Mush! To The Movies! Vol. I

The first screening in the polar film series Mush! to the Movies:

90 Degrees South: With Scott to the Antarctic (1933)

with 

Roald Amundsen’s South Pole Expedition Film (1912) 

Thursday, January 22nd, 2015 
7:30pm
$10.00 General Admission

or

Free tickets with advance RSVP for
Current Members of The Velaslavasay Panorama Enthusiast Society and Los Angeles Filmforum Members
Contact the secretary to RSVP: event@panoramaonview.org

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90 Degrees South: With Scott to the Antarctic 1933, 70 min. black and white; digital projection.
Directed by Herbert Ponting
Courtesy of Milestone Films 
Special thanks to Dennis Doros 
The screening of this film is sponsored by Forward M.B., Inc., Computational Engineers, Los Angeles, Calif. 

A documentary exploring the story of the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition, Robert Falcon Scott's voyage with his crew of 60 men to the South Pole in the years 1910-1913, as seen through the lens of Herbert Ponting. 

Scott reached the Pole on 17 January 1912, but he and the survivors of his team perished on their return to their base camp, on 29 March. 90 Degrees South is the sound version of a film that had already undergone several iterations under Ponting’s direction. Shorter clips were screened in 1913-1914 and utilized in an elaborate lecture on the expedition, presented by Ponting over 1000 times. By the early 1920s, perhaps influenced by the success of Nanook of the North, Ponting edited the footage into a silent feature called The Great White Silence (1924), now considered a classic. A decade later, confronted with the success of sound cinema, Ponting used most of the same footage, adding some photos and new maps, along with his own recorded narration, to make a sound version, 90 Degrees South. 

Preceded by:

Roald Amundsen’s South Pole Expedition, the Cinema Version 
1912, 16 min., screening from digital 
Cinematography: Lt. Kristian Prestrud 
Restored by the Norsk Filminstitutt (Norwegian Film Institute) 
Special thanks to Lise Gustavson of the NFI 
This screening of this film is sponsored by Sister Mantos

Norwegian Roald Amundsen led the first successful expedition to reach the South Pole, arriving at the Pole on 14 December 1911. Probably influenced by Ernst Shackleton’s film from his expedition of 1907-1909, Amundsen included a cinematographic camera on his expedition to Antarctica in 1910-1912, although one of his crewmen served as the primary cinematographer. One version of the footage (roughly 25 minutes), intercut with slides, was used by Amundsen to accompany his lecture tour after his return to Europe. These packed lectures were a primary means for early explorers to raise funds. A shorter stand-alone “cinema version” with intertitles, not needing a lecturer, was also cut to appear in theatres, and this is the version to be screened this evening. Filming was done on the voyage and at the base camp, but Amundsen did no include a moving picture camera on the trek to the South Pole. The arrival at the Pole, as with Ponting’s film, was captured only with still images.