains, however, is whether industrials
utilize a particular aesthetic vocabulary to construct
that imaginary. What seems necessary is an
archaeology of industrials, in the Foucaultian sense,
an exploration of the discursive practices that make
up the genre.14
As a closer analysis of The Eyes of Science and
Highlights and Shadows will demonstrate, James
Sibley Watson brings numerous avant-garde techniques
into play while simultaneously constructing a
positive vision of corporate America and its industry.
These values are communicated through a belief in
science and technology as inherently beneficial, in
the efficiency of an enlightened corporate technocracy,
in the competency of a highly skilled and trained
workforce, and in the inherent democracy all the
above guarantees average Americans.
Unplumbed possibilities
In a 1931 editorial marking the sixth anniversary of
the founding of the Amateur Cinema League, Hiram
Percy Maxim characterised the organisation as unlike
any other, given that it held no meetings, involved
no identifiable markers for its membership, and that
most members hardly knew each other. Indeed, only
the magazine and the lending library connected the
national administration to its 250 local affiliates. Nevertheless,
the ACĽs identity was clearly defined by
its membership, as Maxim noted: `We amateur cinematographers
see ourselves as a growing band of
artisans who have been furnished with a new and
wonderful tool with unplumbed possibilities'.15
One
of those possibilities for new forms of cinema was
clearly the industrial film.
Industrials have been produced since the birth
of cinema. Edison's Blacksmithing Scene (1893) and
Giant Coal Dumper (1897), as well as the Lumire
brothers' Forgerons (Blacksmiths, 1895) can be
thought of as surviving early examples of industrial
films.16
As Charles Musser reports, the production of
industrial and sponsored films became an important
source of income at the turn of the century for the
American Mutoscope and Biograph Company: of
653 films made between May 1903 and May 1904,
120 were sponsored by large corporations or the
United States government (for example Billy Bitzer
shot several films at Westinghouse in 1904). The
Selig Polyscope Company produced a series of films
for the Armour Meat Packing Co., hoping to counter
negative press surrounding Upton Sinclair's novel,
The Jungle.17
As early as 1904, International Harvester
commissioned a series of industrial films,
which they loaned free of charge to small town and
itinerant exhibitors, indicating that by the Nickelodeon
era industrials were an established genre, especially
popular with rural audiences.18
Demonstrating tractors, harvesters and reapers, the
McCormick Company's industrials were also available
in 35mm di-acetate, allowing for portable projection
in non-theatrical spaces.19
General Electric
entered the field of industrial films in 1907. One of the
earliest surviving Pathé Frres films from Russia is an
industrial: Zavod rybnyh konservov v Astrahane (Astrakhan
Fish Cannery, 1908). Shot onsite, the film's
editing and its moving camera shots of fishermen,
fishwives or cannery employees at work and on
break, is extremely sophisticated for the period, giving
evidence of a cinema verité technique that would
not come into vogue again until after the Revolution
with the emergence of Vertov, who made anti-capitalist
industrials.
In 1914, Henry Ford founded a motion picture
unit which began producing a weekly series, Ford
Animated Weekly (1914­21).20
Even before World
War I, film producers began to specialize, differentiating
production as well as product. In 1910, Jamison
Handy founded his industrial film production company,
Jam Handy, in Detroit, his first client being
National Cash Register; for five decades he was the
auto industry's most important film producer.21
Meanwhile, the Raths-Seavolt Company was
founded in St. Paul, Minnesota, another firm that
would produce industrials for decades, especially
under the Ray-Bell Company brand. The year 1914
also saw the founding of Wilding Picture Productions
in Detroit, and two years later, Hugh V. Jamieson
formed the Jamieson Film Company in Dallas, which
remained in existence until 1972 when it was absorbed
by a rival Houston firm.
By the late 1920s, industrial films were a staple
in the theatrical and non-theatrical market, but production
was still handled largely by professionals
utilizing 35mm.22
The actual quality of these industrials
varied greatly, leading Paul Rotha to complain:
FILM HISTORY: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008 ­ p. 38
38 FILM HISTORY Vol. 20 Issue 1 (2008) Jan-Christopher Horak
`Regrettably enough, where such films have been
made, especially of the industrial type, they have
most often been regarded by the Trade more as an
easy means of making a profit than as an opportunity
to develop a new branch of cinema'.23
Rotha was
writing in 1939, but he was a critic and filmmaker who
came of age in the late silent period, when among
cineastes there was still a firm belief that good cinema
occurred in any genre, if the medium's aesthetic
parameters were being stretched. At the same time,
he agreed with his mentor, John Grierson, and other
members of the British documentary school, that the
communication of information, i.e. social content,
was of primary importance.
Not surprisingly, then, amateurs interested in
experimenting with film forms soon gravitated to industrials,
especially after 16mm film was introduced
by the Eastman Kodak Company. Given the fact that
educational institutions, churches, civic groups and
amateur film clubs quickly switched from 35mm diacetate
projection to 16mm exhibition, it made sense
that 16mm would indeed become a `semi-professionaľ
format for industrials, especially after the introduction
of 16mm sound film in 1930 and a
sound-on-film projector by Victor Animatograph two
years later. The Eastman Teaching Films lending
library, distributed by Eastman Kodak to encourage
the use of 16mm home projection, included numerous
industrials in its late 1920s catalogues. By 1931,
according to a source at Eastman Kodak, more than
52 per cent of industrials originated in 16mm, produced
by sixty-two industries and 434 companies.24
The same year saw the founding of the Calvin Company,
a Kansas City-based producer of educational
and industrial films in 16mm that would soon become
one of the leaders in the production of industrials.25
By the early 1930s, industrial films were turning
up regularly in the pages of Amateur Movie Makers,
the official publication of the Amateur Cinema
League, especially in a regular column by Louis M.
