Film canister contains handwritten label:"Queen Mar"
Queen Mary ship at NY harbor
David Pablo Boder was a professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology who traveled in 1946 to Europe to record interviews with displaced persons. Arriving in Paris in late July, Boder would spend the next two months interviewing 130 displaced persons in nine languages and recording them on a state-of-the-art wire recorder. The interviews were among the earliest (if not the earliest) audio recordings of Holocaust survivors. They are valuable not only for the testimonies of survivors and other DPs, but also for the song sessions and religious services that Boder recorded at various points during the expedition. Boder's itinerary included four countries—France, Switzerland, Italy, and German—and sixteen different interview sites. On most days he conducted between two and five interviews, with each interview lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours. As the weeks went by and Boder sensed his time drawing short, he stepped up the pace. Toward the end, he completed as many as nine in a single day (on September 21 in Munich). Most days total half that number; some days are unaccounted for. Boder left Europe in early October, having recorded over ninety hours of material and completely used up the two hundred spools of wire that he had brought with him. A very detailed biography is published at http://voices.iit.edu/david_boder and in Alan Rosen's The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Agfa logo. EXT ES of Manhattan, panning right. Camera appears to be on a boat, possibly an ocean liner. EXT shot of the ship’s smokestacks, followed by a downward panning shot of an open hatch on the ship. EXT shot of the ship’s sun deck, followed by another EXT right panning shot of the city. The boat is docked on the west side of Manhattan (the Palisades and the Hudson can clearly be seen), as the shot travels past several other docked ships until stopping when it faces the city. VS EXT shot of the ship’s sun deck, only this time there are people approaching the camera; at least one of them appears to be the ship’s captain, as indicated by his uniform. EXT slight LA shot of the ship, the RMS Queen Mary, panning right, up and to the left, and then down to show off the ocean liner. A crate can be seen lifted in the BG of the shot, to the far left. The A.S. Beck Shoes they are at is at 565 5th Avenue.