Film editing remains a mystery to perhaps most moviegoers, which is as it should be: You should be watching what happens, not how it's put together. So especially for watchers of the televised Oscars, it can be one of those awards, like sound or short films, during which you fix another drink. But given how essential good editing is to a film, it's surprising it took the Academy so long to give out an award for it.
The nominees were ...
And the Oscar went to ...
 |
| The cast of Eskimo with John Barrymore on the set of Reunion in Vienna |
Nervig's win was for what might be called a "docudrama." Like White Shadows in the South Seas, it was directed by W.S. Van Dyke and shot by Clyde De Vinna, and blended documentary footage shot in Alaska with staged narrative footage. The screenplay was by John Lee Mahin from a book by Peter Freuchen about the problems caused by the confrontation of the indigenous peoples with white traders. Nervig's task was to blend the documentary sequences of animal hunts and daily life of the Inuit with the staged stuff. In a way, the editing Oscar started off much the way the cinematography Oscar did: favoring the exotic over the familiar. An extraordinarily expensive film for its day, Eskimo was a box-office failure. Nervig, who spent his career at MGM, would win another Oscar for another film that blended location footage with staged action, King Solomon's Mines (1950). He was also nominated for A Tale of Two Cities (1935).
No comments:
Post a Comment