Category: This Film Is 100 Years Old

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Plymouth’s Pram Derby (1923) / Plymouth’s First Air Mail Test Trip (1923) / Cinematographic View of the Royal Albert Bridge (1901)

Three short bits of documentary film about Plymouth.

Plymouth’s Pram Derby is 3 glorious minutes depicting the titular event from 1923. Wild be-hatted crowds, determined women competing for some arbitrary prize, and finally three surprisingly sweet portraits of the winners. I loved basically all of this.

Plymouth’s First Air Mail Test Trip (also from 1923, and shot, as the pram race was, by G.E. Prance) isn’t half as good, consisting of 2 minutes of bowler-hatted men holding up sacks while looking as proud as can be. I did like the atmospheric shot of a boat arriving at the start, however, which almost made up for the lack of aeroplane action.

The final film here is from 1901, and directed by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon (whose documentary footage I’ve included a couple of times here before, although I probably should have watched more). Cinematographic View of the Royal Albert Bridge is five whole minutes of incredibly beautiful footage of ships and coast, taken from a camera mounted on another ship in the harbour, before it eventually arrives at Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge.

The still pictures don’t really do the footage justice, losing the breathtaking beauty of the parallaxing scroll as the camera smoothly sails across the sea. You can still get a nice look in th epicture below at the weird futurism as these archaic looking ships sail past the massive bridge from some far distant future at the end though (futurism that is doubly weird because the bridge was built in 1865.)

In conclusion, I like ships and boats, I suppose. And the sea.

And prams.

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Notes:

1. I watched all these on the BFI Player. Prams/Planes/Boats

2. I went to Plymouth recently. I hurt my knee, got accosted by some drunk, and then caught covid.

3. Great day out, would recommend.

4. But apart from that it was quite nice.

5. Actually the best bit was where they’d tried to bury any evidence that there had ever been a crazy golf course down by the seafront, so now all the old holes looked like ancient barrows for some long dead sequence of viking kings.

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Film Information

Title: Plymouth’s Pram Derby
Director: G.E. Prance
Year: 1923
Duration: 3 minutes
Watch: BFI Player

Title: Plymouth’s First Air Mail Test Trip
Director: G.E. Prance
Year: 1923
Duration: 2 minutes
Watch: BFI Player

Title: Cinematographic View of the Royal Albert Bridge
Directors: Mitchell and Kenyon
Year: 1901
Duration: 5 minutes
Watch: BFI Player

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This Film Is 100 Years Old

The Cup Shall Come South! (1923) / Cup Final 1923 (1923) / Getting Ready For Cup Final (1923)

The Cup Shall Come South! is a short series of portraits of the West Ham team from 1923, shortly before they played that year’s FA Cup Final.

The first eleven stand in a line, then look into the camera one by one, some confidently, some nervously. Embarrassment, boredom, maybe even a hint of anger, fury. It’s all there.

Nowadays the form’s so perfected, every player gurning or fist clenching to the camera in choreographed isolation for the on screen line-up imagery that there’s not a trace of personality anywhere at all, no emotion but pre-packaged passion.

But here it still feels real, somehow. A glimpse of an illusion of who they really all are.

I always find these sort of film portraits really moving, for some reason. I couldn’t tell you why. I recently watched the short docuemntary film Portrait, in which a series of Russian farmers stand still and look directly at the camera in a manner similar to this, and thought it was kind of beautiful. And I’ve always really liked Andy Warhol’s screen test portraits.

If I wasn’t such a nervous man I’d ask everyone to let me take a minute long image of them just standing there, looking at the camera, looking right into our eyes, giving us the chance to see right into their souls.

Anyway, unfortunately for West Ham the cup did not come south for them at all, and wouldn’t for quite some time again.

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Notes

1. I watched these on the BFI Player: The Cup Shall Come South!; and Cup Final 1923; Getting Ready For Cup Final.

2. The 1923 FA Cup final was the first at Wembley, the so-called White Horse Final, where 250,000 people turned up and only that fabled white horse saved the day.

3. Although he doesn’t turn up much in the footage presented here.

4. You do get a shot of his arse but that’s about it.

5. The black horses got robbed really.

6. Especially because the best bit of this footage is when the ref and the West Ham captain are waiting to do the coin toss, and some police come charging past.

7. Which is a genuinely thrilling bit of footage.

8. And not done justice by that still at all.

9. Also a lot of the footage their makes me a bit queasy

10. As wildly overcrowded crowd footage often does.

11. I mean just look at it.

12. I’m just glad everyone was okay.

13. Also all this footage is even more impressive/amazing/terrifying after watching “Getting Ready For Cup Final“, and seeing the absolute state of Wembley a few months before, half built, eerily empty.

