My Favourite Film of 1896.

Film You’ll already know the story about L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (watchable here), that on its first public projection the audience was so amazed by the realism of the vehicle heading from the background to foreground that they thought it might continue into the auditorium and vacated the building in a panic. Martin Scorsese parodies the moment in Hugo with an actual train crash through a railway station (albeit in a dream sequence). The Wikipedia page has a short discussion about the veracity of the story or at least the cause of the audience’s reaction, but the point is that if it did happen, that audience had a reaction, a visceral, physical reaction to a film, however short it is.

Over the past couple years and before I’ve talked about my own emotional reaction to films. Crying tears of awe on seeing the olyphants in Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Puking my guts out one Christmas whilst watching Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan. Shouting during a screening of Like Water For Chocolate at an inopportune moment. Running myself out of a screening of Texas Chainsaw Massacre unable to cope as soon as the meat hooks appeared, leaving an empty screen at the Showcase Cinema on the East Lancs Road. Sobbing through Titanic at that same cinema, indeed sobbing through numerous movies. Most recently shouting Blinovich’s name right through the end of The Lake House (luckily at home where no one but me could hear).

Looking back, for the most part, none of these seems to have anything to do with the real purpose of the given film. Does a comedy make you laugh? Does a drama take you on an emotionally satisfying journey? Does a thriller literally thrill? Is an action film actually exciting? Aren’t the best films capable of many or all of these? To that we might include those films designed to provoke an intellectual response which is still a reaction of a sort although I’d argue that the best of that type of work is capable of making us laugh or cry on the way to making us think. But ultimately this is still predicated on who we are, or experience. Pauper’s Jack Black and humour vacuum Josh Gadd has enough admirers to sustain his career.

Tarkovsky’s Stalker has one of the funniest scenes in cinema and a really mind bending conclusion despite for the most part allowing us to meditate on voids and losses and the search for a purpose. When the three men, who we’ve watched walk for over an hour through a deserted, apocalyptic wilderness reach their destination at the centre of the zone and hear a phone ring it’s impossible not to laugh due how unexpected it is. Did the filmmaker expect that? The laconic performances suggest so as the characters seem as surprised as us, but in what’s otherwise a relatively serious film, we’re as surprised to be laughing as much as they are to hear the phone ringing. Did Tarkovsky build to this emotional release?

There’s strong evidence the brothers Lumiere wanted to scare their audience or at least find realism in the image. The position of the camera looks like an early experiment in 3D and the film was later reshot with a stereoscopic camera and rescreened for screening in 1935 along with numerous similar experiments. It’s speculated that perhaps the audience ran out of that screening when indeed they did in fact have the train unexpectedly coming towards them and that reaction has become attributed to the earlier event. You would think that the audience might have become more cine-literate by the 1930s but considering how some couldn’t see the artifice during early screenings of The Blair Witch Project decades later, a spellbound audience can be convinced of anything.

Perhaps we should simply agree that for any piece of art, especially cinema, to provoke any reaction is a good thing, even if it’s unintended. Laughing at the ineptitude of a film might not be what a filmmaker expects but they should take some solace in the fact that enough people care enough about it to actively dislike it. How many mediocre comedies, dramas, thrillers and art house pieces pass by without notice. The makers of Texas Chainsaw Massacre would surely have preferred me to stick around for the final hour of their film (otherwise it would have been a short) but they’d probably get a kick out of the fact it scared and sickened me to the point of wanting to run for the exit. I’m certain that nothing could replace the relief I felt at the auditorium doors clattered behind me.

My Favourite Film of 1897.

Film How often do you feel angry these days? Not just low level sighing, but full on righteous indignation? For various reasons, at a certain point, happiness became something of a luxury in the world, something which happens sometimes when we least expect it, but for much of the time, we’re in a complete state of shock and awe about something.

There’ll probably be a few of you who’ll look at that and see it as a gross generalisation and that may be. For the most part, helped in no small measure by my anxiety tablets, I’ve shifted into a state of blasé disbelief, of watching the news and having realised that I have little or no control over what’s happened, decided to simply let it all wash over me.

There’s plenty to be angry about, you know the reasons, and if you are able to do something directly that’s fine, channel that anger, do something about it. But most of the rest of us can only simply get on with things and hope that everything will be alright in the end. But stay informed in case there is a way we can join the effort.

Which isn’t to say I’m not resisting. Keeping my own council, voicing my own beliefs and being unafraid to have them is a form of resistance. Argue your case with intelligence and logic whenever possible even in the face of evil and ignorance. Because there is a lot of evil and ignorance in the world and evil people. We meet them every day. Walk past them in the street.

Ultimately we’re all in this pillow fight together and even if, like the feathers flying about in this short film (produced by Siegmund Lubin), such things as facts and empathy simply end up floating in the air rather than attaching themselves to their target, we need to keep swinging against the persecution complex of a majority which feels oh so threatened by the smallest, long overdue changes in society.

Which is why, even though for the first time in years I shouldn’t be feeling positive for the future, I still have hope. Even though the world seemed to change so quickly last year, there’s nothing to say it won’t head back on track just as quickly. The universe is not without a sense of humour. Even if I don’t particularly believe in a god, I believe that.

My Favourite Film of 1898.

Film If I was taught anything useful growing up, it was the value of money, or at least I like to think so. Without much to spend, everything bought had to be accounted for. We didn’t splurge and material things weren’t that important. Clothing was bought on market stalls and the like for example and I was brought up to ignore labels, something which is still true. I simply don’t understand why anyone would want to spend hundreds of pounds on single pieces of clothing and always shop around, probably to the point that it would have been cheaper just to buy the first damn thing I saw.

