Educational Media Reviews Online

Screening Room was a Boston television series that for almost ten years during the 1970s offered independent or experimental filmmakers a chance to show and discuss their work on a commercial ABC television affiliate station. The series was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner, who was then Chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and Director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard. Recently, The Museum of TV and Radio in New York offered to copy the two-inch master tapes that had been given to the Harvard Film Study Center. Approximately 25 were selected to be released as DVDs, and among them this episode.

Filmmaker Ricky Leacock was Robert Gardner’s guest on June 15, 1973. Al Mecklenburg and Jon Rosenfeld, members of Leacock’s research team at MIT, were also on-hand to demonstrate super-8 sync technology in a section of the program. Modeled on chain-smoking contemporary talk show formats, the program allowed for guests to comfortably have a discussion with breaks for viewing film segments. Unlike the highly edited film clips shown today as promotional material on talk shows, this format’s present-day incarnation would more closely resemble Inside the Actors Studio than any current talk show. The comfortable rhythm of the show also allowed for lengthy film segments to be shown. In Leacock’s case, the two main films shown were his 1964 Republicans – The New Breed (also known as Campaign Manager), a 30-minute film about the Goldwater political campaign he made with Noel E. Parmentel Jr., and his 1970 Queen of the Apollo, a 20-minute film he made with his daughter Elspeth Leacock about a 16-year old who is Queen of a Mardi Gras ball in New Orleans. There is also a shorter segment showing rare footage that Leacock shot of Indira Gandhi as well as other work.

Starting with a basic overview of Cinéma vérité and Leacock’s role in its development, we move along to Leacock’s concerns and passions at the time of the interview. At MIT Leacock was in the position of having funding to conduct research about ways of producing films with sync sound less expensively than what could be achieved using 16mm film and equipment. In 1971, his research team began working on Super 8mm sync sound where the camera was obviously less expensive, lighter, and more portable along with a system of recording audio without a cable connecting both apparati. Leacock’s social aspirations at this point in his career led him to want to make this inexpensive technology available to developing countries. It’s unfortunately a direction that was not successful. The obvious defect of their system was that a homemade system with little prospect of standard and reliable mass production could not function properly for the use they envisioned. You could not send a technician along with every piece of equipment to a developing country. The less obvious problem which they could not see at that moment and what eventually killed their system was that at the same time they were developing their system, Japanese manufacturers began selling single system Super 8 sound cameras. In fact just a couple of months later, in August 1973, Kodak made their magnetic sound Super 8 equipment commercially available. In this technology the image was photographed at the same time as the sound was recorded on the same piece of film. This single system process also had its limitations: the sound quality was not as good as a double system such as theirs, and so, any sophisticated editing of image and sound was extremely limited. However, the majority of consumers always pick ease over quality and the outcome was simply that Super 8 single system wiped out the Super 8 double system for the uses Leacock thought about, even before video came into the picture and thus almost completely obliterated Super 8 a few years later.

This interview comes at cross-roads in Leacock’s career as he searches for meaningful ways to continue his work. He talks about being disillusioned by Cinéma vérité documentary. He questions the direction of the movement’s progression in creating a definite need to grab the audience by showing so many crisis moments and, without referring to his long-time associate Robert Drew, discusses this turning into a pressure on filmmakers to heighten the numerous crises. His own style of showing small aspects of middle-America now seemed to diverge from the direction documentary had begun to take. He is prophetic in understanding the coming of video as he sees its many applications even then, and agrees that there are certain things that should only be done on video.

This program is important historically in terms of serving as a document about a specific point in the career of one of the most important Cinéma vérité filmmakers but it is also a significant text in the study of the history of moving image technology and its ever changing format incarnations. The relevance and continuation of the parallel of the dichotomies, film/video in 1973, and analog/digital in 2006 is striking in that similar concerns still prevail. This program is recommended for academic areas of study in journalism, media/film production history, and film studies.