Where the wild things are

Percy Smith (left), from F.A. Talbot’s Moving Pictures: How They are Made and Worked (1912)

It’s been a long time in coming, but it’s been well worth the wait. Today saw the launch of WildFilmHistory, a site dedicated to recognising 100 years (so they say) of wildlife filmmaking. Produced by the Wildscreen Trust and supported by Lottery funding, this is a multimedia guide to one hundred years of natural history filmmaking, from the pioneering days when stop-motion films of flowers opening wowed them in the music halls to the age of Attenborough and beyond.

The site is biographical in focus, and at its centre are ninety-one (so far) mini-biographies of wildlife filmmakers, twenty-nine of them with accompanying oral history recordings, which very usefully come with PDF transcripts. So you get interviews with the likes of David Attenborough, Hans and Lotte Haas, Desmond Morris, Tony Soper and the late Gerald Thompson, but also the academic Derek Bousé, whose excellent history Wildlife Films investigates our period - more of which below. There’s also a very useful timeline.

But of greatest value for our purposes are the film clips of early wildlife films. There are thirteen of them (many from the British Film Institute collection):

• Das Boxende Känguruh (1895) - Max Skladanowsky’s film of a boxing kangaroo and its trainer Mr Delaware.
• Rough Sea at Dover (1895) - Something of a surprise choice, Birt Acres’ self-explanatory film which they argue is “considered by some to be the first natural history orientated film”.
• Pelicans at the Zoo (1898) - Pelicans at Regent’s Park Zoo, made by the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, a breathtakingly beautiful film if seen on 35mm (it was originally shot on 70mm), a little more prosiac in Flash.
• Spiders on a Web (1900) - A new one on me. This was apparently made by G.A. Smith and features two spiders in close-up, viewed through a circular mask (but no web to be seen). Clearly an extract from a longer film.
• St. Kilda, Its People and Birds (1908) - Made by Oliver Pike, this shows both human and animal life on St kilda, off Scotland, at a time when it was still inhabited by people.
• The Birth of a Flower (1910) - Exquisite stop-motion photography of flowers opening, complete with stencil colouring, made by the great Percy Smith for Charles Urban.
• The History of a Butterfly - A Romance of Insect Life (1910) - A fully-fledged natural history film, made by James Williamson, with a fair bit of nitrate damage to remind us of the precious state in which some of these films survive.
• The Strength and Agility of Insects (1911) - Eye-popping pyrotechnics performed by flies, who juggle corks, twirl matchsticks etc. This is actually a re-issue of an earlier film, The Balancing Bluebottle (1908), filmed by our hero of the era, Percy Smith, for Charles Urban once again. No animals was injured during the making of this film (honest).
• Secrets of Nature: The Sparrow-Hawk (1922) - One of the famous British Instructional Films series of educational films from the 1920s/30s, this was made by Captain C.W. R. Knight (the site’s synopsis mistakenly says in one place that Percy Smith made the film, though he was associated with many Secrets of Nature productions) (Captain Knight turns up twenty years later as the eagle-tamer in Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going, trivia fans).
• Secrets of Nature: The Cuckoo’s Secret (1922) - Another title from The Secrets of Nature, this time filmed by Oliver Pike and produced by ornithologist Edgar Chance
• With Cherry Kearton in the Jungle (1926) - Cherry Kearton was the most celebrated naturalist of the era, and with his brother Richard more or less pioneered the art of wildlife photography and then cinematography. This is a ‘greatest hits’ compilation of some of his African natural history films.
• Simba (1928) - An African travelogue (extracts only) made by the enterprising American couple Martin and Osa Johnson, blending actuality with staged scenes, and alarmingly also blending shooting with both camera and gun.
• Dassan: An Adventure in Search of Laughter Featuring Nature’s Greatest Little Comedians (1930) - Cherry Kearton anticipates The March of the Penguins by several decades.

And so it continues up to the present day, with many marvellous clips which both amaze and cause a sigh of happy nostalgia (Zoo Quest, Jacques Cousteau). A little oddly, the site includes pages for films that they haven’t tracked down yet - these include Oliver Pike’s In Birdland (1907), which they argue was the first true wildlife film (hence the centenary), but unfortunately no copy is known to exist.

This is a very well produced site, on which a huge amount of effort has been expended on clearing and producing the clips, esearching the history, and presenting the interviews. The early film clips are wonderful to see, even if I miss one or two titles that I think should have been there (e.g. Herbert Ponting’s fine penguin footage from his films of Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition). The site opens up the history of wildlife film, demonstrating an interconnected heritage, championing excellence, and encouraging us all to find out more.