My parents had to be imaginative when it came to treats and incentives. Sometimes this was easy. A sweet van would park at the top of the road every week, Mr K’s, and I’d be given ten pence to spend on chewy chocolate bottles and Sherbet fountains from the retiree in the brown overalls. None of this would happen if I’d been “naughty” in the intervening days. Not that I remember being an especially difficult child which is counter to what my parents have just told me. I have no memory. I asked what they meant by that but the details due to our relative ages now are now sketchy. I expect it was just general childhood misbehaviour.

But the one treat I do remember is being allowed to sit at the front on the top deck of the bus. This was usually either the 80 or 82 from Speke into Garston or the city centre and was one of the most exciting things I could do because it meant I could watch the bus driver through the periscope which was the way they could keep an eye on the top deck before security camera were invented (this all happened in the late 70s or early 80s). It also gave me a driver’s eye view, albeit from a higher angle, seeing the streets and landscape at the front rather than the side. Even though this would be those same journeys, there was always something new to look at.

When I was old enough to travel on buses without my parents, it still took a while before it felt ok to decide to walk up those steps by myself and even when I did, it felt illicit, like I was stealing something which I hadn’t earned or didn’t deserve. Plus by then I understood the dangers of passive smoking and it still hadn’t been banned on public transport. In my teenage years, upstairs was also were the boys and girls hung out together and since I was nervous around the latter, the bottom deck became a haven from all of that. The one occasion I did venture upstairs, I almost had an anxiety attack, I think when the girlfriend of one of my mates looked at me.

Now I’m old enough to enjoy the experience for what it is, the chance to see the world from an unusual angle, a similar thrill as View from an Engine Front – Barnstaple but live and on a road. Now I’ll sit in this position whatever chance I get, looking across tops of bus shelter and roofs, jumping out of my skin as the bus hits the tree tops. My longest trip lately was all the way to Preston although I’ll admit I did read for a bit here and there as the bus traversed the motorways. If you’re not actually driving, there’s no point subjecting yourself to the hypnotism of the monocoloured roads and embankments and street furniture. I wonder where I’ll be next.

My Favourite Film of 1899.

Film The first filmed Shakespeare was a one minute short version of King John, the surviving part of a quartet designed to advertise Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s forthcoming production at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. Since there are only a few weeks left of this project and it will be my final opportunity to talk about my love of Shakespeare, I thought I’d list some of the screen versions which have meant the most to me or are just favourites and I haven’t had a chance to talk about yet.

Hamlet (1996)

My Hamlet of Hamlets and would have been in there for 1996 if it hadn’t been for the one film per director rule and director Sir Ken's In The Bleak Midwinter having been released the year before. Everything you would ever want to know about my love for the production is in this old 2009 review and in the intervening years my admiration for his achievement has only increased. Admittedly, I’ve more recently become testy about conflating Shakespeare texts and indeed cutting anything out of them, of the opinion that you would slice away half of a Renoir or expect to read an edited Jane Austen novel, but this is such a celebration of the material, presenting as many of Shakespeare’s words as is coherently possibly, I’m inclined to say this is my favourite film of my second favourite play, perhaps even my favourite film of any Shakespeare play.

Measure for Measure (1978)

One of the finest of the “traditional” approach BBC Shakespeare productions (in other words in period costume and set design), I first watched this during English class, my pubescent mind sucker punched first with full on lust for Kate Nelligan’s Isabella then by the implications of the late Tim Piggott Smith’s Angelo’s similar reaction. Their key scenes in Act II are electrically played in this production, as the Vulcan-like Angelo enters full on pon farr in the face of a woman he can’t have and shouldn’t want. It’s the first occasion I really understood the power of Shakespeare after having to endure Julius Caesar the previous year which the mid-teen version of me found remote and archaic. The productions I’ve seen since have often painted Angelo and Isabella in mono terms, whereas the text and this production implies that every character in the play is morally ambiguous. Plus it doesn’t assume that it’s a comedy trying to wring humour out of lines which are clearly anything but.

As You Like It (2009)

For no other reason that it’s a recording of the very production I saw during my only visit to Shakespeare’s Globe (so far). It’s disconcerting to see just how much of the production is similar to my own memory, right down to what appeared to be moments of improv. There aren’t any pauses for the sound of planes which was definite feature when I attended, and it’s a pleasure to actually see the Seven Ages of Man speech which I inexplicably missed on the day due to a toilet break. Here’s the inevitable blog post about that afternoon. Nearly all of the productions from the Dromgoole era have been gathered in a big boxed set which at £80 seems expensive but considering that they’re otherwise £20 individually, really isn’t.

Romeo and Juliet (1996)

Which also contradicts what I was saying about cutting the text and so forth, but Baz Luhrman’s adaptation which retains the emotional power of the play as well as servicing its aim of presenting the text to a young audience. It’s one of the cinema visits I remember most vividly, in the late Odeon on London Road, filled with teenagers who by the end were split directly by gender, boys scoffing, girls sobbing. Peter David writes about a similar experience in his essay, “On The Terrible and Unexpected Fate” that viewers were reacting as though the ending was a complete surprise even though Shakespeare actually tells us the ending in the prologue. Unlike him, I didn’t get up and berate the audience for their lack of observational skills, reasoning that it takes most cinema audiences a minute or two to settle so they probably just missed it. My only other memory is of buying the VHS release and finding a wining noise in the background throughout which after having tried a couple of replacements turned out to be a mastering error.

Much Ado About Nothing (2012)

I adore the Branagh film which I saw on its opening day in an otherwise empty screen at what’s now the World of Cine on Edge Lane (Virgin Cinemas back then), and find myself sobbing even when listening to the soundtrack and Emma intones with “Sigh no more…” Joss Whedon’s version wins out for a couple of reasons. For a start, Nathan Fillion is that rarest of curiosities, a Dogberry whose funny yet hopelessly poignant in a way which Michael Keaton’s sweaty mugging never is. It’s also an exceedingly mature presentation; these are characters with inner lives, even minor characters with few lines that are often removed from productions, worn down by everything which is happening outside of the bubble of the house. Plus there’s the fan theory that it offers Angel’s Wesley and Fred the chance to redo their relationship in a strange monochrome afterlife. That Whedon achieved all this between shooting and editing The Avengers is a marvel.

