Early films (1905-1908)

Rescued by Rover (1905)

So far as I can tell, this is the first film with a dog in it.  Like the more famous Lassie, Rover is a collie dog with a knack for seeking out lost infants, and calling the relevant adults to their aid.  It's a strong idea for an early film, as the sight of a dog rushing down lanes and through rivers is something one couldn't represent nearly so well on stage or in print.

The film was made by Cecil Hepworth, a British director who in 1900 made the wonderfully gruesome special effects film 'Explosion of a Motorcar', and in 1903 an excitingly early film of 'Alice in Wonderland'.  The man was evidently a smart cookie, realising the potential of the cinema and delivering a blend of narrative and effects (hitherto films had often been one or the other) with a really good framing and timing.  Watch it here - it's exactly the sort of melodrama one might expect from the silent age.

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906)

‘Humorous Phases of Funny Faces’ contests with ‘The Merry Frolics of Satan’ to be the most immediately arresting movie title of 1906.  It’s a logical progression of the tricks we saw in ‘The Enchanted Drawing’ (1900) - faces are drawn on a blackboard, but come alive and interact with one another.  While the earlier film was about the relationship between the artist and the art, this one puts the emphasis on the picture, which suits the camera better.  The animated part now fills the whole of the frame, and the artist is a cameo, rather than a star.  Quite amusing!  Chortle at it here, if you will.

If you’re curious, ‘The Merry Frolics of Satan’ is a hand-tinted Méliès film, and has a much less exciting title in its native France  It has a great skeletal horse in it, and some fine special effects.  Not much Satan, though.

Ben Hur (1907)

Long term readers may know that The 1959 'Ben-Hur' is my favourite film.  It’s been shot a few times, and this was the earliest.  The film is most notable for having been made without the permission of the rights-holders, meaning the production company were sued for copyright violation.

It’s not a very satisfactory adaptation, even by the standards of the age.  The film assumes a familiarity with the novel, serving as moving illustrations to aid the imagination, rather than a narrative in pictures.  We’re given no reason to think or care about the characters, and when a slate falls from the Hur family’s roof, injuring Valerius Gratus, the camera pays it no heed.  If you don’t know the plot, the movie has very little to offer.  There are crowds and chariots, but no spectacle, no excitement.  Nobody has yet thought of moving the camera to follow the action, and since everything is shown in long shot, there’s no real detail to look at.  I suspect most of the cast are in splendid historical costumes of some sort or another, but they’re all just distant blurs.  You can watch the film here if you wish.

So, those Bens-Hur, in order of preference:

1. Ben-Hur (1959), a true epic, full of excellent performances and strong dialogue (though some Esther’s more religiose comments in the second half come across rather weakly).  This version has the best theology of all, and its chariot race is one of the most exciting sequences in all cinema.  Plus, Charlton Heston!

2. Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ (1925).  Many people favour this silent classic over the 50s talkie.  It certainly has style, and some fantastic hats.  One of the best American silents, and certainly the most expensive.  Its chariot race is pretty thrilling, though technological limitations of the time mean parts of it are too obviously faked in studio.  Jesus is manifested as a disembodied arm, which I’m inclined so say lacks his characteristic humanity.

3. Ben Hur (2003).  An animated version, which at 80 minutes does most of the things its far-longer predecessor did in 212.  It’s for children, so simplifies the story quite a bit, and gives Messala a happy ending.

4. Ben Hur (2010).  A TV miniseries.  I’m not a fan of this version, with its jerky slo-mo, its disappointing Jesus and its wilfully unmemorable chariots.  It tries too hard to avoid copying the 50s film, and so ends up lacking its merits.  A good cast, though ill-used.

5. Ben Hur (1907).  As above, this is limited by its era, but far more by a lack of imagination.  Edwin Porter or Georges Méliès could have made it beautiful.

A new version will be in the cinemas in 2016, so expect me to pop up then to provide heavily biased comparisons with my favourite film.

Japanese Butterflies (1908)

When I resolved to plug some gaps in my chronology, I asked friends if they could name any extremely old films.  Two of my lodgers had once seen a movie ‘about butterfly women’ in a museum in Berlin, and a little research revealed it to be ‘Japanese Butterflies’, a Spanish film from 1908.

