PRIZE FILM

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 862, 4 January 1930, Page 21

PRIZE FILM

Novel Artistry Marks “Water” Story i A NON-DRAMA TIC TRIUMPH The first prize of £IOO in the 1929 “Photoplay” amateur conj test has been awarded to Ralph Steiner for his non-drama'tic film, “H 2.0.” a study in water in motion and of abstract patterns of shapes in water. The contest judges were King Vidor, motion picture director. James It. Quirk, editor and publisher of “Photoplay* Magazine; Georg** Pierce Baker, of Yale University, an 1 Wilton A. Barrett, executive secretary of the National Board of Review. Won Previous Prize Steiner, whose work as an advertising photographer won the award of first prize in the New York Arc Directors’ Show, is at present staff photographer for the Delineator Home Institute. He has contributed to “Vanity Fair,” “Theatre Arts” and other magazines. An exhibition of his still photography was held two years ago in New York. A specialist in advertising pholo-

grapliv of the modern school, Steiner two years ago became interested in movie making.

“I saw so many poor movies that I decided I couldn’t do worse,” he says. Besides “H 2.0,” Steiner has produced an experimental film in which he attempted to portray the best and worst features of American life: another showing the operations involved in the filling of a silo on a large farm, and a third, of the ballet type of film, called “People Playing Croquet.”

Gilbert Seldes in the “New Republic” says of this amateur movie maker: “Mr. Steiner’s first experiments with the cinema were overly influenced by his expertness as a stiil photographer. “He took, for instance, hundreds of feet of film, developed them and van them off, convinced by his knowledge of negatives and plates that they were good pictures. . . . So they were; but as he learned, they were not good moving pictures. “Of Steiner's later work I have seen only a film which was to he called ‘H2.O’ or possibly ‘Water.* Its subject is water in all its w'ays of movement, rain and waves arid waterfall and coursing river. . . . As cinematography it is a triumph.”