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122-616: In 1967, he was the winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for The Anderson Platoon . The film followed a platoon of American soldiers for six weeks at the height of fighting in Vietnam during 1966. Pierre Schoendoerffer was born in Chamalières of a French Alsatian Protestant family. As Alsace was a territory contested and annexed in the 17th, 19th and 20th centuries by both France and Germany leading to

244-567: A diplomatic cable , is a confidential communication between a diplomatic mission and the foreign ministry of its parent country. These continue to be called telegrams or cables regardless of the method used for transmission. Passing messages by signalling over distance is an ancient practice. One of the oldest examples is the signal towers of the Great Wall of China . In 400 BC , signals could be sent by beacon fires or drum beats . By 200 BC complex flag signalling had developed, and by

366-518: A Captain . In 1954, his friend and superior Sergeant-Chief Péraud asked him by telegram to join him at the battle of Dien Bien Phu and he dropped with the 5th Vietnamese Parachutist Battalion (5e BPVN aka 5e BAWOUAN). As a result, upranked Corporal-Chief Schoendoerffer "celebrated" his 26th birthday in the midst of the 57-day siege. He filmed the entire battle for the SCA but after the French ceasefire and

488-742: A Red Ribbon Award at the New York Film Festival , a BBC's Merit Award and an Italia Prize. Pierre Schoendoerffer was elected at the Académie des Beaux-Arts ' Section VII: Artistic creation in the cinema and the audio-visual field, Seat#4, on 23 March 1988, replacing Guillaume Gillet . He was president of the Académie des Beaux-Arts from 2001 to 2007. Schoendoerffer was primarily influenced by epic adventure novels, notably Joseph Kessel 's Fortune Carrée (1932). Kessel wrote The Devil's Pass (1956) he co-directed with Jacques Dupont. In

610-453: A code by itself. The term heliostat is sometimes used as a synonym for heliograph because of this origin. The Colomb shutter ( Bolton and Colomb , 1862) was originally invented to enable the transmission of morse code by signal lamp between Royal Navy ships at sea. The heliograph was heavily used by Nelson A. Miles in Arizona and New Mexico after he took over command (1886) of

732-410: A distance and cablegram means something written via a cable, whereas telegraph implies the process of writing at a distance. Later, a Telex was a message sent by a Telex network, a switched network of teleprinters similar to a telephone network. A wirephoto or wire picture was a newspaper picture that was sent from a remote location by a facsimile telegraph . A diplomatic telegram, also known as

854-470: A distance of a quarter of a mile. In the 1890s inventor Nikola Tesla worked on an air and ground conduction wireless electric power transmission system , similar to Loomis', which he planned to include wireless telegraphy. Tesla's experiments had led him to incorrectly conclude that he could use the entire globe of the Earth to conduct electrical energy and his 1901 large scale application of his ideas,

976-473: A few days, sometimes taking all day to send a message despite the use of the highly sensitive mirror galvanometer developed by William Thomson (the future Lord Kelvin ) before being destroyed by applying too high a voltage. Its failure and slow speed of transmission prompted Thomson and Oliver Heaviside to find better mathematical descriptions of long transmission lines . The company finally succeeded in 1866 with an improved cable laid by SS Great Eastern ,

1098-418: A film, he waved a light on the screen. When a majority of flashlights had voted, the film was switched off. Hoop Dreams was stopped after 15 minutes." The academy's executive director, Bruce Davis, took the unprecedented step of asking accounting firm Price Waterhouse to turn over the complete results of that year's voting, in which members of the committee had rated each of the 63 eligible documentaries on

1220-555: A message was relayed 640 km (400 mi) in four hours. Miles' enemies used smoke signals and flashes of sunlight from metal, but lacked a sophisticated telegraph code. The heliograph was ideal for use in the American Southwest due to its clear air and mountainous terrain on which stations could be located. It was found necessary to lengthen the morse dash (which is much shorter in American Morse code than in

1342-440: A modification of surveying equipment ( Gauss , 1821). Various uses of mirrors were made for communication in the following years, mostly for military purposes, but the first device to become widely used was a heliograph with a moveable mirror ( Mance , 1869). The system was used by the French during the 1870–71 siege of Paris , with night-time signalling using kerosene lamps as the source of light. An improved version (Begbie, 1870)

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1464-606: A natural rubber from the Palaquium gutta tree, after William Montgomerie sent samples to London from Singapore in 1843. The new material was tested by Michael Faraday and in 1845 Wheatstone suggested that it should be used on the cable planned between Dover and Calais by John Watkins Brett . The idea was proved viable when the South Eastern Railway company successfully tested a three-kilometre (two-mile) gutta-percha insulated cable with telegraph messages to

1586-548: A reportage about the Algerian War for his Cinq colonnes à la une (ORTF) TV show. Thanks to Lazareff he later returned to Vietnam in 1966 and made his acclaimed The Anderson Platoon for the ORTF. Later in 1991 he went back to Dien Bien Phu and recreated the battle in a self-titled epic docudrama — in the fashion of Tora! Tora! Tora! — in which his son Frédéric played his own role as cameraman. The actual Vietnamese army

1708-410: A scale of six to ten. "What I found," said Davis, "is that a small group of members gave zeros (actually low scores) to every single film except the five they wanted to see nominated. And they gave tens to those five, which completely skewed the voting. There was one film that received more scores of ten than any other, but it wasn't nominated. It also got zeros (low scores) from those few voters, and that

1830-614: A ship off the coast of Folkestone . The cable to France was laid in 1850 but was almost immediately severed by a French fishing vessel. It was relaid the next year and connections to Ireland and the Low Countries soon followed. Getting a cable across the Atlantic Ocean proved much more difficult. The Atlantic Telegraph Company , formed in London in 1856, had several failed attempts. A cable laid in 1858 worked poorly for

