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Author
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Topic: Panorama International Travelogues
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted February 06, 2013 11:55 AM
Panorama International Travelogues (1x200’, Panorama International, 1975)
I’ve loved travel for a long time: I’ve been all the way from one shore of the Pacific all the way around to the other.
Naturally this means one of the favorite genres in my collection is travelogue films. I have a bunch of Pathe Pics and Looks at Life, so I was really pleased to find something a little closer to home in Panorama international Travelogues.
These are all 200 foot shorts concerning one US region, be it a state, a natural feature or a city. Being only ten (or so) minutes long, they aren’t very much in depth, but they succeed in giving you the flavor of a place. They were produced for Super-8 distribution and I don’t believe they have ever been released on any other format.
My first one was “San Francisco”. I found it on the Derann used list. The lure for me was the fact that I’d recently spent a couple of weeks in San Francisco on business. The film has scenes taken around the hotel near Fisherman’s Wharf where I'd stayed. (My room overlooked where the Hyde Street cable car is turned around to go back up the hill.), and captured the place much as I remembered and enjoyed it.
I was hooked!
These films are like potato chips: you can’t simply have just one. In the years since I’ve accumulated these:
California
Grand Canyon
Las Vegas
New York - A Dynamic Expression of American Civilization
San Francisco
Washington DC
Yellowstone Park - A Vision of Picturesque Legend
“Los Angeles” is still out there somewhere: appropriate since at least so far I’ve never set foot in the real L.A. either. Could there be a “New Orleans”, “San Diego”, "Santa Fe" or a “Boston” (and others)? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t mind at all.
There are overlaps among the films. “California” shares footage with “San Francisco” (and probably ”Los Angeles”). “Las Vegas” shares with “Grand Canyon”, since “Canyon” shows a tour by plane which takes off from Vegas.
One that kind of gets to me here and there is “New York”. There are a lot of views of the World Trade Center and that tends to bring a hush to a room these days.
The narration in these films often veers into weirdness: it’s as if the writer just got a thesaurus and wanted to get his money’s worth. You keep on running into lines like “It presents a vista of outstanding and eclectic harmony” which use a great many syllables to say essentially nothing. If real people talked like this they would be asked “What on Earth are you talking about?!”. Still I feel these films inspire sentiments of awesome perspicacity in all who imbibe their munificent and verdant splendor. (See how dumb that sounds?)
These "abundant panoplies" take place in mid 1970s America of course, and it’s fun to watch the passing scene. For example, the cars are by and large from the very pits of the American Automobile. To use the language of the narrator: Mid 1970s Detroit Iron was elephantine in corpulence, glacial in acceleration, egregious in quality, bulbous in appearance and superabundant in corrosivity (-huge, slow, crappy, ugly and rusty!). The clothing and the haircuts are a hoot all on their own! Therefore these films take you not just to a place, but also a time. (Oh, that they were made in the mid 60s even if just for the cars!)
The quality is a variable. All are at least a little grainy. In the case of “San Francisco” and “Yellowstone Park”, they are very sharp, but in some others the graininess is excessive and the sharpness will have you reaching for your focus knob without any satisfaction.
The sound is generally very good, although in some the level jumps around.
The color has generally survived the years very well, and is often quite beautiful.
“Las Vegas” and “Canyon” have a leader set up to help the projectionist focus, yet no dark length of film to start the machine and light the lamp!
All of these are full and sometimes overfilled 200 footers. A little close attention on rewind can prevent a mess.
The bizarre thing about all of these films is I’ve never seen even one of them for sale over here. All came from the UK: either Derann or Paul Foster.
My favorites among them? “San Francisco”, “Yellowstone Park” and “Washington DC”.
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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