Bailey, `Educational Films'.26
In a typical column in
March 1932, Bailey describes an industrial about the
making of ready-to-wear shirts for the D & D Shirt
Company in Buffalo, New York; the making of precision
lathes for Pratt & Whitney in Hartford, Connecticut;
and the production of ice in Watsonville,
California.27
In April 1932, Arthur Gale reports on the
screening of Making Photographic Lenses (1932),
produced by New York City filmmaker George Kirstein
at a local cinema club.28
Meanwhile, reviews of
industrials were also appearing in other publications
addressing professional and amateur photographers
and filmmakers, including The Camera.
In February 1932, Epes W. Sargent, writing in
Amateur Movie Makers, gave film amateurs advice on
how to produce industrials that will sell, noting that
`Photographic beauty is a point that wins in many
industrials'.29
One can read the appellation, `Celluloid
that sells', as addressing amateurs who wished
to professionalize themselves as producers of industrial
films, at least to the extent that they can amortize
their production costs. Not surprisingly, then, much
of the advice in the article is prescriptive, focusing in
its narrative of a reluctant farmer as customer for an
automobile both on psychological motivation and
descriptions of camera movement; form functions to
motivate the viewing subject (i.e. the actual customer/audience)
and its imaginary double on the
screen to consume the goods offered. Finally, Sargent
argues that the product or process of manufacture
must be clearly visible to the viewer: `If the
subject is an engine, show it at rest and in motion'.30
A later piece in Amateur Movie Makers, `Planning
industrial films', by ACL member Cyril Presgrave,
discusses both efficiency and aesthetics for
industrial films.31
He first differentiates between three
different intended audiences, each requiring a
slightly different mode of address, whether company
personnel, consumers wishing to educate themselves,
or the `general public', the last named becoming
a potential consumer after experiencing the
film. Concluding that the `intra industriaľ group will
require mostly bare facts, and that the film for the
consumer will involve mostly illustrating a producťs
usage (neither chore being particularly interesting for
the filmmaker) the author theorizes a general audience,
requiring the most from the filmmaker's technical
and aesthetic skills: `we find the industrial
camera developing a new power. In the other types
of film, the camera is subordinated and limited to
recording plain fact; here, however, the cameraman
may use imagination and take advantage of some of
the possibilities of his camera.' Presgrave then goes
on to suggest the use of close-ups and other cinematic
techniques `to bring the industrial film to life
and render it worthy of recognition as a true use of
the cinema'. More telling in reference to his formalist
film aesthetics, Presgrave develops an elaborate
scenario with specific camera directions for a potential
industrial on electric refrigerators. Noting that it is
constructed `cinematically', rather than filming professional
actors in a `stage play', the author repeats
FILM HISTORY: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008 ­ p. 39
A neglected genre: James Sibley Watson's avant-garde industrial films FILM HISTORY Vol. 20 Issue 1 (2008) 39
the charge of contemporary film theorists, like Rudolf
Arnheim, that early cinema and much commercial
cinema was theatrical. Yet, in apparent contradiction
to the formalist argument presented through much
of the article, the author also theorizes the ideological
value of industrials, characterising them as reflections
of American industrial might: `The United States
is a great industrial country; our factories are the
most up to date; our social system permits the highest
standard of living known.' Indeed, for the dedicated
amateur, communicating those statements to
a mass audience becomes the pre-eminent goal of
industrial film production.
Films like poetry
Born in 1894 to a prominent Rochester family, heir to
Hiram Sibley and the Western Union fortune, Dr.
James Sibley Watson was a medical doctor who
never really practised his profession. He had studied
at Harvard, where he met and became a friend of e.e.
cummings, later the godfather of his first son. After
marrying a Daughter of the American Revolution,
Hildegarde Lasell, whose New England blue blood
lineage could be traced back to émigré French
Hugenots, Watson attended New York University and
completed his residency at Bellevue Hospital in
1923.32
Instead of devoting himself entirely to medicine,
J.S. Watson turned some of his energies towards
the arts, purchasing and publishing The Dial
in 1919 with Scofield Thayer, a friend of Hildegarde's
from Harvard (and, after 1921, a patient of Sigmund
Freud).