1952-440: A single-needle telegraph was adapted to indicate just two messages: "Line Clear" and "Line Blocked". The signaller would adjust his line-side signals accordingly. As first implemented in 1844 each station had as many needles as there were stations on the line, giving a complete picture of the traffic. As lines expanded, a sequence of pairs of single-needle instruments were adopted, one pair for each block in each direction. Wigwag

2074-663: A substantial distance was by Ronalds in 1816 using an electrostatic generator . Ronalds offered his invention to the British Admiralty , but it was rejected as unnecessary, the existing optical telegraph connecting the Admiralty in London to their main fleet base in Portsmouth being deemed adequate for their purposes. As late as 1844, after the electrical telegraph had come into use, the Admiralty's optical telegraph

2196-418: A system for mass distributing information on current price of publicly listed companies. In a punched-tape system, the message is first typed onto punched tape using the code of the telegraph system—Morse code for instance. It is then, either immediately or at some later time, run through a transmission machine which sends the message to the telegraph network. Multiple messages can be sequentially recorded on

2318-503: A system of communication that would allow the central government to receive intelligence and to transmit orders in the shortest possible time. On 2 March 1791, at 11 am, they sent the message "si vous réussissez, vous serez bientôt couverts de gloire" (If you succeed, you will soon bask in glory) between Brulon and Parce, a distance of 16 kilometres (10 mi). The first means used a combination of black and white panels, clocks, telescopes, and codebooks to send their message. In 1792, Claude

2440-534: A telefax machine. In 1855, an Italian priest, Giovanni Caselli , also created an electric telegraph that could transmit images. Caselli called his invention " Pantelegraph ". Pantelegraph was successfully tested and approved for a telegraph line between Paris and Lyon . In 1881, English inventor Shelford Bidwell constructed the scanning phototelegraph that was the first telefax machine to scan any two-dimensional original, not requiring manual plotting or drawing. Around 1900, German physicist Arthur Korn invented

2562-466: A telegraph between St Petersburg and Kronstadt , but it was never completed. The first operative electric telegraph ( Gauss and Weber , 1833) connected Göttingen Observatory to the Institute of Physics about 1 km away during experimental investigations of the geomagnetic field. The first commercial telegraph was by Cooke and Wheatstone following their English patent of 10 June 1837. It

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2684-576: A war cameraman for the French army and was sent to Saigon , in French Indochina . There Corporal Schoendoerffer met and became friends with Service Presse Information ("Information Press Service", SPI) war photograph Sergeant-Chief Jean Péraud, who took him as his protégé . Schoendoerffer's first SCA production was a 9-minute short documentary First Indochina War Rushes (1952) that would surface thirty years later on screen in The Honor of

2806-419: Is Cinerama , White Wilderness (which also won for Documentary Feature ), Let It Be , and Birds Do It, Bees Do It . Five documentary filmmakers have received honorary Oscars : Pete Smith , William L. Hendricks , D. A. Pennebaker , Frederick Wiseman , and Agnès Varda . Telegraphy Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to

2928-465: Is a form of flag signalling using a single flag. Unlike most forms of flag signalling, which are used over relatively short distances, wigwag is designed to maximise the distance covered—up to 32 km (20 mi) in some cases. Wigwag achieved this by using a large flag—a single flag can be held with both hands unlike flag semaphore which has a flag in each hand—and using motions rather than positions as its symbols since motions are more easily seen. It

3050-519: Is a telegraph consisting of a line of stations in towers or natural high points which signal to each other by means of shutters or paddles. Signalling by means of indicator pointers was called semaphore . Early proposals for an optical telegraph system were made to the Royal Society by Robert Hooke in 1684 and were first implemented on an experimental level by Sir Richard Lovell Edgeworth in 1767. The first successful optical telegraph network

3172-458: Is a telegraph machine that can send messages from a typewriter-like keyboard and print incoming messages in readable text with no need for the operators to be trained in the telegraph code used on the line. It developed from various earlier printing telegraphs and resulted in improved transmission speeds. The Morse telegraph (1837) was originally conceived as a system marking indentations on paper tape. A chemical telegraph making blue marks improved

3294-571: Is a telegraph system using reflected sunlight for signalling. It was mainly used in areas where the electrical telegraph had not been established and generally used the same code. The most extensive heliograph network established was in Arizona and New Mexico during the Apache Wars . The heliograph was standard military equipment as late as World War II . Wireless telegraphy developed in the early 20th century became important for maritime use, and

3416-447: Is that it permits duplex communication. The Wheatstone tape reader was capable of a speed of 400 words per minute. A worldwide communication network meant that telegraph cables would have to be laid across oceans. On land cables could be run uninsulated suspended from poles. Underwater, a good insulator that was both flexible and capable of resisting the ingress of seawater was required. A solution presented itself with gutta-percha ,

3538-645: The Bildtelegraph widespread in continental Europe especially since a widely noticed transmission of a wanted-person photograph from Paris to London in 1908 used until the wider distribution of the radiofax. Its main competitors were the Bélinographe by Édouard Belin first, then since the 1930s, the Hellschreiber , invented in 1929 by German inventor Rudolf Hell , a pioneer in mechanical image scanning and transmission. The late 1880s through to

3660-496: The 3rd Academy Awards , prior to the introduction of a documentary category, With Byrd at the South Pole won the award for Best Cinematography , becoming the first documentary both to be nominated for and win an Oscar. 1952's Navajo would become the first film nominated for both Best Documentary and Best Cinematography. Woodstock was the first documentary to be nominated for Best Film Editing while Hoop Dreams

