Month: August 2013

A German officer’s photo record of World War I

Modern(ish)

As his visit home for Thanksgiving two years ago was winding down, Dean Putney’s mother pulled out an old black photo album that he had never seen before. Inside were more than 700 pictures taken by his great-grandfather Walter Koessler when he was an officer in the German Reserve Artillery Battalion during World War I. Koessler was an architect and an accomplished photographer who was conscripted into the army while still in architecture school. He was sent to the Western Front where the army put his photographic skills to work, sending him up in biplanes and airships to take official aerial reconnaissance photos. However the vast majority of the pictures he took were informal shots of him and his comrades going about their daily life during all four years of the war: maneuvering cannons, bathing, about to slaughter a cow, playing cards in the trenches and, as the early optimism of the war decayed into years of mass butchery and attrition, dying in the trenches.

After the war, Walter emigrated to the United States. He settled in Los Angeles and worked as an art director for the movies. That’s where he put together the 100-page photo album recording his life from 1914 to 1918. He also kept a box of around 60 stereographs (two slightly offset pictures side-by-side that create the illusion of three dimensionality when viewed through a stereoscope like a View-Master) of the war and pre-war period and hundreds of the original negatives of both the photographs and the stereographs.

Most published and widely circulated pictures from World War I were taken by the Allies. Not that there weren’t plenty of military photographers and journalists on the German side as well; it’s just a history is written by the victors phenomenon. So extensive a personal record of the entire war compiled by a single officer who also had the chops to take properly composed, even beautiful, photographs is a unique resource. On top of that, Walter’s family kept the entire collection in excellent condition, especially the negatives which were rarely exposed to air or light and are so sharp, so rich that they look almost like new.

Dean Putney realized this precious record had to be shared with world. There were no captions on the pictures, just a few dates noted on the back of some, so Dean dedicated himself to research. He interviewed family, searched the web, contacted experts, even went in person to visit one of the sites depicted in the pictures so he could have an after shot to go with the devastated before.

A few months ago, Dean started a Tumblr to post the pictures as he began to scan them. The Walter Koessler Project is a great browse, but Dean wanted to do even more. He wanted to publish a high quality book of the collection that was the same size as the photo album with space for his research notes and for that, he needed money.

He turned to Kickstarter, starting a project with a goal of $50,000 dollars on August 6th which would allow him to make a minimum order of 1000 copies with a publisher that does the kind of large format, specialty work Dean wanted to pay the proper respects to his great-grandfather’s war experience. Within two days he had raised $18,000. By the time I read about it on Boing Boing and contributed on August 9th, the project was more than halfway to its goal.

It has now exceeded that goal by $20,000 and there are still three weeks plus to go. Dean’s aim is to have the book in high resolution PDF form and in the casebound 11″ x 17″ coffee table format delivered in time for Christmas of this year. That’s contingent on everything going right, of course, and there could be unavoidable delays, but even if the coffee table book isn’t ready, some of the other rewards — PDF book, high resolution digital files of all the pictures, individual prints — will be.

I don’t know what Dean plans to do with the extra money, but I hope it’s nothing more complicated than additional print orders because I’ve seen Kickstarters get weirdly rococo and fail to make good in response to an unexpected windfall. I think this is a phenomenal project, a history lover’s dream come true and a beautiful tribute. I also deeply appreciate Dean making the works freely available to bloggers and non-commercial media via a Creative Commons license as long as they are not used to promote war. Walter Koessler was a pacifist by the end of war. In this too Dean is paying homage to his great-grandfather and the horrors he experienced.

New method gives insight into final days of medieval child

Medieval

Chemist Kaare Lund Rasmussen from the University of Southern Denmark has found a way to extract information once contained in the soft tissues of decayed human remains from the soil in which they were interred. That gives researchers access to details about the final weeks and days of a person’s life that cannot be determined from the bones. The trick is to gather soil samples from the precise positions where the tissues used to be.

“When the body decays in the grave a lot of compounds are released to the surrounding soil – by far most of them organic compounds. Also most of the inorganic elements are transformed to other compounds and later removed by the percolating groundwater throughout the centuries that follows. If we can localize an element in the soil in the immediate vicinity of the skeleton which is not normally found in the soil itself, we can assume that it came from the deceased and this can tell us something about how the person lived. We are not interested in death, but in the life before death,” Kaare Lund Rasmussen explains.

