Amateur Movie Makers (Dec 1926-Dec 1927)

HOMEMADE TRAVELOGUES How to Put Home "Box-office" into the Film Record of Your Winter Trip ERHAPS you're going on a winter trip. It may be the Mediterranean or Hawaii, or Quebec, o r Bermuda, or the California Coast. And the object you place at the head of your list of necessities, the contraption that is so bound up with your plans for a delightful journey that you can't tell whether it or the journey comes first, is your movie camera. Every time some new scene appears around the bend of the road, whr-r-r-r-r goes the camera. With every new object of interest, whiz-z-z-z-z goes the footage. This is going to be a peach of a picture, with scenes of the tame deer and the hot springs and the whole blooming canyon, or their equivalents in other parts of the world. It's going to be! But is it, ah, is it? The Assembled Movie Amateurs of the World, after locking the doors and pulling down the blinds, admit secretly to each other that there is very, very often something lacking in those gorgeous movies they took. Not that they don't look perfectly all right. But the trouble seems to be that nobody cares how they do look, not after one viewing, at least! And the relatives and guests on whom each film is inflicted politely say "isn't it wonderful," and they "don't see how you do it," but if they had to tell the truth, cross their hearts, hope to die, they would agree that it is simply an awful bore. It's By Vera Standing just another scenic, and not a really good one either, of places they have seen dozens of times in movies before. Just another scenic! That's the answer. And the heart-broken cameraman can't understand it at all. Photographed by Bert Huntoon A MOUNTAIN MIRROR Of course it's a scenic. Wasn't he purposely travelling through odd, pictorial, historical, or whatever they may have been, localities? SUNSET AND SEA Photographed by Bert Huntoon Didn't he want a record of what he had seen? What the bow-wows would he be making, if not a scenic? Don't many people insist that the scenics are what they like best on a theatrical program? Bitterly he runs off his beloved film for his own enjoyment. People who don't like it just don't have to look at it. But somewhere in the depth of his soul a nagging, truthful little voice repeats that he too is being terribly bored. And mute admission of his boredom will be found five years later in a can of broken, dried-up bits of film that nobody has taken the trouble to look at in all that time. The fact is that two kinds of pictures are being confused, real scenics, and real travelogues. This latter word has gone out of use since the time when a lecturer showed pictures, still or in motion, to illustrate a lecture dealing with real travel, but it is the proper name for what you want to put on your film. Scenics are impersonal, travelogues are personal. Do you remember some of those lecturers, who showed lovely, interesting, entirely impersonal scenes of some exotic region, and then, for no reason at all, dragged themselves into the picture from time to time? It was quite maddening to many spectators for they were entirely alien to the surroundings, and their personal activities as such were of no human interest whatever to anyone watching the scenes. But on the other hand when the speaker showed scenes, not for their abstract beauty or their historical interest, but Twenty-eight