“I Have Seen the Future” Home Movies of the 1939 New York World’s Fair

That word “future” bothered me; I kept thinking of fortune telling . . . . It suddenly occurred to me that we might call it “The World of Tomorrow.”

GROVER WHALEN [End Page 56]

The most sought-after keepsake of the fair was the GM Futurama button that read “I Have Seen the Future.” With over five hundred films of various gauges, lengths, and formats permeating almost every exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, film was crucial in the fair’s self-imagining and in creating a vision of the “World of Tomorrow.” The scope of the films on offer, in terms of both subject matter and the variety in technological innovation, was staggering. In addition to films incorporated into exhibits, there were also official films about the various zones and pavilions that were shown around the country to entice potential visitors. As a part of this film-saturated environment, Kodak and other film equipment companies attempted to develop fairgoers themselves into moviemakers by marketing home movies of the fairgrounds as integral to the World of Tomorrow experience. Though there has been some research into the commercial and industrial films at the fair, the history of home movies of the fair deserves further consideration.¹ The Futurama button’s message reflected not so much a desire for clairvoyance as a utopian expression of the bodily, tangible experience of the fair that demanded active participation, an impulse for which home moviemaking proved eminently suitable.

The history of home movies is still a nascent area within film studies.² Discussions of home movies have tended to center on comparisons with Hollywood, with home movies seen either as running counter to or being complicit with its dominant aesthetic. But speaking of a singular “history” of home movies is misleading, because the establishment of a single narrative is both impossible and unproductive.³ As Patricia Zimmermann writes, “home movies constitute an imaginary archive that is never completed, always fragmentary, vast, infinite.”⁴ The challenge facing both researchers and archivists, then, is how best to transform these individual, sometimes opaque histories into documents that illuminate aspects of a collective past.

The long-distance, slow-panning shots in official films of the fair can inspire frustrations with their generic view of exhibits and pavilions, but many home movies satisfy this urge to get closer to the fair’s monumental facades.⁵ By registering the film-makers’ subjective experiences of wonder, these films offer the cinematic equivalent of uttering “Wow! Look at that!” Perhaps in part a reaction to the prevalence of official fair films, the home movies also testify to a desire to insert oneself or one’s own family into a film of the fair as a way of asserting that one had, in fact, “seen the future.” This act of ownership, of “taking” a movie, was a means of having a stake in the fair’s vision of Tomorrow. The visitor’s-eye view also reflects aspects of the fair that the planners surely would have avoided preserving on film—the cracks in the facades, the dirty puddles, the actors and actresses looking bored on their breaks—moments when the quotidian asserts itself alongside the wondrous.

This article will focus on the 1939 New York World’s Fair films in the holdings of Northeast Historic Film (NHF), which offer an invaluable perspective into the nature of the fair experience that is often missing from the official films. Of the thirteen collections at NHF, all of which had one reel of fair footage, except the Sally Walsh collection (which holds two), I have chosen nine collections to discuss: Walter J. Clark, Robert Decker, Sally Walsh, Everett Greaton, Lee Scouting, Albert Conley, Sheldon Museum, Norman Richmond, and Cyrus Pinkham.⁶ These home movies shot at the fair give a more palpable sense of what feeling swept away, overwhelmed, and dazzled by the fair looked like; stylistically, they reflect the excitement and confusion that resulted from such a visually stimulating environment. Each film presents a unique version of a widely shared experience, and this strikingly personal perceptual experience of the fairgrounds interests me most. What was it like to walk the grounds? To travel along the Helicline between the Perisphere and Trylon? To move between the stately official fairgrounds, the more entertaining commercial pavilions, and the licentious Amusement Zone? The official films of the fair answer these questions in a basic sense by providing facts, but they fail to give a sense of the embodied experience of the fair. NHF’s 1939 New York World’s Fair home movies provide a rare indication of how people reacted to the fair experience by showing where they pointed their cameras, what provoked them to turn them on in the first place, and where they lingered.

Today’s experience of the New York World’s Fair usually involves some amount of nostalgia for its prewar futurism. The most prevalent descriptions of the experience of the fair, the recollections of visitors recorded on the occasion of the fair’s fiftieth anniversary, are tinged with memories of simpler times, because people who were still alive to recall the fair tended to have visited as children.⁷ Home movie makers in 1939 (or 1940—the fair ran for two seasons, with some significant changes between the first and second seasons after the outbreak of war in Europe) did not view the World of Tomorrow with nostalgia; rather, they were intent on capturing and asserting their presence in its vision of the future. The space of the fair is fresh and vivid in their films in a way that both the official records and current digital re-creations of the event cannot match.⁸ Rather than attempt an exhaustive survey, this article describes some of the stylistic tendencies in these films as a means of enriching our understanding of the fairground experience beyond official records and written accounts.