3782-530: The AFP news agency, he met Joseph Kessel , the adventurer, World War I and Free French World War II aviator, war correspondent, reporter, and novelist whose Fortune Carrée he had admired in his childhood. Over dinner and a long "Kesselian" night with a lot of alcohol and even a little bit of opium, Schoendoerffer narrated his three-year adventure in Indochina to Kessel who was impressed. Soon they parted, but with

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3904-494: The Academy Film Archive . Following the academy's practice, films are listed below by the award year (that is, the year they were released under the academy's rules for eligibility). In practice, due to the limited nature of documentary distribution, a film may be released in different years in different venues, sometimes years after production is complete. Finalists for Best Documentary Feature are selected by

4026-726: The Drummer-Crab plays a role in Apocalypse Now ' s French plantation chapters connecting the Vietnam war with the French experience in the First Indochina War. During the production of Oliver Stone 's Platoon (1986), Stone, who was also a Vietnam veteran forced his cast and crew to live like an actual platoon in the jungle, it was the very same technique used by Schoendoerffer twenty one years earlier in The 317th Platoon . Produced in 2011, Pierre Schoendoerffer,

4148-660: The English Channel (1899), from shore to ship (1899) and finally across the Atlantic (1901). A study of these demonstrations of radio, with scientists trying to work out how a phenomenon predicted to have a short range could transmit "over the horizon", led to the discovery of a radio reflecting layer in the Earth's atmosphere in 1902, later called the ionosphere . Radiotelegraphy proved effective for rescue work in sea disasters by enabling effective communication between ships and from ship to shore. In 1904, Marconi began

4270-508: The First Macedonian War . Nothing else that could be described as a true telegraph existed until the 17th century. Possibly the first alphabetic telegraph code in the modern era is due to Franz Kessler who published his work in 1616. Kessler used a lamp placed inside a barrel with a moveable shutter operated by the signaller. The signals were observed at a distance with the newly invented telescope. An optical telegraph

4392-705: The Franco-Prussian War (1870) next World War I (1914–18), his forefathers were French, and lost all their belongings. His maternal grandfather, who was an 1870 veteran, volunteered in the French Army in 1914 at the age of 66 and the rank of captain. He was killed during the Second Battle of the Aisne at Chemin des Dames . His father was the director of the Annecy hospital and died shortly after

4514-589: The Han dynasty (200 BC – 220 AD) signallers had a choice of lights, flags, or gunshots to send signals. By the Tang dynasty (618–907) a message could be sent 1,100 kilometres (700 mi) in 24 hours. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) added artillery to the possible signals. While the signalling was complex (for instance, different-coloured flags could be used to indicate enemy strength), only predetermined messages could be sent. The Chinese signalling system extended well beyond

4636-536: The Indochina War had on him. Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature The Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film is an award for documentary films . In 1941, the first awards for feature-length documentaries were bestowed as Special Awards to Kukan and Target for Tonight . They have since been bestowed competitively each year, with the exception of 1946. Copies of every winning film (along with copies of most nominees) are held by

4758-532: The London and Birmingham Railway line's chief engineer. The messages were for the operation of the rope-haulage system for pulling trains up the 1 in 77 bank. The world's first permanent railway telegraph was completed in July 1839 between London Paddington and West Drayton on the Great Western Railway with an electric telegraph using a four-needle system. The concept of a signalling "block" system

4880-471: The 1850s until well into the 20th century, British submarine cable systems dominated the world system. This was set out as a formal strategic goal, which became known as the All Red Line . In 1896, there were thirty cable-laying ships in the world and twenty-four of them were owned by British companies. In 1892, British companies owned and operated two-thirds of the world's cables and by 1923, their share

5002-530: The 1890s saw the discovery and then development of a newly understood phenomenon into a form of wireless telegraphy , called Hertzian wave wireless telegraphy, radiotelegraphy, or (later) simply " radio ". Between 1886 and 1888, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz published the results of his experiments where he was able to transmit electromagnetic waves (radio waves) through the air, proving James Clerk Maxwell 's 1873 theory of electromagnetic radiation . Many scientists and inventors experimented with this new phenomenon but

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5124-517: The Academy, is it? It's 5% of the Academy." The awards process has also been criticized for emphasizing a documentary's subject matter over its style or quality. In 2009, Entertainment Weekly 's Owen Gleiberman wrote about the documentary branch members' penchant for choosing "movies that the selection committee deemed good because they're good for you... a kind of self-defeating aesthetic of granola documentary correctness." In 2014, following

5246-534: The British government followed—by March 1897, Marconi had transmitted Morse code signals over a distance of about 6 km ( 3 + 1 ⁄ 2  mi) across Salisbury Plain . On 13 May 1897, Marconi, assisted by George Kemp, a Cardiff Post Office engineer, transmitted the first wireless signals over water to Lavernock (near Penarth in Wales) from Flat Holm . His star rising, he was soon sending signals across

5368-603: The Documentary Branch based on a preliminary ballot. A second preferential ballot determines the five nominees. Prior to the 78th Academy Awards , there were twelve films shortlisted. These are the additional films that were shortlisted. For this Academy Award category, the following superlatives emerge: Arthur Cohn – 3 awards (resulting from 4 nominations) ; Simon Chinn – 2 awards ; Jacques-Yves Cousteau – 2 awards ; Walt Disney – 2 awards (resulting from 7 nominations; Disney has an additional 2 wins in

5490-719: The Documentary Short Subject category) ; Rob Epstein – 2 awards ; Marvin Hier – 2 awards ; Barbara Kopple – 2 awards Mark Jonathan Harris – 2 awards Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 , at the time the highest-grossing documentary film in movie history, was ruled ineligible because Moore had opted to have it played on television prior to the 2004 election. Previously, the 1982 winner Just Another Missing Kid had already been broadcast in Canada and won that country's ACTRA award for excellence in television at