Rasmussen and his team extracted soil samples from the burial of a child who died between 1200 and 1250 and was buried in a cemetery in Ribe, Denmark. They took little tubules of soil from the areas where the lungs, liver, kidney and upper arm muscles would have been before the remains were skeletonized. The soil was then analyzed in the lab for traces of mercury.

Mercury’s properties make it a potential rich source of varied information about the deceased. In soil that is neither polluted nor rife with cinnabar deposits, mercury is a very rare element, but people have used it for thousands of years in everything from medicine to cosmetics to filling canals in the massive mausoleum complex of Qin Shi Huang, first emperor of a united China. That means the source of any mercury found in burial soil is almost certainly the human remains.

It is also absorbed and released at different rates depending on which tissues it’s in, so for instance, since mercury inhaled in the lungs is excreted within no more than 48 hours, any mercury found in the soil sample taken from the lung area indicates that the deceased took a hit of mercury up to two days before death. Mercury was found in the lung area soil of the Ribe burial, ergo, the child was exposed to mercury shortly before he or she died. Mercury was also found in the kidney area soil, indicating exposure two months or so before death.

“I cannot say which diseases the child had contracted. But I can say that it was exposed to a large dose of mercury a couple of months before its death and again a day or two prior to death. You can imagine what happened: that the family for a while tried to cure the child with mercury containing medicine which may or may not have worked, but that the child’s condition suddenly worsened and that it was administered a large dose of mercury which was, however, not able to save its life”, says Kaare Lund Rasmussen.

Archaeologists have been testing for excess mercury in bones for some years now, but bones take a long time to absorb mercury so they can only testify to exposures that happened from three to 10 years before death.

So far, the University of Southern Denmark team has used their new methodology on soil samples from 19 medieval burials in two Danish cemeteries: the Lindegaarden cemetery in Ribe, southwestern Jutland, and the Ole Wormsgade in Horsens, eastern Jutland. This is a potential gold mine of archaeological information that has been up until now been dug, sifted or brushed away.

Too Much Johnson found in Italy

Modern(ish)

Too Much Johnson, in addition to being an irresistible double entendre, is a silent movie made by Orson Welles in 1938 as a companion piece to the eponymous 1894 play by William Gillette being staged by the Mercury Theatre, Welles’ New York City repertory company. The film, much like Gaul, was divided into three parts: one 20 minute prologue to play before the first act and two 10 minute introductions for the remaining two acts. It was a slapstick comedy in the style of Mack Sennett, meant to play off the physical comedy of Gillette’s farce. It starred Mercury actors including Joseph Cotten, Virginia Nicholson (Welles’ wife at the time) and Orson himself in a small role as a Keystone Kop.

The movie never did make it onto the stage. The theater wasn’t set up for film projection and the premiere was repeatedly postponed. Finally the play was scheduled to debut in November of 1938, but cost overruns on the previous play, Danton’s Death, forced the troupe to cancel the New York production of Too Much Johnson. Instead, they ran it for two weeks at the Stony Creek Summer Theatre in Stony Creek, Connecticut, starting August 16th, 1938. The film was never shown and the play was a flop.

Since it was never distributed, it wasn’t copied. Welles put the film in storage and literally forgot about it until he found a print in his house in Madrid in the 1960s. Unfortunately a fire at the Madrid home in 1970 destroyed the fragile and highly flammable nitrate film. From then on, Too Much Johnson was considered lost.

It was a keenly felt loss, despite its relative obscurity. Too Much Johnson was the second film Orson Welles ever made. He edited it himself on a Moviola machine in his room at the St. Regis Hotel. The first film he ever made was an eight-minute short called The Hearts of Age (watch it on YouTube here) that he shot in 1934 when he was just 19 years old. The third was his masterpiece Citizen Kane, so film scholars have long been intrigued by the elusive Too Much Johnson as the first movie Welles made for the paying public (even though the paying public never saw it) three years before Kane.

In 2008, a surviving print was discovered in the warehouse of a shipping company in Pordenone, a city in the northeast Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. It had apparently been abandoned there in the 1970s. The finders were staffers with Cinemazero, a cultural organization that together with Cineteca del Friuli runs Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, a silent film festival that draws scholars, critics and fans of the genre to Pordenone every Fall. Cinemazero staffers realized they had found a pearl of great cinematic price.