Archival collections of home movies of the 1939 World’s Fair are usually grouped not by maker but by subject. This grouping makes analyzing them more difficult insofar as it eliminates the context of the filmmaker. One of the great joys of working with the collections at NHF is the wealth of information that came with these films. The layers of information in the collection files provided much-needed context to the individual films. NHF often acquired all the extant films of a given filmmaker, allowing comparison of the 1939 fair films to the rest of the makers’ output. Viewing an entire body of work provides an overall sense of a filmmaker’s level of technical skill and general interests, which in turn contexualize the filmic style exhibited in the fair film. Additionally, the collections’ records are valuable for helping to flesh out a picture of who the fair filmmakers were, where they lived, and even (if it was part of the donation) what equipment they used. These films are rich with visual information but lacking in textual metadata, which means researchers who come to the archive with knowledge of the event can add valuable information to the collection records. There have often been follow-up conversations and correspondence between the NHF archivists and the donors that helped clarify lingering questions of who appears in the films and where and when the films were shot. In some rare cases, as I will discuss later, surviving friends or family were available to answer specific questions.⁹

What’s in a Splice?

The opportunity to examine the original films themselves at NHF enabled me to gain deeper insight into the physical experience of the filmmakers who recorded them as they walked through the fair. To get a better sense of how these filmmakers filmed the fairgrounds, I began by counting splices. The cutting rate was something I had been curious about since I first began examining home movies of the fair in 2001, but up to my time at NHF in 2010, I was watching video transfers, either within the archival collections at the Queens Museum or those put on archive.org by Rick Prelinger. I had not been able to handle the original films and therefore did not know if a shot change was an in-camera edit, the end of a reel, or a splice. As a way of linking editing to the physical experience of moving through the fair, I traced each filmmaker’s path through the fairgrounds on an official map. This mapping helped to ascertain whether shot changes were a postfilming edit or a break when the camera was shut off between point A and point B.

For the most part, people did not edit their fair films very much. Most films had between eight and fifteen splices, some of which were between reels. These data supported my hypothesis that filmmakers were turning their cameras on and off as they moved through the fair and were filming what caught their eye rather than approaching the fair in the more systematic method advocated by Kodak and the Amateur Cinema League (ACL). Both Kodak and the ACL, the premier association for amateur filmmakers, published how-to guides for filmmakers, advocating the best cameras, films, filters, and film speeds for shooting the fair as well as the best locations for the most interesting shots and how to make the most of one’s time filming the fair.

The NHF filmmakers used both standard amateur gauges available at the time, 16mm and 8mm.¹⁰ In this case, the use of the more expensive 16mm gauge was no indication of competency or even a marker of a more serious or prolific filmmaker. It seems some filmmakers preferred to have two 8mm cameras rather than one 16mm machine, because having two cameras meant they could have black-and-white and color film at the ready at all times. This practice is evident in the Sally Walsh collection, where husband and wife both filmed at the fair. Part of the footage is in black and white, where the husband appears with a camera slung over his shoulder, while there is also color footage, presumably shot by the husband with the camera we see in the wife’s footage. This dual-camera approach provided the same, or even more, flexibility, with footage of the same event being captured by two separate cameras and at a lower cost, all while giving two people the pleasure of being behind the camera.¹¹

Figure 1.

A camera chart for the fair, from the Amateur Cinema League guide to filming at the fair. From Movie Makers 14, no. 6 (1939): 326–27.

Firehosing, Fanning, and the Too-Close Tilt

The 1939 World’s Fair marked a turning point in the history of filming at world’s expositions because both cameras and film were more readily available than ever, making people with movie cameras a ubiquitous sight. This ubiquity was made possible by the introduction in 1932 of the 8mm format, and perhaps the fair served as an excellent excuse to buy one of these cameras. This surge in amateur filmmakers momentarily concerned the fair’s planners, who floated the idea of charging amateur filmmakers for the right to use their cameras on the fairgrounds. A memo from ACL president and chairman of the fair’s Board of Design Stephen Voorhees to W. Earle Andrews, the fair corporation’s general manager, inquires about the rumor that still photographers and amateur noncommercial filmmakers would be charged for making films on the grounds. Andrews then wrote to Roy Winton, managing director of ACL, and made it clear: individuals making amateur films for no commercial purpose would be allowed to film.¹² To help guide this new population of moviemakers, a few publications targeted amateur filmmakers at the fair and aimed to mitigate the pitfalls of filming the fairgrounds. For example, the 1939 Popular Science article “Home Movies: How to Shoot Them Like a Professional” gave tips for how to avoid common mistakes like “firehosing” (moving too quickly without direction), panning too quickly, and lacking a plan.¹³ Kodak, perhaps the most dominant presence both at the fair and beforehand through press material, produced a leaflet titled “Ciné-Kodak at the Fair” that gave advice on avoiding such problems as overexposure and provided tips for making a better-than-average home movie of the fair:

Film in sequences. Make several brief shots of each subject from different angles, at different distances—rather than “fanning” it with your camera in one long panoram [sic]. Right there—in this idea of sequences rather than disconnected shots—is the real difference between good movies and mediocre. Title your sequences with close-ups of nameplates and building plaques. Conclude your reel logically. End it with a silhouette of the Fair buildings against a New York sunset. Or, if you attend at night, with the brilliant displays of lights or fireworks.¹⁴

In addition to this leaflet, Movie Makers published an entire issue in 1939 devoted to filming at the New York World’s Fair. It is difficult to know whether any of the filmmakers whose films I discuss had read such articles or were aware of these issues at all. It is, however, clear where they failed to heed these rules. Some attempted the “labeling” of buildings by focusing on signage as a kind of establishing shot, but just as many used the camera as a kind of reading device, panning endlessly across the surface of pavilions to take in the signage. A more focused version of the endless pan, or “fanning,” this method was a common way to identify or “read” the pavilion’s name or logo with the lens. Some films do conclude with shots of the evening’s fireworks and fountain light shows. These examples may reflect an attempt to plan the film’s narrative as suggested, but they may just as likely be at the end for a simpler reason: the light shows were frequently the last attractions seen before leaving the grounds at night.

For all its emphasis on the importance of getting the best shots of the grounds, the Kodak article was quick to stress the importance of the human element:

“The World of Tomorrow”—yes . . . and the people of today, as well. THAT’S the full story to get with your movie camera at the New York World’s Fair. For it’s the everyday people who breathe life into the new-day architecture. Film them both—mingle your shots—and you’ll have a movie which will really make your friends sit up and take notice.

Almost all the 1939 World’s Fair home movies I have viewed include shots of crowds; in fact, to avoid filming crowds at the fair would have been nearly impossible. As the Kodak article goes on to clarify, it is not the crowds as a whole but the individual study that really makes the difference in creating an interesting film:

Figure 2.

Ciné-Kodak leaflet produced for the fair to help guide home movie makers in their own filmmaking.

Just as the Fair has a theme in the Trylon and Perisphere, so does your movie want a theme. You’ll find it in the crowds. Wonderful though the Fair undoubtedly is, it’s the people who bring it to life—characteristically eager or weary, gay or downcast. . . . Keep them in the story. . . . Be alive to chance character studies about the Fair—follow a series of shots of a towering building with a close-up of an unimpressed urchin earnestly attacking a chocolate-covered ice cream on a stick.¹⁵

Character vignettes nevertheless proved elusive in the films I viewed. Including people and crowds was easy, but more than this seemed beyond the capacities or interests of most, with one notable exception to which I will return at the conclusion of the essay.

The “too-close tilt” is my term for the common practice of turning on the camera when in front of a striking pavilion and tilting the camera up and down to take in the entire facade. Being close to the building makes for a disorienting and incomplete image, but it does convey the impression of being constantly confronted by these imposing, remarkable buildings. For instance, in promotional material for the fair, the tip of the Trylon was never shown. It was suggested in these fair-related publications aimed at home movie makers and photographers that they do the same, observing the fair planners’ wish that the Trylon be a symbol for infinite possibilities in the future—a seemingly limitless architectural marvel, literally with no end in sight. In reality, the pan up to the very top and back down again is a benumbingly ubiquitous shot in these films. And yet it is important to remember the awe that each of these filmmakers surely felt being so close to the fair’s iconic structural duo. Its scale alone—the Perisphere was two hundred feet wide, the width of a Manhattan block, and eighteen stories high—was enough to warrant filming. In general, the fact that many amateur fair films exhibit stylistic consistency is not monotonous or a disappointment but rather confirms my assumptions about the difficulty of successfully filming a space full of movement, visual and aural stimuli, and confusing layout (see Figure 1). Although set on a radial plan and with color-coded zones, the physical space of the fair was confusing and distracting, with no clear sense of an intended direction or order in which to view the various pavilions and exhibits. References to the World of Tomorrow as the Land of Oz were popular, even by fair organizers, who referenced the original L. Frank Baum’s vision of Oz with the color-coordinated zones. These were designed to help guide the fairgoer, though in practice these areas were difficult to distinguish, as they were constantly in conflict with the view of a contrasting zone’s color regime. The openness of the grounds was intentional, though the extent to which the public suffered from what became known as “World’s Fair Eyes” was not anticipated. Archer Winsten, motion picture reviewer for the New York Post, bemoaned that there was too much to see: add to the publicized disease “World’s Fair Feet,” “World’s Fair Movie Eyes.”¹⁶

