Spedizione Polare Del Capitano F.E. Kleinschmidt Captain F.E. Kleinschmidt’s Arctic Hunt(1914) Director: Frank Kleinschmidt –
Director of photography: Frank Kleinschmidt –
Production: Arctic Film Co. –
Lenght: 745m –
Intertitles: Italian / English –
The film:
Between 1911 and 1913 Frank Kleinschmidt (1871-1949) shot some of the oldest surviving scenes of arctic hunting. The “Captain”, as he liked to be called, was an unusual character. A German immigrant long settled in Alaska, this crusty 40-year-old had little in the way of financial resources but made up for it with the proverbial pioneering spirit. He felt that cinema and photography were modern man’s way to find “a new zest and interest in the call of the wild”.
On the screen the northern landscape creates a suspended atmosphere, heightened by the film’s monochrome tinting, and even the technical shortcomings caused by practical filming difficulties (loss of focus, oscillation, continuity jumps). Reels of film could freeze, the close-range filming of a bear might come at a very high cost, and finding a stable base for the tripod was no easy task.
The film was used in educational shows staged in the auditorium at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. This innovative method of public communication was highly successful – Kleinschmidt himself related how the audience would take the side of the fleeing quarry, much preferring scenes featuring live animals to the sight of their stuffed carcasses in dioramas.
The film restoration:
Captain F.E. Kleinschmidt’s Arctic Hunt is a reconstruction made from a nitrate positive in the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino, incomplete, uncut, and lacking intertitles, and presumably destined for editing for Italian distribution.
The intertitles used in this reconstruction were made from a translation of those on the Danish nitrate copy in the Danske Filminstitut, and from external sources. The complex process of identification included vital assistance from James Simard (Alaska State Library) and Angela Schmidt (Alaska Film Archives).
The work was carried out by L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory of Bologna in 2017.
