Tag: UK

The Epic of Everest (1924; UK; John Noel)

John Noel had an extraordinary early life. Born in southwest England, educated in Switzerland, and posted with the British army to India, he fell in love with mountains at an early age. When his unit was stationed near the Himalayas in 1913, he travelled in disguise into Tibet to get a glimpse of Mount Everest. He served with the BEF in 1914, being taken prisoner at the battle of Le Cateau before escaping his captors and returning to active service. After the war, he became involved with the Royal Geographical Society and Alpine Club, joining the 1922 expedition to Everest as official photographer. He experimented with new kinds of telescopic lens to photograph and film at long distance in the mountains. The result was the short film Climbing Mount Everest (1922), as well as a desire to do better next time. In 1924, he helped fund the next expedition to Everest, led by General Charles G. Bruce. This time, Noel would record enough footage for a feature film. If the expedition was a success, he hoped to film the team’s actual ascent to the summit. And if the expedition failed…?

This film has been sat on my shelf for a long time. Having written about South: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic (1919), and having seen The Great White Silence (1924), I knew I would get to it eventually. Thanks to the very cold weather we had in January, I was finally inspired to watch it. The first thing to say about The Epic of Everest is that it is astonishingly beautiful to look at. The 2013 restoration by the BFI presents the remarkable footage in as good a quality as could be hoped.

The grain of the image lets you feels the rocks and ice and clouds, as well as the texture of the clothing and animal hides. The scenes tinted blue, pink, or give a dramatic, otherworldly quality to the film—but the landscapes are otherworldly enough in monochrome. Indeed, the whites and blacks seem almost destined to be used for such mountainous terrain. Noel plays with space and time, so that the mountains attain a magical sense of life: we see light and shade rushing across gleaming slopes, or darkness creeping up sheer cliffs of ice. Clouds pass at preternatural speed over the ridges and summits, or obscure whole swathes of the world. The silhouette of Everest itself becomes a constant visual anchor: it’s as though it is the one constant presence in a landscape at the mercy of elements. And it’s a kind of visual motif that embodies the obsession of the expedition that wishes to climb it. That we see the summit so often, without ever being about to reach it, is emblematic of the entire narrative.

These remarks aside, I was a little worried by the opening section of the film. There are a lot of titles, interspersed with one or two shots of landscapes. The landscapes looked beautiful, but I was concerned how much work the titles would have to do to shape the footage into a narrative. Happily, the film settles down after a few minutes and the footage dominates the text. The progress of the expedition is visually clear, helped by some marvellous compositions. The landscapes are also so vast that the literal progress of the lines of men, women, and animals is naturally choreographed. From the large crowds of porters and animals, we then see smaller teams of men and animals, and finally just men. And all the while, the terrain becomes steeper, whiter, harsher.

Indeed, it is the sense of scale that The Epic of Everest most brilliantly conveys. Noel composes the figures in this landscape carefully, so that we always get a sense of how small they are compared to the slopes. What’s more, the extraordinary telescopic lens he uses enable us to see across huge swathes of land to pick out the tiny dots of figures on distant slopes. You really do get the sense of the vastness of this terrain, and the vulnerability of the climbers. If Noel offers us a few glimpses of the faces of the main team and of the local porters, we never linger on any of them for that long. In fact, the only sustained close-ups we get of anyone in the expedition are the two still images of Mallory and Irvine near the end of the film. If this denies us a direct emotional involvement with the figures, it also concentrates all our attention on the reality of the world they inhabit. The drama is often played out at great distance, so the titles must do a lot of narrating for us (together with lots of undercranking to speed up the slowness of their traversal of the snow).

The film’s attitude to the nature and purpose of the expedition is also interesting. As far as the presence and culture of the local Tibetans is concerned, the perspective of The Epic of Everest is a little mixed. We are introduced to one village by being told how filthy and smelly it is, and the tone of other titles is rather patronising. (It is unclear if the film expects or encourages its contemporary Western audiences to laugh.) But I was surprised by how much respect the Tibetans are given: they are thanked for their welcome, company, and help; their temples and religious customs are given nodding respect—to the extent of being given some credence. For we are told that the Lama visited by the climbers told them that their expedition would fail, and the film acknowledges that he was right—even that it was a kind of destiny foreknown.