Playing Shakespeare (1984)

Not a production, but a series of instructive filmed workshops presented by John Barton, director and producer of the RSC with members of the company past and then present, including David Suchet David Suchet, Lisa Harrow, Alan Howard, Ben Kingsley, Michael Pennington, Patrick Stewart, Susan Fleetwood, Sheila Hancock, Sinéad Cusack, Mike Gwilym, Jane Lapotaire, Ian McKellen, Richard Pasco, Donald Sinden, Michael Williams, Judi Dench, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Norman Rodway, Peggy Ashcroft and Roger Rees. They present an idea of the rehearsal process at the RSC, how the text has been taught actors across the years especially how it’s verbally presented. One of the more valuable lessons is that when reading Shakespeare you should follow the punctuation rather than the line breaks unless he calls attention to them by putting the punctuation there. Follow that process and the words flow. Any actor who pauses at the end of a line is doing it wrong. If you have any interest in Shakespeare at all, I’d urge you to seek this out.

My Favourite Film of 1900.

Film Quite recently, I’ve begun to have mixed feelings about Cyrano and its many homages and remakes. For years, two of my favourite films were the Jean-Paul Rappeneau adaptation starring Gérard Depardieu and Roxanne, the modern retelling with Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah in the title role. The latter was one of my formative movies, on heavy rotation on video and then DVD. As a bullied kid, I held CD Bales up as something of a hero, especially in the scene when he throws insults back in the face of the drunken idiot in the bar. Oh how I’d wished I’d had that confidence at school.

But lately I’ve become concerned about Roxanne’s role in the story. I can appreciate why the Cyrano’s lack of self-esteem means that they don’t believe that the object of their desire could love them back. That’s pretty much my entire life. It’s rather insulting, that Roxanne who is capable of treating them as a friend might not think of them more intensely. For my own part, I’ve even had women flat out tell me that they like me in that way and I’ve distanced myself from it, afraid that they might become disillusioned or disappointed if they knew me better.

Does she then deserve to be lied to in this way, to have the handsome fellow bare false witness and pretend to be something they’re not to take advantage of them? However romantic it may seem for Cyrano to be the source of the poetry and be using Christian as an avatar for expressing his feelings doesn’t it mean that she and her heart are being taken advantage of? Although it’s not the only occasion in literature and film or life a woman’s been seduced through subterfuge you might then question the extent to which we might consider her consent for subsequent sex.

On hearing that she’s been lied to, and the mechanism, the natural reaction should be to reject Cyrano and move on with her life. But in all the versions I’ve seen, Roxanne is somehow able to abstract the way his letters make her feel from the person who was fictionally the face in front of them and then shift those longing towards their original author. As is so often the case in romcoms, the resolution comes because the woman forgives the man for his idiotic mistakes.

Where I once saw a hero, I now somewhat see a villain. In choosing to lie to her, Cyrano puts his own feelings above hers, which is wrong and stupid. But it feels like only a man could then write a scenario in which he’s subsequently rewarded for his mistaken moral ambiguity. He’s learnt his lesson and so therefore coupling will ensue. This feels wrong to me, despite the incidental pleasures.  Perhaps it's right that the first silent version only includes a battle.

My Favourite Film of 1901.

Film A bank holiday revised repeat. Here's an account from back in 2008 of seeing Mitchell and Kenyon's Liverpool As Seen from the Front of an Electric Car from the Pierhead to the Circus for the first time. It's available on the BFI player here.

Originally posted 14th May 2008.

A couple of years ago there was a screening in Manchester of Mitchell & Kenyon’s football films. M&K were two Blackburn entrepreneurs who for a period in the early part of the last century set about filming people and work and play and then charging them to see their life projected that evening at various locations including fair grounds and libraries and it turned out St George’s Hall. I’ve thought since then how wonderful it would be to organise such a showing at that venue again and last night I got to see what that looked like as hundreds of people piled into the main hall to see a selection of their films of Liverpool, in a screening organised by the BFI and Liverpool University.

My version of the event was a plasma tv running from a Matsui dvd player with about thirty chairs. Instead, the main stage was filled with a giant screen, showing images from a state of the art projector sat on the organ balcony and an audience covering the whole floor. The programme selected highlights from over two hours of footage shot in the city, generally places with large gatherings of people such as football matches, parades, the return of soldiers from the Boer War, the leaving of Cunard ships from the Pier Head and oddly a reconstruction of the arrest of a criminal.

Except that’s a very broad description of the marvels we saw, blurry scenes of the past put into context by the guest speakers, Julia Hallam from Liverpool University and Vanessa Toulmin from Sheffield’s National Fairground Archive, who’d also commentated on the football in Manchester and has apparently presented over a hundred and thirty similar shows throughout the country. Vanessa seems tireless and has the same enthusiasm for the subject that I saw two years ago.

I went with my Dad and he was particularly impressed with the musical accompaniment provided by Stephen Horne, who at one point played the flute and piano simultaneously creating a spooky atmosphere to accompany the recreated Arrest of Goudie (a film which demonstrates exactly how difficult it was to spin a narrative when you’ve only very long static shots to work with, establishing shots lasting many minutes). Now and then Horne imported familiar melodies including You’ll Never Walk Alone and The Leaving of Liverpool, which created some wonderfully post-modern moments, different eras of the past combining.

Seeing images such as the giving of medals to soldiers even I can’t but feel that we’ve lost something in our stupid cynical world. True, some of the audience in the footage of the May Day Demonstrations look bored stiff (with the exception of one particularly enthusiastic gentleman waving his hat in the air) but it was at least a regular gathering in which the entire community could become involved and which by the looks of things hadn’t been hijacked by commercial concerns (with the exception of the ice cream man perhaps).

