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What Are You Watching? is a weekly space for The A.V Club’s film critics and readers to share their thoughts, observations, and opinions on movies new and old.

I watched Wings Over Everest, a half-hour “documentary” that won an Oscar in the defunct Best Short Subject (Novelty) category back in 1936, because I’ve long been fascinated by the life of one of its directors, Geoffrey Barkas. He was a specialist in adventure footage, best remembered for directing the African unit on the 1937 adaptation of King Solomon’s Mines, but when World War II broke out, he became the head of the British military’s famous Middle East camouflage division. The unit was composed of avant-garde painters, set designers, zoologists, and even professional stage magicians, and during the North African campaign, they invented ingenious ways to disguise hundreds of tanks as trucks, built dummy supply lines and ...