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Film Information

Title: The Cup Shall Come South!
Year: 1923
Duration: 2 minutes
Watch: BFI Player

Title: Cup Final 1923
Year: 1923
Duration: 5 minutes
Watch: BFI Player

Title: Getting Ready For Cup Final
Year: 1923
Duration: 1 minute
Watch: BFI Player

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This Film Is 100 Years Old

Hawick Ba’ (1923)

Hawick Ba’ is one of those fabled folk versions of football, where an entire town rampage around after the ball in a frenzy, actually caught on camera here in 1923 (in the town of Hawick in Scotland) in this fairly wonderful minute or so of newsreel footage.

If this film had a soundtrack it would be schoolchildren shouting “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!” on a loop, forever.

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Notes

1. I watched this on the BFI Player.

2. Having watched this several times now, I still do not quite grasp the rules.

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Film Information

Title: Hawick Ba’
Year: 1923
Duration: 1 minute
Watch: BFI Player

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Various Bits Of Football News (1923)

A round-up of up to the minute football news, live from 1923.

First, in a news piece entitled £6,000 Paid For A Centre Forward, we discover Chelsea have broken the transfer record to sign some randomised player who, from the wonderful 30 second portrait of him at the start (see above), already seems to be deeply regretting his life choices.

Then, in They Call It Football, we discover that Spurs are no better than a bunch of clowns (see below). Poor old Spurs.

More live football news as and when I receive it.

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Notes

1. I watched all these on the BFI Player.

2. I watched some 100 year old football on here a couple of years ago too, which you can read about here.

3. When Spurs weren’t clowns, due to the year ending in 1.

4. Not that that numerical trick works these days anymore

5. That Spurs charity match footage also features a nice bit of “Ceremonial kick-off” footage.

6. Which seems to have been retired ever since Diana Ross brought shame upon such antics at the 1994 World Cup.

7. But which in 1923 was still all the rage.

8. There’s a particularly fine example of it here.

9. In which the Lord Mayor of Manchester looks spectacularly pleased with himself for managing to kick a football of its spot without messing the task up at all.

10. “Look at his face! Just look at his face!” etc etc

11. (Also there’s a few minutes of extra bonus early 1923 football footage here)

12. (Which I completely forgot to add)

13. (Or grab any screenshots from)

14. (But I’ve mentioned it now so it’s okay)

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Film Information

Title: £6,000 Paid For A Centre Forward
Year: 1923
Duration: 1 minute
Watch: BFI Player

Title: They Call It Football
Year: 1923
Duration: 1 minute
Watch: BFI Player

Title: Million Spectators Welcome Return of Football
Year: 1923
Duration: 2 minuts
Watch: BFI Player

Title: 4th Round Of The Cup 1923
Year: 1923
Duration: 2 minutes
Watch: BFI Player

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Merry-Go-Round (1923)

Merry-Go-Round is a 1923 film directed by Erich von Stroheim and Rupert Julian, starring Norman Kerry as the marvellously named Count Hohenegg, who falls in love with Mary Philbin’s beautiful organ grinder at the local fair.

This was intended to be Erich von Stroheim’s follow up to the magnificent Foolish Wives, and indeed shares a lot in terms of themes and plot, but after a troubled start to production, von Stroheim was fired, as described in this pretty amazing sentence from the article on wikipedia:

“After a number of delays in filming, including the derailment of a prop streetcar, the overloading of the studio electrical system due to excessive night shooting, an inebriated lead man, the general disaffection of the extras, and delays caused by a search for an appropriate orangutan, the upper echelon at Universal mobilized against von Strohiem, and Thalberg was authorized to terminate von Stroheim as director.”

After that he was replaced with Rupert Julian (who later directed the Lon Chaney version of The Phantom of The Opera in 1925), and whether that’s the cause or not, Merry-Go-Round’s kind of limp and lifeless, and fairly disappointing, especially in comparison to Foolish Wives.

Although as much of the strength of that is in Erich von Stroheim’s performance, maybe it wasn’t his sacking as director which was the problem but their refusal to hire him as an actor. His replacement here, Norman Kerry, is hilariously inert as a leading man, which kind of undermines the romance angle entirely here.

Anyway, having said that, it’s not all bad. Mary Philbin has a wonderfully expressive face (which is just as well, as about tow thirds of the film seems to be close ups of her as she suffers through just aboute every emotion possible), there’s some nice scenes at the funfair, and they did indeed find a suitable orangutan.

