For a big ol' science geek like me, it seems almost impossible to imagine something that would draw me to the American Museum of Natural History in New York and yet keep me from seeing any of the actual exhibits. (The AMNH is in a constant battle with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington for the title of My Most Favoritest Museum in the World.) But the 29th Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, hosted by the AMNH, is that rare creature. The 29th festival was held last weekend, November 3-6, though during this coming weekend, November 12-13, the museum will host repeat screenings of some of the festival films.
So there I was, in the museum, last Friday night (11.04), checking out the program "Science & Cinema I: Science on TV," featuring some of the earliest science shows to air on American TV. You know, from the era in which the airwaves were deemed to be public resources only on loan to the networks, when there was a popular mandate to produce cultural programming, before cartoons were considered "educational" and the FCC let the networks they're in bed with get away with such nonsense. (I felt like I was in a science-y, geeky version of Good Night, and Good Luck.)
We watched clips from the early 50s' What in the World?, a kind of archaeology game show on which experts and, occasionally, interesting layfolks (such as Vincent Price, in one clip) were presented with an object culled from the collection of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and had to guess what it was. The audience was clued in at the beginning of the show, as the announcer explained what the do-dad was -- the entertainment was in watching the intellectual free-for-all that resulted when the scientists got their hands on the thing. There's no way in hell anything like this would get produced today -- it's way too static and way too egghead-y; the closest current TV offering may be Antiques Roadshow, but there's a mercenary aspect to that show that's necessarily absent from What in the World?, whose objects (masks, jars, puppets, musical instruments, etc.) were simultaneously priceless and worthless. And that's too bad -- TV could use some smartening up.
Next, we were treated to clips from the 1950s series Adventure, a joint production of CBS and the AMNH, which daringly aired live on Sundays, and was kind of a science magazine that covered all manner of topics, from biology to anthropology to music to art... anything that the AMNH might have a finger in. Best of all, though, was that we were joined by Perry Wolff, a producer and writer of the show, and Bernard Birnbaum, the series' film editor; Jac Venza, the show's production designer, talked to us by phone. These guys were so cool, and had amazing stories to tell about those early days of TV, about working with minuscule budgets and confronting McCarthy's ridiculous blacklist (Einstein -- Einstein! -- was banned from the show; Eleanor Roosevelt almost didn't make it on as a guest host), stuff like that. I could have listened to them for hours.
It was easy to laugh at what we today would consider Adventure's nonexistent production values, the unpolished deliveries of the AMNH scientists who appeared in the program, and even the outdated arrogance of the show's attitude: one segment, about the spread of Asiatic peoples from Russia across the Bering Strait and into North America and then Greenland, continues to insist that the Viking is "superior" even after he's been driven away from that icy island by the horrid weather while the "primitive" Eskimo thrives there. There was lots of interpretive dance, too: genes getting down and funky, ballerinas pirouetting on giant pianos to demonstrate the musical scale. But the show was undeniably gripping. Sure, I giggled, but at the same time I could see how, if I'd been a little kid in 1955 or whatever, my imagination would have been gripped by this. And it was refreshing to be reminded, in our era of the sound bite and of 24/7 news networks that are forever apologizing to their guests for being "out of time," that there was a period when luminaries like poet Carl Sandberg and photographer Edward Steichen were allowed to ramble for half an hour, and every well-considered word was riveting.
[For some cool science-on-TV links, including links to clips of classic TV, see my blog, Geek Philosophy.]
Saturday, 11.05
The next afternoon, animator and historian of animation John Canemaker and AMNH dinosaur geek Carl Mehling hosted "Dinosaurs on Film," a retrospective look at some of the screen appearances of the terrible, wonderful lizards over the last century. We started with the classic 1914 toon "Gertie the Dinosaur," from legendary animator Winsor "Little Nemo" McCay, a clear inspiration on Walt Disney and an absolute delight. The images that make up the animation are simple line drawings, but the result is downright charming: Gertie wags her tail like a dog, eager to please McCay, who presented the toon while standing next to the screen and "interacting" with her (Canemaker stood in for McCay) -- Spielberg may have swiped that for the DNA cartoon dinopreneur John Hammond performs with in Jurassic Park.
At the other end of the spectrum came a clip from Jurassic Park III, a spectacular dinosaur fight to the death that had Mehling -- and the audience -- drooling over its stunning realism. In between, we watched the "Rite of Spring" sequence from 1940's Fantasia, with its melancholy portrait of the ancient dino world, and the "Bolero" segment from the 1977 Fantasia parody, the animated Italian film Allegro Non Troppo. A lot more pointed than anything Walt Disney ever dreamed over, the "Bolero" piece tells the story of the evolution of life on an alien planet, from its very beginnings spawned from a microbe spilled out of a Coke bottle (trash left by visiting astronauts). Ooky and globby and Dali-esque, this is a mind-blowing and unforgettable piece of toonery.
Also on Saturday, I saw Sonali Gulati's short film "Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night," about the impact of American, British, and Australian outsourcing on the culture and economy of India. Gulati, a young American filmmaker of Indian descent, visits customer-service call centers in her ancestral land and discover a twisted world in which a highly educated structural engineer seeks work as a telemarketer (and can't get it, because his regional Indian accent is too strong) and scads of young people have their worlds turned upside down thanks not only to the night-shift work that puts them on a schedule with their Western customers and out of sync with the friends and family around them, but also to the expectation that they take a Western pseudonym and acquaint themselves with Western culture, all the better to deal with their overseas phone clients. It's not quite the sweatshop nightmare Gulati -- who was present to talk about her film -- expected, but in some ways, it's almost worse: these well-paid young people are helping to topple their own culture, though they don't realize it, of course. They're only looking for well-paid jobs, but they're enabling the continuing Westernization of India. And from my perspective -- as an American consumer who has had to deal with people on the phone whom I can't understand, and who can't understand me (we being separated by a common language) -- it's infuriating to see how enormous globocorps are preying on desperation around the planet, saving millions, and pocketing all the difference, refusing to pass any of the savings on to their customers. "Nalini by Day" is perfect evidence of how corporate culture demeans and abuses everyone it touches, except its executives, who rake in obscene fortunes.