5612-756: The Fisherman shot in Vietnam, and Iceland Fisherman . The following year he went back to the Pays de la Loire region and embarked on a Swedish cargo ship at Boulogne . In 1947, on board a merchant navy coaster , he sailed for two years in the Baltic Sea and North Sea . This experience would later find echoes in Seven Days at Sea , The Drummer-Crab and even in Above the Clouds . From 1949 to 1950 he left

5734-565: The French prisoner that he had found his reels and had watched them. Karmen kept the reels though, so as a result the only footage covering the battle is from the Viet Minh's perspective. Schoendoerffer was released by the Viet Minh four months later, on 1 September 1954. On the battle's tenth anniversary, in Paris, Schoendoerffer was invited with Bigeard to comment on the Viet Minh footage, including segments from Vietnam , which were broadcast on

5856-694: The French public channel ORTF ( Cinq colonnes à la une show) for the first time. After the First Indochina War Schoendoerffer left the French army and became a war reporter-photographer in South Vietnam for French and American news magazines: Paris Match , Paris-Presse , Time , Life , Look . In April 1955 he left South Vietnam to return to France, stopping along the way in Hong Kong , Taipei , Japan, Hawaii and San Francisco . In Hong Kong, through

5978-645: The Great Wall. Signal towers away from the wall were used to give early warning of an attack. Others were built even further out as part of the protection of trade routes, especially the Silk Road . Signal fires were widely used in Europe and elsewhere for military purposes. The Roman army made frequent use of them, as did their enemies, and the remains of some of the stations still exist. Few details have been recorded of European/Mediterranean signalling systems and

6100-466: The Morse system connected Baltimore to Washington , and by 1861 the west coast of the continent was connected to the east coast. The Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph , in a series of improvements, also ended up with a one-wire system, but still using their own code and needle displays . The electric telegraph quickly became a means of more general communication. The Morse system was officially adopted as

6222-569: The Oscar documentary shortlist exclusions that year, The Hollywood Reporter 's Scott Feinberg reacted to Red Army 's omission: "...no matter which 15 titles the doc branch selected, plenty of other great ones would be left on the outside. That is the case, most egregiously, with Gabe Polsky 's Red Army (Sony Classics), a masterful look at the role of sports in society and Russian-American relations ". ( Icarus , another documentary related to sports and Russian-American relations, later won

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6344-644: The Oscar.) In 2017, following the win of the eight-hour O.J.: Made in America in this category, the academy announced that multi-part and limited series would be ineligible for the award in the future, even if they are not broadcast after their Oscar-qualifying release (as was O.J.: Made in America ). Various other acclaimed documentaries have not been nominated. Though Academy rules do not expressly preclude documentaries from being nominated in other competitive categories, documentaries are typically considered ineligible for nominations in categories that presume

6466-606: The Sentinel of Memory is the first feature documentary about him. Directed by Raphaël Millet , it is a co-production between Nocturnes Productions and the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA, the French National Institute for Audiovisual). In it, Pierre Schoendoerffer revisits his life and career, with a strong focus on the impact that his experience as a war cinematographer for the French army during

6588-481: The announcement of the shortlist of eligible feature documentary nominees, Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard publicly criticized Academy documentary voters after they excluded SPC's Red Army from the shortlist. "It's a sign of some really old people in the documentary area of the Academy. There's a lot of people who are really up in their years. It's shocking to me that that film ( Red Army ) didn't get in," Bernard said. Additionally, in his reporting of

6710-539: The battle, from the Viet Minh raising the Red flag over General de Castries 's bunker staged a few weeks after the siege, to the French Union POWs column marching from Dien Bien Phu to the re-education camp (a crane was used for the shooting), that are featured in Вьетнам ("Vietnam", 1955). During this time, Karmen had some friendly meetings with Schoendoerffer; they spoke about their job, and he revealed to

6832-481: The battle, on 7 May 1954, he was captured and sent to a Viet Minh re-education camp . During the march to the camp, following Jean Péraud, he tried to escape with paratroopers commander Marcel Bigeard , but he was caught. Péraud vanished though and has since been Missing in action . In prison, his life was spared at the insistence of Roman Karmen, the Soviet war reporter who directed all the main sequences illustrating

6954-438: The consensus was that these new waves (similar to light) would be just as short range as light, and, therefore, useless for long range communication. At the end of 1894, the young Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi began working on the idea of building a commercial wireless telegraphy system based on the use of Hertzian waves (radio waves), a line of inquiry that he noted other inventors did not seem to be pursuing. Building on

7076-411: The coordinates of the letter of the alphabet being transmitted. The number of said torches held up signalled the grid square that contained the letter. There is no definite record of the system ever being used, but there are several passages in ancient texts that some think are suggestive. Holzmann and Pehrson, for instance, suggest that Livy is describing its use by Philip V of Macedon in 207 BC during

7198-579: The defeat, just as the other soldiers destroyed their equipment so that it would not be captured by the Viet Minh, Schoendoerffer destroyed his films and camera. This event was later depicted on screen by his own son, Frédéric, in Pierre Schoendoerffer's 1992 docudrama Dien Bien Phu recreating the battle. At the end of the battle in 1954, he saved and secretly hid six SCA 1-minute reels which ended up in Roman Karmen 's hands. After

7320-458: The earliest electrical telegraphs. A telegraph message sent by an electrical telegraph operator or telegrapher using Morse code (or a printing telegraph operator using plain text) was known as a telegram. A cablegram was a message sent by a submarine telegraph cable, often shortened to "cable" or "wire". The suffix -gram is derived from ancient Greek: γραμμα ( gramma ), meaning something written, i.e. telegram means something written at

