Tag: 1922

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This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

“Please to Remember the 5th of November” – But Bridgwater Celebrates (1922)

“Please to Remember the 5th of November” – But Bridgwater Celebrates is 45 seconds of wonderfully evocative documentary footage from a bonfire night carnival in Bridgwater in Somerset, in 1922.

I’ll never tire of the strange and endless beauty available by just pointing a camera at a fire and filming the smoke and the flames and the flickering light illuminating the surrounding scene. It’s lovely.

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Notes

1. I watched this on the BFI player

2. I was searching for halloween stuff but halloween evidently didn’t exist in Britain until the 1960s

3. At least as far as the BFI player is concerned anyhow.

4. Anyway, this all reminded me of the big huge Bridgwater willow man sculpture that I always see when I drive down to my brother’s in Cornwall.

5. Which in recent years always seems kind of forlorn, all headless and armless and bleakly sad.

6. The poor gigantic thing.

7. (It also reminded me that Bloodborne isn’t so much a fantasy game as straight up historical drama)

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Film Information

Title: “Please to Remember the 5th of November” – But Bridgwater Celebrates
Year: 1922
Duration: 1 minute
Watch: BFI Player

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Two-Color Kodachrome Test Shots No. III (1922)

Two-Color Kodachrome Test Shots No. III is, unsurprisingly, a compilation of test footage shots using Kodak’s two-color Kodachrome film, directed by the pioneering Kodak engineer John Capstaff, and featuring portraits of various silent era film actresses (Mae Murray, Mary Eaton, and Hope Hamilton) smiling sweetly for the camera (but in colour!).

A hundred years now they’ve been smiling. And may they smile on for at least a hundred more.

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Notes

1. I originally watched this on youtube

2. But the version on vimeo is slightly longer.

3. And features some landscape footage as well as the portraits.

4. Which is nice.

5. Although this is test footage for a product called Kodachrome, it shouldn’t be confused with the more famous Kodachrome (the colour photograph film), which wasn’t released until 1935.

6. By which time this Kodachrome had been all but forgotten for some reason.

7. Also this film ties in neatly with a couple of the last few things I wrote about on here: The Toll Of The Sea (for impressive early use of colour); and the 1923 FA Cup line up film (for lingering filmed portraits of people).

8. There was also a nice few bits of portrait shots at the end of the Pram Race video too, so basically everything I’ve written about in the last six months or so is referenced here somehow.

9. But anyway if you want to read my observations about colour film and/or how much I like semi static portraits of people, please read the notes in those pieces.

10. Which may or may not be of interest to anyone but me.

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Film Information

Title: Two-Color Kodachrome Test Shots No. III (1922)
Director: John Capstaff
Year: 1922
Duration: 7 minutes
Watch: youtube; vimeo

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

The Toll Of The Sea (1922)

The Toll Of The Sea is an uncredited adaptation of Madame Butterfly, written by Frances Marion, directed by Chester M. Franklin and starring Anna May Wong. It was the second film to be filmed in Technicolor (and the oldest surviving one), and at least the third film version of Madame Butterfly (after an American version from 1915, and a German version, directed by Fritz Lang, from 1919).

This seems to be the first version that actually uses Asian actors in the Asian roles (although Hollywood went back to it’s usuall racist casting decisions in the 1932 Cary Grant version).

I’ve never actually read or seen any version of Madame Butterfly before (not even the Cronenberg version), so I don’t know how much this deviates from the template it’s based on (beyond this being set in China rather than Japan).

In this, Anna May Wong plays Lotus Flower, a Chinese teenager who saves an American serviceman from drowning and then subsequently falls in love with him, a love he reciprocates by, er, getting her pregnant then going back to America to live with his actual wife. Sadness and tragedy ensue.

One of the interesting things about the film is that, because the colour filming process needed lots of light, the entire thing is filmed outside (even the very occasional interior scenes are filmed outside), which feels like a complete reversal of usual studio films.

Combined with the muted colour palette, it lends the whole thing a sort of nostalgic picture postcard look (which I assume is actually the opposite of what it would have looked like at the time, when it must have looked almost impossibly futuristic).

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Notes

1. I watched this on youtube.

2. The final reel of this is lost, so for this restored version (from 1985) they just filmed a sunset and then put in a title card implying she’s drowned herself (hence the title).

3. That’s a spoiler I suppose.

4. But anyway that’s why that picture of the sun setting over the sea up there looks different from the other screenshots.

5. I’ve always found it interesting how colour films took 50 years or so to kill off black and white, but sound films killed off silent movies in about 3 years.

6. Silent films only really making a comeback until whenever pop videos took off

7. There was a nice article in the guardian about Anna May Wong last year (when it was actually 100 years since this film came out)

8. She’s really great in this, especially as she would have only been 16 or 17 when this was filmed, I think

9. The only other thing I’ve seen her in is The Thief Of Bagdad (made in 1924! Don’t tell anyone I’ve seen into the future!), and she’s great in that too.

10. Even if she is only in it a bit.

11. I’d quite like to have one of those American coins with her face on it too.

12. Though I suspect I never will.

13. Also, here’s a list of the oldest colour feature films.

14. It’s kind of depressing as always how many of these are lost.

15. And has also reminded me that I never actually wrote an article about all the early attempts at colouring films (tinting, stencil colouring, etc).

16. Which I was going to at some point.

17. But I forgot.

18. Due to laziness.

19. (Please don’t hate me)

20. Also I didn’t understand this film at all (on an emotional level). I suppose that’s my review.

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Film Information

Title: The Toll Of The Sea
Director: Chester M. Franklin
Year: 1922
Duration: 53 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 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 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

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

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