First published in 1840 and 1844 by Margaret
Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, respectively, The
Dial had been turned into a modernist literary magazine
in 1916 by then editor Martyn Johnston before
Thayer and Watson expanded the journaľs mandate
to include art criticism (by Kenneth Burke, Gilbert
Seldes), poetry (Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings,
Carl Sandberg) and drawings (Gaston Lachaise,
Paul Cézanne). In the 1920s, the journaľs contributors
constituted a virtual who's who of modernism,
Thayer editing from Vienna, while Seldes and Burke
functioned as managing editors; Moore assumed
the editorship in 1926, Thayer and Watson continuing
to subsidize its publication until 1929 when The Dial
folded. Lisa Cartwright characterises The Diaľs high
modernist politics in the 1920s as `marked by the
original journaľs rhetoric of free speech and aesthetic
autonomy, expressed in an adamant separation
of aesthetics from politics'.33
In 1928, James Sibley Watson, Melville Webber,
Marion Gleeson, J.G. Capstaff and others cofounded
an amateur cinema group, the Cinema Club
of Rochester. Watson had started experimenting with
film in 1924­25 while he and Hildegarde lived on a
farm near her family homestead in Whitinsville, MA,
producing home movies of his children as well as
little narrative shorts with family members as actors.34
He also discussed projects and traded film treatments
in his correspondence with e.e. cummings.35
Born in Boston in 1889, Melville Webber had travelled
to Europe in the early 1920s before settling in Rochester,
where he became Associate Director of the
Memorial Art Gallery and a lecturer in art history at
the University of Rochester. While Watson and Webber
produced The Fall of the House of Usher independently,
the Cinema Club's first joint production
was The Luggar (1929), a more conventional narrative,
directed by J.C. Capstaff, the inventor of twocolour
Kodachrome and 16mm cameras and
projectors at Eastman Kodak. At the same time, club
members gathered shots for a possibly uncompleted
`city film', tentatively titled Rochester ­ Its Life
and Character.36
In February 1929, Symon Gould opened the
Film Guild Cinema on 8th Street in New York, screening
The Fall of the House of Usher in its inaugural
programme. Designed by Frederick Kiesler, the Film
Guild was, in the eyes of its architect, the `first 100
per cent cinema in the worlď.37
Numerous dignitaries,
including Theodore Dreiser, attended the premiere.
As noted above, the film became extremely
Fig. 4. The Fall
of the House of
Usher (1928).
Directed by
James Sibley
Watson and
Melville Webber.
[Courtesy,
J.-C. Horak.]
FILM HISTORY: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008 ­ p. 40
40 FILM HISTORY Vol. 20 Issue 1 (2008) Jan-Christopher Horak
popular at ACL meetings, but was also screened at
the experimental `Cine Arť film festival in Marseilles,
France in summer 1931. While Melville Webber had
suggested the Poe story in November 1926, written
the script, and been responsible for sets and costumes,
J.S. Watson had directed and operated the
camera. Webber and Watson each discussed the
film's production in separate articles in Amateur
Movie Maker, Webber commenting on the use of
miniatures for sets and Watson discussing the
prisms utilized in the cinematography.38
It was Watson's
goal, he wrote, to `improve the flow of the
picture', rather than merely illustrate a story, `so as to
make the spectator feel not with any particular hero
or heroine, as one does in a cheap novel, but to make
him feel the whole piece like a piece of poetry'.39
Watson here equates (Hollywood) audience identification
with literary values, hoping instead to communicate
directly through images, as does a poet. In
keeping with modernist currents, whether from the
left (Brecht, Eisenstein), or the right (T.S. Eliot), Watson
invokes an anti-psychological, anti-identification
rhetoric. He seemingly succeeded. Writing in The
Arts, C. Adolph Glassgold praised the film as a work
of abstract art: `Aiming to produce a distinct mood,
it justly defines the function of its abstract technique
as a means to procure that mooď.40
Starring non-professional actors, including
Hildegarde Watson and Melville Webber as the `mysterious
stranger', The Fall of the House of Usher is
virtually non-narrative in its re-imagining of Poe's tale.
While critics have noted its indebtedness to German
Expressionism, it is more radical in its construction
of cinematic space; while Expressionism relies on
painted sets, seen in medium and long shot to give
some sense of an organic space, Watson and Webber's
film has few recognisable sets and no recognisable
geographic space. It relies, rather, on a
dazzling array of often distorted shots, multiple exposures,
travelling mattes and animated sequences
that allow fragmented glimpses of characters in
purely cinematic space. Watson's high key, chiaroscuro
lighting reveals and shrouds objects and characters,
again giving audiences few visual cues to
orient themselves in his spatial construction.
Watson and Webber's second avant-garde
film, Tomatoes Another Day (1930), on the other
hand, is a unique example of Dadaist aesthetics in
early sound cinema: a minimalist and virtually expressionless
acting style is implemented on a claustrophobic
set, the overtly melodramatic love triangle
held in long takes and medium shots to accentuate
the narrative's theatrical space. A husband surprises
his wife in flagranti with her lover and shoots him. The
actors verbalize their every action, ironically commenting
on the over-verbalization of early sound films
and on the inane plots of post-silent era Hollywood
productions. The Dadaist clash of low art melodrama
and highly stylized, statically expressionist body language
was possibly too modernist and satirical for
Watson's own taste; he considered the film a failure
and suppressed its existence, until it was recently
discovered in the nitrate holdings of the estate.41
Collaborating again with Melville Webber, Watson
shot Lot in Sodom in his Prince Street stable/studio
between late 1930 and early 1932, utilizing a
home-made optical printer, and working on editing
and scoring well into 1933.42
The film premiered at
the Little Carnegie Theatre in New York on 25 December
1933, along with Josef Berne's Dawn to Dawn.
Lot in Sodom ran for more than two months in New
York, and continued to play in theatres throughout
the 1930s and 1940s, becoming in the process probably
the most commercially successful avant-garde
film of the era. Amateur Movie Makers listed it as one
of the `Ten Besť films of the year. Herman Weinberg
wrote ecstatically about the film: `I have never seen
light manipulated so eloquently as in these expressive
lights and shadows which sometime form men
or fragments of a body, sometimes coagulate into
flowers or break up their particles into water...'. Marianne
Moore also reviewed the film in the same issue
of Close-Up, calling it the best art film she had ever
seen.43
While ostensibly a narrative of the biblical
epic of Lot and his wife who is turned into a pillar of
salt while fleeing Sodom, the film is much more
Fig. 5. The Eyes
of Science
(1930). Directed
by James Sibley
Watson and
Melville Webber.
