A Record of Fleeting Realities

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE WAR, THE WEST AND THE WILDERNESS by Kevin Brownlow; Knopf; 602 pages; $27.50

The beginning of the movies coincided with the ending of three historical moments: years of peace in Europe, the frontier era in the American West, and the time when explorers tried to fill in the blank spaces on the globe. As one heroic age ended, a new one began, with new kinds of heroes: men and women who wondered what might be done with new-fangled motion-picture equipment to record the fleeting reality of their time.

Except for a few, like Robert Flaherty, and the team of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack who went on to make King Kong, most of these film makers toiled in anonymity, under unimaginably arduous conditions, to bring back pictures for which they were ill paid, and which posterity has treated with cavalier indifference. A priceless visual record of our immediate past has been lost, cut up or allowed to disintegrate in ill-tended vaults. Similarly, the stories of the people who made these films have gone untended by film librarians. Until now.

In The War, the West and the Wilderness, Kevin Brownlow, a British film historian, sets out on a unique rescue mission, interviewing survivors, rescuing stills from such bygone epics as Squaw Man and The Big Parade, trekking through early archives. The stories he brings back are the stuff of legend. They could, as well, be the stuff of marvelous adventure movies, if the entertainment industry were not currently catering to adolescent disco fantasies.

Typical of the soldiers of fortune who drifted to movie work was Phil Tannura, a Signal Corps cameraman whose journey to 1919 Russia recorded the maltreatment of Bolshevik captives. "We came to a prison in Omsk," he recalls. "They brought thirteen [prisoners] out and I noticed some soldiers on the side with guns. I asked what the soldiers were for. 'Well,' they said, 'you wanted to shoot them.'

'No,' I said, 'we just want to shoot some pictures of them. You can kill 'em tomorrow. But I don't want any prisoners shot for the camera.' ''

A lawman named William Tilghman had once worked with Bat Masterson in Dodge City. By 1915 he was directing westerns, which in those days often starred such authentic outlaws as Al Jennings and Emmett Dalton, last of the legendary family gang. Tilghman was on location in Chandler, Okla., when word came that a wild bunch headed by Henry Starr (Belle's nephew) had robbed a bank in Stroud, 17 miles away. The director dropped his camera, grabbed his gun and rode off in pursuit of the miscreants, capturing one "Alibi Joe" Davis before resuming work on his picture. The incident was typical of the way reality and legends based on that reality were mixed up in the paleolithic era of film making.

Indeed, Brownlow persuasively argues that the documentary film can be a contradiction in terms. In evidence, he quotes Flaherty: "One often has to distort a thing to catch its true value." Eskimo culture, for example, had already been altered by civilization when Flaherty made Nanook of the North. To capture the hunt as it had once been, the director transported Nanook by boat to a polar island he could not normally have reached. There the men waited three days for heavy seas to recede before the sequence could be staged. Cooper and Schoedsack rented an elephant herd from the King of Siam, then turned the beasts loose for the climax of Chang. For Grass, a monumental record of Kurdish tribesmen's annual search for pasturage, the team went before the nomads in order to get the right angles for their scenes. One night, clad only in summer clothes, they reached a mountaintop ahead of their subjects, and were trapped by nightfall. They dug into a snowbank and ate uncooked barley from the feed bags of their donkeys. "We said, 'We'll probably die up here,' " Cooper tells Brownlow, " 'but let's make the goddam picture.'"

The same spirit moved people engaged in re-creations of historic events, like The Covered Wagon and The Iron Horse. They permitted sharpshooters to aim perilously close so that splinters would fly authentically in gunfights, and they suffered blizzards, sandstorms and dangerous river crossings in the days before the intercession of stunt men and special effects. The efforts were so successful that today fictive footage often turns up as authentic record in historical compilations.

The people who made these films often found in the work a pioneer's satisfactions--especially when they contrasted it to life back in the studio. As William S. Hart said about life on location: "I was surrounded by no greedy grafters, no gelatin-spined, flatulent, slimy creatures--just dogs, horses, sheep . . . and white men and red men accustomed to live among such things. If we wanted a snake, we could go out in the hills and catch one--one that would warn us that he was a snake, with his rattles ... I was happy."

If one image can summarize the age that Brownlow celebrates, it is that of Herbert Ponting, recorder of Captain Robert Scott's expedition to the South Pole in 1910. To record Scott's ship, the Terra Nova, slicing its way through polar ice, Ponting ordered a camera platform rigged to hang out ten feet from the starboard side of the ship. There, spread-eagled, unable to protect himself since his camera required both hands to operate, this mild-mannered banker's son conquered fear and seasickness to bring back an unforgettable image of heroic folly.

Ponting and his colleagues have at last found a historian worthy of their tenacity and art. As he did for The Parade's Gone By, his great history of silent film making in the Hollywood studios, Brownlow has unearthed photographs--more than 350 of them--as poignant and evocative (and as previously unknown) as the reminiscences he has collected. They are displayed in an opulent, beautifully designed book that opens new historical regions as surely as its subjects, in their time, opened new photographic territory.

-- Richard Schickel

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