In 1928 a trek up Mr. Rainier must have been a far more challenging undertaking than it is today. No high-tech, form-hugging, wicking fabrics, for starters. That the great outdoors offered the same gratifications as it does today, however is clear in a set of 448 films that the Seattle-based Mountaineers Club gave last year to the University of Washington.
The films – of climbing, hiking, sightseeing, and other recreations in the Pacific Northwest – now stand are in sight of a mountain hut of preservation, because the National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded the University of Washington Libraries’ Special Collections a $200,000 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant to maintain them.
The grant will help the UW library preserve, arrange, describe, digitally reformat, and selectively webstream the films.
These moving-image records of the Mountaineers Club, which is an outdoor recreation, education, and conservation group, date from the 1920s to the early 1970s. They capture Mountaineers’ trail trips and summer outings, a tour of the Paradise Ice Caves on Mt. Rainier, mountain rescue films such as Mountains Don’t Care and This is Self Arrest, and performances by the Mountaineer Players at the Kitsap Forest Theater including Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The collections includes, then, everything from daring exploits to summer-camp-like diversions, in films made by Bob and Ira Spring, Dwight Watson, and Charles and Marion Hessey, as well as a newsreel shot by Selznick Pictures cameraman Charles Perryman documenting a 1923 winter ascent of Mount Rainier.
Before last year’s donation, “I had been working with Lowell Skoog of the Mountaineers for a long time to get this donation to happen,” says the UW’s special collections visual materials curator, Nicolette Bromberg. “Lowell is on the Mountaineers history committee and is a wealth of knowledge about the films. He really shepherded the donation along for the Mountaineers.”
The NEH grant is a two-year award. “At the end of that time, we will have a complete finding aid – collection guide – describing each film up online, and we will have 400 clips from the films in our moving-image digital site,” says Bromberg. She will work with her colleague, Hannah Palin, a film archives specialist.
The Mountaineer films join a UW moving-image collection already strong in home movies, documentary film, news film, industrial film, and educational film; items in the collection date from 1914 through recent videotape. The university’s special collections are rich in material relating to the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Western Canada.
Among the holdings, for example, is the Ruth and Louis Kirk Moving Image Collection, a body of regional work related to the history, the landscape, and the people of the Pacific Northwest. The films document such subjects as Native American communities, national parks, environmental issues, historic preservation, and archaeological projects in the Northwest, including the Marmes Rockshelter, the Ozette Indian Village, and the Manis Mastodon sites. The Kirk collection is a selection of clips taken from the films and television shows produced by the Kirks from 1968 through 1991. They created more than 50 films and television shows in Tacoma, Washington, Vancouver, British Columbia, and elsewhere. They also made industrial films for such companies as Kumsheen Raft Adventures and Weyerhaeuser Real Estate and for public entities such as Tacoma Public Utilities and the National Park Service.
The NEH grant to the UW special collections is among $17-million in funds awarded this month for 208 humanities projects.The National Endowment for the Humanities, created in 1965, is a federal agency supporting research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.
Several other Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grants were for work related to film and other moving images:
Catticus Corporation, Berkeley, California
Masthead of May 7, 1948, issue of the weekly newsletter Counterattack
American Reds: The Failed Revolution, 1920-1956.
Development of a 90-minute film and website exploring the history of the rise and fall of the Communist Party, USA. ($75,000)
Bay Area & Peninsula Library System, San Mateo, California
California Light and Sound: The California Audiovisual Preservation Project. Digitization of 233 audio and moving image recordings pertaining to the history and culture of California in the 20th century, held by archives and libraries throughout the state. ($153,357)
University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois
Music in the Films of Robert Altman: From M*A*S*Hto A Prairie Home Companion.($6,000)
A Martin 130 China Clipper class passenger-carrying flying boat, in 1934.
Across the Pacific.
Production of a two-hour documentary about the 1935 crossing of the Pacific Ocean in a Pan American Airways flying boat named the China Clipper. ($600,000)
Twin Cities Public Television, Inc., St. Paul, Minnesota
The Constitution. Production of a four-part, four-hour television series accompanied by a companion website, a digital engagement strategy, PBS NewsHour’s Student Reporting Labs in ten cities, and a series of high school debates developed, implemented, and webcast by the National Constitution Center. ($400,000)
Western New York Public Broadcasting Association, Buffalo, New York
Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America.
Production of a 90-minute documentary film and an associated website exploring the life and career of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. ($500,000)
CUNY Research Foundation, Bernard Baruch College, New York, New York
Cinema, Prisons, and the Making of Modern America. ($6,000)
Journey to Normal: Women of War Come Home. Development of a script for a 90-minute documentary film and interactive website featuring a searchable database of interviews with female U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, an online community discussion forum, and a story-sharing tool. ($75,000)
Science Center Theater, Montgomery County Community College
Blue Bell, Pennsylvania
The Betzwood Film Festival marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Betzwood Motion Picture Studio. It features the first and last films made at the famous movie Philadelphia studios: “While matinee idols, Arthur V. Johnson and Ormi Hawley, tangle with fate, the entire population of Toonerville tangles with the most unpredictable public transportation ever devised.”
Film historian Joseph Eckhardt presents an illustrated lecture with Betzwood Archive film clips, vintage photographs, and stories about the making of silent movies in Montgomery County. Films will be accompanied live on the organ by Don Kinnier, and projected by The Secret Cinema’s Jay Schwartz.