So, if you are interested in finding out more, where should you go? Well, as mentioned, I strongly recomennd Derek Bousé’s Wildlife Films (2000). This is a first-rate history of wildlife filmmaking and television production, good not only on the plain history but on the mysteries of the genre, which ever since its earliest days has had to adopt assorted entertainment strategies, particularly storytelling, to make its work palatable to a mass public. It is thoughtful and informative. Also recommended is the similarly thought-provoking Animals in Film (2002) by Jonathan Burt. There’s also the recent BBC publication, Michael Bright’s 100 Years of Wildlife (2007), which is aimed at the popular end of the market, but does at least name check people such as Kearton, Smith and Urban.

WildFilmHistory is a wonderful resource, which promises to grow and welcomes any information on new material that they might use. In the spirit of the great filmmakers it champions, go explore.

The Lodger on HD

The opening images from The Lodger (1927), from 1000 Frames of Hitchcock

This Friday sees what I think is a first for a silent film - exhibition in HD format. The US channel MGMHD is showing Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927) at 4.20am on February 1st. It is, I believe, derived from the BFI National Archive’s restored print, and was transferred in the UK by Granada International. I have seen a bit of it, on a non-HD screen alas, but even so the image quality looks quite stunning.

The image above of the opening frames of the film comes from 1000 Frames of Hitchcock, “an attempt to reduce each of the 52 available major Hitchcock films down to just 1000 frames”. It’s an offshoot of the remarkable HitchcockWiki, which I commend to you. 1000 Frames of Hitchcock provides the same service for The Pleasure Garden (1925), Downhill (1927), The Ring (1927), Champagne (1928), Easy Virtue (1928), The Farmer’s Wife (1928), The Manxman (1929) and Blackmail (1929, but the sound version only). And all the others, of course.

The Great War in Colour

The BBC is putting on more for the Albert Kahn and autochrome addicts among you. This Monday BBC2 starts a three-part series The Great War in Colour: The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn, which looks at the First World War through the colour photographs in the Kahn collection. Part one is on 21 January, at 19.00. The programmes are streamed online via BBC iPlayer for one week after transmission.

Note: If you are new to this site and looking for background information on Albert Kahn, please visit the Searching for Albert Kahn post.

Pordenone On Screen

This evening BBC World Service radio is broadcasting an item on the Pordenone music masterclasses as part of its On Screen film programme. Every year at the Giornate del Cinema Muto there are masterclasses held on the art of accompanying silent films, in which aspiring silent film musicians work all week with the established musicians who accompany the films during the festival, with audience. It has become one of the most popular features of the festival.

The World Service programme was recorded during the festival, and features Pordenone regulars Donald Sosin, John Sweeney, Gabriel Thibaudeau and Neil Brand. The programme is being broadcast today, Wednesday 14 November at (GMT) 09.30, 19.30 and 23.30 and tomorrow at 02.30. It will then remain available online for a week. The item is 20mins into the 27mins programme.

It’s an encouraging item about the general rise in the popularity of silent cinema of late, and its affirmative tone is in marked contrast to the snide attitude revealed by that recent Today broadcast. I particularly like John Sweeney contrasting silent cinema with sound, arguing that the latter offers no sense of surprise, but the latter’s liveness is like going to the theatre - “if you weren’t there, you missed it”.

Comedians on comedians

Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns, from www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour

The television series Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns, first shown on BBC4, is being repeated on terrestrially on BBC2, with the first episode on Buster Keaton having aired this evening. Episodes on Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and Harold Lloyd are to follow. It was an engaging, unassuming production which simply wanted to put Keaton’s art first and foremost. It mostly took the format of one of Merton’s live shows, with Merton a lot of the time on stage giving short introductions before showing clips, Neil Brand at the piano, and audience laughing, all rounded off with the one complete film - in this case, The Goat (1921). I laughed heartily at gags I’ve seen a hundred times, and though it really only brushed the surface of Keaton’s comic gift, it must have left every viewer impressed with his art and many determined to check out more on DVD.

Merton is not the first television comedian to use his current popularity to pay homage to the silent comedians of the past. Bob Monkhouse in the 1960s presented a series, Mad Movies, which I can dimly remember, which introduced us to a wide range of silent comedians - not just the Keatons, Chaplins and Lloyds, but minor figures like Billy Bevan, Lupino Lane, Charley Chase, Larry Semon, Chester Conklin, Ben Turpin et al. I think the films all came from his personal collection. It gave us all a marvellous grounding in the names, the gags and the styles of the era (like Merton, Monkhouse explained to us how the gags and stunts worked). Then there was Michael Bentine’s Golden Silents, which was a multi-part, light-hearted history of the cinema, presented at the National Film Theatre, demonstrating as Merton does the great value of showing these films before an audience. You have to be laughing with someone really to appreciate the greatness of the silent comedians.

