Completely Inconsequential Film History Brought to You by Pixar

I had the pleasure of taking in the new Pixar film Up today, and it exceeded all of my expectations, which were pretty high to begin with. I don't recall the last movie that had me in tears the first fifteen minutes, then had me laughing like a little girl just a few frames after. Yet another masterpiece from the best animation studio in the world.

I was particularly hooked by the 1930's newsreel that opens Up, how accurately it captured the material from that period (see the very first ever post on this blog for my thoughts on the Hearst Metrotone collection at UCLA). In the newsreel, we see the diminutive protagonist Carl as a little boy, watching the exploits of ficticious explorer Charles Muntz, who travels the globe in search of exotic creatures by way of a giant diridgible. This, combined with my recent failed attempt to locate my school's copy of Kevin Brownlow's The War, the West and the Wilderness ... segue... made me think of all those filmmaking explorers who went out to the Pacific, the Arctic, and Near East and nearly everywhere in between to capture places never before photographed. I particular, I thought of a husband and wife couple, Martin and Osa Johnson.


Active between 1914 and 1937, Martin E. Johnson and Osa Leighty Johnson made several documentaries on location in Africa and the South Seas, including Congorilla (1932), which they touted as "the one and only picture shot entirely in Africa." Their collaboration ended in 1937, when Martin was lost in a plane crash.


Martin and Osa were a cute couple, but they were hardly the most inventive, or ethical, documentary wunderkinden. They did the Robert Flaherty trick of playing records for the "natives," or of giving a chimpanzee a beer and filming the results. Basically, they look down on the natives and say "Aren't you glad you're not them, America?" They even filmed and touted (there's that word again) their own capture of a gorilla family, having the mother killed and the babies isolated by hired locals. For this work, they received sold-out premieres on Broadway.

Here are a few shots of the Johnson's at work. Not glamorous, but then even a PA gig on Entourage probably isn't as sexy as you might think.

This still reveals that the Johnson's offered equal opportunity employment, at least once they got to the location. In those unequal days of the 1930's, even Oscar Micheaux was stuck with white camera operators.

I do wonder what Martin and Osa would think of the currently thriving American film presence on the Dark Continent.

For more information, check these out:

The Osa Johnson Safari Museum, located in her hometown of Chanute, Kansas. Finally, there's a place in Kansas I actually want to go to. Can you say your local library has a safari museum and used to be a train station? Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? Probably not, unless you're lucky enough to live in Chanute.
http://kansastravel.org/safarimuseum.htm

The blog where most of these images came from, and which also has a lot more information about them:
http://theselvedgeyard.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/martin-osa-johnson-safari-film-legends/

Another article/photo source:
http://www.a2oxford.info/pages/reno_2006/pages/osa_arc.html

Oh, and GO SEE UP.