Here’s Welles biographer and actor Simon Callow on why the rediscovery of this little film is so significant:

“It was filming these sequences that first made [Welles] fall in love with film; here he began to discover the possibilities not only of shooting but of editing. It will tell us an enormous amount about his visual sensibility and indeed about his theatrical instincts; at last we can really get a sense of what this recklessly inventive production for the Mercury Theatre might actually have been like had the film been used.”

Cinemazero sent the film to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, where experts in film preservation spent years stabilizing, cleaning, restoring the footage so it could be copied to modern film and screened for the public for the first time.

“This is by far the most important film restoration by George Eastman House in a very long time,” said Paolo Cherchi Usai, senior curator of film, who supervised the project for George Eastman House. “Holding in one’s hands the very same print that had been personally edited by Orson Welles 75 years ago provokes an emotion that’s just impossible to describe.” […]

“All but one of the reels were in relatively good shape,” said Cherchi Usai. “But one of them was badly decomposed, and we initially thought it was too late to save its images.”

A last-minute rescue operation was attempted at Haghefilm Digitaal, a leading preservation lab in the Netherlands. Technicians there managed to salvage over 96 percent of the footage, with no recourse to digital techniques. “I’d call it a masterpiece of craftsmanship,” added Cherchi Usai. “What they have achieved is nothing short of a miracle—one only has to look at a photo of that reel before treatment in order to understand what kind of ‘mission impossible’ this was.”

The film on that reel was so brittle it couldn’t be touched. Haghefilm Digitaal was able to rehydrate it using a chemical process so the film could be played and copied to safety stock. No digital tools were used.

Too Much Johnson will have its world premiere in Pordenone during this October’s Le Giornate del Cinema Muto festival. It will have its US debut on October 16, 2013, at the George Eastman House’s Dryden Theatre, but tickets are only available to George Eastman House members. If sufficient money can be raised, the National Film Preservation Foundation will share the film over the Internet in 2014. Click the Donate Now button on this NFPF page to contribute to the digitization of this unique glimpse into the cinematic development of a groundbreaking genius.

The Maltese Falcon for sale

Modern(ish)

The stuff that dreams are made of is going up for auction at Bonhams New York on November 25th. It’s the black bird from The Maltese Falcon, the MacGuffin that drives the plot of the classic 1941 film noir starring Humphrey Bogart as hard-boiled private detective Sam Spade.

In Dashiell Hammett’s story, the Maltese Falcon is a golden statue encrusted with gemstones that was made in the 1530s by the Knights of Rhodes as a gift for Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to thank him for giving them the island of Malta. The falcon was lost on the way. It traded hands many times over the centuries, getting a coating of dull black enamel at some point to disguise its obvious value. Hammett was apparently inspired by the Kniphausen Hawk, a ceremonial pouring vessel made in the late 17th century for Count George William von Kniphausen. It stands on a rock base and is encrusted with garnets, amethysts, citrine quartzes, emeralds, turquoises and sapphires. It was bought by the Duke of Devonshire in 1819 and has been part of the Chatsworth collection ever since.

The movie prop version looks nothing like the Kniphausen Hawk. First-time director John Huston hired his old high school friend Fred Sexton, a prominent Los Angeles artist with paintings in the collections of stars like Edward G. Robinson and Paulette Goddard, to make the falcon for the movie. Several falcon props were made after Humphrey Bogart dropped the original prop on his foot leaving it with a dented tail. Three copies are known to exist today, two made out of lead weighing 47 pounds, and one six-pound resin version that was used in scenes when the bird is being carried. The original with the busted tail is in the Warner Brothers Museum which can only be visited if you pay $52 for the VIP studio tour (EDIT: No it’s not. The auction falcon is the one that was dropped. See update here.) The resin falcon was lost for years before being rediscovered in 1991. It sold at auction in 2010 to a consortium including actor Leonardo DiCaprio for $305,000.

One of the lead birds was given to actor William Conrad by studio head Jack Warner. It was sold at auction in 1994 after Conrad’s death. Jeweler Ronald Winston, son of Harry Winston, bought it for $398,500 (a record price for a movie prop at that time) and used it as the model to make the bird all the crooks in the story dream of. The Winston falcon is made out of 10 pounds of gold, has cabochon Burmese ruby eyes and two sets of interchangeable claws, one gold, one coral. From its beak hangs a platinum chain with a 42-carat diamond. It took two years to make and cost $8 million. It was displayed at the 69th Academy Awards in 1997.