The Capital of Culture year, with collective experiences such as this screening are proving that actually such things are still possible. Usually in screenings I’m quite obsessed about talkers making noise during the main feature. Here it seemed positively encouraged, a collective brains trust attempting to work out exactly were in Liverpool particular films had been shot, or exclamations of surprise as the older demographic of the audience saw shops and streets that have long disappeared.

My Favourite Film of 1902.

Film There is a home video in existence, recorded during my A-Levels, about a quarter of a century ago, in which I’m shown, because it happened, reading the description of how various chunks of technology on the Starship Enterprise D work from a copy of the official Technical Manual to some school friends who’re doing their best to ignore me. I was about sixteen years old and I think it’s probably my nerdiest moment which is quite something considered everything which has been published on this blog and elsewhere for the past fifteen odd years. Later in this filmed conversation, I turn to describing the Vulcan concept of the IDIC before someone throws an empty water bottle at someone else’s head. I don’t think it was mine. It’s quite a while since I’ve been able to watch it.

Not long afterwards, I declared this to be a different person, that I’d completely changed and I was more interested in other things, had some kind of “awakening”. But I was fooling myself. I’m still that person, I just multiplied my number of interests and learned when to shut up about it within disinterested company. I’m in the process of watching all of Star Trek in hard chronological order for goodness sake. I watched the first twenty minutes of Star Trek Generations before Encounter at Farpoint and returned to the rest of it between the Deep Space Nine episode Distant Voices and Voyager’s State of Flux. I was nervously holding my finger next to the pause button during TNG’s The Pegasus, guessing the exact moment to insert Enterprise’s These Are The Voyages before realising that they run in parallel so need to be watched concurrently.

Why do some people gravitate towards science fiction more than others? Escapism certainly, but all kinds of page and screen fiction offers that release. It’s what it’s designed for. How I became enraptured was probably through habit. As a child, I’d be slotted in front of Saturday morning cartoons and Star Trek, Doctor Who and Buck Rogers, Street Hawk and Airwolf and at a certain point it just becomes the thing I most looked forward to. Plus although I know they’re not mutually exclusive, an especially disastrous afternoon watching Everton lose to Manchester United in a cup final turned me away from football forever. My finely tuned trauma reaction led me quickly to decide that anything which made me cry that much wasn’t a good thing.

I also have a collector’s mind and most science fiction is designed to take advantage of my kind of personality. From a perspective of pure commerce, the franchises are designed to churn out more story, more product leading completest to want it all and now. But that’s because we want to know the whole story. Once a world has been established, we’re desperate to know all of the details, watch the narrative cartographers, both solo and within a writing staff of a television show explain how their world fits together. That’s how they survive in numerous formats. We’re desperate to see what’s next and how it fits with what’s gone before, ready and eager to point out when it doesn’t much and perhaps publish a corrective.

But single stories still have great power. In Melies’s A Trip To The Moon, we know little to nothing about the society which inspires the mission, the film is closer to fantasy than scientific fact, obviously. But its impossible to watch with just a surface interpretation of events. We’ll wonder about the kind of propulsion the space ship has, why they’re breathing on the moon and why the celestial body has a face. We’re equally delighted and perplexed, our imaginations filled with notions of what the rest of the society might be like even though we know it’s futile and silly. Same with Blade Runner. Same with Gravity. Same with Inception. Tiny details here and there engaging with our detective skills. Often films which explain too much are crushing bores.

But other than the intellectual exercise, when even with the most generic quest storyline there’ll be something engaging about the world even if the film itself doesn’t disappointingly take advantage of it, there’s the sense of being shown something new, outside of our reality. During the meet and greet for my MA Film Studies course, when we were introducing ourselves and the kinds of films we like, I said that I’m often impressed by films which are critically derided if they’re visually interesting. That’s still true. I love the Resident Evil film franchise whose newest instalment received a one-star review in Empire. Every film is visually stunning even if the stories have become repetitive. I can’t wait to see it.

In other words, I completely understand what enthralled that younger version of me even if I’m thoroughly embarrassed by his approach. You are what you are and I’m pleased that I embraced that if only because the person I was in my early twenties who sold off his original Doctor Who collection at a flea market for buttons in heavy denial probably wasn’t a happy young adult. Of course it helps that the social stigma has somewhat dissipated but I like to think I would have ended up here either way. When you reach a point when you can ask a box the size of a hockey puck to play almost any music you’d like, what the weather is and to tell you a joke, in other words you’re living in the future, it helps if you’ve already considered the possibilities.

My Favourite Film of 1903.

Film  Some brief notes on genre. Again.

The Great Train Robbery is popularly thought of as the first Western or at least a pre-cursor to the modern western. But in production, this was not in the minds of the film makers. The situation is rather more complicated and although for various reasons it’s possible to label it a “western” it’s also a number of other things.

Genre tends to be defined in two ways, semantic and syntactic. Semantic refers to how the film looks and the tropes of the genre are in what we can see. If everyone has guns, hats and horses in a desert it’s a western. If it’s guns, hats and cars in the city it’s gangster film.  If it's phasers, environmental suits and spaceships its sci-fi.

Syntactic is about the structure of the story. A romantic comedy is a meet cute with various obstacles then inhibiting the couple from coupling until they do. A hyperlink film has lots of different plots, with lots of different demographics of people mixing unexpectedly across numerous geographic locations. A walking film is a road movie on foot.  If everyone dies at the end, its a tragedy.

There are also two ways of deciding the genre in which a film fits. The first is to watch a “corpus” of similar looking films, looking for commonalities, “tropes” and then dismissing titles which don’t match and seeking others which do. Semantically that’s how The Great Train Robbery became thought of as a western due to the tropes we’ve already discussed.