The internal consistency of these films also provides a more useful baseline for discussing interesting anomalies or deviations rather than the “ideal” home movie advocated by Kodak or the ACL. Patricia Zimmermann provides one model for how to read amateur films’ apparent disregard for convention or professional advice. She describes the conventional home movie style—shaky camera work, lack of editing, and predominance of medium shots—as an act of defiance against Hollywood. Quoting Jonas Mekas, she connects the amateur and the avant-garde, seeing “amateur technology as resistance, forecasting its emancipatory potential.”¹⁷ There are also important technological factors that account for some of these stylistic variances and perhaps explain the general consistencies; the weight of a 16mm camera, which may have required hand winding, and rangefinders versus viewfinders. There is also a third possibility, which can illuminate the perceptual effects of the fair on the individual. Much like the postcard from the Columbian Exposition that reads simply, “Dear Mother, Oh. Oh. Oooooo!” amateur films from the 1939 World’s Fair offer a similar record of the overwhelming, spectacular nature of the fair.¹⁸ Amateur film’s mode of resistance at the fair, if we can call it that, may be as a recording device for capturing the immediacy of an intense visual experience unlike any other medium. Amateur films do much to replicate the inevitable “World’s Fair Eyes” effect of the fairgrounds’ perceptual overload.¹⁹ In this way, these films are unlike the professionally produced views of the fair; they show the fair as it was, not as the ideal hoped for by the fair planners.

In other words, these films can be mined for what they reveal about the nature of the fair. The idiosyncratic moments among all of NHF’s World’s Fair home movies are too numerous to treat individually, but considered in the aggregate, they suggest an emergent taxonomy of the amateur filmmaker’s view of the fair that can be mapped. In what follows, I present four broad categories of my observations on these fair films: the “unofficial view,” “who’s in the frame?,” the “individual in the crowd,” and “experiment or accident?”

The Unofficial View

The Walter J. Clark collection exemplifies the benefits of having a home movie maker’s entire body of work. Clark is one of the more skilled and adventuresome filmmakers in the fair films of the NHF collection. The Clark collection contains more than fourteen thousand feet of film, in the form of twenty-six reels of home movies and nineteen reels of purchased commercial shorts. Clark’s fair film highlights an aesthetic pitfall of the fair’s radial plan: the backs of buildings were often exposed. Undecorated service entrances were often visible to fairgoers and captured by their cameras, which took a bit of the luster off of the World of Tomorrow gleaming facades. The visibility of the Amusement Zone from the main fairgrounds captured in Clark’s film probably would have chagrined the planning committee. Although they recognized the public’s expectation that the fair would include such attractions as freak shows, wild animals, native peoples, and girlie shows, fair planners wanted them to be segregated, physically and conceptually distinguished from the forward-thinking globalism of the World of Tomorrow.

Mapping the shots in Clark’s 16mm fair film, there are thirteen sections that have a total running time of 13 minutes, with no splices except to join reels. Clark begins filming on the bus into the grounds, passes the General Motors and Ford buildings, then departs at the Trylon and Perisphere to go through the Court of Power (Consolidated Edison, General Electric). He then moves on to the amusement area and the amphitheater. From this point, the film moves back into the official section of the Court of States, then goes through the Romanian, Czechoslovakian, and Japanese pavilions. It makes a loop to return to previously visited sites, revisiting the amphitheater, the Trylon and Perisphere, and the Court of States.

Clark’s film contains numerous shots taken from some form of transportation, a trick mentioned in Movie Makers magazine to create more dynamic shots.²⁰ It certainly has the desired effect, enlivening the crowds, buildings, and landscape. But here, too, there is some unevenness, as shots seem to speed up and slow down when Clark moves from the bus to walking and back to the bus again. As for the people he films, there is only one shot, on the Greyhound tour bus moving through the grounds, where he focuses on the young girl who appears to be his only companion. It is unclear whether the other people he films are character studies, in keeping with the suggestions of the amateur filmmaking guides, or other members of the group who are all visiting the fair together. There are also technical issues with over- and underexposure. Shots including large swaths of whitewashed buildings and bright blue sky are blown out, while interior shots are at times so dark as to be indecipherable. In an article titled “Put ’Em on Your Camera Too,” Kodak promoted a series of lenses and filters (described as “sunglasses on your camera”) designed to combat the site-specific problems of the World’s Fair moviemaker who was continually moving between darkened interiors and the brilliantly lit outdoors.²¹

Although his is one of the more creatively constructed fair films in the NHF collection, Clark has a tendency to record everything as he sees it, panning across (aka reading) the front of pavilions. That tendency brings him too close to the subject, something else Movie Makers warns against.²² This stylistic tendency seems to be an artifact of the fair’s overwhelming nature; even this talented amateur has difficulty following the rules in the face of so much visual stimulation.

