Sidney Meyers
Encyclopedia
Sidney Meyers was an American film director
and editor.
Sidney Meyers is best known for two documentary film
s: The Quiet One
, which he wrote and directed, and for which he was nominated for an Oscar
for Best Original Screenplay; and British Academy of Film and Television Arts
winner The Savage Eye
, which he co-directed, co-produced and co-scripted with Joseph Strick
and Ben Maddow
.
on March 9, 1906 and grew up in East Harlem
, then a teeming immigrant neighborhood. He was the eldest child of Abraham and Ida (née Rudock) Meyers, who had immigrated from Poland
to the United States at the turn of the century. Abraham, a paper-hanger and activist in the Painters and Paper-hangers Union, District Council 9, of the AFL
, supported the family as best he could. It was noticed early on that Sidney loved music; a Jewish charitable women's organization arranged for him to have the use of a violin
and to receive music lessons when he was a young school-child.
During his years at De Witt Clinton High School Meyers played in the school's award-winning orchestra and joined the American Orchestral Society. While at the City College of New York
, majoring in English literature, he continued to play the violin, and later the viola. On completing his studies he spent some three years as a member of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
, then conducted by Maestro Fritz Reiner
.
On his return to New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life with his wife Edna (née Ocko) and their son Nicholas, Meyers became interested in film-making and began to search for work in the fields of directing and editing, while playing the violin and viola in a Work Projects Administration orchestra. As was the case with many sons and daughters of immigrant families during the seemingly-endless Great Depression
, he was drawn to left-wing political ideas. Using the pen-name of Robert Stebbins he wrote on the cinema for the left-wing arts magazine New Theatre
.
Meyers worked for the Federal Arts Project of the Work Projects Administration; in 1937 his film People of the Cumberland appeared under its auspices. During World War II
Meyers served first as the chief American film editor for the British Ministry of Information and later worked as a film editor for the US Office of War Information.
After the end of the War Meyers established a career as a free-lance film editor. He collaborated with directors, producers and other film artists, all of whom felt that his contribution was not limited to editing, as central as the latter may be to the work. Indeed he is best remembered for those films which he directed and wrote, and for which he served as consultant.
Meyers's television editing credits include supervision of the CBS television series East Side, West Side; The Power and the Glory with Laurence Olivier
; The Slaves, with Dionne Warwick
; the Wisdom Series; Assignment India; Assignment – Southeast Asia.
The Quiet One, which Meyers directed and scripted, established him as one of the leaders in the genre of documentary drama. Meyers collaborated with Ben Maddow
and Joseph Strick
in the production of The Savage Eye, and with Samuel Beckett
and Alan Schneider on Film; his contribution to Edge of the City was vital.
Meyers continued to work until his untimely death from cancer in 1969: he served as consultant for The Queen (1968), and was script consultant for Joseph Strick's film adaptation of James Joyce
's Ulysses. Shortly before his death he completed the editing of Joseph Strick's The Tropic of Cancer.
Shortly after his death, the Sidney Meyers Memorial Scholarship Fund was established at the City College of New York.
was the Moviola
(or Movieola), a machine in which film was viewed, cut, and recombined manually. Ralph Rosenblum, who was mentored by Meyers, describes the exhausting process from the editor's point of view: "I sit in a corner at one of the Moviolas piecing together a sequence that was shot from five different perspectives. I work quickly, long lengths of film flying through my white-gloved right hand. I stop, mark the film with a grease pencil, fly on, make another mark, cut, splice together the desired portions, and hang up the trims, pieces of deleted film. … Five film barrels crowd the cutting room, with long trims hanging into them from an overhead rod. There's a lot of film on the floor—not rejected film, as the cliché has it, but film that's in the process of being reviewed or edited or wound" (When the Shooting Stops, pp. 5–6).
and narrated by Gary Merrill
. In a 1949 review, Bosley Crowther
defined the film: "Out of the tortured experiences of a 10-year-old Harlem Negro boy, cruelly rejected by his loved ones but rescued by the people of the Wiltwyck School, a new group of local film-makers has fashioned a genuine masterpiece in the way of a documentary drama."
