Editorials
Meet Weegee, the Original ‘Nightcrawler’
In Dan Gilroy’s debut film Nightcrawler (our review), Jake Gyllenhaal plays a freelance crime journalist named Lou Bloom who lurks L.A.’s underbelly at night armed with a camcorder, capturing gruesome footage to sell to the news. Car crashes, murder, all around mayhem (and a healthy dose of misanthropy) are Bloom’s mealticket.
Over 80 years ago, over on the east coast, a portly cigar-chomping immigrant beat Gyllenhaal to the punch. In his time, Weegee (a take on Ouija) was the reigning champ of candid crime journalism, which he’s also credited as originating. As he helped conduct and shape the culture of tabloids as we know them, he also spotlighted the seedy, gritty side of the human experience, elevating murder and calamity to a high art.
Weegee was born in the the Ukraine in 1899, under the name Ascher Fellig. When he was a baby, Fellig’s father moved to America to become a rabbi, later sending for the rest of his family once he’d earned enough bread. At age 10, Fellig emigrated to the U.S. with his mother and three brothers. When the family came through Ellis Island, his Ascher name was anglicized to Arthur.
The family had trouble making ends meet, so despite being a good student, Arthur was forced to leave school shortly after the eighth grade. He worked a bunch of odd jobs around the Lower East Side but it wasn’t until he had his picture taken by a street photographer that Arthur felt he’d found his calling. He purchased his own tintype camera and hit the streets.
His first racket was taking photos of kids in their Sunday best, sitting atop a pony he’d rented from a local stable. Afterwards he’d try to hock the photos to the kids’ parents. Within a few years, he got his big break working in the darkroom of Acme Newspictures. There he’d develop other folks’ pictures for use as stock photos in the papers. But at night, while all the other employees were asleep, Arthur would creep out into the shadows and shoot emergencies, murders, and death. The office girls at Acme gave him the nickname “Weegee” after the infamous spirit board, because he seemed to possess a supernatural intuition for breaking news.
From 1935 to 1945, Weegee was the preeminent freelance crime photographer of NYC. At first he’d find stories by going into Manhattan police headquarters and sniffing out whatever he could find on the teletype machine. He quickly grew tired of this, so he bought himself a souped-up ’38 Chevy Coupe, complete with portable dark room in the trunk and police radio (he was the only press photographer ever given permission to have one in his car). Equipped with spare cameras, flash bulbs, and even a typewriter, Weegee stalked the streets at night, chasing down “Page One” stories, oftentimes beating cops to the scene. His four-wheeled studio allowed him to expedite the process from negative to printed photo, giving him one hell of an advantage over other press hounds.
For the times he wasn’t out on the beat, Weegee rented an apartment directly across from police headquarters. He naturally kept a police scanner next to his beat and would sleep with one ear open. Somehow, he’d manage to snooze through humdrum police calls, then spring outta bed for the juicy ones. He’d sell his photographs to the tabloids and various news photo agencies, eking out a living in a profession most starved their way through while in the process becoming a minor celebrity around town.
When asked how Weegee picked what stories he’d chase after, he said he looked for ones with a name. Barroom brawls between nobodies in Hell’s Kitchen might fetch him $10, but a scrap between society types would draw the big bucks (maybe $25). In Naked City, Weegee’s first collection, he explains that murders and fires were “my two best sellers, my bread and butter.”
Murders were the easiest for him to shoot. Stiffs made the best models, because they “couldn’t get temperamental” and stayed there on the concrete for a good two hours before being carted away in the meat wagon. Weegee observes in Naked City that at murder scenes, the bodies always seemed to be well-dressed, face-up on the sidewalk with their hats sitting beside them. They always had hats, “pearl gray” ones. He jokingly said one day he wanted to just go follow a guy in a pearl gray hat and set up his camera so he can catch an actual murder as it happens.
“I had so many unsold murder pictures lying around my room…I felt as if I were renting out a wing of the City Morgue.” – Weegee
He even took so many shots of the era’s most notorious criminals – Waxey Gordon, Dutch Schultz, Mad Dog Coll – while they were behind bars that he became known as the official photographer of “Murder, Inc.”
With fires, Weegee had to work much more quickly. He shot a lot of photos of people being rescued and he was fascinated by the items they risked their lives to retrieve from the flames (snakes, art, violins, religious artifacts). He also always made sure to take shots of the crowds watching the fires, in case the cops were looking for a known pyro. There are a lot of Weegee shots of fire survivors, which he preferred over the burnt up corpses. When firemen would come out with victims, they’d retrieve a priest to deliver last rites. This ritual always made Weegee cry.
He wept because through all the murder and mayhem, Weegee was a shy and sensitive guy. It wasn’t all about the paycheck for him. He sincerely liked humanity in all its beauty and ugliness. Aside from the crime beat, he snapped photos of lovers at Coney Island, opera singers, Sinatra, the black community in Harlem, and simply anyone and everyone from all walks of life. His street cred swelled so big, he even managed to break into the film world. Stanley Kubrick brought him in as technical consultant on Dr. Strangelove because he wanted the film to have the sharp flash effect of Weegee’s photos.
But man, his crime photos are something else. The excitement and urgency still bleeds off of them to this day. Their gritty candidness displays how murder and violence are commonplace, but that all this bullshit happens to real humans – not just people on the movie screen.
