Summer 2006

By Sean Savage

A few more pieces of the elusive Madison News Reel puzzle have been put in place. The film was found in a barn in Bristol, Maine and donated to Northeast Historic Film in February, 2001. Thanks to generous supporters of NHF’s Save-a-Film project, a new internegative and print has been made, though making sense of this curious film’s content has required some diligent detective work.

Apart from all the esoteric inside humor that is clearly the main purpose of the film, one of the most striking things is that eyeball logo. In fact, for years NHF staff referred to the film simply as The Eye Beholds.

The inclusion of this fragment suggests an affiliation with The Bureau of Commercial Economics, a silent-era exhibitor and distributor of industrial films. The Bureau may have attached their logo to the head of the films they showed, though in this case the shot comes second, suggesting something else is going on.

In fact, the Madison News Reel is a collage film, appropriating almost all of its material from a single 1920 Treasury Department film called Uncle Sam – Insurance Agent. The original film described the work of the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, which was quickly founded to protect soldiers and their families when the United States entered World War 1.

The Bureau of Commercial Economics distributed one hundred prints of this title, and the still unknown makers of the Madison News Reel took one of these and re-cut it, adding handmade intertitles to impose new meanings on the appropriated images.

As for the individuals alluded to in the film, Leslie Drew, president of the Madison Historical Society in Madison, Maine, had a look and confirmed the people named in the titles were citizens of the town, but of course those pictured onscreen aren't them.

While the source material is clearly from the late 1910s, the Madison News Reel could have been assembled many years later. There's a reference in the intertitles to an eclipse and the two most viewable solar eclipses in the northeast from this period were in January 1925 and August 1932.

This helped focus the research of the town’s weekly newspaper, The Madison Bulletin, and the collected anecdotal and biographical information aids in estimating when the film was put together. Most of the folks named in the film – Reverend Charles Sinden, Ernest H. Ward, Carrol Danforth, Reverend E.C. Evans, Mark Spear, everybody except “Tom” the hunter – were in the news in 1932, engaging in activities consistent with those suggested in the film.

Many mysteries remain, such as who compiled the reel and where it was shown, and while it is clear that something funny is going on, the true nature of the humor may be lost to time. Further research with the good people at the historical society may tell us more, but we know now that the film is not only an important and fascinating regional document circa 1932, but that it also appears to contain the only surviving copy of that wonderful Bureau of Commercial Economics animated logo. But that’s another story entirely.

Sean Savage is a graduate student at New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program, and former NHF intern. In March, he presented the Madison News Reel at the Orphans Film Symposium in Columbia, South Carolina. The Bureau of Commercial Economics is the subject of his senior thesis project.