[Frame
enlargement from
35mm print,
Motion Picture
Department
Collection George
Eastman
House.]
FILM HISTORY: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008 ­ p. 41
A neglected genre: James Sibley Watson's avant-garde industrial films FILM HISTORY Vol. 20 Issue 1 (2008) 41
concerned with non-narrative elements: the play of
light and shadow, the balletic movement of bodies,
the use of multiple exposures and optical tricks, and
the poetic utilization of visual symbolism. The film's
imagery is also highly erotic, especially in the scenes
where Lot offers his daughter to the angel, and
homoerotic, particularly in its light-play on semi-nude
bodies of numerous young men. Working without
dialogue and with sparse titles superimposed in English
and Latin, the film features an atonal music track
which underscores the film's modernist construction.
Watson would similarly employ avant-garde film
techniques and music in the production of his two
industrials.
Technology on parade
Just as it is extremely difficult to document the production
of most industrials, given the loss of primary
documents, so too is it impossible to find details
about the production of The Eyes of Science and
Highlights and Shadows. Apart from the credits available
on the film (and in the case of The Eyes of
Science, there are no credits other than the film's
title), no documents pertaining to these productions
seem to survive. Neither the corporate archives of
Bausch & Lomb, nor those of Eastman Kodak, revealed
any information about the making of these
industrials. The papers of James Sibley Watson, now
housed at the New York Public Library, also contained
no clues about the genesis of these two projects.
Given Watson's financial situation and status
as an amateur, one can, of course, assume that
Watson was not paid for producing these `sponsoreď
industrials. It is also even likely that as a
prominent Rochesterian, probably interested in supporting
the city's two biggest industries/employers,
Watson may have actually financed some of the
production, while Bausch & Lomb opened up its
facilities, cooperated with the production and retained
copyright. The fact that Eyes of Science utilizes
only public domain classical music supports this
theory. In the case of the feature length Highlights
and Shadows, Eastman Kodak probably donated
film stock and developing services, as well as supporting
the production with company personnel.
However, given the total lack of supporting evidence,
any theories in this regard are pure speculation.
We do know from the copyright notice on the
film's head title that The Eyes of Science was completed
in 1930 and from the end title that it was
produced `in collaboration with the scientists and
technicians at Bausch & Lomb'. Since the original
camera negative is 35mm, this amateur industrial
was apparently not shot in 16mm, although 16mm
reduction prints were made for the Amateur Cinema
League's library. The first public notice of the film
appeared in May 1931 in Amateur Movie Makers,
crediting both James Sibley Watson and Melville
Webber as the producers of `an amateur educational
industriaľ, and stating that it should be of special
value to the science divisions of educational institu-
tions.44
More importantly, the film was chosen as one
of `The Ten Besť amateur productions of 1931 by the
staff of Amateur Movie Makers.45
Almost immediately,
the film became a popular item on the amateur
cinema club circuit. For example, as early as December
1931, Carl Louis Gregory lectured on lenses and
light at the Metropolitan Motion Picture Club in New
York City, screening The Eyes of Science with his
lecture, while a similar lecture/film by George Rhode
was held at the University of Southern California the
same month.46
Eight years later, the film was still
being screened: The Philadelphia Cinema Club reported
showing the film in January 1939, along with
a lecture by G.C. Crebbin of the Bausch & Lomb
Company.47
The Eyes of Science ostensibly visualizes the
production of optical lenses for microscopes and
other scientific instruments, yet its opening shot
through a bell jar, distorting the scientist behind it,
recalls The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and presages
Frankenstein (which opened months after this film)
rather than a standard, well-lighted industrial; this
impression is increased through high key lighting on
the scientists and their laboratory instruments, while
the background remains shrouded in darkness, a
stylistic device also much in evidence in Fall of the
House of Usher. The next shot superimposes a
close-up of a human eye and a microscope, as an
invisible speaker lectures about the expansion of
human vision through optics. The trope of the camera
eye is, of course, a central metaphor of the film
avant-garde in the 1920s, utilized by Dziga Vertov,
László Moholy-Nagy and many others.
In the first sequence, then, the film demonstrates
the physical properties of light rays as they
are broken or bent by glass prisms and lenses. Many
of these images, while clearly illustrating the narration
on the sound track, may also be read as abstract
plays of light and shadow recalling similar European
and American film experiments, including Watson's
own Lot in Sodom, Francis Bruguire's abstract light
FILM HISTORY: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008 ­ p. 42
42 FILM HISTORY Vol. 20 Issue 1 (2008) Jan-Christopher Horak
play, Light Rhythms (1930), and precursing Mary
Ellen Bute's Rhythm in Light (1934) ­ the latter film
benefiting from the assistance of Melville Webber.48
The following slow pan across a motion picture camera,
coming to rest on a lens which fills the frame,
could have been lifted from Vertov's Chelovek s
kinoapparatom (The Man with the Movie Camera,
1929), which Watson and Webber would have more
than likely seen.