The other is through cycles, in which a film is popular, does business and so a lot of similar films are made to capitalise. Found footage films are a recent example, as is teen horror in the wake of Scream or “torture porn” after Saw. Usually these genres are actually presenting a new twist on some old format and so antecedents will show themselves.

Which is why The Great Train Robbery is so complicated; in production it was actually within contemporary a cycle of “heist” or caper films (see also A Daring Daylight Burglary) and is even still listed as such at the Wikipedia. It fits the syntactic tropes of planning a robbery and carrying it out ala the Oceans films, albeit over a slender run time.

It’s also a period drama, since it’s recalling recent history, the production design recreating a landscape and people from just a couple of decades previous not unlike a 2010s filmmaker setting their film in the 80s. Some of the people watching The Great Train Robbery would recognise the images in their own memories.

The “western” didn’t exist as a film genre when this was made, the term not being used until 1912 and even then it would be decades before directors set out to make a “western” rather than a film which happened to be set in the 1880s in the American West. The final shot of the film is up front on the genre’s Wikipedia page.

Which is why I find film studies so interesting. Nothing is fixed, everything is in flux and preconceptions can be annihilated with a new piece of information or thought and how you approach viewing films changes. Watching The Great Train Robbery as a heist or period film gives it a completely different texture, making it even more entertaining.

My Favourite Film of 1904

Film One of the questions I frequently ask myself (not that it keeps me up at night because there are plenty of other nightmares and anxieties available) is why I find some things funny and others not. What exactly is my sense of humour? What is it about FRIENDS which makes me guffaw or Last Week Tonight with John Oliver or Harold Lloyd films or Fleabag or even Shakespeare when played well but turns me away from the likes of Anchorman, Mock The Week, pretty much any modern British studio based sitcom and whatever it is Ricky Gervais or Sacha Baron Cohen think they’re doing in their own projects.

I think I can see some demarcation lines. I really hate smug comedians or filmmakers, the ones who’ve had a bit of success and so assume that they’re funny, and admittedly make others laugh even if what they’re actually doing is making fun of others or presenting false deprecation. The theatre of embarrassment is hateful. I think I need to have characters with a modicum of dimensionality, who feel like they exist for a reason other than as the basis for parody or comedy. Oh and not written to be wilfully stupid for no logical reason. There has to be some kind of realistic underpinning characterwise. Matt Damon in The Informant! Is a good example.

That explains why I have such a tin ear for the likes of Anchorman or Zoolander in which I can often see what the joke is, understand what it’s trying to do but don’t laugh. For some reason I genuinely loved the interaction between Steve Carrell and Kristen Wiig in Anchorman 2, which seems like a much more affectionate piece of characterisation than elsewhere. One of the reasons Mock The Week and many of those panel shows turn me off, is the sense of one-up manship (because it’s usually men doing it), of wanting to upstage everyone else even at the expense of belittling the other comedian. It’s noticeable in Have I Got News For You how respectful Merton and Hislop are with each other and how other contributors often mess up the tone.

All of which has the counter argument that I’m over analysing and if something is funny, it’s funny, but I have met people who think that Adam Sandler is some comic genius, they see something I don’t and there is an element of frustration about missing out. Mark Kermode has a theory that people spend a lot of time going to the cinema to see films they don’t like and I am tempted to see one of the films I’d hate with an audience to experience the reaction. Perhaps the fact I watch most of this stuff alone causes them to lose some of their power. Certainly I can imagine the silent slapstick An Interesting Story (which you can watch here) going down a storm back in its day in front of the right audience. Some films don’t work as well without the collective response.

So what do I find funny? The unexpected, the proverbial banana skin in its many forms, when everything seems to be going ok but then a random element intrudes. But quite often I’ll be laughing at the reaction rather than the action itself. It doesn’t need to be someone tripping over. It could be some surrealist element which doesn’t quite fit with the general sense of the rest of it, so I’m probably laughing at the cheek or simply because I’m impressed at the cajones. I also like smart people being funny together but not to the point of purposeful cruelty. Watching people take the piss out of someone isn’t fun. Unless it’s the real world and they’re a figure of authority and they deserve it. I tend to love current affairs jokes.

Example: I recently watched part two of the Star Trek: The Next Generation story, Gambit. Data’s in command and part of the story is about him imprinting his authority especially on Worf who’s being an insubordinate arse again. There’s a moment when he gives the Klingon an order and as he stalks off the bridge, Data settles backwards in the Captain’s chair with a sense of satisfaction and Troi gives him a look which can only be described as “Ooh, get you…” I laughed, a lot. The timing of the performances is impeccable, but there’s something about the way she moves her head and eyes and the camera holds the shot for much longer than usual. Throwaway moments tend to be funnier to me than more obvious comedy.

The films of last year I laughed at most were Deadpool, Star Trek Beyond, How to be Single and Money Monster which also demonstrates that I prefer films which are of another genre which also happen to be smart rather than simple out and out comedies. The West Wing is one of the funniest series ever written but you would never consider it a sitcom. The reason When Harry Met Sally works is because there’s a ring of truth about the characters and they’re not supposed to be paragons. Much of the time, if you give me a reason to root for a character within a proper narrative, you’ll have me. The Boss would seem to run counter to my tastes but the fight scenes between the girl guides are amazingly amusing. I tittered all the way through the widely derided Vacation.

So perhaps my sense of humour isn’t that easily defined.

My Favourite Film of 1905.

Film  In tribute to The Misadventure of a French Gentleman Without Pants at the Zandvoort Beach (which you can see here), here’s a storty from my archive about when I too almost lost my pantaloons in the sand, along with the rest of me:

Another Place.

My boots were stuck in the sand. Actually they were deeper than the sand. I was in the mud. My boots were stuck in the mud. I tried to pull myself out, but I feel my socks coming loose and the shoe being left behind. I tried to step forward but I couldn't. I look ahead into the distance and see my Dad running madly forward.

