It has been suggested that the Society of Motion Picture Engineers might be interested in my experiences in handling motion picture film under various climatic conditions; namely, those I encountered during the time I spent in the North making Nanook of the North and during the past two years making Moana in the South Seas. We shall not have proceeded very far with this paper before you will understand that my experiences are those of one who has had no technical training and whose entire experience has been gained outside of the laboratories and studios of the motion picture industry. However, it is to be hoped that that which follows may to some extent be illuminating.

From the year 1910 to 1916, I carried on geological explorations in the eastern sub-Arctic, and during the latter half of these expeditions I became interested (although only as an amateur) in motion picture films, taking as a minor part of my exploratory work such subjects as came within the range of my camera. Needless to say, they were not of any importance or value. When I decided to make Nanook, I had a definite plan in mind; that is, to go back into the North equipped for a year and a half and devote my entire time to working out the life story of the Eskimo, which, as I have mentioned before, became Nanook of the North. I realized from the start that in order to work out my subject effectively I must have not only the equipment for developing my negative but apparatus both for printing and projecting, so that I could see my results in order to correct them and retake whatever might be necessary.

Transportation was the first problem, for the journey to the point where I proposed to work- Cape Dufferin, on northeastern Hudson Bay- involved a journey by canoe down to southeastern Hudson Bay, making economy of weight and bulk imperative. For my projecting equipment I chose a Hallberg generating set and Hallberg's suitcase type of projector, an outfit which Hallberg had designed for mule back transportation in the South American market. This outfit, which gave a good account of itself, was portable to the last degree, the apparatus complete- engine and dynamo- weighing less than a hundred pounds. For printing apparatus I used a Williamson wall-type printer; for developing, four 200-foot capacity spider frames made of brass, the pins insulated with rubber tubing, and four 15-gallon capacity copper trays. I am still looking for the man who invented those spider frames, for a more laborious method of developing film (the loading of a 200-foot unit alone was a fifteen-minute operation) I have never seen. The danger of overlapping of the film while in the developer required almost constant supervision, making my experience in developing some 70,000 feet of negative and 20,000 feet of print an unforgetable one.

The point where I decided to winter and undertake the film was the fur post of Revillon-Freres near Cape Dufferin on northeastern Hudson Bay, as the crow flies, 900 miles north of the railway frontier of northern Ontario. The post comprised a store, a factor's house, and a clerk's dwelling. The last named, a single story hut about 30 by 30 feet, was turned over to me to be used as a dwelling and laboratory combined. The man power of the place was one white man (the factor) and some half dozen Eskimos. The Eskimos lived on sea biscuit, lard and tea, and were given a not too opulent wage, amounting to less than five dollars a month, and were maintained by the factor as his servants. Three of them, since I had come into the country without an assistant, were turned over to me to be my servants. These were Nanook and two lesser individuals bearing the somewhat grotesque nicknames of "Harry Lauder" and "Matches." Our first job was to partition off with scraps of lumber and rubberoid a portion of the hut for a dark-room, 6 by 15 feet in dimension. At one end was a window which we banked up with rubberoid and then on a board frame mounted the Williamson printer, first cutting an inlet about two inches square to admit light, for by daylight controlled by nothing more accurate than white muslin stretched over the aperture, the prints of Nanook were made. There was no motor drive on the printer. Every print was ground out by hand. I printed, all told, about 20,000 feet in that memorable year. But the darkroom and its impedimenta were simplicity itself in comparison with the lengths to which I had to go to provide some sort of place for the film drying and washing. With the most meager resources as to lumber (what little I could carry on the sixty-foot schooner on which I had journeyed) we built a wing to the hut some twenty feet long and ten feet wide and then a drying reel whose 1600-foot capacity was such as almost to fill the room. For heat we had a discarded box stove and for fuel nothing more adequate than bituminous ship's coal! Under such conditions the 70,000 feet of negative and 20,000 feet of print (pardon me if I repeat the figures) were dried, the reel kept in motion only by the strong arms of Nanook or Harry Lauder and sometimes, depending on the weather, kept in motion, more or less, the whole night long while I slept in my sleeping bag just beyond cremation range. Our source of water for washing the film was the river sealed with eight feet of ice through which a water hole was kept chiseled every morning and night of the winter. From the hut this hole was a quarter of a mile away, so by sledge and dogs the water in ice choked barrels was sledged by the womenfolk and children of Nanook's and Harry Lauder's families with much laughter, much shouting, and a fight now and then among the team. The number of barrels we wrestled with that long year can be imagined.

