Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/407863
59 NOV-DEC 14 / CINEMONTAGE Frontier, whose makers included Lerner, Maddow and Leyda. China Strikes Back (1937) was composed of raw newsreel footage (smuggled out of China) portraying the life of the Eight Route Army, a military unit under the command of the Chinese Communist Party. People of the Cumberland (1937) was a combination of re-enacted drama and documentary footage that showed how a poverty-stricken community struggles to become an efficient, productive society through education and the labor movement. Here, Elia Kazan was an assistant to directors Sidney, Leyda and William Watts. For the 1939 World's Fair, Chrysler Motors sponsored Frontier to create The History and Romance of Transportation entirely out of stock footage. White Flood, completed in 1940, is another Frontier film that had to be made in the cutting room. This film is now remembered for its beautiful footage and the very original music score by Hanns Eisler. In each, Sidney is credited with both editing and writing. With the approach of World War II, many of the participants in Frontier drifted away. After Pearl Harbor, the British Ministry of Information gave Sidney the responsibility for preparing its films for American audiences, and eventually the US Office of War Information employed his talents to plan and supervise its films. The two major films for which Sidney had a significant share of responsibility — and on which much of his reputation rests — were The Quiet One and The Savage Eye (1960). Both were independently made, outside the ambit of Hollywood studios. The Quiet One was the first major American film to use a black youth as its protagonist and one of the first non-fiction films to deal with issues of racism and black poverty in America. Meyers directed and edited, while the camera was in the hands of Richard Bagley and the marvelous still photographer Helen Levitt. Janice Loeb produced. When their film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing (Story and Screenplay), Sidney insisted that all four names were to be recorded as authors. When the Academy refused, Sidney declined the nomination. All but Bagley were ultimately credited. The film was also nominated for Best Documentary (Feature). The Savage Eye began with Maddow's idea of attempting to see Los Angeles as the painter and printmaker William Hogarth might see it. As in The Quiet One, documentary footage was braided into the narrative. This challenge to "penetrate the dark and tawdry side of 1950's urban life," as Maddow described it, took nine years to complete. It received raves in Europe, while some New York critics considered it "cold," "heartless" and "inhuman." When one of the critics gathered the film's makers around a lunch table, Sidney felt obliged to react: "If you despise humanity, you wouldn't bother with it. That's true of all satirists. You take a shellacking in life before you're through with it, but there's a common bond of suffering." Sidney died December 4, 1969 at age 63. In a stirring remembrance, written after Sidney's memorial service, Leyda recounted Sidney's post-war years, and his struggle for a livelihood: "What would he have said to the crowded funeral parlor that grim Sunday The Savage Eye. Trans Lux/Photofest