"That's the sandals lost then." He said. He's only in his socks.

We went to Crosby beach today to see "Another Place" or Anthony Gormley's statues. I'd watched the news reports beforehand of teenagers going out too far and getting stuck in the tide, holding onto the figures for dear life. How we'd laughed at the stupidity. So we'd said we wouldn't go out too far. And we hadn't. But that sand looked so stable and I'd stepped forward and plop.

I didn't panic. I wasn't actually sinking. But I wasn't going anywhere else. I eventually managed to pull my left foot out, boot and all. But there was nowhere for it to go but backward, back into a squelch as it went back into the soft sand. My plan was to keep doing this until I hit a hard surface. That lasted about thirty seconds when I realised it would require the right foot to move and it wasn't going anywhere.

By now my Dad had retrieved his sandals and had trotted back over. I put out my hand and he took it and tried to pull. But he was falling towards me so he stepped back again. I'm glad my Dad's here. I imagined the phone call home if I'd been out on my own "I'm on Crosby beach and I'm stuck in the mud." I'm not very practical -- whenever something happens in the real world, usually with nature, I have no idea what to do. I'll struggle through, but my Dad somehow just knows. I've no common sense whatsoever.

"I'm going to have to come out of the boots." I said.

I pulled my left foot out, with boot still stuck in the mud. My foot found some more sand to get lost in, but this seemed safer somehow. I turned and tried to pull the orphaned boot out. I eventually had to dig my hands in and pull the thing up from underneath. It was misshapen and caked in dirt, which scattered off as I flung it backwards towards the steady sand behind. Time to do the same with my right foot. I pulled my right foot out, but this time I started sinking. I panicked and dragged myself backwards as quickly as I could, each step slightly easier. I dragged my way up the stand. I turned back. My boot had been left behind.

By now I'd decided it was a lost cause. I'd walk all the way back to the station and get the train back into Liverpool in my bare feet if I had to. But before I could say anything, my Dad had jumped forward and was throwing himself into a battle with the sand to the pull the boot up. Now he was knee deep and I'm telling him to leave it or that I'd go back myself, but by now he had both hands in each of the holes I'd left behind trying to find the thing.

Dad found the boot. It was sunk a little bit, and by hand he dug a space around it, throwing the mud from side to side until he could pull it free. Dad turned and handed it to me -- it was full of sand and clay which I tried to shake out as best I could. Dad turned and with much more agility than I had, stepped back up to the steady sand.

We spent the next half hour using the salt water which had been left behind by the tide in some parts of the beach trying to wash ourselves off as best we could. Somehow, while Dad was getting cleaner and cleaner, I was getting even dirtier. I kept joking about how in some places you'd pay thousands for a treatment like that. I had mud everywhere. It was caked up my jeans, up my legs, up my arms. There was even a spot on my face. He suggested I use my sock as a cloth and this worked. But I wasn't clean, just making space in my skin so that I could move my fingers to blow my nose and throw the hair out my eyes.

Eventually we were together enough to walk back up the beach and enjoy the statues. They're an incredible sight, lonely figures looking hopelessly out to sea, unable to move. For those few minutes when I couldn't get my legs to move I knew exactly what that was like.

My Favourite Film of 1906.

Film After last week’s early sound experiment, here’s a colour filmmaking system from 1906.

George Albert Smith’s documentary Tartans of Scottish Clans is mostly simply that, shots of tartan patterns with their identifying labels, with a last minute twist.

Smith is utilising a two colour process he invented.

Kinemacolor projects a black and white image behind alternating red and green filters.

The Wikipedia page has a more detailed explanation along with further examples.

My Favourite Film of 1907.

Film It’s 1907 and here’s singer Jean Noté performing the French national anthem with synchronous sound. The Jazz Singer’s generally thought of as being the first sound film, and although it’s true that it was the first to utilise a technique which was commercial repeatable, the director Georges Mendel achieving a similar effect over a decade earlier. One can well imagine if this was shown in cinemas, the audience taking to their feet and singing along. Just remarkable.



But this still isn't the earliest. William Dickson was experimenting with sound in the mid-late 1890s.

My Favourite Film of 1908.

Film Here’s a comment from underneath this YouTube bootleg of Segundo de Chomón’s La maison ensorcelée (potential English titles, The Witch House or The House of Ghosts or The Haunted House). Scrainbow1234 says, “4:50 inception lol” which is shorthand for noticing the similarity between the way in which the entire house shifts backwards and forwards taking the people and contents with it and the famous corridor action sequences from Inception.

Having watched the scene through a couple of times, I’m fairly sure they were shot in a similar way, the entire set on a “gimbal” with people on either side shifting back and forth causing the floor to up tip backwards and forwards. But I’m still not quite certain. There’s something about the way the bed moves and the actors which means that I’d also theorise that it’s the camera which is moving and the bed is being shifted back and forth by wire or the acrobatic talents of the people. Or both.

But I like not knowing. It makes the scene much more compelling. As discussed a couple of weeks ago, digital verisimilitude has led some films and filmmakers to become far less compelling that they might have been or once were. We assume everything is digital so we’re less wowed by the ingenuity of film makers despite the fact that often just as much ingenuity is required in order to create the rendering and textures.

That’s certainly impacted on my enjoyment of horror films. More often than not, I find myself unfrightened for much of the time because I know full well that the monster or action on screen has been designed and created, I’m unable to embrace my suspension of disbelief. Jump cuts are idiotic. Sometimes I’m even annoyed when the horror intrudes when I’m enjoying the company of the characters or the setting so much. It Follows. The Conjuring. The Visit.

