Category: This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

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This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Playmates (1922)

Playmates is a short film in which two actors dressed up as children show off the latest in groundbreaking animatronic toys from 1922.

Playing out like very early test screens for JF Sebastian’s workshop in Blade Runner, this is all usurprisingly horrifying, combining both the enduring disquiet of animatronic dolls with the utter mortal terror of human adults dressed as and pretending to be very young children. Completely monstrous.

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Notes

1. I watched this on the BFI Player.

2. I like the way these sort of horrifying animatronic toys have barely changed in a century.

3. Motorised beasts lumbering uselessly around in circles on a table in your local toy shop every Christmas.

4. Only occasionally received as presents.

5. But somehow endlessly disappointing whenever they are.

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Film Information

Title: Playmates
Year: 1922
Duration: 2 minutes
Watch: BFI Player

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This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Studies In Animal Motion (1922)

Studies In Animal Motion is a 1922 nature documentary, using slow-motion film to show a number of different animals in wonderfully illuminating detail.

Taking advantage of inevitable improvements in film and camera technology, Studies In Animal Motion takes great delight in showing off hitherto unseen marvels of nature, including how kangaroos leap about, how frogs and toads tongues work, how birds wings move, how snakes undulate, and so on.

There’s also a few surprising inclusions in this showcase for slow motion technology, including snails and tortoises, and a weirdly fake looking crab that I’m half convinced was a particularly impressive animatronic effect rather than an actual crab.

The strangest moment by far is when they decide to use footage of a kangaroo boxing with a zoo keeper to demonstrate how well it can balance on its legs and tail. I’m not sure this is strictly ethical behaviour for a zoo keeper, to be honest.

Part me of also wonders if this was the backstory for Roger in Tekken, but presumably that particular boxing kangaroo was from an entirely different zoo.

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Notes

1. I watched this on the BFI Player again.

2. This was part of a series of pioneering nature documentaries made in the 20s and 30s called Secrets Of Nature.

3. There’s a dvd boxset of this that I keep meaning to buy.

4. But haven’t yet.

5. Anyway from the description on that page it seems this vidoe’s not on their anyway.

6. I watched some even earlier films by Percy Smith on here before: To Demonstrate How Spiders Fly (1909); and The Acrobatic Fly and Birth Of A Flower (both 1910)

7. At times in Studies In Animal Motion there’s heavy damage to the film, which creates some nice jump cut details (teleporting sea lions and vanishing kangaroos), while also giving us some pretty spectacular looking avant garde cut images that I absolutely loved.

8. Which was nice.

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Film Information

Title: Studies In Animal Motion
Director: F. Percy Smith
Year: 1922
Duration: 10 minutes
Watch: BFI Player

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This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Fishing At St Dogmaels (1922)

Fishing At St Dogmaels is, perhaps unsurprisingly, approximately 2 minutes of footage of some people fishing in St Dogmaels in Wales, in 1922.

Not necessarily the most exciting film, but I’ve included it here because the brief scene where they row across the river (shown above) is really quite beautiful, too. Kind of mythic in its grandeur.

Which I think is reason enough to mention it.

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Notes

1. I watched this on the BFI Player like usual.

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Film Information

Title: Fishing At St Dogmaels
Year: 1922
Duration: 2 minutes
Watch: BFI Player

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This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Skating In Oulton Broad (1922)

Skating In Oulton Broad is a minute of home-filmed footage of people skating on the frozen lake of the title, in Lowestoft, in 1922.

There is beauty in the badly framed, endless wonder in the out of focus, entire worlds built up through every decade of decay, hiding there in those undignified ruins at the end of every sliver of film.

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Notes

1. I watched this on the BFI Player.

2. Recently I was reading about the restoration of an old painting at the National Gallery

3. How in their restorations they removed all traces of life and wonder from what they had.

4. And often too I think about the weird hypnotic beauty of the Salvator Mundi

5. Before they scrubbed him clean of any sense of mysticism.

6. And of course no one’s going to try and upgrade these skaters into 4k ultra HD

7. Every blemish digitally erased until everything is as sharp as the eye can see

8. (Although maybe if they were French…)

9. But if they do

10. All we’ll be left with is

11. Nothing much at all.

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Film Information

Title: Skating On Oulton Broad
Year: 1922
Duration: 1 minute
Watch: BFI Player

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Dogs Of High Degree (1922)

This is a piece of newsreel footage of some dogs at some dog show or other in 1922. One whole minute of dogs follows (also includes some owners). They’re nice dogs, I reckon. And at least 100 years old.

