silver nitrate notes

Wings and the First Aerial Cinema

13 sep 2012

William A. Wellman directed Wings (1927) for Paramount on a budget of around $2 million, much of it spent on twenty-eight aircraft, two military airfields, and the cooperation of the US Army Air Corps. Wellman had been a fighter pilot in the First World War. He insisted on shooting actual aerial sequences with actual aircraft. The cinematographer of record was Harry Perry (1888-1985), with E. Burton Steene and others on the aerial unit. Wings won the first Academy Award for Best Picture.

The aerial sequences are the technical achievement that survives. Perry's camera operators flew in the aircraft, mounted in custom rigs that allowed them to point lenses at neighbouring planes during dogfights. Some of the sequences were shot from cameras attached to wingtips. Some were filmed from a separate camera plane chasing two stunt planes through choreographed manoeuvres. The footage is unstaged in the sense that the planes were really flying and the camera operators were really in the air with them. Several of the stunt pilots were killed during production.

Clara Bow gets the marquee credit, but the film's actual stars are the aircraft. Wellman shoots them in framings that emphasise their fragility. The fabric-covered wood-frame planes look like what they were: assemblies of cloth and wire that occasionally exploded in flame. When a German Fokker is shot down in the film's central dogfight, the descent is photographed from above as the plane spirals slowly toward a French village. Perry's camera follows the descent for nearly thirty seconds without cutting.

The ground sequences, shot at airfields in Texas and on hand-built sets in Hollywood, are conventional 1927 silent photography. Wings is, structurally, an aerial film with a romantic subplot. The romantic subplot is what got it the Best Picture Oscar. The aerial sequences are what gave it a place in cinema history.

A 2012 restoration by Paramount made the film visually presentable again. The aerial photography reads, on a clean print, as something the 1990s could not yet have produced with computer effects.

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sources
[1] Wellman, William A. Jr. Wild Bill Wellman. Pantheon, 2015.
[2] Whitfield, Eileen. Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood. University of Kentucky, 1997.
[3] Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade's Gone By.... University of California Press, 1968.
[4] Paramount Pictures restoration notes, 2012.