The still photographer Helen Levitt
was one of the film's cinematographers and writers, along with the painter Janice Loeb. Ulysses Kay
wrote the score for the film. The film's three writers - Meyers, Loeb, and Levitt - were nominated for the Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Academy Award; the film itself was also nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award. The National Board of Review named The Quiet One the second best film of 1949.
and starred John Cassavetes
, Sidney Poitier
, Jack Warden
, Kathleen Maguire
and Ruby Dee
. The score was composed by Leonard Rosenman
. Edge of the City was based on Robert Alan Arthur's screenplay which was the final episode of the Philco Television Playhouse: "A Man Is Ten Feet Tall" (1955). Although produced by MGM the film received a low budget; MGM feared that because of its racial content it could not be shown in the southern US, and indeed because of the refusal of theaters in the South and elsewhere to screen the film, it was not a commercial success.
The film was considered unusual for its time not only because of its portrayal of an interracial friendship, but also because the main African-American character was in a position of authority over the white; and also due to hints that the character played by Cassavetes might be homosexual. Edge of the City was praised by representatives of the NAACP, the Urban League, the American Jewish Committee
, among others, for its courageous depiction of an interracial friendship.
) in the 1950s. It stars Barbara Baxley
.
The film was written, produced, directed, and edited by Meyers, Ben Maddow
and Joseph Strick
. The camera footage was done by cinematographers Haskell Wexler
, Helen Levitt
and Jack Couffer
; the music is by Leonard Rosenman
. The Savage Eye won the 1960 BAFTA Flaherty Documentary Award as well as several film festival prizes.
The Savage Eye belongs to the cinema vérité
movement of the 1950s and '60s. In the words of John Hagan: "One can see how, in its study of a woman whose marital problems have estranged her from the world, it anticipated, if not influenced, such films as The Misfits
, Red Desert, and Juliet of the Spirits
."
: notably Robert J. Flaherty
's Nanook of the North
(1922). The latter was filmed on site, using local people and claiming to show their lives as they really were. Such films were staged, however; Falherty famously had his subject kill a walrus with a harpoon rather than use his gun.
Another major influence on young film-makers of the 1920s and '30s was Realism
. The latter, largely a European tradition, included "city symphony" films, which aimed to show people as products of the man-made environment in which they lived. Walter Ruttman's Berlin, Symphony of a City (1927), is an example. In the USSR Kino-Pravda
("cinematic truth") was developed by Dziga Vertov
, who created Soviet news-reels during the 1920s. According to Vertov's cinematic philosophy the movie, via techniques such as slow motion, time lapse, fast motion, close-ups and of course editing, could produce a rendition of reality more accurate than that perceived by the human eye.
Meyers's influence can be discerned in cinema verité
and its close relative direct cinema
. Enabled by the development of convenient, portable cameras and means of synchronizing sound, cinema verité often involved following a person during moments of personal crisis. The place of editing in creating the final artistic product is so central that the editor is on occasion given credit as consultant, or even co-director.
"On one level film editing is like editing in general, literary editing, writing a piece of literature, preparing a book review or any presentation, selling an idea, putting it over. General principles maintain, clarity of ideas, coherence, emphasis on chief idea, lining up of proofs, and substantiation, avoidance of repetition, avoidance of belaboring the obvious, in other words, granting the reader intelligence but at the same time stressing value of your contribution to his fund of knowledge. A sense of when you've made your case and that any further exposition on it will be overdoing matters. These are by no means easy objectives to attain but necessary to obtain, nevertheless. ...
The film is very different. It is an expression in continuity. Its own qualities, its own dynamics. There is no turning back or leaping ahead unless you are permitted to do so by the film itself. Film is a Form in Continuity, within a more or less restricted frame. This frame is its entire world. Nothing exists outside of it. And whatever happens within it is autonomous."
