all SET PHOTOGRAPHERS always lie : and never more so than in the 1940s...

If your knowledge of pre-1950 cinema is mostly limited, like mine, to the still photographs used to illustrate articles about them in magazines, journals and books, the Internet has probably been a distinct movie revelation.

Not so much the movies themselves (when viewable on Youtube) as much as the Internet’s hundreds of amateur GIFs featuring famous actors in famous scenes, made directly from movies of that era. 

GIFs, as most know, are brief (two to four seconds) silent motion loops taken from the movies themselves.

Because a GIF, until activated, is a still image to the viewer, it presents a very different take on those famous wartime cinema scenes than what the 1940s set photographer presented.

Compared to the tiny 35mm half movie frame exposed to a moving subject at a shaky 1/24 of a second, a set photographer’s tripod-mounted big 4x5 or 8x10 negative, of a subject asked to sit still, and shot at a high speed of 1/250 a second, was inevitably going to be much much sharper, for technical reasons alone. 

The shots indeed do look crisp, sharp, mostly distinctly black and distinctly white : as they had to be , to be reproduced successfully on coarse absorbent newsprint by the then crude newspaper half tone printing technology. 

So 1940s newspaper images of  films looked very different, not only compared to the actual film itself, but also to those same set photographer’s image when reproduced on the 1940s’ mirror smooth coated paper of the up-scale magazines and books, using their superior halftone printing technology. (The technology still used to reproduce them today.)

Back to the GIFs and the actual movies themselves.

Generally, the GIF and movie shows the actor(s) and the background behind them in a much softer and dimmer, greyer, focus.

The effect is rather like (by deliberate design) the photographic effect professional and amateur art photographers aimed to achieve between the 1860s to the 1930s :  now known to historians as the “Pictorialism” Movement.

Photographs that were much closer to the rather soft focus achieved by painters of all eras due to the comparative bluntness of brushes and fingers compared to the effect of tiny light photons exposed to tiny specks of silver compounds.

In the 1930s to 1950s, Hollywood and its global rivals retained this Pictorial Look even as the elite world of still photographers moved on to their new objective of sharp focus all over the image left to right, front to back.

You might suspect that the soft focus look flattered the stars and stars sell movie seats. True, but the real reason it was retained was the immense costs it saved.

Movie lighting equipment is built like a tank and can easily last decades, its capital costs spread widely over hundreds of films and adding little to the budget. Nor was the cost of extra electricity more than a pittance.

It is true, high illumination was hard on the eyes during long sets and the heat in summer couldn't be reduced by noisy fans.

However the truly costly part of extra lighting was the much longer set up time required for each scene : and labour costs, from star down to stage hand, was the major expense in every film ever made.

Studio bosses and their bean-counters demanded that light levels be kept low to reduce set up time (remember : time equals money) and that to balance this, lens were to be set wide open to gather as much light as possible and then the development time of the film negative was to be extended to compensate.

So the camera operator focused on the actors’ faces as accurately as he could, from close up, with the backdrop left neglected. But a len used wide open, at its biggest aperture, is probably only sharp in the middle - aimed at the actor’s eyes and mouth. The actor’s face and body are nicely, gently, blurred.

The backdrop, again by deliberate design, was set well back in the shot and was well blurred and dim, ensuring our eyes naturally focused on the sharpest brightest part of the overall image : the actor’s eyes and mouth.

What sex there was in these Hays Office era  heavily censored movies - and there was plenty ! - was almost all found in those same eyes and mouth, together with hands and hair.

As a big cost-saving bonus, a backdrop that was to end up drastically blurred and dimmed on camera required much less effort, time and material expense to render realistic !

Once we notice this on the still GIFs, we tend, I believe, to notice the effect in the movies themselves.

By the 1950s, this soft focus effect was disappearing for a variety of reasons. The old guard of cinematographers were retiring, dying or being laid off by the studios. 

Color films of that era required more lights and much flatter lighting —- TV even more so.

 The move to shooting out in the real world meant that backdrops were set even further back than inside a sound stage but the intensely bright sunshine still rendered them in sharp focus.

 The trend to super wide screen movies also tended to find viewers thinking a super-wide blurred background was now too much of a good thing.

The main reason though was that the art photography was, once again, again distinctly out of sync with the larger ideological world around it.

Pictorialist photography bloomed ( a great word to describe it, in the circumstances) at the height of the steel-hard Machine Age, at the height of Reductive Modernity.