That last dog there is billed as the smallest dog in the world, but I’m pretty sure it’s not and never was. The little liar.

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Notes

1. I watched this on the BFI Player

2. I have little extra information to add.

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Film Information

Title: Dogs Of High Degree
Year: 1922
Duration: 1 minute
Watch: BFI Player

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901) / The Death of Poor Joe (1900)

Scrooge, Or Marley’s Ghost is the oldest Christmas Carol adaptation on film, ade in 1901 by WR Booth (who directed a few other films I’ve already reviewed here, if you’re interested in).

This is a very quick run through of A Christmas Carol, assuming the audience already knows the story, and instead simply condensing the whole thing down into five scenes (although unfortunately the last one seems to have been lost at some point in the century since).

But still, we get the three visions of past, present and future, with some nice early double exposure trick shots to help portray the ghosts, and some good overacting from Scrooge (I especially like his “Look! It’s me!” turn to the camera when he sees the scene from his past).

Because it’s so short, this is fairly slight all round, but it’s pretty charming nonetheless, and I like how utterly delighted the children in Bob Cratchit’s scene seem to be. I was also kind of surprised to see the word ‘Xmas’ here, but apparently that’s hundreds of years old and not some relatively modern invention like I’d obviously previously assumed. Maybe X isn’t quite the futuristically cool letter I’d always thought it to be.

Now, while Scrooge was the oldest Christmas Carol adaptation, the oldest Dickens film is the (very short) Death Of Poor Joe, which was made a year or so earlier, in 1900. A whole minute of ultra misery, this recreates a single scene from Bleak House, and there’s not much to say about it really (I have never read Bleak House, so the full sadness of the situation is lost on me, I’m afraid).

But for completeness’s sake I have included it here.

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Notes

1. I watched Scrooge, Or Marley’s Ghost on the BFI Player

2. But it’s also on youtube if you can’t see the BFI Player version.

3. Although that version seems to be played at double the speed of the one on the BFI site.

4. I don’t know why.

5. Also I watched this while listening to this version of Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence by Ryuichi Sakamoto, which seemed to fit rather nicely.

6. Although it’s such a lovely bit of music it probably fits nicely with everything.

7. Also, I watched The Death Of Poor Joe on the BFI Player too.

8. And that’s available on youtube too.

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Film Information

Title: Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost
Director: WR Booth
Year: 1901
Duration: 6 minutes
Watch: BFI Player; youtube

Title: The Death Of Poor Joe
Director: GA Smith
Year: 1900
Duration: 1 minutes
Watch: BFI Player; youtube

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912)

The Cameraman’s Revenge is a Russian animation from 1912, directed by Ladislas Starevich, in which he uses stop motion animated dead insects to tell a slightly baffling tale of infidelity, voyeurism and revenge, for some reason.

Two beetles in a loveless marriage run off whenever they can to have affairs, one with an artist (another beetle), the other with a showgirl (a dragonfly), while the projectionist at the local cinema (he’s a grasshopper, I think) uses his camera to film the showgirl’s affair through the keyhole in the hotel door.

Then there’s just about enough time for some fist fights and confrontations and other odd convolutions of plot before we reach the end.

Anyway, and unsurprisingly, I liked this a lot. The animation’s great (although the picture quality is terrible, so obscures a lot of it), there’s some wonderful touches (especially when everyone goes to the cinema and their watching the scenes we’ve already seen projected onto their little cinema screen), and it’s surprisingly prescient in it’s prediction of mobile phone and hidden camera voyeurism, although the idea that the local cinema would be where you showed all this rather than on the grottier corners of the internet is quite wide of the mark.

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Notes

1. I watched this on youtube.

2. There’s probably other versions available.

3. And hopefully better quality ones somewhere (although I didn’t find any).

4. This is one of the problems of watching old films on the internet, all the general degradations of film over time combined with video conversion fuzziness and youtube compression artefacts until everything’s a complete visual mess.