Like a lot of very early films we’ve looked at, it eschews plot for spectacle (though, as mentioned in the film above, sometimes we’re presented with neither), and gives us a number of special effects and striking images.  Japan!  Some men!  Dancing butterflies!  A woman!  A chrysalis!  A giant butterfly!  A slightly different giant butterfly!  That’s really all there is to it - a  of Oriental beauty and mystery, its frames coloured-in by hand.  You can watch it right here.


Tune in again for 1909-1912, though since films start expanding from shorts to features (which is to say, films an hour or more in length), these years may be spread across a few posts.  Technology is marching on!

A Zed and Two Noughts (1985)

Do excuse my wonky screen-caps - I'm photographing my TV again

We're nearing the end of the Penciltonian now, so as well as watching films from those last few years, I'm tidying up a number of loose ends.  I was keen to watch a film for every letter of the alphabet, and found that I had, quite appropriately, left Z for last.  Since I didn't have the time to watch 'Die Zweite Heimat' (1993) before the end of the year, I turned to 'A Zed and Two Noughts', a pleasingly literal choice for the letter.

Like most Peter Greenaway films, this is full of wit, conspiracies, nudity and astoundingly attractive cinematography.  So much symmetry, such colour.  Greenaway's introduction to the film points out the myriad myriads of light-sources used, from sunlight and starlight to different kinds of bulbs, flames, sparks and rainbows, and with this in mind the uses of light and colour in the film are really quite remarkable.  Some images anticipate my favourite Greenaway film, 'The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover' (1989): a woman in flamboyant, ancient reds in a pink-lit lavatory, or the fascinating or horrible treatment of food that is no longer food.

Venus de Milo (Frances Barber) and a zebra.

"The wives of two zoologists die in a car driven by a woman called Bewick who's attacked by a swan on Swan's Way".  The zoologists, identical twins, obsess over decomposition, grow more identical, and begin to liberate zoo animals for Alba Bewick, who loses a leg but grows more symmetrical.  Though the film is enjoyable and engrossing, you must never watch it it while eating your dinner: it's a beautiful picture, studded with time-lapse footage of decay - apples, prawns or zebras, passing from near life to maggots to brown mush.

The cast includes credible actor Geoffrey Palmer, arrestable comedian Jim Davidson, David Attenborough as narrator of a nature documentary, and a piquant part for Frances Barber, who I know better as Doctor Who's intensely villainous Madame Kovarian, here playing Venus de Milo, a writer of erotic animal stories.  It's a curious and exciting cast, and a film that lingers long in the memory.

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I haven't found a film that looks and sounds better.  Magnificent light, colour and framing, and a pulsing, obsessive, urgent score by Michael Nyman.  This was the first film I looked at on blu-ray, and is the only film I would recommend to you in that handsome, unnecessary format.

Tarzan of the Apes (1918)

A mere four years after the novel saw publication, here comes 'Tarzan of the Apes'.  It opens with a zoologically dazzling opening montage to match that of 'Life of Pi' (2012) - A snake!  A warthog!  A lion!  An elephant!  Some kind of bear!  Double rhinoceros!  I suppose audiences back then might have been more easily impressed by such stock footage displays as the one that starts this picture.  (That is, if it is stock footage - it could have been shot for the purpose for all I know, but lions really don't live in jungles, and the scenes with actors were apparently shot far from these animals' real haunts, in Louisiana).  Still, it must have been exciting to go to the cinema and see, not just bleary human forms and shuffling slides of text, but vast, shaky animals.  It's the same reason we see a venus fly-trap in action in 'Nosferatu' (1922), or animals in full colour in 'The African Queen' (1951)

As we all know, Tarzan is a hairy but clean-shaven fellow who lives in the jungle, swings on vines (he does so only briefly here, at the half-way point of the film - I suspect the famous image comes from a later picture) and was raised by animals, making his eventual meeting with civilised society (as opposed to sinister-looking Arab slave-traders, local savages and other horrid stereotypes) exciting and slightly-but-not-very romantic.  The concept is a little similar to that of The Jungle Book, except that, while Mowgli was (I think) an Indian child raised by a wolf, a panther and a hilarious bear, young Tarzan is an English child of the upper class raised by apes and heir to a fortune and heritage of which he knows nothing, meaning a (financially) happy ending is practically guaranteed from the start (though as we'll see, this film never quite reaches that inevitable 'you were rich all along' conclusion).