(1969) -- Editor
Slaves (1969) -- Editor (TV)
Ulysses (1967) -- Script Consultant
Film (1965) -- Editor
FDR (1965) -- Editor (TV mini-series)
East Side/ West Side (1963-4) -- Editor (CBS TV)
The Power and the Glory (1961) -- Editor (CBS TV)
The Savage Eye
(1959) – Co-producer, Co-director
Edge of Fury (1958) - Editing Supervisor
Adventuring in the Arts (1956) -- Director
Edge of the City
(1956) -- Editor
The Steps of Age (1951) -- Supervising Editor
The Quiet One
(1949) -- Director; Script; Editor
In the Street (1947) -- Filmmaker
People of the Cumberland (1937) -- Director
1959 The Savage Eye won the British Academy Awards' Robert Flaterly Award for Best Feature Length Documentary
1959 The Savage Eye nominated at the Venice Film Festival for the Fipresci Prize
1959 The Savage Eye top honors at Edinburgh Film Festival
1949 The Quiet One nominated at the Venice Film Festival for the International Prize
1949 The Quiet One nominated at the Venice International Film Festival for Competing Film
1948 The Quiet One nominated by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Original Screenplay in the documentary category
Film director
A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...
and editor.
Sidney Meyers is best known for two documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
s: The Quiet One
The Quiet One
The Quiet One is a 1948 American documentary film directed by Sidney Meyers. The documentary chronicles the rehabilitation of a young, emotionally disturbed African-American boy; it contains a commentary written by James Agee, and narrated by Gary Merrill...
, which he wrote and directed, and for which he was nominated for an Oscar
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
for Best Original Screenplay; and British Academy of Film and Television Arts
British Academy of Film and Television Arts
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts is a charity in the United Kingdom that hosts annual awards shows for excellence in film, television, television craft, video games and forms of animation.-Introduction:...
winner The Savage Eye
The Savage Eye
The Savage Eye is a "dramatized documentary" film that superposes a dramatic narration of the life of a divorced woman with documentary camera footage of an unspecified 1950s city. In a 1960 review, A. H...
, which he co-directed, co-produced and co-scripted with Joseph Strick
Joseph Strick
Joseph Strick was an American director, producer and screenwriter.Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Strick briefly attended UCLA before enrolling in the Army during World War II. In the Army, he served as a cameraman in the Army Air Forces.In 1948, he and Irving Lerner produced Muscle Beach...
and Ben Maddow
Ben Maddow
Ben Maddow was a prolific screenwriter and documentarian from the 1930s through the 70s. Educated at Columbia University, Maddow began his career working within the American documentary movement in the 30s.In 1936 he co-founded the short-lived left-wing newsreel The World Today...
.
Biography
Sidney Meyers was born in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
on March 9, 1906 and grew up in East Harlem
Harlem
Harlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which since the 1920s has been a major African-American residential, cultural and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands...
, then a teeming immigrant neighborhood. He was the eldest child of Abraham and Ida (née Rudock) Meyers, who had immigrated from Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
to the United States at the turn of the century. Abraham, a paper-hanger and activist in the Painters and Paper-hangers Union, District Council 9, of the AFL
AFL
AFL may refer to:* American Federation of Labor, one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States, and now part of the AFL-CIO* American Football League AFL may refer to:* American Federation of Labor, one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States, and now part...
, supported the family as best he could. It was noticed early on that Sidney loved music; a Jewish charitable women's organization arranged for him to have the use of a violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....
and to receive music lessons when he was a young school-child.
During his years at De Witt Clinton High School Meyers played in the school's award-winning orchestra and joined the American Orchestral Society. While at the City College of New York
City College of New York
The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...
, majoring in English literature, he continued to play the violin, and later the viola. On completing his studies he spent some three years as a member of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
As the fifth oldest orchestra in the United States, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra has a legacy of fine music making as reflected in its performances in historic Music Hall, recordings, and international tours...
, then conducted by Maestro Fritz Reiner
Fritz Reiner
Frederick Martin “Fritz” Reiner was a prominent conductor of opera and symphonic music in the twentieth century.-Biography:...
.