The falcon coming up for sale in November is the other lead piece. It has been owned for decades by a private collector who has loaned it to museums for public display. There is no official pre-sale estimate yet, but it’s likely to fall in the millions of dollars, which means the black lead bird will be worth almost as much as the solid gold one with the ruby eyes and giant diamond in its beak just because it was in a really great movie once.

Monumental 6th c. Maya frieze found in Guatemala

Ancient


Archaeologists excavating the ancient Mayan site of Holmul in the northeastern Guatemalan region of El Petén have discovered a monumental high-relief frieze buried in the foundations of a temple pyramid. The part of the temple in which the frieze was built in 590 A.D., a turbulent and poorly documented period in which the rulers of Tikal fought for control of the area with the Snake dynasty of Calakmul (the variant Kaanul is used in some articles about the find). The pyramid was built over it in the 8th century.

Lead archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli was excavating a tunnel dug by looters looking for remains from the Maya Preclassic period (2,000 B.C. – 250 A.D.), the area he specializes in. He extended the tunnel just a little ways past the point where the looters gave up and found the frieze. It’s from the Classic Maya period, but Estrada-Belli was far from disappointed.

“It is one of the most fabulous things I have ever seen,” says archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli of the Holmul Archaeological Project. “The preservation is wonderful because it was very carefully packed with dirt before they started building over it.”

It’s 26 feet wide, 6 feet high fully 95% of the carving is intact (only the one corner closest to the surface is eroded). There are even traces of the original polychrome paint still visible. Three human figures, one on each end and one in the middle, wear feather headdresses and jade jewels. Each man is identified by a cartouche, but only the name of the central figure is still legible: Och Chan Yopaat, meaning “the storm god enters the sky.” The three men are seated cross-legged over the head of a mountain spirit. Beneath Och Chan Yopaat, two feathered serpents emerge from the mountain spirit. They too are sacred spirits emanating from the mouth of the mountain which is the ancestral home of the ruling Holmul dynasty. The serpents frame two deities who hold signs in both hands that read “naaah waaj” meaning “first tamale,” a reference to a ceremonial food offering.

Underneath the figures is a band of 30 glyphs dedicating the building to Ajwosaj Chan K’inich, ruler of Naranjo, a city-state south of Holmul allied to the Snake Lords of Calakmul. The inscription describes Ajwosaj’s involvement in Holmul in an usual way. The glyph for a verb that means “to put in order” is followed by the name of a local deity archaeologists believe may have been a patron god linked to the Snake dynasty. Estrada-Belli believes this passage describes a ritual re-establishment of a local god who had been ousted by the Tikal rulers when they conquered Holmul.

Putting it all together, Estrada-Belli thinks Ajwosaj, fighting under the Snake Lord banner, defeated the Tikal allies who ruled Holmul and installed Och Chan Yopaat as a ruler allied to Calakmul via Naranjo. Ajwosaj also returned the ancestral deities displaced by Tikal to their rightful place and the frieze depicts this ceremony. This is the first time Och Chan Yopaat has appeared in the historical record, and before now historians didn’t know which of the two dominant powers ruled Holmul in this period.

As if the frieze with its precious new information about Maya history weren’t enough, the team also found the remains of an adult male buried beneath the steps leading to the building the frieze decorates. He was buried with ceramic offerings depicting, among other religious icons, the nine gods of the Maya underworld. One incisor and a canine had been drilled and filled with jade beads. Jade is a symbol of royalty in Mayan culture. The remains of a decayed wooden mask were found on his chest. There is no handy cartouche identifying him, but it’s possible that he’s one of the figures from the frieze. He’s certainly a member of the ruling class. A large hieroglyphic symbol carved on the side of the frieze building marks it as a royal house probably dedicated to deified local rulers.

The tunnel leading to the frieze has been reburied for now to keep the find safe from the looters who just missed it last time and to keep the humidity and temperature as stable as possible. Work on the site has stopped now as the rainy season approaches, but it is being monitored for security purposes. Estrada-Belli hopes they can eventually stabilize the site enough that it can be visited by tourists, but that’s a long-term goal. In the short term, he’s just hoping the frieze will be unharmed and ready for more study when the team returns next Spring.