It's an interesting view of humanity's innate yearnings.

So, for the first half, young Tarzan is raised by a lovely chimp called Kala, larks about a while, and has no reason to talk to anybody - convenient in a silent film.  The intertitles mainly tell us what is happening or what characters are thinking, which seems a rather poor use of silent film as a visual storytelling medium.  This feels less like a film, more like a written story with moving illustrations - illustrations which are as spectacular as they are expensively staged: slightly.  As in 'America 3000' (1986) and 'Battlefield Earth' (2000) , our hero learns English and ingenuity after discovering a book, and immediately comprehending its uses and the meaning of its symbols.

After this we skip a number of years, and meet the adult Tarzan, played by Elmo Lincoln, an actor with an amazing name.  He engages in a variety of adventures of exactly the kind one might expect of Tarzan, and left me wishing I was watching the less innovative but much more fun 'George of the Jungle' (1997).  This, though, was almost certainly the first time there had been a film quite like this, so I suspect I ought to have admired its novelty - but I've seen it all done more enjoyably and slickly later on, so these fresh adventures seem, with the weight of time, full of cliché.

It's not even as sexy as it sounds.

The film only covers the first half of the novel's story.  I'd be tempted (though to be honest not very tempted) to watch the sequel which was released the same year (and was a Western, curiously enough) but it no longer exists anywhere in the world, and can be watched by nobody.

The film suffers, as many 1910s films do, from lack of close-ups of actors' faces, meaning that even if they're doing their best acting we don't really see the emotion, so it's very hard to engage with it as a drama.  By this point these things were getting better, and film-making was growing steadily more competent, so I suspect the rather rough and bleary print I saw on Youtube has also counted against my appreciation of this film.  That is, the early 20s films I've seen restored for home release have looked and sounded so crisp and beautiful, and my dismay at the 1910s may in part stem from the fact that I've watched the whole decade for free in gloriously compressed 240p YouTube video.

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You can find the film on YouTube, but here's the novel too.

A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978)

'A Walk Through H' is one of my favourite pieces of art, and worth just as much as a visit to a gallery.  It's pictures and narration, so my comments will follow suit.

The story is told in 92 maps, with occasional birds.
It's almost animation, but the pictures don't move, only the camera does.

A red path has guided the ornithologist through these many maps,
but may not be reliable.

The maps begin to fade, leaving only the image of a signpost,
or the skeleton of a windmill.

The maps hail from a variety of sources, and seem to have been selected by
Tulse Luper.  In reality, they're drawn and painted by Peter Greenaway,
my favourite director, and a painter at heart.

The maps have an unusual beauty.

An important map, reproduced from a bogus ecological textbook.

This map was stolen from Van Hoyten, the Owl Keeper at Amsterdam Zoo.
Van Hoyten appears (in person) in 'A Zed and Two Noughts' (1985),
which I hope to tell you of some other time.

A map on the plumage of an upside-down partridge. 

"My wife took a drawing I had bought to be framed. It was a drawing I didn't know too well, but well enough to know that, when it came back, it had been exchanged for another. This is that replacement. I said nothing to my wife but, taking the receipt, I went to find the frame-maker. I couldn't find him. I mentioned to my wife that I'd passed the shop where she'd had the drawing framed, she only looked surprised for a moment."

As the ornithologist nears the end of his journey, time is taken for
exultant music, and many birds. 

"Tulse Luper suggested my journey through H needed 92 maps. Anticipating my question he suggested the time to decide what H stood for was at the end of the journey and by that time it scarcely mattered."

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This film is on Volume 1 of The Early Films of Peter Greenaway, along with 'Windows' (1976) and 'H is for House' (1974), which I have talked about elsewhere.  Volume 2 has my favourite, 'The Falls' (1980), which I would have made you read about and watch, dear reader, were my copy not on semi-permanent loan to an actress in Leeds.

The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)

Gary Cooper, considered quite the dish of the day

I was recommended this film by my grandmother Mopsy, who saw it shortly after it came out.  It clearly had a fairly broad appeal, as it was also enjoyed by Adolf Hitler, who apparently saw it thrice, and who was in most important respects unlike Mopsy in character.  I fear its merits have fallen away somewhat as the years went by.  Moustaches and European domination of ostensibly lesser countries have both gone out of fashion, and talking pictures have increased their scope and flair.

