Business screen magazine (1946)

DESTRUCTION continued excellent examples of nine different buildings — ranging from Chicago's Garrick Theater to a handsome New Hampshire mansion to New York's imposing Penn Station — being reduced to rubble. Some material was in the form of film footage, some in stills, but all captured that moment-of-destruction impact we were looking for. Meanwhile, the technical problems were being explored. Projection equipment had to be arranged for, and quickly, if it was to be in place and functioning for "dress rehearsals" before the exhibit's opening date. Budget limitations simply ruled out 16mm. Was there an 8mm projector that could run continuously, hour after hour, day after day, for five months— unattended? "Forget it!" was the most printable answer we received from incredulous audio-visual equipment dealers. Meetings continued. Rear-screen projection was a must: it would better tolerate light spill from other galleries, and the necessity of mounting projectors out of maintenance reach would be avoided. Multiple images were highly preferable for impact; how many would depend on the cost of hardware. Whatever the number, we were presented with a new — and unchangeable — requirement: screen size was to conform to the rest of the exhibition, mounted entirely in 40-inch-square panels. used singly or in combination for mural-size photographs. The standard thrce-to-four ration was out; each screen, whether there were two or twenty, had to measure precisely 40 inches from top to bottom and from side to side. By now it was evident that Super 8 might be the only solution — even though the requisite image size would still be anything but a snap to achieve. The problem was pre Mounted on special pedastals to minimize vibration, projectors perform their 56 houra-week job of beaming repeated scenes of destruction on six 40-inch screens. sented to the manufacturers, most of whom plainly did not know — because they had never before encountered such a challenge — whether their machines, or any, could function under the conditions we described. Projectors were exhaustively tested and compared: in sharpness and brightness, in ease of operation, above all in ruggedness and ability to withstand wear — and. in economy. We settled, at kust, on the Technicolor SIOWS. Six screens, it was mutually agreed, would fit both the budget and the space allotted within the exhibition to the film presentation. Now the pieces were beginning to come together. We had our material, and we knew what we were aiming for. Rights were cleared for the photos and footage we had selected. Next the stills in our macabre demolition collection went under the animation camera, to be cut in with the live footage; animation was conformed with the 24-frames-persecond speed of the live footage, the whole to be projected at 18 — a modified slowdown we felt was desirable to subtly prolong the "moment of destruction" (and which, incidentally, did just tliat, very effectively). Most of the material was in b/w; we converted the color to b/w, for stark ness as well as for consistency. The final, edited result was reproduced on Super 8 loops running slightly under three minutes. A separate special-effect sound track was prepared and inserted into Cousino tape cartridges. At the Museum, final plans were drawn for the physical set-up: the six screens to abut, with a 40-inch-square mirror rightangled at each end of the row of screens, and special baffles between screens on the projector side to prevent light spills. At midnight on April 30, work men at the Museum could be seen frantically sawing, painting, moving cumbersome colunms, iron railings, and photo panels into position. This was it — for at 10 a.m. on May 1, there was to be a special press review of the exhibition, a full day before the show opened to the public. Miraculously, all was serene next morning as reporters and critics were admitted to a stunningly mounted display of American architectural achievement. In the exhibit's fourth and final gallery, they entered a room illuminated only by the light of the six square screens. Each film loop was deliberately projected out of synch with the other five, so that the same scene of devastation seemed eternally repeated — and in slightly slower-than-life motion — as the shocked viewer watched; faintly but distinctly, there was heard the sound of an ominously pealing bell. "Bell tolls for all" "The bell tolls for us all," art critic Emily Genauer of the New York Post reported, while "giant wrecker's balls swing relentlessly back and forth in some demonic choreography as they topple the towers and walls of majestic 19thcentury structures." Wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning Ada Louise Huxtable of the New York Times: "The message is clear. The ball swings, towers topple, rubble cascades. This is a significant and disturbing show, as it is meant to be." As the exhibition continues (in New York through October 4, the show is at this writing scheduled to then tour other museums across the country), other visitors stand and watch the mosaic of destruction playing endlessly upon the screens — mourners paying final respects to a part of their heritage. On leaving, each receives a booklet, "What You Can Do," prepared by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a cosponsor of the exhibition. If movies do move people — as we believe they do, and as the Metropolitan evidently does as well — a beginning is being made in combating one of the major, albeit oftoverlooked, threats to our American environment: the threat, as the National Trust puts it, of loss of our historical identity, of the advent of "an environment strange and unfriendly." 36 BUSINESS SCREEN