American Memory Film Collection

American Memory Film Collection at the Library of Congress.

Click on the title of the topic that interests you, then click on "List the Film Titles" for the individual film. That link will give you a choice of mpeg, rm, or QuickTime for most of the films. Which you can then watch. (Some of the topics are less straightforward, and you have to hunt a little for the list of available films.)

The coolness brings me near to weeping. These are real people I'm looking at, and it's a lot easier to realize that from film than from photographs.

These are mostly nonfiction films, out of copyright, very short. It's like magic. Like looking through a time machine.

You can also listen to some audio recordings. Ever wondered what Theodore Roosevelt's voice sounded like?

World War I, a CBS News production

World War I, a CBS News production. Narration written by Arthur Kloch, narrated by Robert Ryan. Originally aired 1964-1965.

The historical narrative in this documentary series is much simplified compared to most books on WWI I've read, and also the episodes are by topic rather than strictly chronological; so, watching this, it helps to already know what events were all happening at the same time. They don't give you a timeline. The show focuses on Big Names of History, or people who will become Even Bigger Names later on, like Herbert Hoover and Winston Churchill, as well as on major battles. There was little to no information about the various home fronts, which is fine since I've researched that very heavily. The very best thing about this series is that both sides are shown and described in equally neutral language and with almost equal depth.



However, I wanted this series for the film footage, and that I got in spades. It's not as organized as I would like. There are some shots they reuse whenever called for, for example a shot of shells exploding. Generalized footage of soldiers on the march, etc., was used where it made sense in the episode, not where/when it might actually have been filmed. But I don't mind so much; I wanted the look of the thing. Somehow, photographs give you something words, even primary source words, can't, and film footage even more so. You can see faces, and you can see their expressions change. You can see their body language. Sometimes, in watching the people, I barely hear the narration.



One interesting thing that I learned was how closely all the royal families of Europe were related at that time. It's one thing to know that, another entirely to have it laid out that Kaiser Wilhelm II was Queen Victoria's oldest grandson and cousin to both King George V of England and Czar Nicholas II of Russia.

The footage of the documentary is in black and white, and sometimes shaky. Watching on my small television, my eyes grow tired after a while. Sometimes it's difficult to watch, when thinking of nameless soldiers seen in closeup, "I wonder how he died? Or if he survived the war?" That, too, is why I think watching this is very useful as research. Not for the facts it gives me, but for the speculations it engenders.

Tune in tomorrow for a guest post by Morag McKendrick Pippin about researching and writing romance set during World War Two.

Related posts:
The Research Book Dilemma.

The Faces of WWI.

The Art of War: WWI Poster Art.

WWI Recruitment Posters.

Excerpt from a War Nurse's Diary - The General.

Excerpt from a War Nurse's Diary - The Operation-Theatre.

Theda Bara in "A Fool There Was"

As part of my research into the period of World War One, I watched a video copy of the 1915 Theda Bara movie, A Fool There Was.

It's a silent, intended both to titillate and to warn against dangerous women. Interestingly, Bara's character has no name--she's simply called "The Vampire."

I did not find Theodosia Goodman (Bara's real name) to be quite as much a vampire, i.e., vamp, as the audience was obviously meant to. I kept making up little reasonable stories to explain her seemingly awful behavior towards men, because at least she had some spine.

The video quality wasn't great, and she only had one or two closeups. This is a film I wouldn't necessarily recommend to anyone for fun, but it's good research material.

My favorite intertitle: "Kiss me, my fool!"

Vampiric seduction technique: Theda Bara enthralls Schuyler first by having his deck chair placed next to her own, then later by dropping one of her trademark flowers. When he bends to pick it up, she lifts her skirt. Above her ankles. Twice, later on, she deflects him from returning to his wife and Adorable Daughter of the Long Curls simply by entering the room and clasping him in her arms. Did she smear her body with opium?

Favorite historical research moment: The wife of one of Schuyler's old friends finds out about him and Bara, and refuses to stay in the same hotel. Social contamination from being in the same building?

Best Evil Laugh: Bara yukking it up after a former lover shoots himself in front of her. Really, it was hysteria, because he'd done Bad Things to her...she wasn't bad, she was just acted that way.

"The Good Old Naughty Days," silent erotica

Several years ago, I saw "The Good Old Naughty Days," a collection of silent French pornographic films, mostly from the 1920s.

I was foiled in my hope of seeing a period brassiere--the women didn't wear any, presumably because they were too much trouble to take off; ditto corsets, in the couple of pre-1920s films. Oh, well. I did learn that men's shirt tails then were a lot longer than I had realized. One only sees them tucked in, if you're looking at drawings and photographs in costume books. In more than one film, a guy had to yank his shirt tail out of the way so the action would be more visible.

This sort of film is better without attempts at dialogue. My friend and I joked the intertitles would probably say "Oh! Oh! Oh!" but in fact most of them either told you things like "and now the abbot shows up" or were funny, like the "Musketeer" one that had each act as a separate food course ("seafood," for example).

Incidentally, my limited French proved adequate to read intertitles in blue films. Go me!

Only two of the films showed men entirely naked, which I found interesting. I thought of possibilities: 1) these films were intended for men, who didn't want to see naked men; 2) these men didn't undress all the way at home, either; 3) those shirt tails were a fetish of the past (seems less likely, but who knows?). I was a little disturbed by one young guy (wearing a very fake old man wig and moustache) who was so skinny you could see his ribs clearly, every one of them--this distracted me into wondering if he was really poor, or had just jumped out of the trenches, or something. He was probably just skinny. That particular guy was hung like a horse, my friend pointed out, and this was true. Maybe he just burned a lot of calories in his work...he seemed to be having a good time.

In general, the actors had ordinary bodies. I couldn't tell if the women shaved their legs--most kept their stockings on--but I could see that most of them didn't shave under their arms, and the women might have trimmed their pubic hair but none of them shaved it. As I said, for most of the men one didn't get a good view of areas surrounding the genitalia.

There was one (very funny) cartoon of a Priapic little guy called Eveready whose penis would detach and reattach to humorous effect. It included man with donkey and accidental male-male anal penetration. One film with nuns also had a little white doggie who, when encouraged, licked the genitals of both a woman and a man (I and the audience couldn't stop laughing at that one). Things haven't changed much. Nuns, nurses, provocative partial clothing, awkward positions to display for the camera, money shots. People don't roll their eyes any more to display extreme lust, as one Theda Bara-lookalike attempted, however.

The short that most amused me was, essentially, "Madame Butterfly" fanfiction, which gave the opera a happy ending through lesbian geishas, a male/male encounter of hero with faithful servant that included both oral sex and anal penetration, and voyeurism (faithful servant masturbates to the threesome of hero and two geishas at the end).

The film I liked most was one the documentarians noted looked as if it had been filmed and framed by a professional. It was a male-female-female threesome, notable for the film quality (seemingly higher definition) and lighting. I liked the way bars of light from the windows fell over the people, despite the fact that they were so piled up it was difficult to see what they were up to. Very arty. And it was all very enlightening about the past.