It has the flavour of a war film, though I'm fairly sure we weren't actually at war with India in the 1930s.  Our handsome and moustached hero (the very famous Gary Cooper, who I always thought was a dancer, but apparently wasn't) and his comrades have to fight the handsome and moustached villain, Mohammed Khan, whose name alone will tell you why this film is unlikely to be remade.

The villainous Mohammed Khan

In my last update, 'Metropolis' (1927), the silent film reached its full extent, a vast, visual feast, a story told in pictures; it's rather distressing to find out the state of cinema these eight years later.  Now that money and time are poured into audio recording, the visuals seem to matter far less, and long, static dialogues take place in plain offices.  Perhaps it's just that 'Metropolis' was highly stylised, while this is much more naturalistic, but that too is probably a consequence of sound-recording, as something so extreme as 'Metropolis' with dialogue would seem bizarre, even comic.  Either way, on all fronts, 'The Lives of a Bengal Lancer' seems a far less impressive, less cinematic way of telling a story.

Oh, the talking scenes are intercut with charges and skirmishes, some high-quality explosions and an extremely dated scene in which the characters have great fun sticking pigs with spears, an effect achieved simply, by having the actors really go out and stab pigs with spears.  This all seemed rather uncharming.  The spectacle is there, but the story, and the drama, is all in the talking.

The playing of a pungi summons a snake, with hillarious consequences

The film isn't without merits, but at each level I find myself thinking it could be better.  The lively banter and camaraderie of the main characters could be even more fun, and the film would be more engaging if it was.  The slight tragedy of the ending could have been richer, less of a footnote.  Far more could have been wrung out of the central conflict: Lieutenant Stone tries in vain to gain some affection from his father, a Colonel, who doesn't wish to show favouritism - a thread with no real resolution.

All in all, a bit disappointing.  I was left a little concerned for the fate of the talking pictures, wondering whether the move toward dialogue would present a string of wordy disappointments.  Thankfully the three films I watched thereafter, from the forties, fifties and sixties respectively, were all excellent, and have together restored my faith in the talkies.  Unless calamity befalls me, they'll be the next three posts.

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I can't truly recommend this film, but as a Briton neither can I fail to advertise a chance to spend your money with a multinational corporation.

Ben-Hur (1959)

Ben-Hur is my favourite film.  I don't think I'd claim it as the best film I've looked at, or even as the film I think is the best, but it's the one I'm closest to, and love the most dearly.

I saw it as a child, but forgot almost everything about it except that it was long, exciting, and that it spans enough time for the main character to grow a beard.  I rediscovered it almost by accident in 2004, when I stayed up all night writing an essay for university, then realised I had just enough time to take in the movie's three-and-a-half-hours duration before breakfast.  I did so, and was overwhelmed.

What I'd entirely forgotten about this ancient epic was that it's about Jesus of Nazareth.  By most standards, he's a very minor character here, as he only appears in about 5 or 10 per cent of the film, and we never see his face or hear him speak; nonetheless, he's at its heart.  The film's oft-forgotten subtitle, 'A Tale of the Christ', probably tipped me off ahead of time, but since he appears only very briefly at the one-hour mark, then disappears until the film is almost over, the climax featuring his trial and execution caught me unprepared.

Judah, Messala, Judah's mother and sister.  In very widescreen.

So, what's the story about?  Charlton Heston plays Judah Ben-Hur, a young Jewish prince in Jerusalem, AD 26.  His boyhood friend, a Roman called Messala, returns to the city having been placed in charge of the garrison, and tries to persuade Judah to give up the names of Jewish troublemakers and those who oppose the Roman rule.  This invitation to treachery mars their friendship sufficiently that, when a lose slate falls from Judah's home it's wilfully misinterpreted as an attack on the new Governor, who was passing at the time, and Messala condemns his friend Judah to become an oarsman in a Roman galley - a very terrible form of slavery - and locks up his mother and sister.  So, as with 'Die Nibelungen' (1924) or perhaps 'Julius Caesar' (1950), the first half of the film shows matters getting worse and worse, and the second half is about revenge.