The next sequence visualizes the production
of glass lenses and prisms from the melting of raw
materials to the grinding and polishing by hand of
individual lenses. With evenly lit medium and long
shots, the sequence conforms closely to the conventions
of documentary filmmaking; yet in the following
section, which demonstrates the mechanized grinding
of lenses, Watson rhythmically cuts the sequence
to music, editing shots on form and movement in a
manner similar to the industrial machine sequences
in Walter Ruttmann's Berlin, die Symphonie der
Großstadt (Berlin, Symphony of a City, 1927) or the
above-mentioned Vertov film. In illustrating the precision
tooling of metal parts holding a lens in place,
Watson transitions from straight cuts to a series of
dissolves on movement and form, again in homage
to the above films.
The final sequence in The Eyes of Science
discusses the beneficial usages of microscopes and
other optical instruments in engineering, medicine
and biology. In particular, the microscopic images of
typhoid bacilli, chicken fetuses, blood streaming
through veins and white blood cells attacking bacteria,
recall in their abstract quality the scientific microscope
films of Jan Cornelis Mol and Jean Painlevé,
which were much appreciated by the European
avant-garde.49
The sequence, as well as the film,
ends on another close-up shot of a microscope as
the camera dollies back to reveal the whole instrument.
Thus, while the film accomplishes its mission
as an industrial to illustrate the process of lens production,
Watson and Webber utilize virtually every
cinematic technique available to the filmmaker, from
abstract animation to camera composition, from
montage to superimpositions through optical printing,
in the process referencing well-known avantgarde
works. The Eyes of Science may, therefore, be
read not only as a treatise on camera vision, optics
and the production of lenses, but also as a metafilm
that self-reflexively catalogues the tools of the contemporary
filmmaker.
The production of Highlights and Shadows
(which runs 71 minutes), occurred in the winter and
spring of 1937­38. James Sibley Watson is credited
as the producer, in cooperation with the Kodak Research
Laboratories. The only other credit in the film
pertains to the musical accompaniment by Dr.
Howard Hanson of the Symphony Orchestra of the
Eastman School of Music, who utilized his own compositions,
as well as those by Burrill Phillips, Bernard
Rogers and Wayne Barlow, all of whom were teaching
composition at the Eastman School. Other
sources credit Lowell Thomas, the voice of the FoxMovietone
Newsreels, as the on-screen narrator, and
Kenneth R. Edwards of Eastman Kodak as production
manager.50
These more professional credits
seem to indicate that Kodak had a much stronger
hand in the production than Bausch & Lomb may
have had on the earlier film, its length also dictating
a much more extensive budget.
Highlights and Shadows, like its predecessor,
had a rich and varied exhibition history. It was apparently
first shown at a Hollywood meeting of the American
Society of Cinematographers in June 1938,
garnering much praise.51
The film was then screened
for Kodak employees in Rochester on 15­16 July at
the Eastman Theatre and again on 6­7 October for
Kodak stockholders and their families.52
Another preview
took place at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York
on 18 August 1938, and was attended by members
of the national press as well as a large number of
camera notables and photographic dealers. As a
later press report noted, the film `has been highly
praised by Hollywood producers and cameramen,
as well as newspaper reviewers throughout the coun-
try'.53
On the other hand, one reviewer complained:
`the music, instead of supporting the film, dominated
it distressingly, perhaps not in volume, but in insistent
rhythm and tempo that soon became annoying'.54
Was he referring to its modernist vocabulary? Made
available free of charge in 16mm by Kodak, Highlights
and Shadows was distributed to amateur
movie and camera clubs throughout the country, and
was also included in Kodak's nationwide 1939 print
exhibition, shown in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington,
Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Milwaukee,
St. Paul, Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis,
Memphis, Atlanta and Detroit, among other cities, as
well as at Kodak's 1939 New York Worlďs Fair Pavil-
ion.55
One can, therefore, assume that literally hundreds
of thousands of individuals saw the film.
Detailing the manufacture of photographic
and motion picture equipment and film, Highlights
FILM HISTORY: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008 ­ p. 43
A neglected genre: James Sibley Watson's avant-garde industrial films FILM HISTORY Vol. 20 Issue 1 (2008) 43
and Shadows begins with a frontal close-up of a
Kodak Ektar 305mm lens, while the credits are superimposed
on the face of the lens. While the lens
continues to function as a frame, an optically produced
iris opens revealing a revolving globe, followed
by another iris of an Egyptian native filming the
Sphinx with a 16mm camera; optical wipes then
connect individuals in local dress filming or photographing
sites/sights in Holland, Greece, Japan,
London, Spain, Berlin and China. If early cinema
brought the wonders of its imaginary and exotic
geography to a stationary audience, these images
now include the subject both as producer and consumer.
As if to underscore this participatory aspect
in the production of moving and still images, Watson
continues with a dissolve montage of amateurs and
Hollywood professionals filming or photographing;
they, not the full-frame environment, are now the
centre of attention. The lens/frame remains clearly
visible throughout the sequence, again invoking the
trope of the camera eye, now seen as a truly international
phenomenon, deeply affecting producers and
consumers of photographic images. In the next shot,
Lowell Thomas stands in front of a completely black
background, explaining that motion pictures are now
an experience of eyes and ears, an optical soundtrack
magically appearing frame left, modulating exactly
in tune with Thomas's voice. Three shots of a
motion picture developing machine and a film projector
gate follow, the sequence closing by returning
to the globe, reflected in the camera lens. Thus,
within this introductory sequence, Watson has made
the cinema's image and sound technology transparent,
allowing the viewer to reflect on the nature of the
experience as a mechanically-produced reflection of
the world.
