Leslie P. Thatcher’s Another Day is an outstanding and prize-winning example of an amateur city symphony. A short experimental documentary about Thatcher’s hometown, Toronto, the film was named one of the “Ten Best” amateur films of 1934 by the editorial staff of the Amateur Cinema League’s official journal, Movie Makers. They described the film as a “cinematic interpretation of work and play on a Saturday … a splendid example of the relatively simple avant-garde film, so popular among European amateurs but so seldom attempted by even the advanced workers of the American continent.” The magazine praised it as “technically brilliant” for its use of experimental techniques, such as dissolves, wipes, and double exposures, which the filmmaker combines with straight photography and striking camera angles and compositions. Finally, Movie Makers summarized the film in a typical city symphony description: “Set against the background of Toronto, Another Day portrays in semi-abstract fashion the dramatic changes which overtake the life and tempo of a great city as Saturday crosses the noontime deadline from work to play.”
Thatcher’s film does indeed follow daily activities on a Saturday in chronological order, but it also applies the modernist, city-symphony fragmentation of everyday events. Historian Lewis Jacobs explicitly presented Another Day as a city symphony inspired by Vertov, but its more immediate inspiration was fellow Torontonian Gordon Sparling’s ode to Montreal, Rhapsody in Two Languages, which was released earlier that same year. In fact, it is Rhapsody‘s closing line—“and it’s another day!”—that provided Thatcher with his title.
A salesman for paper and engraving companies who was an active member and co-founder of the Toronto Amateur Movie Club, Leslie Thatcher (1901–89) also made some other shorts dealing with Toronto such as Toronto Centennial (1934) and The Royal Visit to Toronto of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (1939). In addition, he received another “Ten Best” award for his Fishers of Grande Anse (1935) and won a silver medal in the travel category for his first film Mighty Niagara (1933) in the American Cinematographer’s amateur film competition. Thatcher later founded his own film production company and made industrial and sponsored films.
Eva Hielscher
further reading
“Movie Makers: The Ten Best,” Movie Makers: Magazine of the Amateur Cinema League (December 1934): 513, 534.
Jacobs, Lewis, “Avant-Garde Production in America,” in Roger Manvell (ed.), Experiment in the Film (London: Grey Walls Press, 1949), 113–52.
Tepperman, Charles, Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923–1960 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015).
Tepperman, Charles, “Uncovering Canada’s Amateur Film Tradition: Leslie Thatcher’s Films and Contexts,” in Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer (eds.), Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada (Kingston and Montreal, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 39–58.
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