The thing is, when Judah is struggling across the desert towards his fate in the galleys, he meets Jesus.  Or rather, he meets some guy, who gives him water as he's perishing of thirst.  We've already seen a brief glimpse of the nativity in a (somewhat religiose) scene before the opulent opening credits, and seen Joseph the carpenter, so the long-haired bloke is obviously Jesus.  This moment comes back to Judah at various times on his adventures, and on his return to Jerusalem he meets Balthazar, the wise man (you know, 'We Three Kings' and all that), who saw the Christ as an infant, and has come back from Alexandria to find him again before he dies.  Balthazar can see Judah's murderous intent, but urges peace and forgiveness.  From this point the viewer, or this viewer at least, knows Judah Ben-Hur needs to depart from his anger and find peace with his erstwhile friend Messala, but we also want to see him revenge himself with appropriate violence for his years of great suffering.

This excellent conflict drives the film's second half - the call to forgiveness and the need for bloody vengeance.  Charlton Heston, an actor I've grown to like very much since seeing him in this (I have most of a foot of 'Heston section' on my DVD shelf, next to, and dovetailed with, the Biblical epic section), performs this sort of conflict very well.  I find his scenes of anguish, distress and obvious internal torment very affecting, though I can see it's an acting style that's less popular these days, and that his egregious firearm politics of later life have marred him in many people's eyes.  If you're not familiar with him, know only that he'd make an excellent Indiana Jones or a damn good Batman, and that the sort of roles once written for him now go variously to Swarzenegger or Will Smith.

Judah resolves to have his revenge

I was a bit wary of going back to 'Ben-Hur' this year, after watching all these many films for this blog.  I've been so impressed by the quality of film-making in general and special effects in particular in films from the 30s, 20s, 10s and even 1900s that I worried this magnificent epic would seem less impressive in comparison, now that I was judging it less ignorantly.  I'm delighted to say that it's an excellently shot film, the sets huge and believable, the famous chariot race is real and the sea-battle tense rather than embarrassing.

The two big action set pieces are astounding things.  The chariot race was done for real and is about as good a chase or race sequence as you could ever hope to see.  Parts of it are shot-for-shot lifted from the 1925 film of the same novel (which has also lent its-self to the storyboards of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg) but Ben-Hur seizes the inspiration and adds rich colour and the widest widescreen you've ever seen.  The chariots really do go at thrilling pace, there's the thunder of hooves and the roar of a real excited crowd.  The sequence runs for almost twenty minutes without any sign of flagging - as the horse-drawn chariots thunder nine times around the vast arena, with many catastrophic accidents along the way.  What makes the chariot race yet better is the complete absence of incidental music.  Often, as here or in some of the Roger Moore bond films (to give an unlikely example), edge-of-your-seat sequences become far tenser when the music stops, and we're just given the sounds of the environment, loud or quiet as they would be.  The music can blare in once the action is through.

It's no great surprise that it won a lot a lot of Oscars at the time, and I could happily single out all eleven of them for special praise, but I'll settle here on two.  First, the film editing, which allows a tremendous, if hardly plot-necessary, tension builder as the hortator of the galley hammers out the increasing speeds for the the oarsmen: battle speed, then attack speed, then ramming speed - with the pace and urgency of shots rising with that of the hammers, the oars and the music.  Second, the wonderful performance by a possibly-slightly-blacked-up Hugh Griffith as Sheikh Ilderim, who shines as the film's comic relief, a man of gusto and gleeful intelligence, who laughs along so graciously and patronisingly with the Romans' slurs against his ethnicity, knowing the joke is turned round against them, and who shows a great kinship with his four white horses, who ought to share his Oscar for best supporting actor.

A reflection in a bloody puddle

The end of the film is the part that stunned me when I watched it early one morning in 2004.  Judah learns that his mother and sister live, but are lepers, and are dying.  Esther, the rather wet romantic lead (though she's better and stronger in an argument toward the end) has persuaded him that the wondering Rabbi (oh, you know who) can heal them.  He takes them to see him, but finds the streets deserted, as everybody is away watching Jesus' trial.  Judah tries to help Jesus carry the cross, and tries (unsuccessfully) to offer him water as he thirsts, realising then that this is the man who once saved him.  Jesus is crucified, and everybody looks on helpless.  It's miserable, seeing this man who's done nothing wrong, has only acted kindly and gently in this film, nailed up to die.  He hasn't even said anything, anything - this isn't, as some imagine, and as I had imagined back then, somebody in any way judgemental.  He's a man who, by his actions, has cared, saved, and challenged.  Balthazar, who has come so far to see the man he met as a child, sees him executed, 'taking upon himself the sins of the world'.