“Reductive Modernity” was the resulting ideology/hegemony when middle class educated elites world wide concluded - (mis) led by scientists - that reality as something that fundamentally, in its most basic smallest forms, was something stable and simple and predictable and knowable and controllable.

Reality was ‘clear-cut’, a favourite term of leading modernist Howard Florey, simple straight-forward, clear, laid out in stark black and white.

Pictorialism reacted against this view, presenting instead a world of grays and fog and dim light, of uncertain shapes and boundaries : a pre-Modernist view of the world in fact.

Typical of photographers, who are generally an apolitical lot, the bulk of photographers began moving to clearcut black and white stark Modernist photography just when much of the air in the tires of Reductive Modernity began leaking out, around 1945, when Auschwitz and the Atomic Bomb suggested modern reductive science had its limits.

Greyness and fog and obscurity and blurred uncertainty began coming back intellectually, what we today call Post-Modernism for lack of a better word.

I am definitely a post-modernist, not a modernist - and I suspect Henry Dawson was too.

So I want the still images in my digital book on Martin Henry Dawson and his WWII penicillin-for-all crusade to be actually wartime film-like, Pictorialist, intellectually pre or post modern, not at all like the Modernist set photographers’ work of that time or like other Modernist stills of that  era.

But because my images are stills, not motion images, I want rather a mix between the look of the actual Pictorialist movie themselves and of Pictorialist styled still photos, which can look very much like a paintings.

In a word they are mixed media - part a photograph taken by a machine and part the result of a human mind and a human finger altering the machine’s efforts to achieve an effect.

And reproducing the look of GIFs of that era seems the best way to go about it...

Internet allows human brain to bypass the bottleneck of the birth canal, along with age-old institutional & financial bottlenecks

                                 HGT : Fungi & bacteria do it, so why not humans as well ?

Long ago, science fiction writers thought they had a solution to allow the human brain to grow ever smarter and more powerful.

They realized that human anatomy, the birth canal, in particular was would restrict the new born’s head (and hence the human brain inside) from getting any bigger.

Already human births were much more difficult & dangerous than that of their ape counterparts who settled on smaller heads and smaller brains in their newborns.

The sci fi writers saw humans being conceived in test tubes and erlenmeyer flasks with no limit on the size of the infant brain size.

The top half of old fashioned human adult skull built of bone would be removed, leaving an enormous exposed brain pulsating like a heart, above a small and underdeveloped body.

Turns out of course that the measure of intelligence is not brain size but the density of brain connections and yes there seems to be a physical limit on increasing density much more.

Humans - as individuals, out of the womb, -aren’t likely to get much smarter.

But human societies have no real limit on their collective intelligence.

They are simply using an idea they recently (circa 2000 AD) copped from the microbes who have been using it to ensure their dominance of the world for the last four billion years  : the globe-wide horizontal (free) transfer of invaluable information , on a need to know basis.

The Meek aren’t about to inherit the Earth in the Future : they are inheriting now , as in the past and as they will in the future.

The microbes have always dominated the representation of Life on Earth not in spite of being small and weak , but because of being small and weak.

We have all heard of the single invisible bacteria cell that divides every 15 minutes and in theory could cover the earth a few feet thick in a matter of days.

We dont hear enough about the single bacteria cells that take 15 million years to divide, lying low until times improve.

That really matters. For just as even the CONs can govern in good times, even megafauna like humans do well during good times on Planet Earth.

But they quickly go extinct when times get tough and their huge daily energy requires outruns the available food and heat.

And yes, I agree - partially - with your argument before you make it : the bacteria cell that reproduces every 15 minutes is not the same one as the cell that reproduces once in 15 million years.

But they are related - intimately.

Because microbes reproduce non-sexually, they do not hive off to produce separate species : their genetic boundaries remain fluid.

Microbes use the abundant DNA from other dead microbes (remember microbes are mostly DNA not muscles and bone) for many things : as bedding and barriers in bio-films, as food and also as a library book with a new-to-them recipe for survival when the environment changes to extreme.

Its brute force method : incorporating foreign bits of DNA into one’s own genome is like playing with plutonium but while billions of microbes routinely die trying out new DNA patterns, there are trillions times trillions of them left.

And if even if just one cell hits upon a startling good new feature, at 15 minutes a throw, it soon out competes all the others in its area in the race to survive and reproduce.

We now know that bacteria can survive inside tiny particles in the winds high up in the atmosphere to be quickly spread over every continent.

Let us be clear : they are generally not creating something totally new with this additional DNA chunk : they are generally putting a working subunit to a new use.