We were really lucky in the late 60s and early 70s - there was the intensive education in the art of silent comedy that we received from Monkhouse and Bentine, and we would be regularly treated to Robert Youngson’s compilations of comedy clips, such as The Golden Age of Comedy (1957), When Comedy was King (1960), Days of Thrills and Laughter (1961) and Laurel and Hardy’s Laughing 20s (1965). I’ve not seen them since that time, and I expected that the narrator’s interjections and the selectivity of the clips might irritate now, but at the time they helped rescue silent films from oblivion, and we watched them avidly. I can remember also that Chaplin shorts were a regular feature on early evening television - we were soon familiar with almost the entire oeuvre, and would lap up a rare new title with a collector’s fervour.

American TV also did its bit to keep the flame going for silent films in general. Jay Ward’s Fractured Flickers was first shown in 1963 and regularly syndicated thereafter. I’ve no memory of seeing it, but the approach seems to have been to take a rather satirical view of the films. Silents Please, first aired 1960, which used films from the Paul Killiam archive, was a more straightforward homage, and stood up very well when it turned up in some form or other in the UK in the 1980s in the early days of Channel 4. At least I assume it was the same series; someone might know.

Will silent comedies continue to amuse future generations? You have think that they have a good chance, indeed that it is verbal comedy that dates so badly, while there will always be something eternal about the silent art. But slapstick, however elevated a form it could be in the hands of the greatest practitioners, is not a form of comedy that is likely ever to return to the mainstream, and the clothes, the manners, the socio-cultural references, the black-and-whiteness and of course the silence will all inevitably confer too much strangeness upon this material for it ever to gain even the revival in popularity that Youngson and Monkhouse managed to conjure up. Or will artistry win out and will these films always retain a fundamental human appeal? Do we want to continue to admire them because they artistic, or because they are funny?

The Twenties in Colour

Dancers in ruins of Angkor-Vat, Cambodia, 1922 © Albert-Kahn museum, from www.ejumpcut.org

The promised follow-up series on Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète project, covering the 1920s, started on BBC4 this evening. The four-part series, The Twenties in Colour, follows on from the earlier series, The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn, in showing how Kahn’s team of still and motion picture photographers continued their task to make a photographic recod of the world. Included in the series is Paris after the Armistice, scenes in the Middle and Far East, and (I hope) some of the scientific-medical cinematography produced by Jean Comandon, who collaborated with Kahn in the late twenties.

Those who want find more about Kahn’s work, and web sources for Autochrome photographs etc, should go to the earlier post, Searching for Albert Kahn, which has the background story and a number of useful links.

Meanwhile, for those of us unable (or in my case, too idle) to get hold of BBC4, the original Wonderful World of Albert Kahn series is to be showing in re-edited, half-hour episodes form on BBC2, starting 16 November, at 19.30pm.

Seeing it Through

Charles Masterman, from www.firstworldwar.com

Just a note to folks that this evening on BBC Radio 3 we had Neil Brand’s ninety-minute play, Seeing it Through. The subject of the play is Wellington House, the covert British propaganda outfit from World War One (also known as the War Propaganda Bureau), which under Charles Masterman conducted a would-be civilised campaign of information management, using willing well-known authors (Wells, Bennett, Doyle, Chesterton) to argue Britain’s rightfulness in fighting such a war, and employing other media, including film. There was passing mention of Charles Urban, who produced the documentary feature Britain Prepared (1915) for Masterman, and reference at the end to The Battle of the Somme (1916), made by the British Topical Committee for War Films, with somewhat anachronistic comment on its use of some inauthentic footage. A thoughtful, skillful piece from the prodigious Mr Brand.

You’ll be able to catch the play for the next week on Radio 3’s Listen Again service. I recommend doing so.

Three types of authenticity

Douglas Mawson’s ship The Aurora, from www.south-pole.com

This evening on Channel 4 there was an intriguing 90 mins documentary on Douglas Mawson, When Hell Freezes, made by the estimable Flashback Television. It’ll need to be some other time for me to produce for you a substantial post on silent film and polar exploration (a particular interest of mine), but this programme needs to be noted now for its use of original archive film of Mawson’s expedition as one type of evidence with which to convince us in our comfortable twenty-first century lives of the splendours and miseries of the golden age of Antarctic exploration.

Mawson is less well-known than Robert Falcon Scott or Ernest Shackleton, whose own Antarctic follies have been richly documented in recent years, Shackleton in particular. Mawson was perhaps less of a self-publicist, though he took care to have a motion picture cameraman with him (the motion picture rights helped pay for several of the Antarctic expeditions of this period), who just happened to be Frank Hurley, later (and particularly of late) to find fame as Shackleton’s cinematographer. Mawson also produced a book, The Home of the Blizzard.