Which brings us to the ending. Narratively, the film is far stronger than Herbert Ponting’s The Great White Silence. Since the filmmakers could not accompany Scott and his team to the South Pole in 1912, the story of their fate is told via substitute footage and an animated map. Conversely, though filmmaker Franky Hurley was present throughout the gruelling events depicted in South in 1914-16, he was unable to film any of the climactic journey and rescue. That film ends with footage of the location recorded long after, with a lot of wildlife thrown in for good measure. Both are unsatisfactory ways to conclude fascinating narratives. But for The Epic of Everest, Noel was present and filming throughout the climactic events. And there is a powerful irony in the fact that the film’s boasts of telescopic lenses proved powerless against the weather to record the final stretch of Mallory and Irvine’s attempt to reach the summit. Like Noel, we can only sit at a great distance and observe the slow and often obscure events unfold. One moment, the climbers are tiny dots, the next they are lost in cloud. We wait. Hours pass. Other figures appear, messages are relayed with painful slowness. Mallory and Irvine have disappeared, and the film cannot solve the mystery or offer us any alternate means of representing what happened.

In dealing with the failure of the expedition, and the death of two of its members, the film becomes surprisingly reflective. If Mallory and Irvine died, we are asked, isn’t resting forever in this astonishing landscape an idyllic kind of afterlife? Further, the text of the titles wonders if the expedition was fated to fail, and whether some spiritual aspect of the mountain—and, implicitly, of Tibetan culture—prevented them from reaching their goal. It returns to the native idea of the mountain as a goddess that protects herself from intruders—especially (I think it is implied) from those outside of Tibetan culture. Whether the filmmaker is being sincere, or is just finding a convenient way of ending the film on a dramatically satisfying fashion, is up for debate. But I think the ending does succeed narratively and emotionally: the last images, tinted a burnished red, of the mountain drawing the darkness up over its flanks and summit is an exceptionally beautiful way of making a sense of irresolution a fitting conclusion.

The BFI restoration comes with a choice of two scores. The first is by Simon Fisher Turner. I say “first” because the cover of the Blu-ray credits this as “a film by Captain John Noel with music by Simon Fisher Turner”. (Not quite in the same league as the BFI release which Amazon sells under the title “Michael Nyman’s Man With A Movie Camera”, which really takes the biscuit.) Described in the liner notes of this edition as “an epic of contemporary music-making”, it boasts an array of sampled sounds—from the original 1924 recordings of Tibetan vocalists recorded by the expedition to various kinds of “silence”, yak bells etc. The music that is not sampled or recorded on location is rather more generic. Washes and warblings of sound, dashes of synthesized brass, tinklings and scratchings, breathy acoustic sighs… This mood music engages only in the very broadest way with the rhythm of the film, or the rhythm of watching it.

The liner notes contain a very brief essay by Fisher Turner. “Where do I begin?” he asks. “On the internet.” He freely acknowledges his role as acoustic “thief”, while also emphasizing the improvisatory way he compiles pre-existing and original sections of the soundtrack. It’s difficult to reconcile the claim of this being an “epic of contemporary music-making” with Fisher Turner’s own account of downloading apps and stealing audio from online videos. Bits of his essay read like parody: “Ideas come and go. Puzzle making. Noise collecting. Soft electricity. Sound climbing. Notimemusic. Snowblind snarls. I meet Ruby and Madan, and play music on the sofa, and eat Nepalese lunch with blue skies and new friends.” Epic indeed. At least Fisher Turner’s soundtrack for The Epic of Everest is preferable to his score for The Great White Silence, which I found entirely unenjoyable—and sometimes downright stupid. (At one point, the soundscape lapses into silence. Fisher Turner himself then appears in audio form, telling us that the silence we are listening to was recorded at Scott’s cabin in Antarctica. Having to appear on your soundtrack to explain the soundtrack is absurd enough, but Fisher Turner chooses to speak at the very moment when there is a lengthy intertitle on screen. Trying to read one voice and listen to another is difficult, and it struck me as the very acme of aesthetic imposition to literally talk over the film while the film itself was “talking”.)