Think of it in the same way computer programs ‘call’ on an pre-assembled activity in a software operating system library to put to a somewhat new use in a new app.

The reason why microbes have so much DNA sub-assemblies to work with in the first place is because compared to humans, they are very tolerant of failures, defectives, deviants, cripples, handicapped, challenged (whatever non-PC word is current this week).

Often these microbes would seem to have a no chance to survive in normal conditions but more often than not, along the shore of the vast sea of normal conditions with its trillions of normal microbes, there are little backwaters were the conditions are weird enough to allow tiny numbers of every freak imaginable to survive, sort of, just barely.

When conditions turn weird all over, the freaks or at least their DNA, allow some bacteria to survive and perhaps even flourish under the ‘new normal’.

Darwin, being an upper middle class rich Victorian couldn’t see this.

He was as consumed with the issue of the proper inheritance of family wealth and honour within the family as every other well off Victorian.

If you’ve ever read any Victorian novels, you already know this.

The precious inheritance of genes, to him, were strictly passed down - VERTICALLY - from mom and dad to child, strictly within the species: and dissolute living could quickly destroy it, while new genes came along at a glacial pace - millions of years in the making. The inheritance of genes was private, internal to the family, and was family property like a copyright or patent.

You had to pay a dowry to buy his son’s valuable genes, or show evidence of a very good job, to buy his daughter’s valuable genes.

Just as libraries in his day were either private, for internal use only or run for profit as lending libraries.

The idea that many living beings can borrow freely, from any and all species, valuable species as needed - and that they let others borrow their genes as well - was morally repugnant to Darwin, as a Victorian.

As a scientist ?

We’ll never know : it wasn’t until 1929-1930 that Dr Martin Henry Dawson raised the possibility that gene exchange among pneumonia germs had any wider biological implication. Darwin was long dead by then, but his Victorian values lived on for another 100 years or more, inside the mings of most scientists.

Microbes superior to humans in the race to survive and reproduce ? Ridiculous !

Even more annoying was Dawson and his followers’ claim that the microbes were superior because of their tiny size and physical weakness, not in spite of it.

Human scientists of the Modernity clan, just feel it in their bones, as much as corporation CEOs do, that bigger is always better.

Time therefore to look at the opposing argument favouring smaller as better.

Humans are massive and big energy consumers because they practise a very private property oriented autarky.

They want to do it all themselves, to be all around handymen.

We can swing a 15 lb hammer at concrete one minute and adjust the tiny screw in a pair of eyeglasses the next. Unlike other species with one very good (superior to us) sense and four others not so good, we demand to be pretty good with all five senses.

We have powerful muscles and delicate muscles, and tons and tons of brains.

Inside that brain we have tons of skills and knowledge and while we might lend some of it out in the form of written or verbal communication, we decide when and how.

And when we die, all that brain knowledge and skill dies with us - except that our kids might inherit our skills but our memories - unless verbally discussed, die with us.

We relatively rarely out-source things until we need them : we dont have thick coats of hair all year around in case it turns Arctic cold, but we do put them on in the winter (parkas) and do without them in the  tropic sun (string bikinis).

This is flexible, so we can live anywhere when times are good , but if it turns cold and we dont have clothes, we freeze to death.

Bears, with thick coats year around avoid the hottest summer-sun and hide in warm caves in the coldest part of winter. They don’t do well on tropic beaches.

All this requires masses of precious energy : the average North American uses so much energy that it now literally threatens all life on earth to provide by traditional fossil fuel means.

By contrast, individual bacteria are not good all arounders. They specialize.

And they economize.

They are small and round so that their food doesn’t need energy to be gathered up and consumed : it drifts in by diffusion and by definition, is already bite size or it won’t be able to drift in. Their poop drifts out the same way.

Any bigger and a bacteria would need muscles to go out and gather food as diffusion doesn’t work at distances greater than half the width of a traditional tiny microbe.

So no energy is needed to create bones and muscles and fuel them.

Instead almost all of the time a microbe spends reproducing is devoted to making DNA. Bacteria are mostly all DNA.

 Inside the incredibly tiny bacteria is, in effect, the science writer’s giant brain.

 Even so much of the time, the newly created DNA is unused :tightly coiled up, consuming no energy. It only gets used when circumstances change and chemical levels sets some genes into motion.

It may only take 25 minutes to reproduce a new bacteria offspring filled with DNA , versus humans taking 25 years before they send their offspring off into the world, but natural selection is merciless.