Robert Decker is another of the filmmakers who exhibits a sense of experimentation and above-average talent. His other films at NHF include inventive shots, such as filming from the front of a moving car going up a curved mountain road and a shot of his family with their backs turned to the camera but looking into a mirror in a shop window, so that their waves of “hello” are visible in their reflection. The forethought and creativity established in Decker’s earlier films continued into his film of the fair, where the mundane aspects of the fair predominate. Decker was fascinated by the behind-the-scenes jobs that kept the World of Tomorrow running. For example, there are lingering shots of unexplained dirty puddles behind fair buildings and one of a man cleaning out the water in the fountains underneath the Trylon. These are the routines that kept the fair beautiful, but they also expose it as a creation, a dream world. Decker appears not as interested in the dream as in the work necessary to keep the fantasy afloat and the moments of the mundane that lie just below the skin of “the future.”

Figure 3.

Decker 1939 New York World’s Fair home movie, showing his interest in the less glamorous aspects of the fair, such as puddles. Courtesy of Northeast Historic Film.

As mentioned earlier, there were official films for sale, and Kodak specifically produced “best of” reels that contained images of the pavilions lit at night, the fountains, and so on. These shots would be difficult for the amateur to capture, and Kodak’s footage allowed anyone to insert these shots into their own home movies to enhance their visual appeal. The Decker fair film has an unexpected use for this “spectacular” footage, however. Instead of using the professionally shot footage of the most striking aspects of the fair, Decker begins his film with professionally produced black-and-white footage and includes intertitles explaining the footage of the president’s visit and other facts about the fair. The middle consists of Decker’s own color footage, which covers one whole day and ends with the nightly fireworks show. At the end, Decker brings the narrative full circle by splicing on a “The End” title card from the official film. In other words, Decker punctuates the staid restraint of the conventional black-and-white representation of the fair with his own jumpy explosions of color; the effect is a lively trip to the Land of Oz in the middle of the “official” view of Kansas (and the rest of the world).

Who’s in the Frame?

Despite the ever-present crowds, some films have little presence in them, which is to say that the filmmaker picks out no one person in particular. Others, like the Unobskeys, place a family member in the foreground of nearly every shot. The Unobskey collection contains more than three thousand minutes of black-and-white 16mm film, covering the years 1928–59.²³ Their fair film demonstrates a family sharing the duties of filming and, with that, the fun of filming the fair. Proving you were at the fair meant you controlled what was filmed or that you were the one captured on film. In this film, two sets of adults appear: the boy’s parents and another couple, likely an aunt and uncle. (There were three sons in the second generation, so these are likely two of those brothers.) The boy is nearly always in the frame, sometimes under protest (or, at the very least, not interested in costarring with every monument and pavilion). There is, however, one point at which the footage gets very shaky. Judging by the presence of all four adults in the frame, it seems this shot was the boy’s turn behind the camera. The young Mr. Unobskey goes from the one forced into bodily providing a sense of scale to being able to capture a moment of his own and giving us a glimpse into his perspective.

The Sally Walsh collection demonstrates a two-camera household, containing two reels of fair films, one in color and another in black and white.²⁴ Because we see Mr. Walsh with his camera slung over his shoulder in the black-and-white footage, and in their other home movies, Mrs. Walsh appears most often in the color footage, this strongly suggests that the husband shot in color and his wife operated the black-and-white camera.²⁵ The two reels also exhibit different camera techniques. The husband is fond of a “tilt-down, pan over” move. Often starting at the top of a pavilion, the camera will tilt down and pan to the right to continue filming the surrounding area, as if tracing the letter L. He uses mostly medium-long shots, and his two companions are nearly impossible to locate throughout his fair footage. He repeatedly films the same spots; in fact, he goes back to the Trylon and Perisphere multiple times, which provides an impression that they were walking in circles.²⁶

At the level of the shot, circularity is more common in the wife’s film. She often tilts down and pans over and continues in a circular direction, going back up, panning

Figure 4.

Unobskey 1939 New York World’s Fair home movie, showing the family grouping before the youngest member gets behind the camera. Courtesy of Northeast Historic Film.

Figure 5.

