"A Whole Book for a Nickel"?: L. Frank Baum as Filmmaker
1995; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/chq.0.1073
ISSN1553-1201
Autores Tópico(s)Photography and Visual Culture
Resumo"A Whole Book for a Nickel"?L. Frank Baum as Filmmaker Anne Morey (bio) Drawing on Frank Joslyn Baum's biography of his famous father in order to discuss L. Frank Baum's only sustained venture into filmmaking (1914-15), historian Kevin Starr comments that the three Oz pictures made under Baum's aegis were "delightfully acted and costumed, technically superior" (68).1 His judgment coincides with that of the younger Baum, who would naturally have felt favorably toward a filmmaking enterprise in which he himself played a key role; it also echoes puffs that the Oz Film Manufacturing Company placed in trade magazines to claim, for instance, that "competent critics positively assert that in [The Patchwork Girl], their first great feature film, The Oz Company has created a new and better era and opened a new vista in the field of Picturedom" ("Scenes" 649). In fact, however, by the standards of the time the films were not particularly innovative technically, a circumstance that contributed to their commercial failure. Far from "opening a new vista in the field of Picturedom," they attempted in a number of ways to return to a style of filmmaking already some years out of date.2 Baum's retrograde vision as filmmaker illuminates the uneasy relationship between pictures aimed primarily at children and those aimed primarily at adults in this liminal period. His films, particularly The Patchwork Girl (1914), seek to appeal to two generations at once by using devices (such as direct address to the camera) designed to titillate adults even as they undermine this offer by using other techniques to attract children. Conversely, their acceptability for the young is challenged by the presence of adult come-ons. While the "trick" visual style of The Patchwork Girl and its successors helped to doom them because it was ill-judged for the moment in which they appeared, it also draws our attention to issues of vision and the gaze analogous to Baum's effort to provide polymorphous pleasure in the movie theater. Baum, in short, establishes an alternation between film-as-voyeurism, in which the audience conducts an ostensibly unacknowledged and "childlike" surveillance of events presented as secret, and film-as-exhibitionism, in which the narrative pauses to gratify an adult audience's desire for spectacle. This article will contextualize Baum's films in artistic and social terms before moving into a more specific analysis of how The Patchwork Girl's treatment of visual themes suggests the contradictions and tensions surrounding Oz-and, perhaps, enabling it. The three Oz films made by the Oz Film Manufacturing Company(which subsequently produced several films for adults) bear differing relationships to Baum's published texts. The first, The Patchwork Girl, adapts an existing Oz book, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, produced a year earlier when the author repented his attempt to end the series. The second, His Majesty the Scarecrow of Oz (1914), inspired the novel rather than vice versa; The Scarecrow of Oz came out in book form in 1915, although the film also incorporates scenes that belong to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and that do not, therefore, appear in the book. Finally, The Magic Cloak of Oz (1915) brings a non-Oz fantasy, Queen Zixi of Ix (1905), into Baum's most familiar fairyland in an attempt to increase audience appeal. But in each case the task confronting Baum was that of "picturizing" Oz, as a coinage of the day had it. The fictional world of Oz, and especially its magic, had to be made real enough to be filmed. This necessity brought Baum to a type of filmmaking pioneered some fifteen years previously by such early directors as Georges Méliès in France. Trick films of the Méliès type document impossibilities by editing footage to produce special effects: carriages abruptly become hearses, women become flowers, and so on. Thus, for example, His Majesty the Scarecrow of Oz shows viewers the freezing of Princess Gloria's heart within her breast, accomplished by superimposing footage of the normal and then the freezing heart onto the base film. A review of 10 October 1914 in Photoplayers Weekly gushed that certain scenes "seemed like...
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