If another bacteria can ditch a third of its rarely used genes, it could reproduce in 15 minutes and hence out-breed its slower companion with the bigger genome.

But if - when - times turn tough, lacking those suddenly useful, hitherto useless, genes could be fatal.

So its a dynamic process for bacteria - making their genomes either too big or too small.

Their backup Ace-in-the-Hand is their ability to incorporate, splice-in, bits of DNA lying about in the liquid environment around them. HGT : Horizontal Gene Transfer. Not from your own mom or dad, but from unknown moms & dads from distant species.

The trillions times trillions of microbe are all - everyone of them as much as all of us - subtly different : they all contain unique knowledge.

They are all ‘authors’ of potential library calls, to use programmer jargon.

At the time time, they can all potentially borrow library calls off other unique microbes’ DNA.

They are all potential ‘borrowers’.

The winds connect the global microbe library together : a new microbe formed of bits of its old self combined with bits of others can quickly spread itself around the world and in time will die and its new gene substructure can be taken up by a different type of microbe, via HGT.

And so on and so forth.

Traditionally we humans couldnt or won’t do this - much.

Greed makes us want to patent or copyright our secret new knowledge - people must pay to use it.

Or barriers (costly barriers) prevent the diffusion of new knowledge : the cost of reading a book in a new language or travelling thousands of miles to learn a new skill.

Or the knowledge itself required hundreds of thousands of dollars of machinery to put to use.

Scientists tried hard to make new knowledge available to all : they created norms that said secret scientific knowledge was morally bad unless freely published and they tried to convey it in the book of easily transportable books or articles written in a common language : first Latin then French,German and now English.

But equally, scientists worked to restrain other scientists from freely publishing new kowledge : their norms also declared that science wasn’t really science unless it had been vetted by other powerful scientific leaders. Generally you had to publish within the general consensus of your field or your work was effectively ignored, if seen at all.

And most scientific knowledge was never seen by , even by most scientists. Those books and articles were very very expensive and so a great research university, until recently, did not mean it had great researchers to act as mentors, or lots of research grants, but simply that it had a huge library of the best books and articles.

So expensive was the process that few famous ‘research’ universities had real strength across the board : their library collections tended, in practise, to excel in this but not that.

But I am a songwriter, not a scientist, so let me tell you how the human move to emulate the microbes global library of reader-writers has affected my trade.

Growing up in one of Canada’s six regional capitals (Halifax Nova Scotia) I had two radio stations that played top 40 pop rock and two TV stations that showed performers a few hours a week.

The mid Sixties and early Seventies saw an explosion of well researched books on the origins of the current pop rock scene - great for me and well timed as it was these earlier eras I was particularly interested in.

But I could not hear any of the fabulous but little known songs that featured in these books : if they weren’t on a compilation album that made it to my two or three records stores, I was out of luck.

Any trip out of town to another province or country meant a visit to as many records stores as possible to bring back rare records.

Books on the mechanics of songwriters were nowhere to be found : the few books to be available, generally on country music or Tin Pan era pop, tended to be longer on autobiography and songwriting business practises than on motifs and inside notes.

Demoing my songs would have been easy if I had lived in the world’s handful of recording and publishing centres : Paris, London, New York, Nashville or LA. I’d walk in, based on my gift for gab, into the publisher’s rep’ office and sung my tune or perhaps unspool a tape recording of it.

But I knew that generally, preparing an expensive demo and then making copes and mailing it off at great expense, cold turkey, from the boonies into NYC or London’s publishers was a total waste of time.

The best I could hope for was to peddle the song to a passing music star and hope they’d record it. This was a time honoured and well accepted route but pretty hit and miss in a city well off the usual touring routes in every genre.

Today, I won’t need an expensive demo as the free Garageband app on every Apple product would produce a finished record better sounding than any Pop Era studio could do with a million dollars of equipment.

Posted on Youtube as a music video - again  for free - it would be available to all potential customers : performers or publishers., worldwide.

I’d still have to make those all-important personal connections, but could do so via the internet, rather than moving to Nashville for years.

And today there is a vast array of songwriting advice for free on the internet - even better all the songs you can want on on Youtube : the original demo, the first non-hit versions, the hit version done live and all the varied covers ever since. Together with free access to the lyrics, sheet music and MIDI file.

These together present a songwriter education a college degree couldnt provide.

And I am not just a borrower : on GarageBand forums I offer up my limited but unique knowledge of some features others haven’t noticed. Forums that provide a world-wide community.

I feel like a microbe - and it feels good...