Weegee at the Fair, 1964

Avant-garde (Aesthetics)

Experimental films

Trick photography

Dolphins -- Training

Promotional films

Exhibitions -- New York

Pavilions -- New York

Kaleidoscopes

This short film, produced by the Florida Development Commission at the Florida Pavilion of the 1964 New York World's Fair, opens with a kaleidoscopic view of the tower of the Florida Pavilion. Then shows photographer Weegee with a signature cigarette dangling from his lips in front of the Unisphere looking at the camera through a kaleidoscope.
The next scene is inside the Florida Pavilion watching a porpoise show. A young man watches a porpoise trainer through a kaleidoscope and then the viewer is shown the performer converging at the waist and reflected into seven views. The young man then hands the kaleidoscope to a young woman (possibly 1964 Miss Florida Pricilla Schnarr) who sees the trainer reflected and moving. A porpoise jumps to complete a trick while the title "Florida Pavilion" is shown. The film ends with a few shots of porpoise tricks.

Weegee, 1899-1968

Florida Development Commission

Series S828

1964

experimental films

eng-US

moving image

aa440

Postwar Florida (1945-1968)

7

0:01:23; black and white; silent; aa440; Series S828

Black and white

silent

true

Weegee, 1899-1968

Brown, Priscilla Joan Schnarr, ca. 1947

0:01:23

aa440.mp4

New York City (N.Y.)

Flushing (N.Y.)

Photographer Weegee was was born Usher Fellig in Austria-Hungary (now Ukraine) in 1899 and immigrated to New York in 1909 as Arthur Fellig. Working as a freelance photographer, he used the pseudonym Weegee (a reference to both to a photographer's squeegee and to the Ouija board). In the 1930s and 1940s, Weegee gained renown for his startling night photography of New York crime scenes and urban life for newspapers and tabloids.
Through the 1950s, Weegee's style moved toward artistic distortions and new methods of viewing photographic subjects. His methods included heating negatives to create distortion and shooting through a kaleidoscope among others. Weegee shared his construction methods and vision for using kaleidoscopes in two articles for the Bolex Reporter titled "Weegee Puts Mirrors on His Bolex" in Spring 1958 and "Through the Kaleidoscope" in Spring 1959. In his 1959 book Weegee's Creative Camera, the photographer explains the intention of his distortions stating, "My interest in the camera is to make it human." Further that "If the camera as it exists prevents me, I must find ways, invent them, if necessary, to make the camera flexible - to bend the camera to my will" (Weegee's Creative Camera, 7).

New York World's Fair (1964-1965)