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Notes

1. I watched this on Mubi. I took the screenshots from this identical (but lower quality) copy on youtube.

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Film Information

Title: Merry-Go-Round
Directors: Erich von Stroheim, Rupert Julian
Year: 1923
Duration: 1 hour 53 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Nanook Of The North (1922)

Nanook of The North is a documentary film, directed by Robert J. Flaherty in 1922, about the Inuit hunter Nanook and his family living in the Arctic north of Canada.

Considered a groundbreaking feat of film making at the time, Nanook Of The North follows “Nanook” and his family through what is presented as a few typical days/weeks in the life of a small family group of Inuit hunters. Bookended with starkly beautiful shots of the Arctic wilderness, in between we get to see them trade and hunt, eat and play, build igloos and pet dogs.

A lot of this isn’t “real” as such, (according to this wikipedia article, several scenes were staged, and anything considered too modern was left out of the film), but it’s certainly effective, creating an evocative image of enduring family solidarity in the face of the unforgiving bleakness of Arctic desolation.

(These duplicitous techniques are still used now, obviously, in everything from nature documentaries to news footage. I remember going to the Olympics in 2012, and while sat in front of one of the screens in the Olympic park, TV crews went up and down the line handing out Rebecca Adlington and Andy Murray masks to small groups of bystanders, filmed these supers fans spontaneously and vociferously supporting their heroes, then went back down the line and took their masks back. The bastards.)

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Notes

1. I watched this on Mubi, but grabbed the screenshots from youtube.

2. The Mubi version was a 1998 restoration with a soundtrack by Timothy Brock.

3. But apart from that I think it’s basically the same as that youtube version.

4. This film contains a lot of animal death (seals, walruses, fish, a fox), by the way.

5. So maybe give it a miss if you’re of a sensitive disposition.

6. Like me.

7. Prone to imagining you’re some poor old walrus bellowing in confusion and fear as you get harpooned to death in the waves.

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Film Information

Title: Nanook Of The North
Director: Robert J. Flaherty
Year: 1922
Duration: 78 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

‘If Winter Comes’ – It Has! (1923)

A full minute of winter from 1923, including horse drawn snow ploughs and some people sledging down a hill in Buxton, Derbyshire.

That’s a lot of snow. And a lot of horses. (Yet not many sledgers).

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Notes

1. I watched this on the BFI Player

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Film Information

Title: ‘If Winter Comes’ – It Has!
Year: 1923
Duration: 1 minute
Watch: BFI Player

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Haxan (1922)

Haxan is a 1922 documentary directed by Benjamin Christensen that explores and depicts the history of witchcraft and witch hunts in the middle ages.

Using various devices such as stills of medieval woodcuts and manuscripts, dramatisations of actual events, recreations of recollections, stop motion animations, and some pretty lurid sex and nudity (by 1920s standards, at least), Haxan isn’t so much a documentary as a near two hour nightmare, surprisingly unsettling in many ways, not least the wholly demented behaviour of the witch-hunting clerics and monks.

This was banned on release across a lot of Europe, and in America too, just as much for it having the temerity to portray the church as absurdly evil as for its nudity and naughtiness (there’s a wonderful scene of the witches all giving Satan a surprisingly chaste kiss on the arse).

Even a hundred years later there’s still a strange, mesmerising power to its imagery, the ferocity of the performances and the sheer strange delight in some of the black mass scenes that’s kind of unsettling, a weird energy that’s impossible to ignore.

The final section, where it contrasts witch hunt mania to 20th century psychiatric diagnoses of female hysteria, feels startlingly modern, too, after all that’s gone before, and ends the film on a fittingly upsetting note.

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Notes

1. I watched this on an old Tartan Video DVD.

2. Which contained two versions – the original 1922 version, with Danish intertitles (basically this youtube version that I took the screenshots from), and various different soundtracks (included what supposedly was the original score from its premiere), and a 1968 American re-edited version called Witchcraft Through The Ages, with a William Burroughs narration and a wonderfully demented 60s jazz soundtrack.

3. I hadn’t seen that version before and it was wonderful, especially the nice stark black and white look, which I like a lot more than the red tinting on the majority of the 1922 version.

4. And William Burroughs has the best voice. He really does.

5. Anyway I’d seen this a couple of times before.

6. Once was the original version on Film Four a few years back.

7. And the other time was about ten years ago in a pub in Chelmsford, where a textless edit of the film was being projected onto a sheet while a very loud band played a live soundtrack to it very loudly.