Only now and then is there a film which creeps me out precisely because I can’t account for what I’m seeing. The artifice is still there and probably intellectually I know that it’s all fake, all of it, but there are incidents which don’t seem to fit, weren’t anticipated and my brain does what it should do and freaks out. The emergence of the antagonist in Sinister, the middle section of Silent House, The Awakening, Unfriended, As Above So Below. The VVitch

La maison ensorcelée isn’t scary at all, but despite its often humorous intent it is creepy because of the element of surprise, the unexpected and the sense of it being an artefact of an earlier era. Director Jennifer Kent thought as much too and included a section of this silent in The Babadook, another film which did manage to scare me because of its weirdness. If only more filmmakers realised that it’s never about the CGI monster. It’s about us.

My Favourite Film of 1909.

Film There’s a spectacular moment during Charles Kent’s eight minute version of A Midsummer Night Dream which I’m still yet unable to explain. When Oberon tasks Puck to seek the flower which will the source of the night’s romantic farce and his servant says he’ll “I'll put a girdle round about the earth, In forty minutes” (not that the intertitle says this), the nymph is shown floating quickly into the sky then briefly speeding across the spinning earth before landing where the plant must be. Then the action is repeated as Puck makes the return journey.

The incident takes seconds, but even watching the shoddy capture of the film from the Wikipedia page, I’m enchanted. Perhaps the child is being whisked upwards on a wire. Perhaps we’re seeing a double or triple exposure when they’re circumnavigating the globe. But even now, I want to believe. With the rest of the film looking like it could have been filmed in some ancient time, I want to believe that what I’m watching is documentary evidence of fairies even if the effect is about as convincing as the papercuts of fairies at the bottom of a garden.

Special effects are rarely this awe inspiring of late. Watching the average film, even outside the sci-fi genre is to see a screen filled with computer graphics utilised to create the most mundane objects and vehicles. That has the effect of making the viewer assume that everything they’re seeing outside of the actors had their origin inside a computer which means that quite often the film makers then have to release set footage to show that actually a large proportion of what we’re seeing was created practically.

There’s not much which can be done about this now. When the remake/prequel to The Thing is shot with some perfectly reasonable and often brilliant practical effects but the studio orders they replaced with inferior digital effects because it’s what the audience expects (leading to the film being thoroughly trashed precisely because of how awful those intruder effects look) there’s no real chance of going back. I actually quite liked that film by the way and would be eager to see the version which hasn’t been visually bowdlerised.

There are exceptions both CGI and practical. Ant Man’s decent into the micro-verse. The corridors of Inception’s dream sequences. Every part of Gravity. But so inured are we wanting to see something extra special that when Doctor Strange didn’t quite deliver on showing us something we hadn’t seen before or rather that wasn’t simply another painted landscape we were disappointed especially given the hype about the visual leap of what we were about to see. When we see Rogue One, we’re somewhat impressed but quick to say, it’s fine but it’s not quite right. Not yet.

None of which is meant to denigrate the artists who work on something like Gods of Egypt; they’re creating the best work they can within the time and budget, directorial expectations and technological limitations. But I do miss the time when you’d see something happen in a film and be not quite sure how it was achieved, that there wasn’t a catch-all explanation however accurate that was. Say what you like about the remake of Point Break, but did you know that most of those stunts were filmed in actuality? Remarkable.

My Favourite Film of 1910.

Film Few genres are as time sensitive as the Christmas film. There's something inherently strange and unseasonal about watching a festive favourite at any time outside December up to the first six days of January. Indeed, in truth, once Boxing Day is finished, the shine is already off as the sentiments which the story is probably trying to communicate feel hollow somehow especially if like me you couldn't really enjoy Christmas as much as you'd like due to catching the lurgy which was floating around for 2016. The last thing you want is to see lots of shiny happy people having a marvellous time (at least by the end, Capra) when you're stuck in bed unable to eat anything solid.

A Christmas Carol (of which the Edison edition is my film of the year) is no exception.  I try to watch an adaption of Dickens's story every Christmas and although, because of the sheer number of different examples, I've attempted to indulge as late as the Summer because there aren't enough years in a life, the juxtaposition of sun outside and snow on screen simply doesn't work.  It's almost as though the emotional tug of the tale requires the viewer's shaky emotional state around Christmas time in order to work its magic.  Perhaps we're at our most philosophical at the turning of the year, and a story designed to play into our own feelings of regret in order to create empathy for its protagonist is best viewed then.

Television series seem to have a counter effect.  In the age of the boxed set and binges, especially when watching something from network television, we'll inevitably stumble upon a festive edition and in the best of examples it puts us right in the mood, makes us feel Christmassy for the duration, reminds us of what we like about the season.  True there's the inevitable emptiness afterwards when we realise that the actual event is still nine months away, but the next episode is usually at the push of a button and we know that there'll probably be another festive edition within a dozen or so episodes.  Or sooner in the case of modern Doctor Who.

My Favourite Film of 1911.

Films When Geppeto set about creating his artificial boy (as in Giulio Antamoro's adaptation), little could he comprehend, probably because he’s a fictional character, that centuries later, later craftspeople would be capable of producing near lifelike digital marionettes through photographic technology. But that’s what we witnessed this Christmas, when Grand Admiral Tarkin and other special guests appeared in Rogue One: a Star Wars prequel (story).

Which isn’t to say the results are entirely perfect. Beneath the digital Cushing mask, a real actor with an equally impressive stage and screen career, Guy Henry, provides the voice and motion captured performance providing an underlying sense of humanity, yet the results still tip into the uncanny valley. We’re not completely convinced that Sir Peter is back giving a performance, probably because it’s not easy to forget that someone has died.

Much as has been written about the ethics of this decision, of attempting to make an actor posthumously “live” again and give a new performance and I can understand why some would find it distasteful. My adoration for Audrey Hepburn leads me to conclude that the appropriation of her image for selling chocolate bars is an atrocity as is Gene Kelly’s reanimation for a car commercial (his meticulous choreography replaced with something else entirely).