Judah's family departs and hides in a cave from the rising storm, but find themselves, in the moment of Jesus' death, healed physically, as well as given hope and reason to live.  This is what confused and alarmed me back then.  For years I'd thought of the atrocity of the crucifixion as a failure, or at least as a dark and terrible thing, a reason for Good Friday to be bleak, with Easter the only associated hope.    It seemed obscene to see the family of Hur given reason to rejoice and be glad, to be healed in the moment of Jesus' death.  It was only then, having been ostensibly but half-heartedly Christian for most of my life, that I realised the Good Friday was the day that sin was conquered.  It was then, not at Easter, that Jesus declared 'it is finished'.  It was accomplished, as it was for that sin, our sin, and in this film Judah's violent anger as much as that of the crucifying Romans, for which Jesus was executed.  This is why the Friday is counted good, and though death was shown to be defeated on Easter Sunday, the more important barrier, the sin which had so long stood between humanity and God, was broken down in that moment.

Since seeing this in 2004, I've watched the film every year on Good Friday, or as close as I can manage, and to me it marks the real end of Lent.  It carries me in to see why Jesus' mission was important, why the crucifixion, and how we can be saved.  Once the film is over, once I'm relieved and have dried my eyes as necessary, it's practically Easter already, and hope can burgeon.  The film doesn't reach as far as Easter Day.  It needn't.  Judah returns to Esther and tells her he was there til the end, and heard Jesus forgive his executors from the cross, and that 'it was if he took the sword out of my hand'.  Reconciled with Esther, Judah learns that his family are safe and well, and we see the sun rising with the cross in the background and an (apparently unscripted) shepherd leading his sheep.

There are surely greater films, better made or more innovative - even, perhaps, more epic - but there are none I value more highly than 'Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ'.

A Roman who can't bring himself to berate Jesus for watering Judah.

P.S. I could probably end the blog here and be content, but the numerically obsessive part of me says I should plough on and do all hundred years - and so I shall!

P.P.S. When people say 'film adaptations are never as good as the original book', William Wyler's Ben-Hur is a great counter-example.  The book is very good, but the story-telling and the dialogue are notably superior in the film.  This also means other adaptations are never a patch on this version, though the 1925 silent film is quite something.  Incidentally, each of the adaptations (I've sought out other film, TV and radio versions) tell completely different stories about Simonides, Judah's former slave, all quite incompatibly.

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Unless the prospect of long films or 50-year-old films is utterly inimical to you, you should totally see this film.  For various reasons, I have several Ben-Hurs on my shelves, so you're welcome to a lending copy.

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My! (2011)

Watch 'Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My' on Youtube.  Oh, go on!

Each August I help to run a holiday camp for 14-18-year-olds, for the charity Scripture Union.  This camp, 'Transformers', started out as a computer and electronics camp, but has departed from its electronics roots and now fills the body of its days with technical sessions in programming, 3D graphics, photography, video and music production.  I co-ordinate the video activity, which is my main chance each year to be involved in the making of ten- or twenty-minute dramas of alarming intensity or especially eccentric comedy, depending on the whims of the campers.

This short motion picture, 'Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!' is one of three videos we put together in the Summer of 2011, and was devised, shot and edited in about five days, and though it's clearly cheating for me to look at a film that wasn't shot on film and in which I had a hand, this was at least shown on a big screen at the week's end to an audience larger than the cast - and that has to count for something.

So, there's a lion who lives in a conference centre and eats the guests, and who initially looks to be the hero.  Elsewhere, there's an embittered former hunter who is called out of retirement to hunt the lion - with the promise of a string of sausages.  He may be the hero, or perhaps the villain.  At the time of shooting we really didn't know.  Mr Lion has an entourage of tiny animal puppets, and Jeremy Farquad (the hunter) has a silent donkey, Little Jeremey.  It's a true story, by the way.