The shaky image that comes once the Unobskey boy gets behind the camera. Courtesy of Northeast Historic Film.

over, down, and then to the right or left to capture the subject of interest. She tends to film her husband and their companion more than her husband did. Generally, her film focuses more on people and interesting moments, instead of attempting a comprehensive view, like her husband did; her footage contains striking images of fountains, the Amusement Zone, and the Tesla coil. Her footage also contains a brief foray into New York City. In this way, these films convey multiple perspectives on a singular event, providing a polyvalent view of the same day. These two distinct styles of filming and two different approaches to the same subject matter on the same day are reflected in Mr. Walsh’s preference for filming buildings and long shots of the fairgrounds versus Mrs. Walsh’s tendency to film individuals, either anonymous crowd shots or sequences involving her two companions from the day. These differing approaches represent categories of filming styles that could provide a new rubric for studying home movies of public spaces and events such as this and other fairs; those that focus on who’s in the frame and those that instead tend to focus on architecture and exhibits.

The Individual in the Crowd

Some home movies of the fair are about groups attending as both visitors and participants, as in the Everett Greaton collection’s fair film. The Greaton collection contains more than thirty thousand feet of 16mm color film (eighty-eight reels). Greaton made films in his capacity as executive director of the Maine Development Commission, a position he assumed in 1930, and the film style cultivated by the tourism industry infiltrated his home movies. The fair film starts with a girls’ drill team doing their routine on the streets of a small town in Maine and follows with them performing on a ship. The footage shifts to another ship, a ferry in New York harbor, then cuts to the grounds of the World’s Fair. This is a different kind of fair film, a personal travelogue of the team’s trip to perform at the fair. Their performance there takes place on an unidentified grassy mall, and their routine is the synchronized marching, baton twirling, and pattern forming familiar from the previous performances. Like almost all visitors, Greaton filmed the Italy Pavilion, whose dramatic waterfall was a big draw, but for the most part, their experience was not like that of most visitors. They were traveling there for a specific purpose; over the fair’s two seasons, numerous troupes traveled to the fair for the purpose of giving a brief performance. There are, within other collections, shots where similar groups of uniformed young men and women are glimpsed traveling en masse through the crowds. Here the team’s personal experience and agenda color the recording, which is focused not on the fair itself but on their role within it. Their presence also adds something domestic; as a small troupe from Maine, they remind the viewer about this small-town experience of the fair and that these kinds of visitors made up a large portion of the crowds and of the key participants in the fair. Yet because they are so often unidentified, as viewers, we tend to think of them as a unified whole. Indeed, one of the most significant lessons these home movies have to offer is to insist on the heterogeneity of the crowd. Unlike the generic, monolithic version of the fair repeatedly presented in official fair views, these glimpses into individual narratives are distinct records of specific experiences.

The Lee Scouting Museum film provides another example of the fair functioning as the backdrop to a unique participant–observer. The film starts as many do, with the Trylon and Perisphere, but in tilting down, the focus immediately becomes the role of the Boy Scouts. A scoutmaster, map in hand, gives directions to another fairgoer. From here the film turns to the Boy Scout encampment on the grounds, with boys climbing a tree. This footage on the fairgrounds is not a part of the fair usually seen in most home movies; we see the first aid station, where the boys receive a lesson; their encampment; and the surrounding area. There is also extended footage of marching on the grounds, which may be the military group we see with them earlier on the Hudson ferry. The scenes of the Scouts at their encampment, standing at attention, close-ups of their tents and teepees, human towers, packing up and readying to leave, and finally, waiting at the train station all document their specific Boy Scout–centered experience of the fair. This record of their trip to the fair pays little attention to the fair itself, instead focusing on the role of the Boy Scouts at the fair, their routines and contributions. Along with the Decker film, these examples show the business side of the entertainment provided at the fair, while offering portraits of small-town groups as pieces of the larger patchwork that made the fair such a diverse, fascinating, and sometimes overwhelming site.

Experiment or Accident?

The visual or stylistic anomalies that occur as a result of amateur filmmakers’ lack of professionalization are one of the great sources of insight of these films. Whether these filmmakers left these “mistakes” in for their visual interest or whether they were perhaps genuine attempts at experimentation remains uncertain, but these characteristics provide an alternative view or spark new questions about the films and the filmmakers behind them. For example, in the Philip Sheridan collection, there is a reversed shot of the Italian pavilion. How did this happen?²⁷ Did he load a new magazine incorrectly? This would have gone unnoticed if it were not for the lettering on the front of the oft-filmed water fountain facade. In the Albert Conley collection is another experiment–accident: a double exposure, combined with a rare moment of seeing the cameraman when he films a funhouse mirror. The shots prior to this moment of double exposure depict two women, a younger woman seen before in other footage from this collection and another in a fur coat. In the double exposure, the photographer, filming himself in the funhouse mirror with the two women on either side, is superimposed on an image of the two women standing below the fountain in front of the City of Light exhibit. This in-camera mistake provides a disorienting vision that is absent from the official views of the fair. But it does provide an emblem for the mixture of pleasure and spectacle that permeated all aspects of the fair, from the educational commercial pavilions to the entertainment of the Amusement Zone.