My camera equipment consisted of two Akeley cameras, some minor spare parts, and ten 200-foot capacity retorts. There were also one 4x5 and one 2 1/4 x 3 1/4 Graflex camera equipped with plate magazines and holders for Lumiere Autochrome color plates. My film stock was the standard Eastman motion picture film. My camera plates were Seed Orthonon, in conjunction with which I used Wratten K2 filters as well as with the motion picture film wherever possible. The Akeleys stood up well. For lubrication, I used sparingly Nye's whale oil, such as is used for watch and chronometer lubrication. The Akeleys in the coldest weather- nearly fifty degrees below zero- never froze up. On one occasion, however, during a sledging expedition in January, I mounted the camera, only to find when I began cranking that the film broke up in the gate like so much wafer glass. My pocket thermometer read minus thirty-five degrees. For the balance of that journey my film retorts were kept in an igloo during the night, packed in a grub box, and by day wrapped in my eiderdown sleeping bag, which kept them at a temperature of not more than minus ten degrees, so as to be ready the moment we sighted polar bear, the quarry we were after. With the Graflexes, however, the extreme cold did make a difference. From ten degrees on their shutters invariably stuck. If I were to make another similar expedition I should use between-the-lens shutters on them for winter work.

On two previous expeditions while I was exploring in the North, I used a Bell-Howell camera which I purchased in 1913. It was one of Bell-Howell's first cameras- Number 25, to be exact. Though of course it was a better instrument mechanically than the Akeley, I did not like it nearly so well, the Akeley being less bulky. The Akeley shutter too gave me much more latitude in exposure- no small consideration in the North. Another important consideration. was the ease of panoraming and above all the ease of loading film in extreme cold- so cold oftentimes that I, all thumbs and running nose, had to call upon Nanook and Harry Lauder, trained into loading and threading the gate at the post, to step into the breach.

My projection outfit worked satisfactorily, though the projection space was nothing larger than the trader's living room and the screen a white Hudson Bay blanket, every square inch of floor being occupied by squatting Eskimos alongside the dynamo and the sputtering, fire-cracking engine which exhausted into the room. But the exhaust had no appreciable effect upon the atmosphere, so pungent was the seal oil odor of the post's best Eskimo society.

Plate and film magazines are to a man in my type of work utterly inadequate. On more than one occasion I have without avail approached the photographic companies with the suggestion that if retorts something like film retorts for motion picture cameras were made for my Graflex cameras sufficient to hold, say, a hundred exposures without loading, they would save endless worry and labor, obviating as they would the loading of half a dozen magazines before striking out from my base and the reloading when they were all exhausted in my changing bag, in the not too comfortable atmosphere of an igloo at the end of a long, tired day; or, worse still, with sweaty hands in the heat-drenched latitudes of Samoa.

It was a far cry from filming the Eskimos to my next venture, Samoa, in the South Seas. Armed with my northern experience and having more latitude in the matter of transportation, my South Sea outfit was more nearly adequate to the kind of film which I proposed to make, which, as Nanook was a story of the Eskimo, was to be a story of the Polynesian.

My outfit comprised two Homelite 32-volt generating sets, one to furnish power and illumination for a Power's projector and the other for the Moy printer and motor-driven drying-reels in the laboratory. My developing outfit was a standard studio set of 200-foot developing frames and four wooden tanks for developing, washing, and fixing. The developing and fixing chemicals were Eastman Number 16 developer and Eastman acid hypo fixer. My laboratory was a building a story and a half high, 30 feet long by 20 feet wide, of frame walls, and corrugated iron roof, built under the overspreading branches of a breadfruit tree. It faced the black mouth of a cave which ran down some 30 feet at a steep angle and then wound in for a thousand feet or more under the jungle. The bottom of the cave was covered to a depth of about five feet with water, the coolest, clearest water in all Samoa. Frederick O'Brien had told me all about it before I left New York. It was, in fact, this cave with its cold water which had determined my location in Samoa; namely, the village of Safune, one of the notable villages on the westernmost of the Samoan islands, the island Savaki. More idyllic surroundings for our film work would be difficult to imagine.

Mrs. Flaherty not only collaborated with me on the film, but between us we did the photography. My brother, David T. Flaherty, and L.H.V. Clark, a young New Zealander whom I secured from the government service in Samoa, were our assistants. Clark, I broke in to the developing, printing and laboratory work, which he most ably carried on with the assistance of two unusually bright Samoan boys whose only weakness was the fear of ghosts in the dark-room.