On his return to New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life with his wife Edna (née Ocko) and their son Nicholas, Meyers became interested in film-making and began to search for work in the fields of directing and editing, while playing the violin and viola in a Work Projects Administration orchestra. As was the case with many sons and daughters of immigrant families during the seemingly-endless Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, he was drawn to left-wing political ideas. Using the pen-name of Robert Stebbins he wrote on the cinema for the left-wing arts magazine New Theatre
New Theatre
New Theatre or New Theater may refer to:In the United Kingdom* The New Theatre , Wales* The New Theatre * The Noël Coward Theatre, London * New Theatre , The University Of Nottingham's student run theatre...
.
Meyers worked for the Federal Arts Project of the Work Projects Administration; in 1937 his film People of the Cumberland appeared under its auspices. During World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
Meyers served first as the chief American film editor for the British Ministry of Information and later worked as a film editor for the US Office of War Information.
After the end of the War Meyers established a career as a free-lance film editor. He collaborated with directors, producers and other film artists, all of whom felt that his contribution was not limited to editing, as central as the latter may be to the work. Indeed he is best remembered for those films which he directed and wrote, and for which he served as consultant.
Meyers's television editing credits include supervision of the CBS television series East Side, West Side; The Power and the Glory with Laurence Olivier
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM was an English actor, director, and producer. He was one of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century. He married three times, to fellow actors Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright...
; The Slaves, with Dionne Warwick
Dionne Warwick
Dionne Warwick is an American singer, actress and TV show host, who became a United Nations Global Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization, and a United States Ambassador of Health....
; the Wisdom Series; Assignment India; Assignment – Southeast Asia.
The Quiet One, which Meyers directed and scripted, established him as one of the leaders in the genre of documentary drama. Meyers collaborated with Ben Maddow
Ben Maddow
Ben Maddow was a prolific screenwriter and documentarian from the 1930s through the 70s. Educated at Columbia University, Maddow began his career working within the American documentary movement in the 30s.In 1936 he co-founded the short-lived left-wing newsreel The World Today...
and Joseph Strick
Joseph Strick
Joseph Strick was an American director, producer and screenwriter.Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Strick briefly attended UCLA before enrolling in the Army during World War II. In the Army, he served as a cameraman in the Army Air Forces.In 1948, he and Irving Lerner produced Muscle Beach...
in the production of The Savage Eye, and with Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
and Alan Schneider on Film; his contribution to Edge of the City was vital.
Meyers continued to work until his untimely death from cancer in 1969: he served as consultant for The Queen (1968), and was script consultant for Joseph Strick's film adaptation of James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
's Ulysses. Shortly before his death he completed the editing of Joseph Strick's The Tropic of Cancer.
Shortly after his death, the Sidney Meyers Memorial Scholarship Fund was established at the City College of New York.
Film editing in the pre-digital era
Until well after Meyers's death the main tool of film editingFilm editing
Film editing is part of the creative post-production process of filmmaking. It involves the selection and combining of shots into sequences, and ultimately creating a finished motion picture. It is an art of storytelling...
was the Moviola
Moviola
A Moviola is a device that allows a film editor to view film while editing. It was the first machine for motion picture editing when it was invented by Iwan Serrurier in 1924.-History:...
(or Movieola), a machine in which film was viewed, cut, and recombined manually. Ralph Rosenblum, who was mentored by Meyers, describes the exhausting process from the editor's point of view: "I sit in a corner at one of the Moviolas piecing together a sequence that was shot from five different perspectives. I work quickly, long lengths of film flying through my white-gloved right hand. I stop, mark the film with a grease pencil, fly on, make another mark, cut, splice together the desired portions, and hang up the trims, pieces of deleted film. … Five film barrels crowd the cutting room, with long trims hanging into them from an overhead rod. There's a lot of film on the floor—not rejected film, as the cliché has it, but film that's in the process of being reviewed or edited or wound" (When the Shooting Stops, pp. 5–6).
