Sharon Zuber writes:

>Does anyone have information about who wrote and/or designed the graphics
>for the intertitles for Flaherty's NANOOK?

Can't help on this specific point, but here's a general one, for what it's
worth.  Intertitles were often changed/edited/completely re-designed from
scratch by distributors in foreign countries, or for different versions of
a domestic release (perhaps due to censorship regimes that varied from
state to state, for example).  The most obvious form this took was
translating the text between languages.  This was very cheap and easy to
do, which was one of the reasons why a lot more films from non-English
speaking countries got released in Britain and the US during the silent
period than has been the case since.  The huge cost increases necessitated
by dubbing and superimposed subtitles hit European film exports to Britain
and the US very badly - it also, of course, gave US films a massive
advantage in the British market (because Brits could understand American
English without any form of translation, and so the films could be exported
without any additional cost).  It was this state of affairs that lead
Samuel Goldwyn to remark in the early '30s that "If the US spoke Spanish,
Britain might still have a film industry".

The only version of NANOOK that I've seen just had plain text intertitles
(i.e. no graphics of any description).  This suggests to me that the
provenance of your graphic intertitles may well have nothing to do with
Flaherty (although I stress this is a wild guess) - not that this
possibility makes them any less interesting.

L

------------------------------------
Leo Enticknap
Projection and Sound Engineer
City Screen Cinemas Ltd., London, UK
[log in to unmask]

----
For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives:
http://bama.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html