7442-576: The end of the battle of France (1940), where he was injured. He met his wife Patricia in Morocco (then a Spanish-French joint protectorate ), she was a journalist for France-Soir . They had three children, actor and screenwriter Frédéric Schoendoerffer , director and producer Ludovic Schoendoerffer and actress Amélie Schoendoerffer. Pierre Schoendoerffer died, aged 83, on 14 March 2012 in France. During World War II, Schoendoerffer lost his father and

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7564-537: The erroneous belief that there was an electrified atmospheric stratum accessible at low altitude. They thought atmosphere current, connected with a return path using "Earth currents" would allow for wireless telegraphy as well as supply power for the telegraph, doing away with artificial batteries. A more practical demonstration of wireless transmission via conduction came in Amos Dolbear 's 1879 magneto electric telephone that used ground conduction to transmit over

7686-415: The extensive definition used by Chappe, Morse argued that the term telegraph can strictly be applied only to systems that transmit and record messages at a distance. This is to be distinguished from semaphore , which merely transmits messages. Smoke signals, for instance, are to be considered semaphore, not telegraph. According to Morse, telegraph dates only from 1832 when Pavel Schilling invented one of

7808-508: The fight against Geronimo and other Apache bands in the Apache Wars . Miles had previously set up the first heliograph line in the US between Fort Keogh and Fort Custer in Montana . He used the heliograph to fill in vast, thinly populated areas that were not covered by the electric telegraph. Twenty-six stations covered an area 320 by 480 km (200 by 300 mi). In a test of the system,

7930-623: The first commercial service to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ships, which could incorporate them into their on-board newspapers. A regular transatlantic radio-telegraph service was finally begun on 17 October 1907. Notably, Marconi's apparatus was used to help rescue efforts after the sinking of RMS  Titanic . Britain's postmaster-general summed up, referring to the Titanic disaster, "Those who have been saved, have been saved through one man, Mr. Marconi...and his marvellous invention." The successful development of radiotelegraphy

8052-568: The first documentary and first animated film nominated for Best International Feature Film, although it was not nominated for Best Documentary Feature. The Danish-language animated documentary Flee was later nominated for Best International Feature, Best Documentary Feature, and Best Animated Feature, the first film to accomplish this feat. Nine documentaries have received nominations for Best Original Song : Mondo Cane (for Riz Ortolani and Nino Oliviero 's " More "), An Inconvenient Truth (for Melissa Etheridge 's " I Need to Wake Up ",

8174-463: The five films (including eventual winner Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt ) selected that year as nominees for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. They noted that Michael Moore 's Roger & Me (distributed by Warner Brothers ) was omitted from the nominees, although it had been highly praised by numerous critics and was ranked by many critics as one of the top ten films of

8296-714: The ground without any wires connecting the stations. Other attempts were made to send the electric current through bodies of water, to span rivers, for example. Prominent experimenters along these lines included Samuel F. B. Morse in the United States and James Bowman Lindsay in Great Britain, who in August 1854, was able to demonstrate transmission across a mill dam at a distance of 500 yards (457 metres). US inventors William Henry Ward (1871) and Mahlon Loomis (1872) developed electrical conduction systems based on

8418-524: The high production budget and so the project was eventually cancelled. Young Schoendoerffer was also inspired by Hollywood movies he watched instead of going to high school class. In The 317th Platoon , there's a running reference to Michael Curtiz ' Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) historical movie. In 2004, a L'Express journalist asked Schoendoerffer his favourite movie: Akira Kurosawa 's Ran (1985). Military photograph Jean Péraud

8540-419: The ideas of previous scientists and inventors Marconi re-engineered their apparatus by trial and error attempting to build a radio-based wireless telegraphic system that would function the same as wired telegraphy. He would work on the system through 1895 in his lab and then in field tests making improvements to extend its range. After many breakthroughs, including applying the wired telegraphy concept of grounding

8662-561: The largest ship of its day, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel . An overland telegraph from Britain to India was first connected in 1866 but was unreliable so a submarine telegraph cable was connected in 1870. Several telegraph companies were combined to form the Eastern Telegraph Company in 1872. Australia was first linked to the rest of the world in October 1872 by a submarine telegraph cable at Darwin . From

8784-429: The late 1950s, he adapted on screen two Pierre Loti novels, first Iceland Fisherman (1886) then Ramuncho (1897). Following his 1992 motion picture Dien Bien Phu , Schoendoerffer spent three years working on the screen adaptation of his favourite writer Joseph Conrad 's Typhoon (1902). The script was ready and the filmmaker started location spotting for shooting but the producer didn't find enough money to cover

8906-415: The letter post on price, and competition from the telephone , which removed their speed advantage, drove the telegraph into decline from 1920 onwards. The few remaining telegraph applications were largely taken over by alternatives on the internet towards the end of the 20th century. The word telegraph (from Ancient Greek : τῆλε ( têle ) 'at a distance' and γράφειν ( gráphein ) 'to write')

9028-421: The line at his own expense and agreed that the railway could have free use of it in exchange for the right to open it up to the public. Most of the early electrical systems required multiple wires (Ronalds' system was an exception), but the system developed in the United States by Morse and Vail was a single-wire system. This was the system that first used the soon-to-become-ubiquitous Morse code . By 1844,

9150-624: The modern International Morse code) to aid differentiating from the morse dot. Use of the heliograph declined from 1915 onwards, but remained in service in Britain and British Commonwealth countries for some time. Australian forces used the heliograph as late as 1942 in the Western Desert Campaign of World War II . Some form of heliograph was used by the mujahideen in the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989). A teleprinter

