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Candidates for the National Film Registry: With Williamson Beneath the Sea

Introduction by Brian Taves

The motion picture WITH WILLIAMSON BENEATH THE SEA (1932), the filmed autobiography of J. Ernest Williamson, came to the Library of Congress in 1992 from his daughter, Sylvia Munro, eager to find a permanent home for her father's film, and it became a major restoration project. John Ernest Williamson (1881-1966) was active in motion pictures for nearly fifty years and was the pioneer of undersea photography. His father had been a sea captain and inventor of a deep-sea tube, made of a series of concentric, interlocking iron rings, that, when suspended from a specially outfitted ship, created a shaft into the sea allowing easy communication and a plentiful supply of air down to depths of up to 250 feet. In 1912, young Williamson realized that his father's mechanism, intended for underwater repair and salvage work, could be adapted for undersea photography. To facilitate the tube's new purpose, Williamson designed an attachment, a spherical observation chamber with a five-foot funnel-shaped glass window which he called the "photosphere." With a light hung from the mother ship to illuminate the sea in front of the tube, still photographs of the depths off Hampton Roads, Virginia, proved so successful that Williamson was urged to try motion pictures.

The equipment was taken to the Bahamas, where the sunlight reached down to a depth of 150 feet in the clear waters, enhancing photographic possibilities. His first feature was known as the "Williamson Expeditionary Picture"and ingeniously titled THIRTY LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. Released in 1914, the film demonstrated how the photosphere functioned and the manner in which the Bahamas islanders depended on the life in the sea, climaxing with scenes of Williamson's fight with a shark, which he killed with a knife while remaining within the camera's range.

Through 1955, Williamson continued to shoot both documentary and fiction films in the Bahamas. He realized that fictional films could be a popular and lucrative outlet for films made with the photosphere, and was inherently involved with the scripting and directing of underwater scenes that could be shot with the photosphere. Producing independently whenever sufficient backing was obtainable, among his own fiction films were THE SUBMARINE EYE (1917), GIRL OF THE SEA (1920), and WET GOLD (1921), with such themes as sunken treasure, sea monsters, mermaids, and shipwrecks. He was also willing to work for the major studios when they commissioned his type of picture, such as Universal's TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1916) and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1929).

With the development of technicolor, Williamson and his Submarine Film Corporation undertook to photograph the bottom of the sea in the new process in 1924 with THE UNINVITED GUEST (1924), and WITH WILLIAMSON BENEATH THE SEA includes a silent, minute-long two-color insert in the second reel of some of these scenes. The popularity of Williamson's lecture tours, which included the screening of underwater footage, led to the 1936 publication of his autobiography, 20 Years Under the Sea, which was translated into many languages.

In 1922, Williamson had written, directed, produced, and even portraying himself in WONDERS OF THE SEA, a combination fiction and non-fiction film about Williamson's search, using the photosphere, for a sea monster in the West Indies. WONDERS OF THE SEA became the basis for WITH WILLIAMSON BENEATH THE SEA, which he produced and narrated ten years later for release by Sol Lesser. In addition to demonstrating his filmmaking techniques, WITH WILLIAMSON BENEATH THE SEA also reveals the scientific uses of the photosphere in exploring the deep, with some of the footage was taken from his FIELD MUSEUM-WILLIAMSON UNDERSEA EXPEDITION TO THE BAHAMAS, particularly the gathering of coral specimens. From inside the photosphere, Williamson and his wife patiently study the life of the creatures of the bottom, making photographs, sketches, and paintings of the fish and plants seen through the window. As a documentary, WITH WILLIAMSON BENEATH THE SEA heightens its impact by presenting the undersea footage in a concentrated fashion, without the interjection of a distracting melodramatic surface plotline which marred so many of his fictional features. Added entertainment in WITH WILLIAMSON BENEATH THE SEA was provided by including the daughter of the Williamsons, the baby Sylvia--the eventual donor, in adulthood, of the footage to the Library. (Williamson's last film was a 1955 half-hour condensation of WITH WILLIAMSON BENEATH THE SEA for the syndicated television series, I SEARCH FOR ADVENTURE, with entirely new on-camera interviews and narration by Williamson, and a 16 mm. print was also part of Mrs. Munro's deposit with the Library of Congress). The movie was described in advertising as "Adventure among the mysteries and monsters of the deep," and announced with the banner headline, "a lost world fathoms below recovered in savage splendor."

WITH WILLIAMSON BENEATH THE SEA is emblematic of a period in filmmaking, long past, when pioneers were part-scientist and part-promoter on endeavors that involved as much adventure as technology, and it demonstrates both the scientific use of the photosphere as well as its application in filming motion picture entertainment under the sea. Incorporating both previously-filmed footage along with new material, many of the scenes are from Williamson productions that otherwise seem to be lost; his other original movie negatives were stored in Florida and destroyed in a hurricane. The two concluding reels of WITH WILLIAMSON BENEATH THE SEA feature a series of incidents between divers in the deep, and used some of the highlights from such films as THE SUBMARINE EYE, THE WHITE HEATHER (1919), the quicksand scene from WET GOLD, and the battle with the moray eel from WONDERS OF THE SEA.

In search of authenticity, Williamson always strove to take his camera to the actual ocean floor, never settling for the ease of shooting in a tank, a method increasingly used for supposed undersea scenes in Hollywood productions. However, Williamson never approached the idea of actually taking cameras into the deep. When Walt Disney used this new method to remake 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA in 1954, the Bahamian locales were utilized that Williamson had found almost forty years earlier, and he advised the new crew facing the same practical problems he had overcome in almost forty years earlier.

The materials on WITH WILLIAMSON BENEATH THE SEA which arrived at the Library included an incomplete optical track of the film, a negative, a workprint, and release prints (one nitrate and several safety), along with a separate musical track and assorted trims and outtakes. Some of the safety prints had been cut into hundreds of rolls, probably for Williamson's use in lectures. An original nitrate print at George Eastman House was also obtained for the Library's restoration, and actually proved to be in better condition than much of the safety film stored so many years in the warm, humid climate of the Bahamas. None of these prints were complete, and various pieces from each had to be patched together, and inter-archival cooperation, along with the availability of the Williamson family's material, made possible the restoration of WITH WILLIAMSON BENEATH THE SEA to the original length of 57 minutes. WITH WILLIAMSON BENEATH THE SEA is an ideal example of a restoration that would only have been undertaken by an archive, since it was made independently and its value is not commercial, but as a historical artifact.

M/B/RS staff member Brian Taves (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is coauthor of The Jules Verne Encyclopedia (Scarecrow Press, 1996), and has chronicled Williamson's career there and in an article in the April 1996 issue of Journal of Film Preservation.