The Quiet One
Meyers is arguably best remembered for The Quiet One (1948), a documentary which he directed, and for which he was one of the script writers. The documentary tells the story of the rehabilitation of a young, emotionally disturbed African-American boy; it contains text written by James AgeeJames Agee
James Rufus Agee was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S...
and narrated by Gary Merrill
Gary Merrill
Gary Fred Merrill was an American film and television character actor whose credits included more than fifty feature films, a half-dozen mostly short-lived TV series, and dozens of television guest appearances....
. In a 1949 review, Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther was a journalist and author who was film critic for The New York Times for 27 years. His reviews and articles helped shape the careers of actors, directors and screenwriters, though his reviews, at times, were unnecessarily mean...
defined the film: "Out of the tortured experiences of a 10-year-old Harlem Negro boy, cruelly rejected by his loved ones but rescued by the people of the Wiltwyck School, a new group of local film-makers has fashioned a genuine masterpiece in the way of a documentary drama."
The still photographer Helen Levitt
Helen Levitt
Helen Levitt was an American photographer. She was particularly noted for "street photography" around New York City, and has been called "the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time."- Biography :...
was one of the film's cinematographers and writers, along with the painter Janice Loeb. Ulysses Kay
Ulysses Kay
Ulysses Simpson Kay was an African American composer. His music is mostly neoclassical in style....
wrote the score for the film. The film's three writers - Meyers, Loeb, and Levitt - were nominated for the Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Academy Award; the film itself was also nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award. The National Board of Review named The Quiet One the second best film of 1949.
Edge of the City
Edge of the City (1957), which Meyers edited, was directed by Martin RittMartin Ritt
Martin Ritt was an American director, actor, and playwright who worked in both film and theater. He was born in New York City.-Early career and influences:...
and starred John Cassavetes
John Cassavetes
John Nicholas Cassavetes was an American actor, screenwriter and filmmaker. He acted in many Hollywood films, notably Rosemary's Baby and The Dirty Dozen...
, Sidney Poitier
Sidney Poitier
Sir Sidney Poitier, KBE is a Bahamian American actor, film director, author, and diplomat.In 1963, Poitier became the first black person to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field...
, Jack Warden
Jack Warden
Jack Warden was an American character actor.-Early life:Warden was born John Warden Lebzelter in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Laura M. and John Warden Lebzelter, who was an engineer and technician. He was of Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry...
, Kathleen Maguire
Kathleen Maguire
Kathleen Maguire was an American actress who won an Obie Award in 1958 for her performance in the stage play, The Time of the Cuckoo...
and Ruby Dee
Ruby Dee
Ruby Dee is an American actress, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, and activist, perhaps best known for co-starring in the film A Raisin in the Sun and the film American Gangster for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.-Early years:Dee was born Ruby...
. The score was composed by Leonard Rosenman
Leonard Rosenman
Leonard Rosenman was an American film, television and concert composer.-Life and career:Leonard Rosenman was born in Brooklyn, New York. After service in the Pacific with the Army Air Forces in World War II, he earned a bachelor's degree in music from the University of California, Berkeley...
. Edge of the City was based on Robert Alan Arthur's screenplay which was the final episode of the Philco Television Playhouse: "A Man Is Ten Feet Tall" (1955). Although produced by MGM the film received a low budget; MGM feared that because of its racial content it could not be shown in the southern US, and indeed because of the refusal of theaters in the South and elsewhere to screen the film, it was not a commercial success.
The film was considered unusual for its time not only because of its portrayal of an interracial friendship, but also because the main African-American character was in a position of authority over the white; and also due to hints that the character played by Cassavetes might be homosexual. Edge of the City was praised by representatives of the NAACP, the Urban League, the American Jewish Committee
American Jewish Committee
The American Jewish Committee was "founded in 1906 with the aim of rallying all sections of American Jewry to defend the rights of Jews all over the world...
, among others, for its courageous depiction of an interracial friendship.
The Savage Eye
The Savage Eye (1959) is a documentary drama which conflates a dramatic narration of the life of a divorced woman with documentary camera footage from an unnamed American city (actually Los AngelesLos Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
) in the 1950s. It stars Barbara Baxley
Barbara Baxley
Barbara Baxley was an American actress of stage, film and television.-Early life:Baxley was born in Porterville, California, the daughter of Emma and Bert Baxley.-Career:...