Another happy accident in the Conley footage came about purely out of my own curiosity. Before its footage of the fair, this reel contains shots of a car crossing bridges, with the camera aimed directly out the front of the car. The passing girders create a visual experience akin to the phantom rides of early cinema, where cameras positioned on the front of a moving vehicle gave the ghostly sensation of traveling bodiless through space.²⁸ Curious about their route to the fair, I compared contemporaneous shots of bridges in the surrounding area to the footage and identified the original (pre-1964) Chesapeake Bay Bridge, the Potomac River Bridge, also known as the Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge, and the George Washington Bridge in New York City. The happy accident of this footage leading up to the fair footage is twofold. First, I discovered that the Nice Bridge opened in 1940. This conclusively situates this film as belonging to the 1940 fair season—not, as I had assumed based on the film’s date code, the 1939 season—a fact of some significance. After the outbreak of war, the fair’s theme and motto were changed from “The World of Tomorrow” to “For Peace and Freedom,” and pavilions from countries opposing the United States were either altered or removed.²⁹ The second valuable aspect of the bridge footage is in identifying it for other researchers. Was Conley an engineer? Or simply an enthusiast? Is there value in these images for engineering historians? The Conleys also filmed tunnels and overpasses. Since the landscape of the US highway system has shifted in the intervening decades, these films hold valuable information for researchers interested in subjects other than the 1939 New York World’s Fair. This speaks to the importance of NHF’s detailed collection records and to the need for collaboration and input between researchers and archives to unpack the layers of information these films contain.

The fair film in the Sheldon Museum collection contains another kind of accident that goes one step further and reminds us of the fine line between amateur and experimental. It begins with night shots of the fair. These kinds of shots had a wide appeal, appearing in many of the fair films I have examined, and yet were challenging to shoot well. The nightly light shows incorporated fireworks and fountains lit with colored lights. The buildings themselves often incorporated colored lights or white neon around the building’s perimeter to create an alternative night facade. In the Sheldon Museum fair film, these shots often include the silhouetted heads of the crowd at the bottom, which helps ground the images, but their abstraction lends them a quasi-experimental quality. The initial attempt to make out exactly what is being filmed gives way to a different gaze that simply absorbs the beauty of the imagery. This may not have been the intended effect, but it actually captures the appeal of fireworks and light shows. These are all examples of how moments otherwise considered to be flaws or outside the subject matter at hand (as with the Conley bridges) actually provide further textual evidence of the fairgoer’s experience.

Figure 6.

Conley 1939 New York World’s Fair home movie, showing a double exposure of two women and a fountain. Courtesy of Northeast Historic Film.

The Cyrus Pinkham Collection

Finally, I would like to turn to the happiest accident of my research at NHF, the Cyrus Pinkham collection. From the first frames of Pinkham’s fair film, I knew I was seeing something markedly different. This judgment should not discount the importance of the other fair films, which are invaluable in helping to provide a perspective of the fair that lacks concrete documentation otherwise. Collectively, these fair films provide a fresh perspective on the complex experience of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. I was not expecting, however, to find such a beautifully edited and artfully shot fair film.³⁰ I was immediately intrigued by this collection, and with the help of NHF collections manager Gemma Perretta, I set up an interview with the donors.

Figure 7.

Pinkham 1939 New York World’s Fair home movie, showing a striking use of contrast between the dark, shadowed pavilion structure and the bright sky. Courtesy of Northeast Historic Film.

Pinkham, as a filmmaker, confounds categorization. According to the donors, Bill Waters, his good friend, and Ned Reiner, his partner, he had no formal training as a filmmaker, did not belong to a cine-club, and did not subscribe to any filmmaking publications. What is evident, however, is that he had thoroughly absorbed classical Hollywood style and editing techniques and used them extensively. Shooting on 16mm, almost exclusively in black and white, Pinkham’s films range from simple recordings of family members and short narratives of family events to short fiction films like Be Beautiful? The Pinkham collection contains eighteen reels, a mix of black-and-white and color footage, dating from 1937 to 1940. Reiner described Pinkham’s filmmaking style simply, stating, “He tried to make little stories, not just boring home movies.”³¹ This observation is borne out by the films, which, although affected by vinegar syndrome and in need of restoration, are a testament to Pinkham’s love of editing. Most of the fair films I examined at NHF contained an average of eight to fifteen splices; Pinkham’s film of the fair had ninety-six.

Figure 8.

Dynamic composition from Pinkham’s fair film incorporating a piece of statuary, the Consolidated Edison Ed fountain, and the tip of the Trylon. Courtesy of Northeast Historic Film.