9272-593: The only nominee from a documentary to win), Chasing Ice (for J. Ralph 's "Before My Time"), Racing Extinction (for Ralph and Anhoni 's " Manta Ray "), Jim: The James Foley Story (for Ralph and Sting 's " The Empty Chair "), Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me (for Glen Campbell and Julian Raymond 's " I'm Not Gonna Miss You "), The Hunting Ground (for Lady Gaga and Diane Warren 's " Til It Happens To You "), RBG (for Warren's "I'll Fight") and American Symphony (for Batiste's "It Never Went Away"). Documentaries nominated for their scores include This

9394-399: The possible messages. One of the few for which details are known is a system invented by Aeneas Tacticus (4th century BC). Tacticus's system had water filled pots at the two signal stations which were drained in synchronisation. Annotation on a floating scale indicated which message was being sent or received. Signals sent by means of torches indicated when to start and stop draining to keep

9516-462: The promise to keep in touch in Paris. In Hollywood Schoendoerffer became an apprentice on a movie for ten days, thanks to his connections with Life magazine, but without a Green Card he was eventually forced to leave. Back in France, he signed his first important contract with Pathé Journal and two weeks later he flew to Morocco , where the French Algeria anti-colonial rebellion

9638-523: The recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas pigeon post is not. Ancient signalling systems, although sometimes quite extensive and sophisticated as in China, were generally not capable of transmitting arbitrary text messages. Possible messages were fixed and predetermined, so such systems are thus not true telegraphs. The earliest true telegraph put into widespread use

9760-419: The same run of tape. The advantage of doing this is that messages can be sent at a steady, fast rate making maximum use of the available telegraph lines. The economic advantage of doing this is greatest on long, busy routes where the cost of the extra step of preparing the tape is outweighed by the cost of providing more telegraph lines. The first machine to use punched tape was Bain's teleprinter (Bain, 1843), but

9882-612: The script, Raoul Coutard , a First Indochina War photograph (SPI) veteran was in charge of the cinematography on his first film (later he would join Jean-Luc Godard ), Jacques Dupont assisted Schoendoerffer with the direction and Georges de Beauregard produced it. In 1958, he married "Pat", Patricia, the journalist he met in Morocco in 1955. In 1959, Pierre Lazareff, founder of the newspaper France Soir (where Patricia Schoendoerffer and Joseph Kessel worked), asked him to direct

10004-573: The sea to fulfill mandatory military service in the Alpine infantry's 13e Bataillon de Chasseurs Alpins ("13th Alpine Hunters Battalion", 13e BCA) based in Chambéry and Modane , Rhône-Alpes . The Alpine infantry would later be the title character's corps in The Honor of a Captain . Young Schoendoerffer had realized he was not born to be a mariner, but he did not want to be a soldier either, thinking he would be wasting his time. What he wanted to do

10126-415: The shortlist." Among other rule changes taking effect in 2013, the academy began requiring a documentary to have been reviewed by either The New York Times or Los Angeles Times , and be commercially released for at least one week in both of those cities. Advocating the rule change, Michael Moore said "When people get the award for best documentary and they go on stage and thank the Academy, it's not really

10248-455: The speed of recording ( Bain , 1846), but was delayed by a patent challenge from Morse. The first true printing telegraph (that is printing in plain text) used a spinning wheel of types in the manner of a daisy wheel printer ( House , 1846, improved by Hughes , 1855). The system was adopted by Western Union . Early teleprinters used the Baudot code , a five-bit sequential binary code. This

10370-579: The standard for continental European telegraphy in 1851 with a revised code, which later became the basis of International Morse Code . However, Great Britain and the British Empire continued to use the Cooke and Wheatstone system, in some places as late as the 1930s. Likewise, the United States continued to use American Morse code internally, requiring translation operators skilled in both codes for international messages. Railway signal telegraphy

10492-462: The synchronisation. None of the signalling systems discussed above are true telegraphs in the sense of a system that can transmit arbitrary messages over arbitrary distances. Lines of signalling relay stations can send messages to any required distance, but all these systems are limited to one extent or another in the range of messages that they can send. A system like flag semaphore , with an alphabetic code, can certainly send any given message, but

10614-559: The system is designed for short-range communication between two persons. An engine order telegraph , used to send instructions from the bridge of a ship to the engine room, fails to meet both criteria; it has a limited distance and very simple message set. There was only one ancient signalling system described that does meet these criteria. That was a system using the Polybius square to encode an alphabet. Polybius (2nd century BC) suggested using two successive groups of torches to identify

10736-619: The system saw only limited use. Later versions of Bain's system achieved speeds up to 1000 words per minute, far faster than a human operator could achieve. The first widely used system (Wheatstone, 1858) was first put into service with the British General Post Office in 1867. A novel feature of the Wheatstone system was the use of bipolar encoding . That is, both positive and negative polarity voltages were used. Bipolar encoding has several advantages, one of which

10858-560: The theatrical adaptation of his 1981 novel Up there ( Là-Haut ). Pierre Schoendoerffer received acclaim in international short and feature film festivals. As a writer he won multiple festival, academy and military awards and prizes, including the Prix Vauban, in 1984, (celebrating his life achievement.) In France he is famous for his 1977 three-time César Award -winning Le Crabe-Tambour ("Drummer Crab"), based on his French Academy -award–winning self-titled novel. His first success

10980-555: The time of its nomination. In 1990, a group of 45 filmmakers filed a protest to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences over a potential conflict of interest involving Mitchell Block . They noted that Block was a member of the Documentary Steering Committee, which selects films as nominees, but he had a conflict of interest because his company Direct Cinema owned the distribution rights to three of

11102-537: The transmitter and receiver, Marconi was able, by early 1896, to transmit radio far beyond the short ranges that had been predicted. Having failed to interest the Italian government, the 22-year-old inventor brought his telegraphy system to Britain in 1896 and met William Preece , a Welshman, who was a major figure in the field and Chief Engineer of the General Post Office . A series of demonstrations for