Since the plot was never planned more than a scene in advance, this manages to be one of the least linear, and ultimately most enjoyable of the holiday's videos.  The opening scene or two meander a little and run about 10% longer than needed, but the characters are introduced and each stakes their claim to be the main character.  While properly I ought to praised the whole cast, and often do so, I feel I ought to make some particular mention of the actors behind these two central figures.  Charlotte is a lion, and that's that - and Jeremy Farquad feels so real as to haunt my dream..

We didn't know, shooting those slightly awkward first scenes, what grand tragedy we would find ourselves producing for the story's close.  The story unfolds in a variety of directions.  Jeremy Farquad has a confusing meeting with a donkey identical to his own, during a run-in with a receptionist who's clearly in the midst of her own troubles, and for whom 'Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My' is just a part of an independently eventful day.  Mr Lion disputes with Mr Tiger, prowling predators of equal stature, and the conference centre isn't big enough for the both of 'em.  Elsewhere a cat is striving to become a bear.  Everyone seems to be the centre of their own story, and more could be told about any of them - indeed, four characters from this story have since been spun off into further adventures.

Prowling predators posture past petty Pencilton

Somehow managing to sieze the limelight from this nest of strong candidates, and steal scenes from greater performers, is Pencilton the owl.

Let me tell you about Pencilton.  When we were making this video, I came to hate the fluffy little owl.  He was the worst kind of person, and I wished to see him get what he deserved.  To all who saw his shrill fluffiness he seemed like the Fonz: the minor character who takes over, the epitome of cool and exciting.  To me, he was despicable.  Pencilton lingers with predators, glorying in their kills.  He doesn't do the damage, but he hovers nearby, approving of it.  He hangs around with bullies, to be cool.  He's like Saul in Acts 7 - he doesn't join in with the atrocity, but he holds the coats of the murderers.  He's the sort of owl who would make uniforms for concentration camps and be glad of the business.  A boaster, a liar a casual supporter of ferocity.

Perhaps this is why he comes to such an unpleasant end - not death (of which this film bears a mite too much), but destruction of identity.  The owl with too much regard for himself loses that self.  It's a rather horrible oppression, and I wondered at the time whether the video had gone too far - both in this and in its scenes of firearm brutality.  This is, if you'll recall, a Christian holiday camp, producing a video with a prodigious body-count and this dehumanisation (de-owlisation?) of a fluffy hand-puppet.

A requiem for Little Jeremey...

...or is it Little Miss Receptionist?

Two things, I think, pull this back from going too far.  First, the story is ridiculous and the characters fluffy and bizarre, meaning it's quite possible to laugh your way through the absurdity of the horrific finale.  Second, though Pencilton weeps most mightily, his final few close-ups (in which he is puppeteered by Mr Lion) see the fluffy young owl recalled from his grief by an evident joy at the new life he is to live: gold smelting, zebras, tandems and all.  Had he wept on and on through this list of exciting excursions, I think it would have been one of the most distressing endings I'd ever encountered.

So much did this ending (perhaps, itself, a product of my widely expressed hatred of Pencilton) sadden me, that the day after the holiday came to its end I started my online search for a Pencilton hand-puppet, that I might tell the story of the owl's rescue, fostering and recuperation.  I'll have you know, young Pencilton has come on a long way, has matured away (though not far away) from his selfishness and habitual churlishness, and has made his peace with Little Jeremey, whom he now counts as a brother.  I held a special screening of this video for Pencilton, LJ and their panda friend Sebastian, and they seemed to find some delight in it, or perhaps I'm just going insane.  I'll keep you posted.

I screened this video for some animal acquaintances

But this is not just the Pencilton show, so I shall try to pull back to the whole.  The various factions meet - in an altercation which involves the most magnificent combination of pipe-smoking and reverse footage - before spinning off again into yet another strand, that of Mr Pump's Legacy (not to be confused with Hergé's 'Mr Pump's Legacy'), a particularly merry story-line cut off so suddenly and so alarmingly as to be frightning, rather bleak, and wholly ridiculous.  Strong, excellently judged performances from the whole cast, who raise themselves to new heights for this tense final confrontation, make the whole thing work.  It's funny, sad and horrific in quick succession.  If the movie was longer, I think I'd find time to weep for everybody.