In Ari Folman’s film The Congress, Robin Wright plays a version of herself in alternative future in which actors are able to sign away the use of their image for film work in perpetuity, even past their death, the version scanned and capture as part of the agreement allowing them never to age on screen. The difference there, I suppose, is that the actor agrees to the procedure, even if they regret it afterwards as they see their image used in projects they fundamentally disagree with.

Back to Star Wars and where I stand. I think it’s fine. But I think the ethical fine line is hair thin. In the case of Star Wars, they’re recreating a character, albeit in a near photo-realistic form, which is no better or worse than when the same being appears in the tv series, in Rebels or The Clone Wars. It’s all animation with someone other than Cushing providing voice work or a performance, fulfilling a particular narrative function.

The other potential approach would have been to have Henry simply playing Tarkin and expect the audience to simply accept that the same character was being played by a different actor, as per Saavik across the Star Trek movies. And although it’s true that digi-Tarkin still pulls the viewer out of the film because he doesn’t feel quite right, it does create a clearer sense of continuity with A New Hope.

But this is one of only a few examples where this would be acceptable. If Hammer suddenly had an uptick in budget and decided to create a new horror film starring Cushing, that would be a more dubious decision. Or if someone decided to create a new romcom with Emma Stone swapping meet cute with a young Cary Grant, or a western with Ryan Gosling sparring with John Wayne.

Not that there would be frankly much point. Film is built on renewal and change, the old guard giving way to the new, for better or worse and I’m not sure there’s even an appetite from the audience for this sort of thing. Given the choice, I’d much rather watch a Monroe romcom within which I can be sure she was creatively invested rather than some contemporary pale imitation. There are enough remakes and sequels which fit that category already.

My Favourite Film of 1912.

Film The Titanic disaster is one of those historical events which has been told and retold so often across the past century, mythologised and fictionalised, that it's easily forgotten that the ship itself and its crew, before and after the voyage were captured on silent film cameras, it's possible to see the reality of some of these events. But here we again with Pathe news and as they describe, genuine footage:



However counterproductive the transfer is shocking and the choice of some mournful Moonlight Sonata is still not enough to detract from the magic of this visual record. Mainly we're forced to confront the aftermath, the long journey home of the survivors, those waiting for news outside the White Star Line offices in New York in the time before even radio broadcasts when the only way to receive up to the minute information was to turn up in person.

My Favourite Film of 1913.

Film This post really exists for archival purposes. The film is another Hamlet, for which I’ve written this old school Playing The Dane post. The Hamlet Weblog forever!

My Favourite Film of 1914.

Film Back to animation, and even further in time to Gertie The Dinosaur, Winsor McCay's thrilling animated short in which he attempted and succeeded through a series of drawings to recreate what he thought a Brontosaurus must have been like and getting the beast to perform for the camera. The Wikipedia has an incredibly detailed production history for the film and the fascinating release.

A vaudeville man, McCay effectively achieved the same showmanship as Hammond in Jurassic Park, but utilising a technology which is a distant forerunner to how the dinosaurs were partly created for the Spielberg film.  While project the film before the audience, he'd interact with the animation, coaxing Gertie to do tricks much as a circus trainer might.

You can see how this would work from the intertitles in the later theatrical release version.  He'd ask the animal to raise its left and right leg, to eat some fruit and so forth and eventually take a bough.  The animation falls into some repetition here and there presumably to cover audience reaction and allow for some verisimilitude in the performer's improvisation.

Over a hundred years later the effect is being somewhat recreated through Walking With Dinosaurs Live with another human introducing big beasts, albeit animatronic and with a more palaeontological approach.  But its just the same sort of showmanship and with the same motivation to engender a sense of wonder amongst those watching.

My Favourite Film of 1915.

Film Let's return briefly to the subject of film durations. Les Vampires was originally released across seven months from the 13 November 1915 – 30 June 1916, has ten episodes and a running time of 417 minutes or just under seven hours. Over time there's been some discussion as to whether director Louis Feuillade's meisterwerk constitutes a single film or a series of them and having watched the whole business in just under a week last Summer, I'm on the side of it being a series.

Structurally it has everything you might expect from a modern television series with a clear protagonist, A and B plots, recurring characters and stories which last a single episode undercut with ongoing storylines. Viewing the series was akin to working through a modern boxed set, even though some episode durations vary wildly between installments, even more so than an HBO or Netflix series which aren't pinned to the traditional network television advert structure (or scheduling requirements in the case of the BBC).

At the risk of providing a review, as with television series too, some elements are more palatable than others, some storylines more exciting or involving. There's a lot of running around and superfluous moments designed to create empty tension and a fair number of false cliffhangers in the Doctor Who mode. As Time Out identified in their review "if shown, as it often is, in one great unnatural marathon, it can be sheer torture. Best viewed on tape." Treated as one long film it's unpalatable. Treated as a series it's mainly quite wonderful.

Which then makes me wonder about the number of films which benefit from being watched in shorter installments. The Hateful Eight feels very long, too long, with much padding and not many likeable characters. But I wonder now what my attitude would have been if I'd approached it as a television series, watching each of the different "chapters" as separate entities over a number of sessions. How would that have changed my attitude to the piece? Are we more relaxed about episodic drama having a meander?

But why do we persist in suggesting that some films are too long whilst happily graze through thirteen episodes of some Netflix drama telling one long story? Is it because by its nature episodic television provides breathers and a certain pacing which allows us to mentally detox between incidents whilst a film forces us to keep watching and be engaged with the characters and story for a much more intensive period? The Hobbit films seem very long, but collectively there's less screentime than an average series of Game of Thrones.

Perhaps, as the demarcation between film and television becomes ever unfocused, especially on streaming services we'll become more relaxed about film durations too. How long can it be before Peter Jackson releases yet another version of his Tolkien films which increase his vision yet further. Or perhaps it is that the filmmakers think they can take advantage of our extended attention spans even though they don't have enough story or their characters aren't complex or compelling enough to justify the story they're telling.