The main body of Highlights and Shadows
profiles four divisions of the Eastman Kodak Company:
Camera Works, Hawkeye Works (optical), Kodak
Park (film and photographic paper manufacture)
Fig. 6.
Highlights and
Shadows (1937).
Directed by
James Sibley
Watson. [Frame
enlargement from
35mm print,
Motion Picture
Department
Collection George
Eastman
House.]
FILM HISTORY: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008 ­ p. 44
44 FILM HISTORY Vol. 20 Issue 1 (2008) Jan-Christopher Horak
and the Research Department, with the greatest
amount of screen time devoted to Kodak Park: 34
minutes versus 25 minutes for the other sections.
Each entity is portrayed in intricate detail with an
emphasis on production processes. The nine-minute
`camera works' sequence consists of nearly 150
separate shots, which Watson sets in motion through
a mixture of moving camera shots, dissolves, multiple
exposures, and montages, all of which visualize
industrialized production of photographic and motion
picture cameras. Alternating moving camera
shots of the assembly line process with close-ups of
skilled workers constructing cameras or camera
parts, Watson inserts images (often multiple exposures)
of the final product, highlighting its aesthetic
beauty and design. Narrator Thomas's script focuses
on several issues, including the efficiency and
skill of the handworkers, the uses of technology to
improve products, and the implementation of quality
control through scientific instrumentation, all of which
result in `precision instruments of excellent accuracy'
that match the quality of hand-crafted products at a
fraction of the price.
And just as the products demonstrated are
expertly crafted, so too does Watson create an uninterrupted
flow of movement through film technique:
he matches cuts on form, light and movement,
whether within the frame or by the camera. The film's
construction is seemingly classical, especially in the
way composition privileges a centred and balanced
frame, leading the eye of the viewer into the material,
much like Hollywood narrative. Yet the viewer is not
lulled into unconsciousness, the sheer number of
shots and amount of information presented on the
soundtrack precluding such a state; the lecture directly
comments on the mechanical and labour processes
being illustrated. Indeed, while the industrial
film may mimic avant-garde technique, but may not
be avant-garde in terms of its creation of a self-conscious
viewer through cinematic devices and formal
play, many industrials nevertheless require the active
participation of the viewer in order to process the
quantity and quality of images and words. The `Research
Laboratory' section is instructive in this re-
gard.
Highlights and Shadows argues here that experimentation
is the foundation of modern industrial
manufacturing, utilizing principles of the scientific
method and management to find practical solutions,
invoking through its narration the language of tech-
nocracy:
Systematic investigation, controlled experiment,
exact analysis, and respect for the document
record and the underlining order and
logic of the scientific method, the application
of these principles to industry's problems has
become the established preliminary to all production
procedures. Charting the industry on
this basis shortens the path of experience.
The sense of freedom exercised in the interest
of intellectual engagement and experimentation in
the film is underscored through the musical accompaniment,
consisting here of only a piano playing the
most atonal, i.e. avant-garde, music in the film. Film
composition and editing are also radicalized: Watson's
camera angles transition from the strict verticals
and horizontals of the Kodak production
sequences to the expressionist diagonals of Fall of
the House of Usher, while many shots utilize chiaroscuro,
high key lighting, and are edited according to
formalist principles. A montage involving laboratory
test tubes, glass beakers and agitated, translucent
liquids becomes an abstract symphony of reflected
and refracted light. The intellectual play of the scientists
and academics, engaged for the sake of enlightened
capitalist goals, thus finds a correlative in the
film's experimental technique.
Returning to the theme of mass communications'
global reach, the film's last ten minutes illustrate
the multifarious practical applications of
contemporary photography and motion pictures,
Fig. 7.
Highlights and
Shadows (1937).
Directed by
James Sibley
Watson.
[Frame
enlargement from
35mm print,
Motion Picture
Department
Collection George
Eastman
House.]
FILM HISTORY: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008 ­ p. 45
A neglected genre: James Sibley Watson's avant-garde industrial films FILM HISTORY Vol. 20 Issue 1 (2008) 45
running the gamut from x-ray images to newsreels,
narrative features to classroom films, photographs
distributed by telex to time-motion studies with a film
camera, from photographic portraiture to filmed portraits
of a city. The last-mentioned sequence cribs
shots from Berlin, Symphony of a City just as, previously,
the viewer has seen clips from D.W. Griffith's
America (1924) and a synch-sound sequence of the
late Will Rogers (illustrating film's ability to reanimate
the dead) as well as the coronation of George VI.
Such a sampling of archival film images would not
become a hallmark of avant-garde film practice until
decades later. Meanwhile, the professionally-made
archival images transition almost imperceptibly to
moving images of amateur leisure time activities and,
finally, to a home movie of a wedding, intercut with
shots of a family watching the wedding footage in
their living room. Thus, the arc from the professional
to the amateur, from the producer to the consumer,
is once again bridged, bringing the film to a close on
the same sequence of images from around the globe
seen at the film's beginning.
Clearly, both Highlights and Shadows and The
Eyes of Science can be read as discourses on industrial
scientific management in the era of industrial
high capitalism. Like virtually all industrials produced
in the twentieth century, these films emphasise efficiency,
frugality, science and technology as means
of producing high-quality goods on an assembly line,
allowing American corporations to pass on the savings
to the consumer. In the film and photography
industries, these high-quality, lower cost goods
could, therefore, be made available to middle class
and even working class consumers, not just the
wealthy elite, allowing these communications media
to expand beyond the realm of professionals. Amateurs
are, in fact, the target audience for these films,
since they, rather than professionals, constitute a
mass market that can sustain industrial growth.