His work now rests in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. There are loads of places online to check out his work as well.
In this day and age, the word “troll” is often used to describe various online nuisances. Yet as abundant and irksome as the modern troll can be, they aren’t usually as fearsome as their mythological counterparts. I’m not talking about the small and gentler versions that have become more common to see in media. No, there are much bigger and scarier trolls out there—and André Øvredal’s movie Troll Hunter is one of the best places to find them.
It doesn’t take long for Troll Hunter (or Trolljegeren) to dump the Blair Witch Project-esque setup and aim for something a lot fresher. The trajectory of the story is augmented by Otto Jespersen’s character Hans, the titular Troll Hunter. The second he comes barreling out of the deep, dark woods and shouts “troll” at the camera, this movie takes a turn into what feels like uncharted territory. Not only subject-wise, but also conceptually.
For fantastical and made-up subject matter in cinema, found footage is a fast way to add a guise of believability. After all, what we accept to be the most crucial aspect of documentaries—the truth—rubs off on pseudo-documentaries, despite our understanding of the pretense involved. That is what Øvredal delivered with Troll Hunter: a movie so convincing that some viewers wondered if trolls really do exist. So, had this been straightforwardly made, it likely wouldn’t have been as effective. Conventional narratives would be more inclined to treat something like trolls as flat out unreal, and never try to convince the audience to think otherwise.
Hans petrifies the three-headed Tusseladd troll.
The viewers, like the characters trailing Hans, are quickly thrown into the deeper end of that extraordinary story. They have to process all this new information while staying on the go. So, although there is no significant amount of meandering, narratively or physically, there is still a good amount of atmosphere, not to mention tension building. It’s never anything frightful, but then again, Troll Hunter isn’t your standard offering of horror; it’s more on the low end of the dark fantasy spectrum. We aren’t ever spirited away to a faraway world—we stay in rather familiar surroundings, as well as dip into those less so. The outcome is a movie where you’re constantly more in awe than in terror.
As fantasy fiction might do, Troll Hunter prefers not to deal with incredulity. There is no time to waste on doubt, as interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), soundperson Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) all follow Hans around, recording whatever this character is willing to reveal about his bizarre job. Of course, the Troll Hunter himself is not an open book; in that respect, the diegetic documentary fails to fully capture and unpack the more interesting of its two subjects. Yes, all those giant, monstrous trolls are indeed incredible, but understandably, your mind wanders to their pursuer. What kind of person signs up for this gig and then chooses to stick with it for so long?
Reviews have called out Troll Hunter for its lack of character development. In regard to Thomas and his fellow documentarians, that criticism is valid, but bear in mind, they aren’t the focus of the story, either. Meanwhile, Hans is a well-crafted character. At least better than first realized. Before he was introduced, Hans had already grown tired of the troll grind. Fed up with that low compensation for his services, resentful of the bureaucracy, and wanting to expose his employer on a large scale, Hans’ discontent is glaring.
Then there are those finer details about the Troll Hunter, such as that indifference to both the natural splendor of his everyday surroundings and the affections of an obviously smitten colleague, that also suggest some level of despondency. So it is fair to say this movie doesn’t feature any sizable growth for its characters; however, the namesake isn’t underwritten. No doubt, putting a real-life character like Otto Jespersen in that role is partly why Hans is so fascinating—maybe even relatable.
Otto Jespersen as Hans the Troll Hunter.
There is always a small risk whenever using the term “mockumentary” to describe a found-footage movie, as the word could imply humor where there is none. In the case of Troll Hunter, the term’s usage is appropriate. Some folks have claimed the English-dubbed version has the more comedic tone, however, the Norwegian cut isn’t exactly humorless. Apart from the trolls’ absurd appearances, this is a movie where the characters nearly choke on the monsters’ farts, and Christians are like walking targets. Hans’ complete apathy towards everything is another cause of laughter. Overall, the comedy is intentionally dry and inconsistent. Unfunny, though? Absolutely not.
In a movie where endemic creatures are maltreated, as well as disavowed from living freely and peacefully, it’s hard not to notice the ecological message buried beneath the story. In addition to that is the unmistakable political satire. There is this whole business about intrusive and unsightly power lines—like trolls, they’re big blemishes on the land—that leads to what is perhaps the movie’s funniest moment. The scene in question is that one where certain electric lines, the ones secretly being used to keep the trolls at bay, go in a loop and don’t actually send power to any residents. Yet the monitors of said lines don’t find this at all weird. So it stands to reason that Øvredal was having a go at those who accept the government’s doings without question.
Looking past the fact that trolls aren’t actually real, this movie is an enlightening source of information. And not just for international audiences; Norwegians, too, get schooled about their homeland’s own mythology. It’s also evident from everything on screen that Øvredal and his crew were enthusiastic about the topic. The creature designs are the most indicative of that zeal; those imaginative yet myth-accurate manifestations are equally amusing and grotesque. One second you’re laughing at their phallic noses, the next you’re white-knuckling during a hairy sequence. Most surprisingly is how well the trolls’ visual effects hold up after fifteen years. It’s not all spotless, but on the whole, they remain impressive.
Vouching for a mockumentary about trolls isn’t easy, but those who do come around and give it a shot will more than likely be grateful for the recommendation. For Troll Hunter is a real find in that vast and varied genre we call “found footage“.
A bridge troll reaches up for food and finds Hans decked out in armor.
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