If, however, we thought our film difficulties had ended with the making of Nanook, we were to be disappointed. In Samoa the difficulty began with the first film tests of native characters whom we proposed to use. The complexion of the Samoans is light reddish-brown. In our tests made with the ordinary orthochromatic film they stood out on the screen as dark as negroes, a lifeless black, so much so that we realized the hopelessness of keeping on unless a color correction could be made. But the problem went even further; for in the greens of the jungle and the water, the deep blue of the sea and the sky, and in the cloud forms, so much a part of Polynesia, this too must be captured. This Polynesian scene, unlike Nanook which was a study in black and white and was in all its essentials a dramatic fight for the food wherewith to live, was an idyllic thing, a painter's picture, and all that we had for drama was the inherent beauty of the country and its almost Grecian people. Obviously, there was only one film medium to use and that was panchromatic film. In its use, however, we had had no experience. We soon found that in shadow we could get no correction, particularly in portraiture and the correction of the flesh of our subjects. Only in full sunlight and preferably with K3 filters and open lenses did we secure the complete correction we were after. We shot only in low suns, up to 10 a. m. and after 4 p. m., the sun directly behind us like a low-hanging spotlight flooding the subject. All the close-ups, portraiture, and details were done this way, though the heat on occasions was enough to melt the rubber gaskets on the cameras, and the curtains had to be let down to give our subjects a respite from the sun, or they might have been fried like bacon in a pan.

To us, the method was a revelation not only in the balance of reds and blues and greens, but in the way it brought out through this balance the sculpturesque values of arms and hands and figures, and the forms of trees and leaves as uncorrected orthochromatic film could never hope to do. The transparency of water, as we have shown it in the film, was due of course to the color correction in the green coupled with a staging that enabled me to use the camera high above the water, so that the water itself acted as a reading glass before the camera.

Why, you will probably ask, did we not photograph our portraiture and details with electric illumination? The answer is that we were afraid it would destroy the unconsciousness of our subjects. And if there was one thing in particular that we were after, it was just that quality.

I want to say here that my best results, as I had found with Lumiere Autochrome plates, were obtained with open lenses.

A word about the keeping qualities of our panchromatic film in Samoa: Much of the panchromatic film we used was well over the manufacturer's time limit when we used it, but as far as I could see it was satisfactory. The film was shipped down to us from Rochester at three-month intervals. Samoa from Rochester is half way around the world thirteen degrees south of the equator in the South Pacific Ocean.

Now we came to the subject of developing. The cave we converted into a dark-room, bulkheaded the entrance with double doors, and down into the cave over the water, which was about five feet deep, we built a platform. We made inlets in the platform for our tanks, which rested at the bottom of the water, only a foot or so projecting above the platform. The cold water acted as a jacket around them and maintained our solutions at an even temperature. Two electric lights, a table, and rack stands completed the outfit. The temperature of the water, the iciest in all Samoa- and it actually did feel icy compared with the warmth of the air and the sea water, which is constantly 83 degrees- was 76 degrees. All developing was done in complete darkness, tests determining the length of time. With full strength Eastman Number 16 developer, the usual developing time was 2 1/2 minutes. The maximum time as the solution grew weaker was 6 minutes. Fixation was the usual twenty minutes and washing about fifteen minutes. The washing was done by two Samoan boys bailing into a tank which stood close to the water with its outlet of course at the bottom of the tank.

Drying the film proved to be here, as it was during the making of Nanook, the most difficult of all our operations. Though we had a motor-driven reel and used two oil stoves in attempts at drying the air of the drying-room, on many occasions so excessive was the humidity in Samoa that it required twelve hours to dry our negative. My next equipment will have above all else a drying apparatus designed to dry even if the room has to be built in New York and shipped knocked-down to whatever point is to be my destination though that destination may be the farthest corner of the earth.

