Categories
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

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Within Our Gates (1920)

Within Our Gates was the second film directed by Oscar Micheaux, the pioneering African American writer/director/producer. Released in 1920, as his feature has been completely lost, thisi is now the earliest surviving film directed by an African American.

Stark, ferocious, and at times utterly harrowing, Within Our Gates is a searing look at racial injustice in America. The plot primarily follows a young teacher at a financially destitute school for black children somewhere in the American South, as she tries to raise money from wealthy benefactors to keep the school afloat.

From here the story spirals around, and the plotting, especially early on, seems unnecessarily convoluted at times (not helped by some missing scenes here and there), but the various vignettes contained within are well drawn, especially Evelyn Preer’s central performance as Sylvia Landry, the kind but lonely teacher who suffers seemingly endless misfortune as she tries selflessly to help everyone else around her (over the course of the film, plotted against by her cousin, strangled near to death by her fiance, run over, blackmailed by another cousin, assaulted and raped, and her parents are lynched by a baying mob for crimes they didn’t commit).

All of which makes it feel exceedingly weird when the film abruptly ends with a sudden two minute appeal to the greatness of America and the virtues of patriotism.

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Notes

1. I watched this on mubi. The screenshots are taken from this version on youtube.

2. In addition to writing and directing over 40 films between 1919 and 1940, Oscar Micheaux also wrote seven novels (three before he started making films, and four afterwards).

3. Unfortunately half his films seem to have been lost since.

4. Reading silent film era filmographies and seeing just how little survived is always pretty depressing.

5. The only other surviving film of his first sixteen (made between 1919 and 1926) is The Symbol Of The Unconquered, which I might watch next week.

6. Anyway, back to Within Our Gates, despite the oddity of the ending, and the slightly disjointed opening, I liked this a lot.

7. It had some interesting editing too, with various flashbacks, and scenes intercut with each other in places.

8. Which felt quite modern to me.

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Film Information

Title: Within Our Gates
Director: Oscar Micheaux
Year: 1920
Duration: 80 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
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

Categories
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

Categories
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 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

Categories
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 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 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 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