I wonder how much money was spent commissioning and recording the Fisher Turner soundtrack, and how much was spent on its alternative: the reconstruction of the 1924 orchestral score? The relative market standing of the two soundtracks is clear enough from the way the modern one is prioritized in publicity and on packaging. The liner notes also promise that Fisher Turner’s score is available on “deluxe limited-edition vinyl” and CD. But not, of course, the 1924 score. And you must go past two essays on the modern soundtrack before you reach Julie Brown’s excellent essay on the 1924 score, which is the last one included in the booklet.

So, what of the 1924 score? It was compiled for the film’s screening at the New Scala Theatre in London by the renowned conductor Eugene Goossens (Senior) and composer Frederick Laurence. It consists mainly of music from the existing repertory, together with some specially composed pieces for a few sequences. Much of the music is familiar: there is a lot of Borodin, some Mussorgsky, Korngold, Lalo, Prokofiev, and Smetana. Then there are the more obscure pieces by lesser-known composers: Joachim Raff, Félix Fourdrain, Hermann Goetz, Henri Rabaud. Of the latter, I knew the music of Fourdrain and Rabaud only through other silent film scores. Some of Fourdrain’s music was used in the score compiled by Paul Fosse and Arthur Honegger for Abel Gance’s La Roue (1922), while Rabaud composed the scores for Raymond Bernard’s historical epics La Miracle des loups (1924) and Le Joueur d’échecs (1927).

The music has much to do in keeping a sense of pace and involvement with The Epic of Everest, as the succession of landscapes and titles can sometimes become monotonous—or at least mono-rhythmic. Having solid symphonic works, neatly arranged, provides another temporal dimension to our viewing experience.

There are also some oddities. One sequence is introduced with the title: “Into the heart of the pure blue ice, rare, cold, beautiful, lonely—Into a Fairyland of Ice.” The music cued at this point is the Moldau movement from Smetana’s Má vlast (1872-79). But while Smetana’s music famously captures water in motion, the images on screen are of water arrested: a sonic depiction of racing rivers accompanies the sight of frozen drifts. Elsewhere, there are slightly awkward accompaniments around scenes of Tibetan life. Thus, when a mother is scene happily giving her child a “butter bath”, the music is oddly dramatic. But it is hardly more at odds with the scene than Fisher Turner’s mood-music synth wash with odd clicks and scratches.

Besides, there are far more scenes where the 1924 choices work wonderfully—even with music that is familiar from other contexts. Thus, we get Mussorgsky’s “St. John’s Eve on Bald Mountain” (1867) accompanying a sequence of images of wind and snow blasting across Everest and its approaches. (“Should you not mind wind or frost of fifty degrees, you may stand out on the glacier and watch the evening light beams play over the ice world around.”) It’s fabulously evocative, sinister, thrilling music—every bit the equal of Noel’s images. The original music by Frederick Laurence that introduces the Kampa-Dzong temple (“Tibetan chant”) is also marvellously simple and evocative (harp chords and, I think, bass notes on the piano). And for the last scenes of the film, where the mood changes to one of brooding reflection and resignation, we get another excellent arrangement. Rabaud’s “Procession nocturne” (1899) soars slowly, ecstatically over the images—before the score switches to the sinister fugue from Foudrain’s prelude to Madame Roland (1913) as darkness encroaches over the mountain.

For the BFI restoration, the music is performed by the Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Gourlay. I’d not encountered this group before and had an initial concern that budget might restrict either the size of the orchestra or the quality of the performance. I was happily surprised by both aspects: the sound is full and rich, the music well played and decently recorded. The sonic depth and complexity of a symphony orchestra is immeasurably preferable to the kinds of four- or five-person ensembles advertised as “orchestras” on some silent film releases. The Epic of Everest benefits enormously from its original score, and I wish more releases would take the trouble (or be given the budget) to provide music of this scale and quality.