The Legacy of Siegmund Lubin
Before Hollywood established itself as the center of American movie-making, the world’s largest and most advanced film factory was Siegmund Lubin’s Betzwood Film Studios, on the banks of the Schuylkill River in North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The studios were built as a supplement to Lubinville, which Lubin had built in Philadelphia. Born in Prussia (modern-day Poland) in about 1841, he was a resident of the U.S. – largely, of Philadelphia and environs – from 1883 until his death at the age of about 82 at his home in Ventnor, New Jersey, just south of Atlantic City. The history of Lubin’s endeavors – as America’s first movie “mogul,” and one who took on the manufacture and distribution of films – is now recounted on an extensive website maintained by three aficionados of the Betzwood era. Based at Montgomery County Community College, they are campus archivist Lawrence Greene, professor emeritus of history Joseph Eckhardt, and emerging technologies librarian Jerry Yarnetsky.
Betzwood Film Studio film stills featuring the famously enormous Wilna Hervey as Katrinka from the Toonerville Trolley movies; Montgomery County Community College: Betzwood Collection
Despite his importance to early film, they say, “today, nearly one hundred years after his pinnacle of power, [Lubin] is not much more than a footnote.”
Soon after settling in Philadelphia, Lubin made use of the skills he had gained studying ophthalmology at Heidelberg University, in Germany, to open an optical shop. He spent several years making many thousands of magic lantern slides, of which very few survive. In 1893, by which time he was already in his 50s, he saw Eadward Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope demonstrated at a Chicago fair, and then studied other early film devices, including the Jenkins/Armat Phantoscope.
In 1896 he bought a Jenkins camera and began making moving pictures – his first was of a horse eating hay. From there, he parlayed his interest into a major industry. He sold projectors and cameras of his own design, and for a time ran his own chain of movie houses around the US Northeast. He made films, first on a platform in the backyard of his home; among them were films of prize fights and shorts for “gentlemen’s smokers.” He even appeared in some of his early films, and in 1908 made a series of films designed to combat anti-Semitism.
An eccentric famous for histrionics in three languages, his ethics were often questions, too. He had to fend off several lawsuits from Thomas Edison and others who claimed patent infringements. He remade Edison’s Great Train Robbery, and exceeded Edison in realizing the promise of moving images, say Eckhardt and his colleagues. For example, he helped to create demand for film by advertising in popular entertainment magazines.
He won his own patents, conceived the idea of “home movies,” and even tried as early as 1904 to market “sound” movies. Ever the entrepreneur, he offered “showman’s packages” with everything a newcomer would need to exhibit movies – including metal facades that instantly converted buildings into theaters, or cardboard ones for the meek of heart.
All that came before 1909, when he sold his theater chain – 17 movie houses in six states – and set up a film-distribution system. He expanded his sales of cameras, projectors, and films, and built a huge studio, “Lubinville,” 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia on a property he bought from the estate of Philadelphia brewer John F. Betz.
At first he made medical and scientific films, and then features. His became one of the most commercially successful movie companies of the early silent era, employing up to 1,000 people. He expanded to Jacksonville, Florida, where he employed Oliver Hardy, and to Los Angeles.
But those studios were shortlived. The Lubin empire foundered, and ended in bankruptcy. Lubin had kept up with the rapid technological advances in filmmaking, but his early keen sense of what audiences would want, particularly poorer Americans, had not. “His storytelling lacked the artistic quality that the public was beginning to expect,” say Eckhardt and his colleagues.
They add: “He would also fail to completely understand the transition of single to multi-reel films, a natural evolution and part of the public’s demand for better narratives. Lubin gambled on the continued thriving of the nickelodeons which showed only single reel films, even while he spent a fortune to produce his own mutli-reel features. In the process he spread himself too thin and when the demand for single reel films disappeared, he could not recoup his losses or make ends meet.”
It had not helped that World War I had deprived him of foreign markets, right after an explosion in a Lubinville film vault destroyed the property, and the master negatives for all his films that were stored there. The last straw was that a motion-pictures patent company in which he was a major player lost a costly lawsuit.
Lubin returned to working in his old optical shop. To the end of his life, he tried to get backing to return to production, but his earlier intuitions and skills for business and self-promotion failed him.
Eckhardt has been researching the history of early film in and around Philadelphia since 1979. His biography of Lubin, The King of the Movies: Film Pioneer, Siegmund Lubin, was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 1997.
The site he and his colleagues have mounted features rare photographs, film stills, and other documents of the era.
What Remains?
The Betzwood Motion Picture Studio operated from 1912 to 1923 under the ownership of Siegmund Lubin until 1917, and then Wolf Brothers, Inc. of Philadelphia. The 350-acre studio produced more than 100 films, but due to the usual assaults of time and neglect, only 29 films are known to remain in archives in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands. Few, now, are opportunities to watch such Betzwood stars as the larger-than-life Wilna Hervey.
Each spring, The Betzwood Film Archive at the Library of Montgomery County Community College screens selections from among the films, at its Betzwood Silent Film Festival, (info: 215-641-6518.)
Among the films’ treasured images, says Eckhardt, is this train crash scene from 1914, used in five different Lubin films. The wreck was staged at Phillipsburg, PA, using two old engine scheduled for scrapping. This version is from A Partner to Providence, the eighth installment of the serial The Beloved Adventurer.
Cinema, Prisons, and the Making of Modern America. ($6,000)
Stephanie Sapienza, project manager at