His 1912-13 expedition - naturally conducted for the finest scientific reasons - explored the area of Antarctica to the south of Australia, and aimed to visit the South Magnetic Pole. Disaster struck when team member Edward Ninnis fell through a crevasse, complete with dogs and sled. Mawson and Xavier Mertz, who were with him, turned back from their exploration, but Mertz died on the return journey. Mawson made an astonishing solo journey back, arriving back at the home base only to find that the expedition ship the Aurora had left just a few hours beforehand (happily, some colleagues had remained behind in the faint hope of his possible survival). Hurley, of course, was not with the trio on this ill-fated section of the expedition, and consequently no film of it exists.

What I found intriguing about the film was its multi-layered approach to authenticity. We have in past years had the past made convincing to us through the use of archive film (and photographs). Today, however, the fashion is either for dramatic reconstructions, or a presenter going through the same privations as those suffered in the past. When Hell Freezes gave us all three, plus readings from Mawson’s text. Our modern counterparts were Tim and John, who retraced Mawson’s steps using the same equipment and clothing in the kind of pseudo-authencity one can only achieve when a television programme is to be made about the adventure. The dramatic reconstructions were bleached out to look like Hurley’s original footage, and at time the untrained eye would not have spotted the difference between the two.

The modern adventure failed to thrill, as it was inevitably doomed to do (”will Tim and John survive on the ice…?” Of course they will), but the idea was somehow to blend the three styles so that present became past and past became present. But modern video is too bright, too much of the moment - it anaethetizes the ordeal. The monochrome silent footage, by its very distance, makes those things endured in the past seem all the more astonishing, because they seem so distant. In seeing the films of Scott, Shackleton and Mawson we long for close-ups and the camera techniques of today that will bring them that much closer to us, but maybe it is the lack of intimacy that is their strength. When Hell Freezes’s own faux dramatised scenes were strongest when they showed figures lost in the white distance, not trying to show the agonies etched on their faces.

Anyway, it was a good programme, and despite my advocacy of the archive footage, probably its best moment was the Touching the Void-like sequence where the exhausted Mawson falls down a crevasse and manages, utterly improbably, to climb back up, fall back, yet somehow find the strength to climb his rope once again to safety - while our modern day hero fails to emulate him. Whatever the means of imaginative recreation at our disposal, some feats lie beyond all comprehension.

Peter’s Polar Place is an excellent source of information on the works of Frank Hurley, including archive holdings of films films and those available on DVD. There doesn’t seen to be DVD available of Hurley’s original 1913 documentary, Dr Mawson in the Antarctic (erroneously known as Home of the Blizzard in some sources), but the film itself is held in the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

A little bird tells me…

…that the BBC4 series The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn is due for a repeat soon on BBC2, though this time in half-hour episodes (presumably BBC2 viewers have less of an attention span than the sturdy folk who patronise BBC4). I also hear that there isn’t going to be a DVD release of the series, presumably owing to licensing issues, but that the Albert Kahn Museum in Paris is planning to produce some DVDs of its Autochrome colour photographs (and its films?) which will be available from the museum itself next year… More news as and when I hear it.

100 years of wildlife films, maybe

Martin and Osa Johnson, from www.wildfilmhistory.org

Starting this Saturday (August 25th), BBC4 has a wildlife season, marking 100 years of wildlife films. One might protest straight away that wildlife films were made before 1907, but the argument is that Oliver Pike’s In Birdland (1907) was the first true natural history film, as opposed to scientific analysis films, actualities or entertainment films featuring animals. I think F. Martin Duncan’s work (from 1904 onwards) ought to be acknowledged, even if he mostly filmed in London Zoo, but it’s a bit late now. Ironically or not, In Birdland is believed to be a lost film.

The centrepiece of the season is the programme 100 Years of Wildlife Films, presented by Bill Oddie. Presumably there will be some acknowledgment of the considerable work done in the silent era in this field, by Oliver Pike, Percy Smith, Cherry Kearton, Paul Rainey, Herbert Ponting, C.W.R. Knight, Carl Akeley, Martin and Osa Johnson, and many more.

David Attenborough with a picture of Cherry Kearton, from www.open2.net

There is a programme on Cherry Kearton, in the Nation on Film series, showing on 29 August, called Kearton’s Wildlife (though it’s actually a repeat). The Royal Geographical Society still awards a Cherry Kearton medal for achievements in photographing natural history (David Attenborough is a recipient), and his pioneering work (often with brother Richard) in still and motion picture photography of animals deserves to be far better known. The BBC4 site provides a full list of programmes in the series.

All of this activity coincides with plans by the Wildscreen Trust to develop a centralised collection of films and information on 100 years of wildlife filmmaking, with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund. There’s a website, wildfilmhistory.org, which promises a full launch at the end of 2007. There’s a book in the offing as well. Such is the power of centenaries.