Paul Cuff

Untold stories: Music for silent British cinema

This week, I’m writing about a British literary family history and its connection with music for silent cinema. One of my favourite living writers is Alan Bennett (1934-), and among all his work it is his memoirs and personal essays that I revisit again and again. This is, in part, because many of them are available as audiobooks read by the author himself. I have read his memoirs more than once but listened to the (abridged) audio versions many times over. Of particular interest are two volumes: Telling Tales (2001) and Untold Stories (2005). The former is a series of reflections on Bennett’s childhood and the people and places he knew as a boy growing up in Leeds in the 1940s. Telling Tales is a kind of sketch for Untold Stories, but the latter goes into more detail about Bennett’s parents and their history, tracing the mental illness on his mother’s side of the family through two generations. Both accounts contain details that are of interest for this blog, for Bennett writes about his early cinemagoing experiences—and the earlier experiences of his parents’ generation.

In Telling Tales, Bennett’s piece “Aunt Eveline” relates memories of Eveline Peel, his grandmother’s sister-in-law. At the end of the silent era, she had been a pianist for a cinema in a local cinema (in, I presume, Halifax, where she lived). After the arrival of sound in the 1930s, she became a “corsetière”, then in the 1940s she turned to housekeeping. But she never stopped playing the piano at home, and her music collection was founded on the repertoire she built for silent film accompaniment. Bennett records that he still has Eveline’s sheet music. Much of it is covered in brown paper, not uncommon to preserve well-thumbed scores. More interestingly, the edges of the pages are likewise bound in brown paper, “for easier turning over when, in the darkened pit of the Electric, she gazes up at the silent screen while thumping out ‘Any Time’s Kissing Time’, ‘Mahbubah’, or ‘The Careless Cuckoo Cakewalk’ by Ernest Bucalossi, in brackets ‘very animated’.” Bennett likewise records finding “The Mosquito’s Parade” by Howard Whitney, “At the Temple Gates” by Gatty Sellars, and “sheets and sheets of Ivor Novello” (Telling Tales, 119), together with works by Vivian Ellis, Gilbert & Sullivan, and copious “Edwardian favourites” like Albert Ketèlbey (“Untold Stories”, 52-55).

I was curious about these titles and decided to look them up. Some were easier to find than others. Both “Mahbubah” and “Any Time’s Kissing Time” are numbers from Chu Chin Chow (1916), a musical comedy by Oscar Asche with music by Frederic Norton (1869-1946). This was loosely based on “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves”, and proved an immensely popular hit—running for over five years and two thousand performance. It’s no wonder the music migrated to the popular music press, to recorded media, and thence to the repertory of cinemas. Much the same can be said of the work of Vivian Ellis (1903-1996), a prolific composer for musicals in London’s West End in the 1920s and 30s. Numbers like Ellis’s “Spread a Little Happiness”, from Mister Cinders (1928) could achieve success on stage, then success on record, then success as sheet music for pianists at home or at the cinema.

As for Ernest Bucalossi (1863-1933), he was the son of Procida Bucalossi (1832-1918). Both men were British-Italian composers of light music, as well as arrangers and orchestrators of the music of others. Their work is now obscure, doubly so since they often signed their scores “Bucalossi” without distinguishing father from son. Lists of their hits include numerous dances, arrangements of Gilbert & Sullivan, the occasional operetta or musical, and countless “descriptive” pieces. The latter no doubt appealed to theatre and cinema orchestras to fit new arrangements for stage and screen. Works for ensemble and small orchestra were endlessly used and reused, and who knows how often films were shown with Eveline Peel’s favourite choices at the piano or organ. (I can find no recording of the “Careless Cuckoo Cakewalk”, but there are plenty of short pieces by Bucalossi that survive in various renditions. His delightful “Grasshopper’s Dance” seems to have been a much-favoured ditty since its publication in 1905.)

