Grand Canyon

Grand Canyon (1958)

In 1959, the Oscar for Best Short Subject (Live Action) was won by a Walt Disney film, Grand Canyon.  Nearly twenty years early the studio had received critical acclaim for Fantasia, its animated interpretations of eight pieces of classical music, and it was one of the directors of Fantasia, James Algar, who made Grand Canyon.  It was also conceived in relation to music, in this case as 'a pictorial interpretation of Ferde Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite.'  The film contains actual landscape footage but was initially shown with the animation Sleeping Beauty.  You can see all thirty minutes of Grand Canyon on YouTube at the moment - I'm not sure how long it will stay up, but I've embedded a link below.  The music was composed by Grofé between 1929 and 1931 structured into five parts: I. Sunrise, II. Painted Desert, III. On the Trail, IV. Sunset, and V. Cloudburst.

Who was Ferde Grofé?  He began as a jazz pianist and was the arranger for Paul Whiteman in the twenties, when the band leader was calling himself "King of Jazz".  The New York Times actually called Grofé the Prime Minister of Jazz in 1932 (an absurd title, but I'm now imagining my own fantasy jazz Cabinet).  'On the Trail', the middle section of the Grand Canyon Suite was used for thirty years to advertise a brand of cigarettes.  In addition to the Grand Canyon, Grofé composed musical evocations of the Mississippi and Hudson rivers, Death Valley and the Nigara Falls (a suite commissioned by the Niagara Falls Power Generation project). Grofé conducted some of these pieces outside in the landscape: the Death Valley Suite was performed in Desolation Valley at a centennial celebration of the '49ers, with a narration by film star James Stewart.  The event was far more popular than anticipated - crowds came by bus from Las Vegas, planes circled trying to land at the small airstrip and a long line of automobiles stretched into the desert. 

How mant other landscape films won the Oscar for Best Short Subject (Live Action)?  Originally there were two categories - 'comedy' (the first winner was that famous Laurel & Hardy film where they have to get a piano up a flight of stairs) and 'novelty' - early nominees included short documentaries about Krakatoa and Everest.  Then the films were categorised by length - in 1937 Julian Huxley's celebrated British nature film The Private Life of the Gannets won the 'one reel' Oscar (it beat Jacques Tourneur's Romance of Radium). The Grand Canyon was actually the subject of a 1942 nominee, Desert Wonderland.  Disney and James Algar won the Oscar in 1949 for Seal Island, the first in its True Life Adventures series which by the end of the fifties had included films on the Everglades, Arctic and South American jungle.

In 1967, a lovely short film I have written about here before, Paddle to the Sea, was nominated for the award.  I am not sure what all the films in the shortlists since the 1970s were about but I get the impression they were mainly the film equivalent of short stories and rarely about landscape or nature.  The Solar Film (1979) sounds interesting though: commissioned by Robert Redford, made by Elaine and Saul Bass (the graphic designer who worked with Hitchcock, Kubrick, Scorsese etc.) and featuring 'Tubular Bells' on the soundtrack, it was a film about solar energy.  Since 1977 the BAFTAs also given out a short film award and the last winner was 73 Cows, a film about a couple who take up vegan organic farming.  Perhaps the climate crisis and boom in nature writing will lead to more short films that deal with aspects of landscape. 

I will conclude here by embedding from YouTube a trailer for one of Walt Disney's True Life Adventure Series, The Vanishing Prairie (1954).  This was another James Algar directed Oscar Winner, but in the longer 'Best Documentary Feature' category.  Disney had won the previous year too with The Living Desert, and the year before that the winner was a documentary based on Rachel Carson's classic study, The Sea Around Us (this film was made by Irwin Allen who would later produce The Poseidon Adventure).  In 1956, the Oscar went to The Silent World, Jacques Cousteau's pioneering film, co-directed with the young Louis Malle.  As with the short film award, landscape became less prominent as a theme from the late 1960s, but more recently winners have included March of the Penguins, The Cove and this year's Free Solo, about an attempt to climb El Capitan without any ropes or harnesses.