Tag: nature

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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

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

The Allotment Holder’s Enemies (1918)

The Allotment Holder’s Enemies (1918) is a short film made to advertise The Smallholder, a magazine for allotment owners, providing exciting instruction on how to rid your garden of pests. It was made by Charles Urban, some of whose films I’ve looked at here before.

Alongside slightly strident title cards like the one above, The Allotment Holder’s Enemies contains five minutes of surprisingly lovely and vivid footage of various kinds of fairly benign British garden wildlife, all of which are probably far less benign if they’re about to eat the last cabbage in the country. But it’s still quite amusing to see such ferocious disgust at, well, sparrows.

Poor sparrows.

(Incidentally, that reminds me of this beautiful old bestiary description of bees, which is, and shall always be, one of my very favourite things.)

Anyway, these most destructive birds are then presented to the viewer with some footage (see image immediately below) that doesn’t exactly do much to illustrate the dire biblical plague that obviously at the time they represented.

Just terrifying.

So to calm you down, here are some lovely pictures of snails, caterpillars, grubs.

Although even caterpillars can be quite ferocious.

“Especially to ladies.”

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Notes

1. I watched this on the BFI Player

2. And gleaned, as usual, most of my information from there.

3. A sequel/companion to this, The Allotment Holder’s Friends, was made at the same time.

4. But unfortunately, except for mention of its title in various online catalogues, can find no evidence of its existence.

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Film Information

Title: The Allotment Holder’s Enemies
Director: Charles Urban
Year: 1918
Duration: 5 minutes
Watch: BFI Player

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

The Acrobatic Fly (1910) / Birth Of A Flower (1910)

The Acrobatic Fly and Birth Of A Flower are two films released in 1910 by the brilliant nature film and stop-motion pioneer F. Percy Smith (whose incredible To Demonstrate How Spiders Fly I watched and reviewed previously).

The Acrobatic Fly was a part of an ongoing series of similarly themed short films, in which F. Percy Smith decided to use stop motion to make it look like insects were engaged in a series of pointless acrobatic displays.

I’m not entirely sure why, but I found this fairly disconcerting (presumably because of the use of real flies nailed to a pole).

I much preferred Birth Of A Flower. This film is a series of time lapse sequences, showing flowers opening up their petals into full bloom, and it’s really quite beautiful. Of course, watching it now, these sequences aren’t anything we haven’t seen before (although they’re still beautiful staged), but I expect a hundred and ten years ago footage like this would have been a pretty wonderful novelty.

Although maybe not as much of a commercial success as flies carrying dumbbells.
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Notes

1. I watched these both on youtube – The Acrobatic Fly here, and Birth Of A Flower here

2. That version of Birth Of A Flower is only an extract, but it’s been soundtracked by some Erik Satie music, so I preferred that version to the full version

3. Which can be viewed here

4. But which unfortunately has a fairly ugly watermark ruining it, unfortunately.

5. If you’d like to know more about F. Percy Smith, this Atlas Obscura article is pretty wonderful

6. And well worth your time.

7. This BFI article about Birth of A Flower is also interesting (but a lot shorter).
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Film Information

Title: The Acrobatic Fly
Director: F. Percy Smith
Year: 1910
Duration: 3 minutes
Watch: youtube

Title: Birth Of A Flower
Director: F. Percy Smith
Year: 1910
Duration: 7 minutes
Watch: youtube (extract only); youtube (full version)

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

To Demonstrate How Spiders Fly (1909)

To Demonstrate How Spiders Fly is a very short educational film (it’s only a minute long), made using stop-motion animation to explain how spiders travel across unexpectedly large distances. It was directed by F. Percy Smith, a naturalist and photographer who helped pioneer the use of many now-familiar film-making techniques, such as time-lapse sequences.

I love spiders and I love stop-motion creatures and I utterly love this. What a wonderful thing.

And a hundred and ten years old.

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Notes

1. I watched this, yes, via the BFI Player – To Demonstrate How Spiders Fly
2. I think this may be my favourite thing
3. I just wish I’d seen it earlier so I could have incorporated this knowledge into Spiders Are Wonderful (multiple winner of the factual book of the year award in 2011).

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Film Information

Title: To Demonstrate How Spiders Fly
Director: F. Percy Smith
Year: 1909
Runtime: 1 minute