The other pieces Bennett cites are more obscure. Gatty Sellars (1875-1947) was a popular recital organist in the 1920s-30s, and all I can find out about his piece “At the Temple Gates” is the year it was published: 1930. An exquisitely clunky film by British Pathé shows Sellars performing this piece in 1931. Sellars himself peers awkwardly over his shoulder at the camera, a glimpse of one of innumerable popular entertainers from the interwar years who have disappeared into the shadows. Likewise, I’ve been able to find out very little about Howard Whitney (1869-1924), composer of “The Mosquito’s Parade” (c.1899). He seems to have been American, and several of his short pieces were recorded in the early 1900s. The earliest of these is listed as “Mosquito Parade”, recorded by Arthur Pryor’s Orchestra in 1899. Numerous other short pieces (as with Bucalossi, often given descriptive titles) received renditions for small orchestra, piano, organ, banjo etc. in the earliest years of the gramophone. He was clearly popular enough in the 1900s for his music to have made it into the British repertoire in subsequent decades.

But the most prominent name among Eveline Peel’s collection is that of Albert Ketèlbey (1875-1959), whose acute accent appears as a delightfully distinctive affectation. Ketèlbey was an extraordinarily successful composer of “light music” from the 1910s until the 1940s. He was the master of the “descriptive” piece, short (around five minutes) musical numbers that could fill out a concert programme or be used as scene-setting for a silent film score. Simple, succinct, and suggestive, Ketèlbey’s music was easy to perform and easy to arrange and rearrange for performance in theatres, cinemas, and at home. His career traversed the lucrative worlds of late Victorian and Edwardian musical theatre, silent cinema, and the coming of sound. His music was copiously published for public consumption, as well as being recorded and distributed on various formats. Either as a full score (for orchestra and chorus), or as arranged for smaller forces or soloists, his short piece “In a Persian Market” (1920) was “probably more frequently played, at home and abroad, than any other work in the history of English music, with the possible exception of the national anthem” (Ehrlich, Harmonious Alliance, 37).

Having spent much of the morning listening to Ketèlbey’s tunes on youtube, I can vouch that he represents the very definition of “light music”. He is tuneful, elegant, and very easy on the ear. Indeed, the easiness of the music—to perform and to receive—is doubtless the reason for its extraordinary success. Such pieces of light music are the distant relatives of the kinds of “programme music” or “tone poems” produced by many major composers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though they share the same method of evocative titles and descriptive music, their depth and complexity is… well, far less deep and complex than their “serious” forebears. As I write, I’m currently listening to “In a Fairy Realm” (1927), the first movement of which is like something from Parsifal watered-down to a kind of sugary vagueness. It’s mood music for audiences that could never go to the opera, or who might not have the interest in going. Instead of four-and-a-half hours of Wagner, you can have four-and-a-half minutes of Ketèlbey. If this is not music of lasting depth (either aesthetic or emotional), it is certainly music of great utility. I’m not sure I’d sit and listen to a concert of pure Ketèlbey, but I can absolutely imagine his music working perfectly with silent films. Its lightness might easily be deepened and enhanced by cinematic images, just as the music would enhance the images.

To return to Bennett’s memoirs of his parents and aunt, it’s worth reflecting on the incredible impact of cinema on the business of light music. There was a reciprocal relationship between film and music, as well as between music publishers and cinemas. There was a huge demand for light music to perform during screenings, so music (and the rights to it) had to be made available for this purpose. Composers like Ketèlbey benefitted enormously from the growth of film with live musical performance in the 1910s and 20s. As audiences boomed, so did the quality and quantity of music. Larger audiences meant larger cinemas, larger cinemas meant larger musical forces. And more and longer films required more and longer musical accompaniments. Once embedded in a cinema orchestra’s repertoire, who knows how many times the same pieces would be rearranged and replayed for new films? (For a history of the legal situation of music publication and performance in Britain in this period, see Davison, “Workers’ Rights and Performing Rights”.)

