White Water
May. 2nd, 2019 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerIn 1923 and 1924, when silent film actress and director Nell Shipman was struggling to save her production company and her menagerie of animals out at Priest Lake, Idaho, she made a series of short films on northern subjects (in keeping with her persona as The Girl from God’s Country, God’s Country being the frozen north for some reason).
One of these shorts, White Water, is available in its entirety on Youtube, and as I’ve been reading Kay Armitage’s book about Shipman I decided to watch it. The credits in the film list Shipman’s lover Bert van Tuyle as the director, but the Women Film Pioneers Project lists it as a co-directed production, so make of that what you will. Shipman did write all the screenplays for all of her Priest Lake projects.
This one is twenty minutes of pure melodrama. Shipman arrives in a logging camp. (Armatage says her character is a wildlife photographer, although there’s no indication of this in the movie.) She stops, enchanted by the sound of a young man playing the fiddle while his younger brother dances… until the boy collapses from hunger.
Why can’t the young man get a job as a logger? Shipman asks. And then unfolds their tale of woe: the young man has lost his nerve to log since he cut down a tree that fell on his younger brother and stunted his growth forever! So Shipman takes them under her wing and helps the young man find a non-logging job.
Then the boy, while playing by the riverside, falls into the water… right before the loggers release the logs to flow downstream! He could be crushed! And if he’s not crushed, he’s HEADING RIGHT FOR THE WHITE WATER!!!
So Shipman jumps into a canoe and rows out to save him and topples in the water herself, but don’t worry, it all turns out fine in the end. It’s an impressive sequence, especially when you realize that actors did all their own stunts at the time, particularly in a shoestring operation like Shipman’s.
(Side note: in my silent film novel, one of the heroine’s HAS to be injured in a stunt gone wrong, preferably by falling off a cliff or something so there’s a heart-stopping moment where the other is afraid that SHE’S ACTUALLY DEAD!!!! But actually she’s just twisted her ankle and wisecracks all the way back to the studio as they carry her on a makeshift stretcher.)
I don’t think most modern day viewers would White Water appealing - movie making has changed so much - but it’s an interesting piece from a historical point of view.
One of these shorts, White Water, is available in its entirety on Youtube, and as I’ve been reading Kay Armitage’s book about Shipman I decided to watch it. The credits in the film list Shipman’s lover Bert van Tuyle as the director, but the Women Film Pioneers Project lists it as a co-directed production, so make of that what you will. Shipman did write all the screenplays for all of her Priest Lake projects.
This one is twenty minutes of pure melodrama. Shipman arrives in a logging camp. (Armatage says her character is a wildlife photographer, although there’s no indication of this in the movie.) She stops, enchanted by the sound of a young man playing the fiddle while his younger brother dances… until the boy collapses from hunger.
Why can’t the young man get a job as a logger? Shipman asks. And then unfolds their tale of woe: the young man has lost his nerve to log since he cut down a tree that fell on his younger brother and stunted his growth forever! So Shipman takes them under her wing and helps the young man find a non-logging job.
Then the boy, while playing by the riverside, falls into the water… right before the loggers release the logs to flow downstream! He could be crushed! And if he’s not crushed, he’s HEADING RIGHT FOR THE WHITE WATER!!!
So Shipman jumps into a canoe and rows out to save him and topples in the water herself, but don’t worry, it all turns out fine in the end. It’s an impressive sequence, especially when you realize that actors did all their own stunts at the time, particularly in a shoestring operation like Shipman’s.
(Side note: in my silent film novel, one of the heroine’s HAS to be injured in a stunt gone wrong, preferably by falling off a cliff or something so there’s a heart-stopping moment where the other is afraid that SHE’S ACTUALLY DEAD!!!! But actually she’s just twisted her ankle and wisecracks all the way back to the studio as they carry her on a makeshift stretcher.)
I don’t think most modern day viewers would White Water appealing - movie making has changed so much - but it’s an interesting piece from a historical point of view.