We found that in the use of the standard studio developing rack our rack flare was particularly excessive, as much as a most marked throb when print or trial pieces of negative were projected. Those parts of the film which were in contact with the top and bottom of the rack were often jet black; sometimes, the density extended a dozen frames or more beyond it. We made endless trials to overcome this rack flare- shuffled the film during development; used tight and loose and moderate windings on the rack; reversed racks while in solution; put racks in water for various intervals before development. We even made a drum and, rotating it, developed in a trough, only to get rack flare on every drum slat upon which the film rested. We got ice from Apia, the metropolis of Samoa, and chilled our solutions to the standard 65 degrees, and that failed. Finally, we sent some of the film to the Famous Players laboratory at Hollywood, where had been installed a refrigeration system which was used to chill the racks. Though less marked than ours, the results they sent back had rack flare. Thereupon I gave up the racks and adopted spirals made by Stineman in Los Angeles. I got them in 200-foot units. We all felt that they would be difficult to handle, load, and discharge, but after a little practice, such we found was not the case. They proved to be most satisfactory. I used wooden trays, however, instead of the monel metal trays which Stineman furnishes. If the spirals could be made of hard rubber instead of metal, I feel that this system would be (outside of developing machines which keep the film in constant movement and maintain even stress) the most perfect developing equipment for my type of work.

We were also troubled by waver- not an uneven waver caused by development, but waver the cause of which it took us a long time to find out. The cause was extraordinary when we did come upon it; it was a tank of stale developer which had been thrown into the cave more than a month before, and though this water in the cave was fed by a spring which bubbled up here and there in its length (which was about a thousand feet) and was constantly discharging (this was proven by the fact that nowhere along the water's edge was there any aquatic growth), the chemicals from the solution remained active, I suppose because the cave was constantly in darkness. How we found that the waver was caused by the decomposition of old developer was by washing our film in other water and getting no trace of waver. The cave water was causing intensification, or, call it what you will, when the film was being washed!

Though we didn't realize it at the time, our experiments did not matter much nor was our final spiral-developed negative- free from waver and rack flare and steady as a rock- so valuable as we imagined. For, in the finished prints of Moana- executed in safe and sane and spotless laboratories of the industry- they managed to put back the waver and rack flare that we had taken out plus more pin-holes than I thought the world could hold.

The atmosphere in Samoa is very corrosive. Every metal part of our equipment, nickel-plated or otherwise, if not looked after, soon became a mass of rust. Brass parts became masses of verdigris. A secondhand piano which we had brought with us was in pieces of tin pan in no time; even the sounding board came apart through the softening of the glue. The glue of Graflex plate holders softened, and the holders went to pieces. One of my Graflex 4 x 5 cameras warped so that it was useless. One day I found to my dismay a veining somewhat like the veins in a leaf and an iridescent marking on one of my Dallmeyer telephoto lenses. I found the markings impossible to remove; they were on the inner cells. Those markings are still there, and I am told the lenses will have to be re-ground. But there was just one article we had which, even without care, remained free of corrosion, some English table knives. They were made of rustless steel. If there was one particular source of trouble to me, it was the film track and film gates of my motion picture cameras. Before I go off again, I am going to try to have them made for me out of stainless steel; one of my camera worries and yards of scratched and scarred film will then, I hope, be gone forever.

I often thought while we floundered with our almost overwhelming film outfit in Samoa that if one of our photographic manufacturers had a representative there with us just to study photographic equipment and its practical application under trying and novel conditions, much might be gained thereby, redounding to the prestige of the manufacturer, the infinite comfort (to say the least) of the camera worker, and the advancement of a new field in that which is the common interest of us all- the motion picture.
 

With regard to the Stineman developing outfit, it consists of a metal strip wound as a spiral, and the film is wound in contact with it. I agree with Mr. Flaherty that this is a very practical, portable outfit. Certain precautions must be observed in manipulation of the film spiral. If it is agitated vertically, owing to the flow of the developer through the perforations, perforation streaks are obtained. Our experiments have shown that by twisting the rack once a minute, the development is uniform and the perforation marks are eliminated.

With regard to the drying difficulty, I think that if explorers would prevent swelling of the film during development and harden the film in the unswollen condition by following the procedure outlined in the paper on "Handling Motion Picture Film at High Temperatures," (Transactions No. 19), the quantity of moisture to be removed from the film would be reduced to a minimum, and the film would withstand relatively high temperatures during drying. Mr. Flaherty's procedure was to use low temperature air for drying, and naturally film in a swollen condition would dry with difficulty in a humid atmosphere. If he prevented swelling and suitably hardened the film so that air at a higher temperature (and therefore lower relative humidity) could be used for drying, trouble would be eliminated, and it would not be necessary to construct an expensive drying outfit.

Robert J. Flaherty, "The Handling of Motion Picture Film Under Various Climatic Conditions," Transactions of Society of Motion Picture Engineers, No. 26, meeting of May 3-6, 1926, pages 85-93.

© 1998, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)

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