Quoting art theorist Kirk Bond, Lisa Cartwright
correctly argues that James Sibley Watson was anything
but a radical, belonging instead to `the right
wing of film arť which advocated a strict separation
between art and politics.56
Having been born into the
country's hereditary power elite, Watson utilized
avant-garde cinematic forms to better communicate
what he saw as straightforward facts about local
industries, firm in the belief that rational argument
would win over any audience. Imbricated in the ideology
of industrial capitalism, these films about the
photographic industry today nevertheless give insight
into industrial processes which have since become
obsolete, and into audience desires that
continue to develop in other (digital) media.
1. J.S. Watson, Jr., `An Amatuer Studio Picture', Transactions
of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers
33 (April 1928): 216. See also Lucy Fischer, `The
Films of James Sibley Watson, Jr., and Melville
Webber: A Reconsideration', Millennium Film Journal,
No. 19 (Fall­Winter 1987): 40­49.
2. See National Board of Review Magazine, January
1929.See also `ClubLibrary',Amateur Movie Makers,
4, 7 (July 1929).
3. Letter, James W. Moore to Frank Stauffacher, 28
January 1947, `Art in Cinema' files, Pacific Film Archives,
Berkeley, CA.
4. Amateur Movie Makers, 9, 2 (February 1934): 83.
5. Quoted in Malin Wahlberg, `Wonders of cinematic
abstraction: J.C. Mol and the aesthetic experience
of science film', Screen, 47, 3 (Autumn 2006): 287.
6. See my introduction to Lovers of Cinema: The First
American Film Avant-Garde (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1998).
Fig. 8.
Highlights and
Shadows (1937).
Directed by
James Sibley
Watson.
[Frame
enlargement from
35mm print,
Motion Picture
Department
Collection George
Eastman
House.]
Notes
FILM HISTORY: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008 ­ p. 46
46 FILM HISTORY Vol. 20 Issue 1 (2008) Jan-Christopher Horak
7. `The Ten Besť, Amateur Movie Makers, 8, 12 (December
1933): 499.
8. Henry Clay Gipson, Film in Business and Industry
(New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1947), 34.
9. O.H. Coelln, `The Camera Eye', Business Screen,
31, 10 (October 1972): 17.
10. See Richard Meran Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical
History (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1973), 13f;
Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction
Film (London: Oxford University Press, 1974); Jack
C. Ellis, The Documentary Idea: A Critical History of
English Language Documentary Film and Video
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989).
11. Slide is an excellent source for much of the corporate
history of industrial film production. See Anthony
Slide, Before Video: A History of Non-Theatrical Film
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1992). See also Jay
E. Gordon, Motion Picture Production for Industry
(New York: MacMillan Co., 1961); Leopold Stork,
Industrial and Business Films (London: Phoenix
House,1962);JohnBurden,TheWorkoftheIndustrial
Film Maker (London: Focal Press, 1973); Walter J.
Klein, The Sponsored Film (New York: Hastings
House, 1976); Jerry McGuire, How to Write, Direct
and Produce Effective Business Films & Documentaries
(Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Tab Books, 1978).
12. Rick Prelinger's archive of `ephemeral film', his CD
Rom and his website for downloading material are
invaluable. See `Ephemeral Films, 1931­1960' (CD
Rom), New York, Voyager, 1994. See also
http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger Previously,
one of the few filmographies available was Helen
Steadman,TheIndustrialFilmGuide(London:Kogan
Page, 1974).
13. http://www.filmpreservation.org/projects/industrial
.html
14. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 138f.
15. Hiram Percy Maxim, `Editoriaľ,Amateur Moving Makers,
6, 12 (December 1931): 655.
16. Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890­1900
(Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1997), 310.
17. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The
American Screen to 1907 (New York: Charles Scribner's
and Sons, 1990), 359, 476.
18. Kathryn Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small Town
Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture
(Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1996), 79f.
19. EpesW.Sargent,`CelluloidthatSells',AmateurMovie
Makers, 7, 2 (February 1932): 63.
20. Anthony Slide, Before Video, 3.
21. Walter J. Klein, The Sponsored Film (New York:
Hastings House, 1976), 24.
22. Industrial motion pictures; how to circulate them and
a few cautions regarding their manufacture and distribution
(New York: National Personal Association,
1922).
23. Paul Rotha, Documentary Film (New York: W.W.
Norton & Co., 1939), 53.
24. Louis M. Bailey, `Educational Films', Amateur Movie
Makers, 6, 8 (August 1931): 435.
25. Founded by F.O. and Betty Calvin, the Calvin Company
continued to operate for decades, until it was
dissolved in the 1980s. Rick Prelinger recently donated
the Calvin Company archives to the Library of
Congress.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Company
26. Founded in 1926, under the leadership of Hiram
Percy Maxim, the ACL published Amateur Movie
Makers, but generally left the organising of amateur
film clubs to local members. See Patricia Zimmermann,
Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995),
71­72.
27. See Louis Miller Bailey, `Educational Films', Amateur
Movie Makers, 7, 3 (March 1932): 107.
28. Arthur L. Gale, `Amateur Clubs', Amateur Movie Makers,
7, 4 (April 1932): 171.
29. Sargent, `Celluloid that Sells': 63.
30. Ibid.
31. Cyril Pressgrave, `Planning industrial films', Amateur
Movie Makers, 9, 2 (February 1934): 58, 77.
