Movie Makers (Jan-Dec 1931)

MOVIE MAKERS 83 Harbor hints JAMES W. MOORE JUST as the many graphic scenes and activities of a harbor offer the still photographer a mine of beauty, so, even more, should harbors appeal to the amateur cinematographei as an ideal subject. Here is action at every turn, puffing, flowing, incessant and glamorous. Here is beauty in many forms — moving water, shadowy piers and moss grown piiings, scampering tugs and lumbering barges, haughty liners towering over concrete docks, rusty freighters bearing strange names and nestled against wooden piers. One day they billow steam, white in the sunlight, and on another they are wrapped in a gray blanket of fog. All this is ours for the taking in New York or Shanghai, Gloucester or Santos, small harbor or large, and it all calls out for the mobile genius of the cine camera. Let us see how we might go about filming such a subject. In the first place, one has to do a bit of subdividing. There are, let us say, large harbors and small harbors. The filming of either kind can, in turn, be approached in several differing ways. What we may call the "scenic" treatment immediately sugg e s t s itself, adaptable with equal success to a large or small harbor. Growing out of this and more specific in its manner is what might be called the "'activity" treatment, carried out with greater ease in a small harbor but occasionally presenting an unusual approach in a large one. A combination of these two, effective in tying up harbor shots from the world over, is the use of contrast. Let us see what one can do scenically. Whether our harbor be large or small, in planning a scenic treatment, we should aim to film those things which will recreate the sensuous impressions most representative of our subject. Perhaps we are filming a great center of world shipping. Here, certainly, the outstanding feeling would be one of ceaseless and teeming activity from dawn to dusk and even far into the night. With this in mind, let us plan the film of a representative day in the life of a world port. There is a long shot seemingly taken early in the morning. Faint mist hangs over the scene, softening every outline, and only here and there do we see the meas A guide to recording the glamor of the seaport waterfront Old Coenties Slip — one of the filming goals when on New York's East River ured plodding of ferries and the impatient puffing of a few early tugs. Perhaps there are two or three such scenes from varying points, the last one closing with a ferry coming towards the camera. Next we are outside the pier and see lines of mammoth milk trucks and produce vans awaiting the next boat. We are on the upper deck of the ferry as they rumble on. there is a closeup of the whistle blowing and slowly gray, oily water appears around the boat. Here is but one item in the awakening life of a great harbor. From this rather slowly paced beginning, we go to a series of short scenes of the many phases of activity. We see tugs dashing by and disappearing in a nearby slip, only to puff in view again haltered to a pair of lurching car floats, c. w. Gibbs 0ut in the stream, barges lying at anchor come to life with a flapping line of newly washed clothes. The woman waves casually to a pair of sailors lolling and grinning on the after rail of a freighter creeping by in ballast, the single screw thrashing slowly, half out of water. An excursion boat glides by, white and many decked, and, from a film made at another time, we can cut in closeups of clerks and typists at the rail staring wide eyed at the rusty freighter. Now it is midday and we are looking off at the outer harbor, awaiting the big passenger ships. A man with a great, shiny telescope urges the passerby to "see the giant ocean liner" as a small, white hulled fruit boat slips by outward bound to the Indies. Along the stringpiece, bargemen sit casually munching apples. White aproned cooks loll in the tiny galleys of resting tugs. Then, majestically, from behind a sheltering pier, there looms the great bow of an outgoing liner. A little luck and a little calculation will place us on a ferry sufficiently near its path to shoot its towering bulk, to catch the wisps of steam trailing from its sleek funnels or to shoot the golden name on the stern as it drops away from us. Naturally, these and other scenes cannot all be made in a day or in a week but, with a plan in mind, we can get them as opportunity occurs. In the afternoon, we might journey about the harbor on a small boat and end the film in the falling [Continued on page 96]