8. Which was wonderful obviously

9. I have no idea who the band were I’m afraid.

10. They sounded quite a lot like Earth

11. But they were not Earth.

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Film Information

Title: Haxan
Director: Benjamin Christensen
Year: 1922
Duration: 1 hour 46 minutes
Watch: youtube; Mark Kermode BFI Intro

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Felix In The Swim (1922) / Felix Comes Back (1922)

Here we have two different 100year old Felix The Cat cartoons, both of which are directed by Margaret J. Winkler, who took over producing duties from Pat Sullivan and Paramount Pictures in 1922 and made over 60 Felix The Cat cartoons between then and 1925.

I’ve never quite worked out why Felix The Cat was so wildly popular for so long (it’s not that he’s necessarily bad, it’s just that he’s not that good), and Felix In The Swim (one of 17 Felix The Cat cartoons released in 1922 alone) doesn’t really do much to illuminate things, with some pretty charmless visuals, inert jokes and consistently bad comic timing (although the mice playing the piano are lovely).

Felix Comes Back, though, from later in the year, is much better, with better animation, funnier jokes, some inventive mild surrealism, and a penguin in the Arctic (where all the best cartoon penguins live).

So, if you’re going to watch one hundred year old Felix The Cat cartoon today, make it that one. Or maybe one of the other fifteen, who knows.

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Notes

1. I watched both of these on youtube. Felix In The Swim has added sound effects and music, which don’t actually add that much, while Felix Comex Back is nice and silent, just as nature intended.

2. I previously reviewed a couple of earlier Felix The Cat cartoons on here: Feline Follies (1919) and Frolics At The Circus (1920).

3. Oddly, the title of Felix Comes Back spoils the final joke (when Felix does indeed come back).

4. But maybe they were worried you’d think he was trapped in the Arctic forever otherwise.

5. And didn’t want anyone to become upset.

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Film Information

Title: Felix In The Swim
Director: Otto Messmer
Year: 1922
Duration: 7 minutes
Watch: youtube

Title: Felix Comes Back
Director: Otto Messmer
Year: 1922
Duration: 7 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Cinderella (1922) / The Secret Of The Marquise (1922)

Cinderella (or Aschenputtel) is a short film from 1922, directed and animated by Lotte Reiniger in her signature paper cut outs and shadow silhouette style. It’s beautiful.

An adaptation of the traditional Cinderella story (unsurprisingly, given the title), this includes almost everything you could want from such a thing: evil mothers, grotesque sisters, wonderful transformations, beautiful costumes, dancing, surprisingly horrific mutilations, and even an exploding step-mother.

(Also there’s a nice example of the perils of outdated old language usage changing the entire meaning of the piece, when poor old Cinderella isn’t allowed to the party because she’s a “slut”.)

Lots of early cartoons seem to start with a sequence showing the artist drawing a characters before they magically come alive, and this has a nice variation on that with a pair of magical scissors cutting blank lumps of paper into shape, which I liked a lot. And as ever with Lotte Reiniger’s work is the sheer expressive artistry of it all.

The Secret Of the Marquise is also from 1922, and it seems to be unique (as far as my inexpert knowledge of Lotte Reiniger’s career can tell) in that it’s been reversed/inverted, so that the cutouts are in white and the backgrounds in black, which gives it all a nice ethereal air. It’s only short (2 minutes or so), but it’s as charmingly animated as ever, and whhen I watched this I was assuming it was another one of Lotte Reiniger’s fairy tale adaptations, so the reveal of what the Marquise’s secret actual was was unexpectedly funny, like some long lost 1920s Reeves and Mortimer sketch.

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Notes

1. I watched this on various BFI collections (Cinderella is on the Lotte Reiniger Fairy Tales collection DVD, and The Secret Of The Marquise is an extra on The Tales Of Prince Achmed blu-ray).

2. But they’re also on youtube, which is where, as usual, I grabbed the screenshots from. The Secret Of The Marquise is exactly the same as the disc version, while Cinderella has music on youtube, and also maybe a clearer picture).

3. I’ve reviewed a couple of Lotte Reiniger’s other films here before: Der Fliegende Koffer (1921) and Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (1919).

4. I don’t know why I gave them the German titles and these the English ones but I did so there.

5. Also I liked both of those just as much as I liked these probably.

6. Lotte Reiniger also made a version of Sleeping Beauty in 1922, but I can’t find any versions of it anywhere so is presumably lost. Although it might just be that my cursory Tuesday afternoon searching skills are off.

7. She remade that, and also Cinderella, in the 1950s, but that’s a long way beyond the scope of this website.

8. (But it’s good I liked it).

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Film Information

Title: Cinderella
Director: Lotte Reiniger
Year: 1922
Duration: 12 minutes
Watch: youtube

Title: The Secret Of The Marquise
Director: Lotte Reiniger
Year: 1922
Duration: 2 minutes
Watch: youtube