Close Up (Mar-Dec 1933)

262 CLOSE UP grain — bare feet below a long dress. There are the cresentic sand-dunes on La Joya Pampa — 175 feet from tip to tip — blown along in formation sixty feet a year by trade winds ; walls of oblong rock staggered in modern fashion, with here and there a block weighing about 200 tons ; harvest-field cross of wheat ; " pottery simulating animal forms ; the characteristic straw hat of the Inca, with turned-up brim ; striped ponchos ; and so on. Carveth Wells' This Strange Animal World — a little crude as to narrative — for the Northwest Scientific Expedition of Perth, West Australia, on a voyage with motion-picture camera to the northwest coast — showed the best Australian opossums ever seen by this (Brooklyn) Barnum — a gray one and an albino ; the best merino champion ram ; also an alligator-dance, tribal women and a few dogs looking on, the alligator ; a line of twenty men diminishing in height from thefirst to the end of the line, standing on spread legs, beneath which trellis a man wriggles on hands and feet from the tail forward and out and through the head. Mr. Wells' giant clams (of the kind said to amputate legs and never let go) were not so vivid as Captain Hurley's shown here some years back ; nor were the coral-beds, zebroid fish, sponges, etc., so sharp as Captain Hurley's. The wild kangaroos in flight, undulating like the rapids of a dangerous stream, as they crossed ditches and scrub, were impressive ; also a momentary but hyper-clever close-up of the flying opossum's leg-to-leg membranes ; and the above-referred-to opossums : the gray one on hind legs in a eucalyptus tree, plucking a branch, retiring along the tree ; swinging head down as it ate of the foliage, suspended by tail, by tail only, then up again — weaving around, back of, and through, a clump of vertical twigs, in serpent loops and eights without standing-place or space to squeeze through. The platypus on land, with dry coat of furrier's beaver — was a best thing ; as was the echidna disappearing in such a way as to produce no mound of accumulating earth — mere surface convulsions. In Alaska, motion-pictures of Aniakchak crater — Father Hubbard's seagulls, salmons, and hair seals, were of interest — especially the seagulls, flat to the lee of a storm-wave, widely spaced, with head to the wind. Shafts of iceberg breaking from the mass emphasized the deceptiveness of the telephoto lens — as did Mr. Shippee's sanddunes — the scale being as much altered as the area of Russia would be diminished in a dime-sized map of Europe. Father Hubbard is important but his filming is less lovable than that of Amos O. Burg (in Alaska and South America) and that of Captain Stanley Osborne (in Australia). The kings of the season probably were Dr. Bailey, Dr. Ditmars, and Captain Knight. In Dr. A. M. Bailey's and Mr. Robert J. Niedrock's bird and small mammal studies for their library of nature films at the Chicago Academy Sciences — with enticing commentary by Dr. Bailey — there is not a dull foot. Last year, Camera Shooting in Southern Marshes. This year, In Haunts of the Golden Eagle, tests with turned duck-eggs — pointed ends out and round ends in, and with avocet eggs, indicate that the duck-eggs point in by intention, and that a bird will brood an all-clutch imposture. Dipper-birds (i.e. waterousels) — new to the motion-picture camera — were shown running in and out