11224-445: The two stations to form a complete electrical circuit or "loop". In 1837, however, Carl August von Steinheil of Munich , Germany , found that by connecting one leg of the apparatus at each station to metal plates buried in the ground, he could eliminate one wire and use a single wire for telegraphic communication. This led to speculation that it might be possible to eliminate both wires and therefore transmit telegraph signals through

11346-407: The voting pool and improved his odds. Following protests by many documentarians, the nominating system subsequently was changed. Hoop Dreams director Steve James said "With so few people looking at any given film, it only takes one to dislike a film and its chances for making the short list are diminished greatly. So they've got to do something, I think, to make the process more sane for deciding

11468-423: The work is fictitious, including Best Production Design , Best Costume Design , and acting. To date, no documentaries have been nominated for Best Picture , or Best Director . The Quiet One was nominated for Best Story and Screenplay . No documentary feature has yet been nominated for Best Picture, although Chang was nominated in the "Unique and Artistic Production" category at the 1927/28 awards. At

11590-494: The year. The controversy over Hoop Dreams ' exclusion was enough to have the Academy Awards begin the process to change its documentary voting system. Roger Ebert, who had declared it to be the best 1994 movie of any kind, looked into its failure to receive a nomination: "We learned, through very reliable sources, that the members of the committee had a system. They carried little flashlights. When one gave up on

11712-459: Was a "big brother" for him — he was three years younger — and "the most important person he met in Indochina" as well as an inspiring character model. His own experience as a mariner, a Vietnam veteran and a globetrotter is a strong inspiration in most of his works. This is obvious in the Drummer-Crab , but the most autobiographical work is Dien Bien Phu (1992), where his elder son Frédéric impersonates him. French actress Aurore Clément seen in

11834-459: Was a competitor to electrical telegraphy using submarine telegraph cables in international communications. Telegrams became a popular means of sending messages once telegraph prices had fallen sufficiently. Traffic became high enough to spur the development of automated systems— teleprinters and punched tape transmission. These systems led to new telegraph codes , starting with the Baudot code . However, telegrams were never able to compete with

11956-485: Was a telegraph code developed for use on the French telegraph using a five-key keyboard ( Baudot , 1874). Teleprinters generated the same code from a full alphanumeric keyboard. A feature of the Baudot code, and subsequent telegraph codes, was that, unlike Morse code, every character has a code of the same length making it more machine friendly. The Baudot code was used on the earliest ticker tape machines ( Calahan , 1867),

12078-474: Was appointed Ingénieur-Télégraphiste and charged with establishing a line of stations between Paris and Lille , a distance of 230 kilometres (140 mi). It was used to carry dispatches for the war between France and Austria. In 1794, it brought news of a French capture of Condé-sur-l'Escaut from the Austrians less than an hour after it occurred. A decision to replace the system with an electric telegraph

12200-399: Was being emulated. He became a war correspondent, filming the riots for the French audience - Morocco was then a French protectorate . There he met Patricia, a journalist at France Soir , who later became his wife. In 1956, he resigned from Pathé, whose representative threatened him: "You are leaving us? So you'll never do cinema again, because we are huge!". At this point Schoendoerffer

12322-401: Was coined by the French inventor of the semaphore telegraph , Claude Chappe , who also coined the word semaphore . A telegraph is a device for transmitting and receiving messages over long distances, i.e., for telegraphy. The word telegraph alone generally refers to an electrical telegraph . Wireless telegraphy is transmission of messages over radio with telegraphic codes. Contrary to

12444-485: Was confused with his young career, the major Pathé bringing him back to the situation he experienced in 1951. As he narrated his Hong Kong meeting with Kessel to his fiancée Patricia, she convinced him to contact the one he regarded as an "historical monument". Kessel was actually searching for him since he had a film project in Afghanistan , The Devil's Pass , and he wanted Schoendoerffer to direct it. Kessel wrote

12566-414: Was demonstrated on the London and Birmingham Railway in July of the same year. In July 1839, a five-needle, five-wire system was installed to provide signalling over a record distance of 21 km on a section of the Great Western Railway between London Paddington station and West Drayton. However, in trying to get railway companies to take up his telegraph more widely for railway signalling , Cooke

12688-421: Was developed in Britain from the 1840s onward. It was used to manage railway traffic and to prevent accidents as part of the railway signalling system. On 12 June 1837 Cooke and Wheatstone were awarded a patent for an electric telegraph. This was demonstrated between Euston railway station —where Wheatstone was located—and the engine house at Camden Town—where Cooke was stationed, together with Robert Stephenson ,

12810-487: Was enough to push it to sixth place." In 2000, Arthur Cohn, the producer of the winning One Day in September boasted "I won this without showing it in a single theater!" Cohn had hit upon the tactic of showing his Oscar entries at invitation-only screenings, and to as few other people as possible. Oscar bylaws at the time required voters to have seen all five nominated documentaries; by limiting his audience, Cohn shrank

12932-481: Was filmmaking. As he failed to enter the television and cinema industries, he began photography instead. One day as he read a Le Figaro article about war cameraman Georges Kowal , Killed in action during the First Indochina War, he decided to try his luck in the Service Cinématographique des Armées ("Armies' Cinematographic Service", SCA, now ECPAD). In late 1951, he volunteered to become

13054-510: Was in 1965 with his Cannes Film Festival Best Screenplay winning The 317th Platoon ( La 317e Section ). Both films are based on his experience in the First Indochina War. He is most known abroad, particularly in the United States, for his 1967 Oscar -winning Vietnam War B&W documentary, The Anderson Platoon ( La Section Anderson ), originally made for the French public channel ORTF 's popular Cinq colonnes à la une monthly show. It earned him an Oscar, an International Emmy Award ,