5. Which is a shame, because I expect this looked incredible at the time.

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Film Information

Title: The Cameraman’s Revenge
Director: Ladislas Starevich
Year: 1912
Duration: 13 minutes
Watch: youtube

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This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

La Lune à un mètre (1898)

La Lune à un mètre (The Astronomer’s Dream) is one of the earliest surviving films by Georges Melies, in which an astronomer looks at the moon out of the window of his huge castle and then has three minutes of utterly terrifying moon-related dreams.

This is an absolutely wondrous marvel. Originally one of Georges Melies’s stage shows, this goes all out on recreating his original physical tricks (including the absolutely terrifying mechanical moon face below that eats children and adults alike in its unending furious rampage of greed), while also adding in loads of extra stuff only possible via film, including stop motion, film splices, and even an excellent animated section where the astronomer’s diagrams of the moon and earth join together to form some great planetary beast, with the moon as its the head and the earth its body.

The devil and Selene, goddess of the moon, also turn up for some reason at various points, and all in less than four minutes too. Wonderful.

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Notes

1. I watched this on youtube here.

2. My niece has been reading The Invention Of Hugo Cabret (and half watching Hugo, too), so we watched a couple of George Melies films (this and also Le Voyage Dans La Lune).

3. She wondered why he was so obsessed with the moon.

4. Although I didn’t like to say it was me that was obsessed with the moon.

5. Only showing her his moon films.

6. Instead of some of his non-moon films.

7. Anyway she liked this one best.

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Film Information

Title: La Lune à un mètre
Director: Georges Melies
Year: 1898
Duration: 3 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

The Boat (1921)

In The Boat, Buster Keaton builds a boat and goes to sea.

The Boat is one of those Buster Keaton films with no real plot, but a scenario (in this case: a boat!) subjected to an ever escalating series of set pieces exploring pretty much every possible avenue of amusement available, utilising elaborate sets, clever camera work, some clever sight gags, and also a pun that took me almost a minute to understand (due to my inability to understand puns, or indeed to pronounce the name of his boat in a way even vaguely compatible with the pun). It’s pretty good.

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Notes

1. I watched this on blu-ray, and grabbed the screenshots from this version on youtube.

2. That’s the same version that’s in the box set, which is five minutes longer than loads of the other versions on youtube.

3. I have no idea what bits they’re missing.

4. Anyway, 27 minutes is very long for these Buster Keaton films really.

5. At least 5 minutes longer than usual.

6. While I was watching this I thought that it’d make a good sequel to One Week

7. In that in that one Buster builds a house and everything goes wrong, and in this he builds a boat and everything goes wrong.

8. And Sybil Seely’s back in it as his wife.

9. Then I read on wikipedia that it was actually intended to be a sequel to One Week

10. But then they forgot to ever say.

11. Also is this the first film in which Buster Keaton’s had children? I think it is.

12. Anyway, he appears to be a disastrous father.

13. But at least none of them die.
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Film Information

Title: The Boat
Directors: Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline
Year: 1921
Duration: 27 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

The Goat (1921)

In The Goat, Buster Keaton is framed for a crime he didn’t commit and must run away from the police for a very long time.

The Goat is short on invention and plot (it’s basically one very long manic chase scene from start to end), but high on laughs and execution, with (almost) everything being done with fairly effortless grace and charm.

There’s some really beautiful shots, too, especially the train sequence (above) and Buster’s forlorn face on the wanted poster (below). And the scene on the horse sculpture is a wonderful piece of slow-motion bizarrity.

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Notes

1. I watched this on blu-ray, etc etc, and grabbe dthe screenshots from this version on youtube.

2. I’m getting a little concerned by Buster Keaton’s naming conventions for his films, really. The Scarecrow had about two minutes of scarecrow action, The Haunted House was set in a decidedly unhaunted bank for 50% of its runtime, and now in The Goat there are no goats at all.

3. Not even one.

4. I demand a refund.

5. Also this film features perhaps the best prison escape ever, where the murderer simply switches off the lights and runs away in the dark.

6. (PS: I have no idea if “bizarrity” is a word but I’m using it anyway you can’t stop me.)

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Film Information

Title: The Goat
Directors: Buster Keaton and Malcolm St. Clair
Year: 1921
Duration: 23 minutes
Watch: youtube