In the opening sequence of the World’s Fair film, Pinkham establishes himself as a filmmaker who deliberately planned his filmmaking. He gathered all the major publications covering the fair at the time to create the title card shot and used a Manhattan skyscraper, likely the Empire State Building, the location for the fair’s directorial board and Pinkham’s workplace (he was an assistant to the president of a cigar company), to capture an amazing long shot of the fairgrounds rising up out of the swampland of Flushing Meadows as a means of introducing them. This is not a filmmaker, like so many others whose footage I have seen, who simply turned on his camera as he entered the gates. The Kodak leaflet advises, “Film in sequences. Make several brief shots of each subject from different angles, at different distances—rather than ‘fanning’ it with your camera in one long panorama. Right there—in this idea of sequences rather than disconnected shots—is the real difference between good movies and mediocre.”³²

Pinkham films the kinds of vignettes of human interest promoted by the Kodak leaflet, with a shot of the “Amusement Zone” sign, followed by a matronly woman eating, as well as staging his own mini-narrative to demonstrate the physical exhaustion of the experience of the fair. A man (played by Pinkham) pulls off his shoes, throws them in the trash, and walks away shaking his head—an illustration of “World’s Fair Feet.” Unlike the majority of the films of the fair in the NHF collections, Pinkham used the opportunity to showcase his talents, making a film full of striking compositions, unique perspectives, and whimsy.

Conclusion: Where to Go From Here?

This project began by attempting to answer the question, what can home movies tell us about the experience of the 1939 New York World’s Fair? The NHF collection and other films have proved valuable in providing a range of answers as well as surprises. They also have provoked new questions and opened up new directions for research. For example, the fair films at NHF contain two distinct styles filmmakers used to film the human subject: some films focused on the filmmakers and their families, and some focused on the fair itself. In the Clark fair film, only one shot seems to identify the companion of the filmmaker. In the Unobskey film, by contrast, there is hardly one shot that does not include at least one family member. This difference is intriguing, and there is more to say about the role of the individual as the traditional focus in home movies (at birthdays, weddings, the beach, etc.) versus an emphasis on location and event. A consequence of thinking about this distinction would be to bring together home movies, newsreels, travelogues, and documentaries in a novel configuration.

This potential for home movies to speak to contemporary audiences in unexpected ways also holds true for the historical interest within these films. There is a wealth of information in these films about fashion in the late 1930s and early 1940s. There are the transitory events that were not documented in the official fair films, such as the Boy Scout troop visit and the marching band or the shifts in the fairground between the two seasons as the United States entered into World War II. These moments provide the kind of knowledge that an archive might not predict as being useful, but they are another instance in which the archivist’s knowledge of the collection beyond the descriptions provided in the collections record can guide a researcher in unexpected directions.

There are also moments during which the researcher can and should give back to the archive with the knowledge she brings to the subject prior to seeing the films. One such instance occurred during this project, while I was working with the Norman Richmond collection. In this instance, Richmond is not the filmmaker but the donor. Richmond is the cousin of the filmmaker’s wife, Mabel Wheeler, and orchestrated the donation of these films to NHF. There is not much footage—only around 350 feet—compiled from five reels of black-and-white 8mm, which all date from 1939. The collections record contains a number of mistakes, which seem to have been established, or at least corroborated, by Mrs. Wheeler in her agreement with the archive’s description of the films. She mistakenly identifies the beginning of the fair section as being an auto show in a different location. It is only because I have viewed hours of these films that I recognized the footage not as the auto show in Sidney, Maine, as stated in the collection records, but as the Goodyear demonstration of their tires’ resiliency at the 1939 fair. There are likely countless moments like this, in which a researcher’s knowledge of a collection can benefit the archive’s collection records and future researchers. No cataloger, no matter how skilled, can anticipate every nuance of importance in a particular film; not every expert lives close enough to pay a personal visit to the archive that houses material of interest. Bringing material to the audience is just one step, and just as the researcher must make full use of the knowledge of the archivist, the researcher’s ability to reciprocate and add value to a collection through identification and description will be essential to keeping the material circulating and reaching larger audiences.

The Kodak leaflet describes the fair as a “cross-section of the universe.”³³ The topography laid out here, of the stylistic tendencies prevalent in these fair films, creates its own cross-section of the home movie universe in this particular time and place. These home movies offer a diverse set of impressions of the World of Tomorrow that enrich our understanding of not only what it looked like but also how it was experienced. Collectively, these amateur films of the fair reflect the multivalent, polyvocal histories of the perceptual experience of the fair, the discernible stylistic impact of the fairgrounds on the filmmaking process, and the importance of amateur films as a distinct genre of visual record. The task of archivists, researchers, and enthusiasts is to continue bringing these home movies to a broader audience, asserting that “I Have Seen the Past” is as entertaining and instructive now as “I Have Seen the Future” was then.