Of course, I've a massive natural bias here, by merit of being very close to the production.  Ostensibly the whole thing is devised by the young people, but I fear that in this case more than usual I was being Patrick McGoohan, muttering lines and plot developments from off-camera and seeing the better ones picked up and developed.  I'm quite content to hold myself guilty for anything in the video that went too far (though in some cases I might pass the blame onto Pencilton, that rapscallion).  I do find this to be a highlight of the camp's fairly rich video tradition.  While others may have been more innovative in camera placement or more ambitious in scope (we've set things in space and in 11th century Bavaria before now, and recently squeezed out 26 minutes of Shakespeare and got away with it), I hold this as the best original drama we've yet managed.  The characters all have their own lives, reasons to like them and to despise them, and when they come together I care, and perhaps you will too if you'll cast your eye over this desperate adventure.

Miss Receptionist can't be doing with all these animals

The holiday camp happens every August, somewhere near Guildford, and if you or anyone you know are of the age and inclination to come along and be a camper, you'll find all the details you could possibly want on the holiday's website, and find a good many more camp videos on our Youtube channel.

P.S. I know fitting this eccentric amateur work into my catalogue of 100 cinematic films is cheating, but I'm content to let this stand for 2011 at least until somebody lends me 'The Artist', a film from this year that I'm keen to compare to the 'real' silent films I've been watching.

P.P.S. Pencilton the owl went on to have many wonderful adventures, and this blog is named after him.  His birthday is August 24th and he collects finger-puppets, under the confused belief that they're real-live talking animals just like him.

P.P.P.S. Mr Socks Macguffin, who was almost-but-not-quite in this film (he was editing a different movie on the computer next door) has committed himself to a similar endeavour to this blog - so if you like this, you'll like his - he can be found here playing through two video-games a year from 1971 to the present day, and blogging about the experience.  Be sure to check it out; it's currently only a statement of intent, but I'll be sure to direct you there again as its content grows.

Life of Pi (2012)

I've already told you about one 2012 film, so under the terms of my experiment I've really no business saying anything here about 'Life of Pi', but it's in the cinemas now and I think you should probably see it (whoever you are), so I'll make this exception.

The novel won the Booker Prize in 2002, which means it ought at least to be a story worth telling, and which can be told well.  I've enjoyed very much the only Booker-Prize-winning book I've read (and have appeared on-stage in a blues-musical about a Booker Prize loser, and once lived for a troubled year with the grandchild of the 1974 Booker winner), but haven't read 'Life of Pi', and was assured by a friend that it was a book that must never, ever be made into a movie.

Despite this, it made an enthralling and stunningly attractive film, one of the most visually delicious I've encountered, with a wealth of colour and animals and truly special effects.  Despite this, it's thoughtful, though not unexciting; ambiguous but never vague; it's stylised, but you can believe in it.  I only hesitate to describe it as 'intelligent' because I suspect I'd be taken aside and assured that the whole thing is a nonsense when compared to the book.  Well, so be it.

A real live tiger, probably.

The majority of the film follows a boy, Pi, trying to live simultaneously as a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim while adrift on the ocean in a small lifeboat, which he shares with a ferocious tiger.

I like animals - not in person, but in theory - and this is an animal film, with entrancing zebras and flying fishes, Richard Parker the tiger, orangutans, boars and flamingos.  My favourite was a hyena, whose fluffiness, aggression and voracious appetite reminded me of an owl puppet of my acquaintance.  To look at this as a story of nice and horrible and enjoyable animals isn't at all to miss the film's point, or to ignore the questions at its heart.  If you would like to be charmed and alarmed by animals, and yet be left pondering some long while after the film has ended, I don't think you would regret watching 'Life of Pi'.

This is what night looks like on the pacific, from above.

I might well look out the book during 2013, and am left keen to see some more films from or about India (where, I have wholly failed to so far mention, the eponymous Pi Patel starts his journey).  On that front, a film of Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' (another Booker Prize winner) has also come out this week, and I've been looking forward to it for some while - and my parents have lent me 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel', but that seems to be entirely about retired white people with India merely a vacation, so may be the opposite of what I'm after.  Both of these are 2012 releases, so you probably won't hear about them here again, at least for a while.