The boom in music was also, of course, a boon for musicians. As Geoffrey Self relates, three-quarters of British instrumental musicians were employed (partially or wholly) in cinemas by the end of the 1920s (Light Music, 125). Cinema can be credited for the fact that, in that decade, “more live music was being performed by professional musicians than at any other time in the country’s history” (Ehrlich, Harmonious Alliance, 35). Eveline Peel was thus among the tens of thousands of musicians who benefitted from regular employment by cinemas, not to mention those like Walter Bennett who performed as occasional performers when the need arose. In this context, the coming of sound was an unimaginable crisis. A census in 1931 suggests that about one third of all musicians in the UK were unemployed: up to 15,000 musicians had lost their jobs as a direct result of synchronized sound films (Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain, 210). Eveline Peel’s move from musician to “corsetiere”, and from corsetiere to housekeeper, was just one of thousands of transitions enforced by the shift in film technology.

Bennett’s account of his aunt reopens a whole little world of film history. I wonder what other pieces, by what other composers, survives in her sheet music collection? And how often were they performed, and accompanying what films? Answering such questions would certainly make a good research project: a small window into musical performance in northern England at the end of the 1920s. But Bennett’s own account also illustrates the wider significance of Eveline and her music.

After the arrival of sound, Eveline Peel made music only within the home, with close family and friends. Bennett records that throughout his childhood in the 1940s, there were regular musical gatherings at his grandmother’s home. Eveline would play the piano, Walter would accompany her on the violin, and various others would sing. His description of this kind of communal musicmaking is another window into home entertainment in the war and post-war years. The conclusion to Bennett’s account of his aunt is likewise instructive:

[I]t isn’t death that puts paid to these musical evenings, though when Aunt Eveline dies we inherit her piano and take it home. What takes its place in the smoky sitting room is a second-hand television set and it’s this which, within a year or so, makes such musical evenings inconceivable. My other aunties don’t mind, as talking as always had to be suspended while Aunt Eveline presides at the piano, whereas with the TV no one minds if you talk. And until they get a proper table for it, the TV even squats for a while in triumph on the piano stool that Aunt Eveline has occupied for so long. (“Aunt Eveline”, 119)

I say “instructive”, and of course it is: it touches on the way home entertainment changed from music-making to music listening, from active participation to passive reception; it suggests how the fate of the music and musicians of the silent era gradually sank away into obscurity and obsolescence. But more than this, Bennett’s memoirs are an immensely engaging and moving account of family history. I recommend both Telling Tales and Untold Stories unreservedly.

Paul Cuff

References

Alan Bennett, “Auntie Eveline”, in Telling Tales (London: BBC, 2001).

Alan Bennett, “Untold Stories” and “The Ginnel”, in Untold Stories (London: Faber & Faber, 2005).

Annette Davison, “Workers’ Rights and Performing Rights: Cinema Music and Musicians Prior to Synchronized Sound”, in Julie Brown and Annette Davison (eds), The Sounds of the Silents in Britain (Oxford UP, 2013), 243-62.

Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain Since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

Cyril Ehrlich, Harmonious Alliance: A History of the Performing Right Society (Oxford UP, 1989).

Geoffrey Self, Light Music in Britain since 1870: A Survey (London: Routledge, 2016).

Pordenone from afar (2023, Day 5)

Day 5 brings us both closer to home (well, my home) and further afield than we’ve been so far. Closer to home because today’s programme consists of nineteen British films preserved in the collection of the Filmoteca di Catalunya. Further afield, because these are the oldest films being streamed from Pordenone this year: we begin in 1897 and go so far as 1909. And further afield in another sense, since many of the films recorded events happening far beyond British shores. So, as well as visiting the south coast and Surrey, we go to the north of England and Scotland, but also to Spain and Sri Lanka…

Brighton Seagoing Electric Car (1897; UK; George Albert Smith). Waves breaks amid a downpour of cellulose scratches. Our eyes adjust to the past. Foaming surf, grey seas. The blank sky of a century-and-a-quarter ago. And we behold the strange, dark form of the “electric car”: an open bus of sightseers, moving slowly above the water. The population of the past, specks of faces, waving arms. The past looks back at us, beyond us, to the land behind the camera.

The Inexhaustible Cab (1899; UK; George Albert Smith). A capering clown, a carriage, a canvas street front. The clown ushers his passengers—Victorians all—into the cab. More and more step in. Men, women, boys, girls. The clown joshes with a woman, shoves her in, chucks a child on the roof. The carriage disappears. The occupants are left in a pile. The old woman beats the clown with her umbrella.