13176-605: Was invented by Claude Chappe and operated in France from 1793. The two most extensive systems were Chappe's in France, with branches into neighbouring countries, and the system of Abraham Niclas Edelcrantz in Sweden. During 1790–1795, at the height of the French Revolution , France needed a swift and reliable communication system to thwart the war efforts of its enemies. In 1790, the Chappe brothers set about devising

13298-536: Was invented by US Army surgeon Albert J. Myer in the 1850s who later became the first head of the Signal Corps . Wigwag was used extensively during the American Civil War where it filled a gap left by the electrical telegraph. Although the electrical telegraph had been in use for more than a decade, the network did not yet reach everywhere and portable, ruggedized equipment suitable for military use

13420-782: Was made in 1846, but it took a decade before it was fully taken out of service. The fall of Sevastopol was reported by Chappe telegraph in 1855. The Prussian system was put into effect in the 1830s. However, they were highly dependent on good weather and daylight to work and even then could accommodate only about two words per minute. The last commercial semaphore link ceased operation in Sweden in 1880. As of 1895, France still operated coastal commercial semaphore telegraph stations, for ship-to-shore communication. The early ideas for an electric telegraph included in 1753 using electrostatic deflections of pith balls, proposals for electrochemical bubbles in acid by Campillo in 1804 and von Sömmering in 1809. The first experimental system over

13542-567: Was not doing well with his studies at school in Annecy. In winter 1942–43, he read Joseph Kessel 's epic adventure novel Fortune Carrée (1932), which changed his ambitions; he wanted to become a mariner and travel the world In 1946, he spent his summer as a fisherman aboard a small fishing trawler in the Bourgneuf-en-Retz bay, near Pornic , Pays de la Loire (close to Brittany ). From this experience he would later direct Than,

13664-400: Was not immediately available. Permanent or semi-permanent stations were established during the war, some of them towers of enormous height and the system was extensive enough to be described as a communications network. A heliograph is a telegraph that transmits messages by flashing sunlight with a mirror, usually using Morse code. The idea for a telegraph of this type was first proposed as

13786-455: Was preceded by a 50-year history of ingenious but ultimately unsuccessful experiments by inventors to achieve wireless telegraphy by other means. Several wireless electrical signaling schemes based on the (sometimes erroneous) idea that electric currents could be conducted long-range through water, ground, and air were investigated for telegraphy before practical radio systems became available. The original telegraph lines used two wires between

13908-433: Was proposed by Cooke in 1842. Railway signal telegraphy did not change in essence from Cooke's initial concept for more than a century. In this system each line of railway was divided into sections or blocks of varying length. Entry to and exit from the block was to be authorised by electric telegraph and signalled by the line-side semaphore signals, so that only a single train could occupy the rails. In Cooke's original system,

14030-501: Was quickly followed by a different system developed in the United States by Samuel Morse . The electric telegraph was slower to develop in France due to the established optical telegraph system, but an electrical telegraph was put into use with a code compatible with the Chappe optical telegraph. The Morse system was adopted as the international standard in 1865, using a modified Morse code developed in Germany in 1848. The heliograph

14152-549: Was rejected several times in favour of the more familiar, but shorter range, steam-powered pneumatic signalling. Even when his telegraph was taken up, it was considered experimental and the company backed out of a plan to finance extending the telegraph line out to Slough . However, this led to a breakthrough for the electric telegraph, as up to this point the Great Western had insisted on exclusive use and refused Cooke permission to open public telegraph offices. Cooke extended

14274-496: Was still 42.7 percent. During World War I , Britain's telegraph communications were almost completely uninterrupted while it was able to quickly cut Germany's cables worldwide. In 1843, Scottish inventor Alexander Bain invented a device that could be considered the first facsimile machine . He called his invention a "recording telegraph". Bain's telegraph was able to transmit images by electrical wires. Frederick Bakewell made several improvements on Bain's design and demonstrated

14396-404: Was still used, although it was accepted that poor weather ruled it out on many days of the year. France had an extensive optical telegraph system dating from Napoleonic times and was even slower to take up electrical systems. Eventually, electrostatic telegraphs were abandoned in favour of electromagnetic systems. An early experimental system ( Schilling , 1832) led to a proposal to establish

14518-617: Was the Chappe telegraph , an optical telegraph invented by Claude Chappe in the late 18th century. The system was used extensively in France, and European nations occupied by France, during the Napoleonic era . The electric telegraph started to replace the optical telegraph in the mid-19th century. It was first taken up in Britain in the form of the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph , initially used mostly as an aid to railway signalling . This

14640-442: Was the second (although it was, controversially, not nominated for Best Documentary Feature). Woodstock is also the only documentary to receive a nomination for Best Sound . Honeyland became the first documentary to be nominated for both Best International Feature Film and Best Documentary Feature. The following year, Collective would accomplish the same double nomination. Prior to this, Waltz with Bashir became

14762-480: Was used by British military in many colonial wars, including the Anglo-Zulu War (1879). At some point, a morse key was added to the apparatus to give the operator the same degree of control as in the electric telegraph. Another type of heliograph was the heliostat or heliotrope fitted with a Colomb shutter. The heliostat was essentially a surveying instrument with a fixed mirror and so could not transmit

14884-603: Was used to play the role of both the Viet Minh and the State of Vietnam national army fighting on the French Union 's side against the Communists. Meanwhile, men from the French 11th Parachute Brigade played the role of the French paratroopers. In the 2000s (decade), his latest productions consist of the 2003 novel The Butterfly Wing ( L'Aile du Papillon ) and Above the Clouds ( Là-Haut, un roi au-dessus des nuages ),

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