.
The film was written, produced, directed, and edited by Meyers, Ben Maddow
Ben Maddow
Ben Maddow was a prolific screenwriter and documentarian from the 1930s through the 70s. Educated at Columbia University, Maddow began his career working within the American documentary movement in the 30s.In 1936 he co-founded the short-lived left-wing newsreel The World Today...
and Joseph Strick
Joseph Strick
Joseph Strick was an American director, producer and screenwriter.Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Strick briefly attended UCLA before enrolling in the Army during World War II. In the Army, he served as a cameraman in the Army Air Forces.In 1948, he and Irving Lerner produced Muscle Beach...
. The camera footage was done by cinematographers Haskell Wexler
Haskell Wexler
Haskell Wexler, A.S.C. is an American cinematographer, film producer, and director. Wexler was judged to be one of film history's ten most influential cinematographers in a survey of the members of the International Cinematographers Guild.-Early life and education:Wexler was born to a Jewish...
, Helen Levitt
Helen Levitt
Helen Levitt was an American photographer. She was particularly noted for "street photography" around New York City, and has been called "the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time."- Biography :...
and Jack Couffer
Jack Couffer
Jack Couffer A.S.C. is an American cinematographer and film and television director. Couffer has specialized on documentary films, often involving nature and animal cinematography...
; the music is by Leonard Rosenman
Leonard Rosenman
Leonard Rosenman was an American film, television and concert composer.-Life and career:Leonard Rosenman was born in Brooklyn, New York. After service in the Pacific with the Army Air Forces in World War II, he earned a bachelor's degree in music from the University of California, Berkeley...
. The Savage Eye won the 1960 BAFTA Flaherty Documentary Award as well as several film festival prizes.
The Savage Eye belongs to the cinema vérité
Cinéma vérité
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects. It is also known for taking a provocative stance toward its topics.There are subtle yet...
movement of the 1950s and '60s. In the words of John Hagan: "One can see how, in its study of a woman whose marital problems have estranged her from the world, it anticipated, if not influenced, such films as The Misfits
The Misfits (film)
The Misfits is a 1961 American drama film written by Arthur Miller, directed by John Huston, and starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter, and Eli Wallach. It was the final film appearance for both Gable and Monroe...
, Red Desert, and Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits is a 1965 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini that uses "caricatural types and dream situations to represent a psychic landscape"...
."
Influences
Among those cinematic currents which may be said to have influenced Meyers's work were RomanticismRomanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
: notably Robert J. Flaherty
Robert J. Flaherty
Robert Joseph Flaherty, F.R.G.S. was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature length documentary film, Nanook of the North...
's Nanook of the North
Nanook of the North
Nanook of the North is a 1922 silent documentary film by Robert J. Flaherty. In the tradition of what would later be called salvage ethnography, Flaherty captured the struggles of the Inuk Nanook and his family in the Canadian arctic...
(1922). The latter was filmed on site, using local people and claiming to show their lives as they really were. Such films were staged, however; Falherty famously had his subject kill a walrus with a harpoon rather than use his gun.
Another major influence on young film-makers of the 1920s and '30s was Realism
Realism
Realism, Realist or Realistic are terms that describe any manifestation of philosophical realism, the belief that reality exists independently of observers, whether in philosophy itself or in the applied arts and sciences. In this broad sense it is frequently contrasted with Idealism.Realism in the...
. The latter, largely a European tradition, included "city symphony" films, which aimed to show people as products of the man-made environment in which they lived. Walter Ruttman's Berlin, Symphony of a City (1927), is an example. In the USSR Kino-Pravda
Kino-Pravda
Kino-Pravda was a newsreel series by Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, and Mikhail Kaufman.Working mainly during the 1920s, Vertov promoted the concept of kino-pravda, or film-truth, through his newsreel series. His driving vision was to capture fragments of actuality which, when organized...