Dalmeny to Dunfermline, Scotland via the Firth of Forth Bridge (1899; UK; Warwick Trading Co.). The past is slow. The frames crackle with debris. Frames disappear (we plunge into the dark). People stand by, watching us. The camera is mounted at the front, we see the tracks move under us. We pause to let a train pass in the other direction. (Who is behind those windows? The glass is dark, the interior invisible. The past keeps its secrets.) The Firth of Forth Bridge, long, long ago. The beams and girders close in on us. Time skips. We move through a small, uninhabited station, into a cloud of steam and smoke. (It’s a beautiful moment, a haunting transition—for we never know with such a film when it might end, where we might emerge.) Into a tunnel, through it. Gleaming coast. A bleached sky. (The tinting clings to the trees, the shadows of the rails, the side of the walls.) Fields and trees. The silhouette of a town suddenly appears. (And I do mean suddenly: it’s like the exposure suddenly recovers, as when your eyes adjust after walking from bright sunlight into a dark room.) Where are the people here? Here are two: two workmen on the track in the tunnel. They are just silhouettes, shadows. We cannot see their faces. Do they see us? They move aside and let us pass. We approach the station. Two figures await us in the light. But the light eats them up. The film dissolves their faces in the glare of ancient sunlight. The lens is about to bring them into focus when the film stops.

Review of Lord George Sanger’s Circus by the Queen (1899; UK; Warwick Trading Co.). Twenty horses pull a carriage loaded with performers. Another dozen horses draw the next, surmounted by a band. Huge flags. Camels. Two horses pull an even larger brass band. (The horses struggle under the sheer weight, slipping on the muddy road, their awful effort captured forever.) Ever larger carriages, more absurdly decorated. A black man stands atop a horse. A flotilla of boats (their carriage wheels and horse legs peeping from below their painted skirts). Fake beards. A moving forest of trees. “Lord George Sanger” (the biggest flag yet). Elephants, ridden by non-white performers. No-one is watching them but us. The dark, distant trees stand still.

Sanger Circus Passing though Inverness (1899; UK; John McKenzie[?]). The circus again, now riding past spectators. Unattended elephants scamper along the cobblestones. Unattended camels hurry past a gaggle of unattended children. Flat caps. Umbrellas. The cobbles gleam with rain.

The “Poly” Paper Chase (1900; UK; Warwick Trading Co.). A man trailing shredded paper hurtles past. Through a muddy field, more runners pass, slipping and sliding. Long shorts, long sleeves. Edwardian sportsmen. Moustaches. Determination. A series of streams, muddy expanses. The men leap into water made to feel all the colder by the overexposed celluloid. The trees are bare. The film frame itself seems to shiver.

The Wintry Alps (1903; UK; Frank Ormiston-Smith). So, to winter. A snow fight. A fort made of snow. The camera is impassive. We see sled tracks in the distance, across the slope. The fort is attacked with poles. The crowd in the foreground consists mostly of girls and women, but the sticks and poles are wielded by boys and men. The film cuts closer. A chaos of snowballs. A girl glances behind her, towards us. The scene ends. A children’s ski race. Young faces tense with concentration, or with breathless smiles. The troupe move past us. We see them again, then lose them forever. A slope. Adult skiers. Someone falls. A new view: a ski ramp. Skiers jump. We see them take off here, and land in another shot taken further down the slope. A crowd looks on. Another slope. Skiers sliding and falling. It is pleasingly amateur, imperfect, eager. Very few keep upright down the steep gradient. A final figure lies in the snow. Just before he stands, the film ends.

An Affair of Honour (1904; UK; James Williamson.). Two men overlook a windswept patch of sea. Top hats, moustaches, goatees. A fight, a thrown drink. An exchange of cards. A change of scene: now, distant chalky hills. A treeless valley. The two men, the two seconds. Clumsy disrobing, clumsy practising. How will this end? Shots fired. The second shot in the foot. Another round. A witness is gunned down. Another round. The doctor is killed. Another round. The other second is killed. The only other witness runs away. The two duellers observe the field strewn with dead. They shake hands. (The film presages a marvellous film by Max Linder from 1912: Entente Cordiale, in which two nervous duellists fire multiple shots and kill all the witnesses, as well as birds in the sky and trees. They are so overjoyed to be alive that they run off ecstatically together.)

