This roll of silent footage was shot as part of the production of the the Academy Award winning documentary “The Fighting Lady”, directed by famed cinematographer and photographer Edward Jean Steichen (March 27, 1879 – March 25, 1973). Steichen was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator. The Fighting Lady is a 1944 documentary film produced by the U.S. Navy and narrated by Lt. Robert Taylor USNR.
Shots include: PIlot parachuting into the ocean (:11) from a crippled plane. Ships under fire (:30) by Japanese aircraft. At :47 a Kamikaze hits near an aircraft carrier. At :52 a Japanese plane plunges into the sea. At 1:00 Kamikaze aircraft fly close to a carrier and hit the deck (1:13). At 1:18 part of the plane hits the water adjacent to the carrier sending up a torrent of debris. Another near miss (or possibly a different angle on the one just seen) appears at 1:59. At 2:42 another Japanese aircraft is shot down and hits near a destroyer. At 3:00 an aircraft carrier suffers a direct hit by a kamikaze near the superstructure. At 3:16 is “Scene 408” with shots of planes landing in the sunset. At 4:42, refueling operations at sea are shown. At 5:36 a ship’s band plays music at sea. At 5:52 anti-aircraft gunners stand at the ready while at 6:00 bombs are loaded aboard the carrier. At 6:25 crew members relax, read books and at 6:33 play catch with a baseball. At 6:47 men are shown resting with planes silhouetted by the sun.
At the commencement of WW2, Ed Steichen, then in his sixties, had retired as a photographer and was developing new varieties of delphinium, which in 1936 had been the subject of his first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and the only flower exhibition ever held there. When America joined the global conflict, Steichen, who had come out of the first World War an Army Colonel, was refused for active service because of his age. Later, invited by the Navy to serve as Director of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, he was commissioned a Lieutenant-Commander in January 1942. Steichen selected for his unit six officer-photographers from the industry (sometimes irreverently called “Steichen’s chickens”), including photographers Wayne Miller and Charles Fenno Jacobs. A collection of 172 silver gelatin photographs taken by the Unit under his leadership is held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Their war documentary The Fighting Lady, directed by Steichen, won the 1945 Academy Award for Best Documentary.
In 1942 Steichen curated for the Museum of Modern Art the exhibition Road to Victory, five duplicates of which toured the world. Photographs in the exhibition were credited to enlisted members of the Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps and numbers by Steichen’s unit, while many were anonymous and some were made by automatic cameras in Navy planes operated while firing at the enemy. This was followed in January 1945 by Power in the Pacific: Battle Photographs of our Navy in Action on the Sea and In the Sky.
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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