32. Hildegarde Lasell Watson, The Edge of the Woods:
A Memoir (Rochester: privately published, 1979), 83.
33. See Cartwright, `The Right Wing of Film Arť, in Horak
(ed.), Lovers of Cinema, 159.
34. Watson, `The Edge of the Woods', 105, 108.
35. Cartwright, `The Right Wing of Film Arť, 170.
36. ArthurGale,`Amateur Clubs',AmateurMovieMakers,
4, 5 (May 1929): 339. See also Amateur Movie Makers,
3, 8 (August 1928): 548.
37. Frederick Kiesler, `100 Per Cent Cinema', Close-Up,
3, 2 (August 1928): 35­38; see also `Four Screen
Theatre Being Built Here', New York Times, 9 December
1928, Sec. II, 1.
38. James Sibley Watson, Amateur Movie Makers, 4, 1
(January 1929): 847; Melville Webber, `Simplified
Settings', Amateur Movie Makers, 5, 3 (March 1930):
146f.
39. Watson, `An Amateur Studio Picture': 7.
40. Adolph C. Glassgold, `The Films. Amateur of Professional?',
The Arts, 15, 1 (January 1929): 58.
41. All the films of James Sibley Watson have been
FILM HISTORY: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008 ­ p. 47
A neglected genre: James Sibley Watson's avant-garde industrial films FILM HISTORY Vol. 20 Issue 1 (2008) 47
preservedin35mmfrom theoriginalnitratenegatives
at the International Museum of Photography at
George Eastman House. Thanks to Edward Stratman
for making copies of Watson's industrials available
to me.
42. The optical printer, as well as Dr. Watson's films and
papers can be viewed in the Film Collections at the
International Museum of Photography at George
Eastman House.
43. Herman Weinberg, `Lot in Sodom', Close-Up, 10, 3
(September 1933): 268; Marianne Moore, `Lot in
Sodom', Close-Up, 10, 3 (September 1933):
318­319.Seealso The Nation, 138, 3576,17 January
1934; The New Republic, 78, 21 March 1934.
44. Amateur Movie Makers, 6, 5 (May 1931): 293. The
Eyes of Science was copyrighted by Bausch & Lomb
Optical Company on 11 August 1930; it is listed as
three reels, MP2501.
45. `The Ten Besť, Amateur Movie Makers, 6, 12 (December
1931): 657. The film is listed as having a
length of 3,000 ft (3 reels) in 35mm (as did the first
notice), which would have given it a running time of
approximately 30 minutes, but in fact the surviving
negative only runs approximately 12 minutes. It is
unclear whether the film was shortened or the editors
made an error.
46. Arthur L. Gale, `Amateur Clubs', Amateur Movie Makers,
7, 2 (February 1932): 61. For further reports of
screenings, see Amateur Movie Makers, 7, 4 (April
1932): 150; 7, 5 (May 1932): 223; 8, 2 (February
1933): 64.
47. The Camera, 58, 3 (March 1939): 207.
48. Ted Nemeth is also credited in Bute's film, which like
the Bruguire film is available on Image Entertainmenťs
DVD set, Unseen Cinema. Early American
Avant-Garde 1894­1941, as are Watson and Webber's
Fall of the House of Usher and Tomatoes
Another Day.
49. See Wahlberg's (2006) excellent essay on J.C.Mol;
On Jean Painlevé, see Andy Masaki Bellows, Marina
McDougall with Brigitte Berg (eds), Science is Fiction:
The Films of Jean Painlevé (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2000).
50. `Highlights andShadows: Kodak'sNew Film', Kodak.
A Magazine for Eastman Employees, 17, 4 (August
1938): 11.
51. American Cinematographer, 19, 7 (July 1938): 281.
52. Eastman Kodak press release, 5 October 1938, sent
to the Rochester Times-Union, Rochester Democrat
& Chronicle and Rochester Evening News, Kodak
Collection at George Eastman House.
53. See `Film Depicts Camera's Role', 19 August 1938.
Unidentified press clipping, Highlights and Shadows
vertical file. See also `YMCA to Show Special Movie',
Richmond News Leader, 12 April 1939. Billy Rose
Collection, New York Public Library.
54. `Eastman Presents Highlights and Shadows', The
Camera, 57, 4 (October 1938): 262.
55. See reports in The Camera, 58, 1 (January 1939):
37; 58, 2 (February 1939): 118; 58, 4 (April 1939):
277; 58, 5 (May 1939): 371; 58, 6 (6 June 1939): 444,
446; 59, 2 (August 1939): 114.
56. Cartwright, `The Right Wing of Film Arť, 166 ff.
Abstract: A neglected genre: James Sibley Watson's avant-garde industrial
films,
by Jan-Christopher Horak
Much industrial film production, whether involving amateur avant-gardists or professionals, remains terra
incognita, despite the fact that audiences for industrials at certain times in the twentieth century rivalled
and even surpassed those of Hollywood films, whether shown theatrically or non-theatrically. While not all
industrials can be read as avant-garde, certain industrials at the very least mimic the kind of formal play
that has defined the avant-garde, including James Sibley Watson's The Eyes of Science (1931) and
Highlights and Shadows (1937). This article details the production and reception of these films by drawing
on previously unavailable corporate and archival material.
FILM HISTORY: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008 ­ p. 48
48 FILM HISTORY Vol. 20 Issue 1 (2008) Jan-Christopher Horak