("cinematic truth") was developed by Dziga Vertov
Dziga Vertov
David Abelevich Kaufman , better known by his pseudonym Dziga Vertov , was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist...
, who created Soviet news-reels during the 1920s. According to Vertov's cinematic philosophy the movie, via techniques such as slow motion, time lapse, fast motion, close-ups and of course editing, could produce a rendition of reality more accurate than that perceived by the human eye.
Meyers's influence can be discerned in cinema verité
Cinéma vérité
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects. It is also known for taking a provocative stance toward its topics.There are subtle yet...
and its close relative direct cinema
Direct Cinema
Direct Cinema is a documentary genre that originated between 1958 and 1962 in North America, principally in the Canadian province of Quebec and the United States...
. Enabled by the development of convenient, portable cameras and means of synchronizing sound, cinema verité often involved following a person during moments of personal crisis. The place of editing in creating the final artistic product is so central that the editor is on occasion given credit as consultant, or even co-director.
Legacy
Shortly before his death Meyers began to write notes for a book which was never published. The following is from these notes:"On one level film editing is like editing in general, literary editing, writing a piece of literature, preparing a book review or any presentation, selling an idea, putting it over. General principles maintain, clarity of ideas, coherence, emphasis on chief idea, lining up of proofs, and substantiation, avoidance of repetition, avoidance of belaboring the obvious, in other words, granting the reader intelligence but at the same time stressing value of your contribution to his fund of knowledge. A sense of when you've made your case and that any further exposition on it will be overdoing matters. These are by no means easy objectives to attain but necessary to obtain, nevertheless. ...
The film is very different. It is an expression in continuity. Its own qualities, its own dynamics. There is no turning back or leaping ahead unless you are permitted to do so by the film itself. Film is a Form in Continuity, within a more or less restricted frame. This frame is its entire world. Nothing exists outside of it. And whatever happens within it is autonomous."
Films and TV--partial list
Tropic of CancerTropic of Cancer
The Tropic of Cancer, also referred to as the Northern tropic, is the circle of latitude on the Earth that marks the most northerly position at which the Sun may appear directly overhead at its zenith...
(1969) -- Editor
Slaves (1969) -- Editor (TV)
Ulysses (1967) -- Script Consultant
Film (1965) -- Editor
FDR (1965) -- Editor (TV mini-series)
East Side/ West Side (1963-4) -- Editor (CBS TV)
The Power and the Glory (1961) -- Editor (CBS TV)
The Savage Eye
The Savage Eye
The Savage Eye is a "dramatized documentary" film that superposes a dramatic narration of the life of a divorced woman with documentary camera footage of an unspecified 1950s city. In a 1960 review, A. H...
(1959) – Co-producer, Co-director
Edge of Fury (1958) - Editing Supervisor
Adventuring in the Arts (1956) -- Director
Edge of the City
Edge of the City
Edge of the City is a 1957 drama film directed by Martin Ritt, starring John Cassavetes and Sidney Poitier. It was Ritt's debut film as a director...
(1956) -- Editor
The Steps of Age (1951) -- Supervising Editor
The Quiet One
The Quiet One
The Quiet One is a 1948 American documentary film directed by Sidney Meyers. The documentary chronicles the rehabilitation of a young, emotionally disturbed African-American boy; it contains a commentary written by James Agee, and narrated by Gary Merrill...
(1949) -- Director; Script; Editor
In the Street (1947) -- Filmmaker
People of the Cumberland (1937) -- Director
Awards and Nominations
1967 Man-made Man (CBS) won the Lasker Award for the best medical film of the year1959 The Savage Eye won the British Academy Awards' Robert Flaterly Award for Best Feature Length Documentary
1959 The Savage Eye nominated at the Venice Film Festival for the Fipresci Prize
1959 The Savage Eye top honors at Edinburgh Film Festival
1949 The Quiet One nominated at the Venice Film Festival for the International Prize
1949 The Quiet One nominated at the Venice International Film Festival for Competing Film
1948 The Quiet One nominated by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Original Screenplay in the documentary category