Mysteries of Hong Kong (2/7/01)
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Forgotten Silver. [Peter Jackson and Costa Botes, 1995.]
A bogus documentary about the life and work of the pioneering New Zealand filmmaker Colin McKenzie, who [within the bracketing fiction] began his career at the turn of the century by inventing bicycle- and steam-powered motion picture cameras, filmed a heavier-than-air flying machine whose flight antedated that of the Wright Brothers, pioneered the sound picture in 1908 with a kung-fu movie in Chinese [unfortunately it was a commercial failure, since he neglected to invent subtitles], shot the first color documentary footage of topless maidens in Tahiti in 1912 [and got busted for smut peddling], found himself subsequently reduced to making atrocious slapstick shorts in the teens, and, finally, devoted the remainder of his life [until his untimely demise serving as a combat photographer in the Spanish Civil War] to building a replica of the city of Jerusalem in the mountains of New Zealand and shooting a mammoth Biblical epic based on the illstarred romance of Salome and John the Baptist.
The burden of the fiction is that this forgotten masterpiece has been recently dug up by intrepid film archaeologists who have found the auteur’s lost city in the jungle and unearthed a treasure-trove of reels of film in a hidden room therein; the tale of the reconstruction of the longforgotten epic from this store of ancient stock and its triumphant premiere before a contemporary audience provide a grand finale. [The gigantic Babylonian set for Griffith’s 1916 masterpiece
Intolerance stood three hundred feet high and covered ten acres in downtown Hollywood, and stood crumbling for years after its abandonment; Abel Gance’s amazing 1927 bioepic
Napoleon had been forgotten for fifty years until Kevin Brownlow supervised a restoration and staged a screening — attended by Gance himself, then past ninety — at the Telluride film festival in 1979.]
The ancillary materials on the DVD reveal that this imposture was so successful that many of the viewers who saw the film on New Zealand television were completely taken in — not simply because of the meticulous imitations Messrs. Jackson and Botes managed of silent-era mise-en-scene and the look and texture of decaying nitrate stock, but also, presumably, because of the deadpan interviews contributed by wouldbe critic/historians Harvey Weinstein, Sam Neill, and Leonard Maltin.
A note of protest: the corpulent dancer who plays Salome may, indeed, be typical of the movie heroines of 1915 [the female complements to William Howard Taft]; but Griffith’s Babylonian princess, Seena Owen, could have stepped straight onto the set [and into the hot tub] of an Andy Sidaris feature. Genetics are always superior to the accidents of fashion.
____________Cyborgs a go-go (1/20/01)