Perzina’s Troupe of Educated Monkeys (1904; UK; Charles Urban Trading Co.). A table filled with monkeys in clothes. A man in a Panama hat and linen suit oversees them. He sports a sinister moustache and pince-nez glasses. The camera pans up and down the hairy ranks. We see a monkey made to do a solo. It looks anxiously over its shoulder. The film ends.

Elephants Bathing in Ceylon River (1904; UK; Harold Mease). Elephants and locals in the river. The locals sit atop the elephants. One of them is rubbing down an elephant’s brow, scratching behind its ear. The elephant lies on its side in the water. The Sri Lankan waters gleam with a warm yellowish tint.

[Drill of the Reedham Orphans] (c.1904-1912; UK; Urban Trading Co.). A square. An audience. Women with floor-length skirts. Big hats. The children perform gymnastic routines in dark trousers and white shirts. An adult in uniform looks on from close by. He stands at the centre of their manoeuvres. They form a cross, a star, stand on one another’s shoulders, file past, form a moving circle and counter-spinning spokes.

Venice and the Grand Canal (1901?/1904?; UK; Urban Trading Co.). The camera floats towards the Rialto bridge. In front of us, a boat loaded with barrels. A few passersby stop look down at us. A boat passes in the other direction. Gondoliers silhouetted against the bright waters, the overexposed sky. The camera draws close to another boat. A man is sitting, looking at us. Just as we are about to glimpse his face, he gets up. The film ends.

Edge’s Motor Boat. The Napier Minor (1904; UK; Urban Trading Co.). Monochrome waters. A sleek white boat, bearing the number 19 and the British flag. Another boat cuts through the waves. The edges of the frame ripple with wear-and-tear, like a watermark of time.

Fixing the Swing (1904; UK; Alf Collins). A family: the woman washing, the man snoozing with his face under a handkerchief. The girls wake him. He shouts angrily. They want him to make them a swing. They pass him rope and seat. He starts hammering moodily into a wooden overhang. (Just on the edge of the frame, in the background, a man watches the scene unfold.) The woman makes encouraging faces. The children dance in anticipation. The swing is made. The father shows its strength by sitting on it. It collapses, wrenching off the wooden beam above: water cascade over the family.

Eccentric Burglary (1905; UK; Frank Mottershow). The title bodes well. Two burglars, tumbling over a wall. They try the shutters of the house. They try clambering on each other’s back. Then the film helps them: the footage is reversed, and we see the burglars miraculously leap up to the first storey window and enter. Two policemen approach. The film aids them also and they slide up the ladder. A chase ensues over the rooftop. The camera miraculously looks down at the wall (or its recreation). Men climb up towards us. Locals stop in the background to watch the action unfold, smiling, as the performers now miraculously ride in reverse backwards up a hill with horse and cart. The horse vanishes between frames. The burglars flee, now tumbling backwards up a hill. The police slide up a banister, leap backwards over a gate, over a tree. But nothing can beat a good old-fashioned truncheon. A quick knock on the head and the film ends.

Her Morning Dip (1906; UK; Alf Collins). A well-dressed woman, white dress, hat, and veil, attracts two eager men. (A crowd gathers in the background to watch the film being made. They do not interfere with the action, even as it turns into a car chase.) We end up on the coast, at the seafront. Real life goes on all around us, and our eyes are drawn at least as much to the surroundings as to the two cars that now pull up in the foreground. (Coachloads of day-trippers. A girl and boy walking together, the boy eagerly pointing ahead.) Several more men are now following the woman, a comically leering mob desperate to catch a glimpse of her ankles. She goes into a bathing tent and the mob clamber all over it. The tent flaps eventually part, and from it walks an old bald man in bathing costume. Followed now by a huge crowd of smiling onlookers, he camply tests the waters and hops like a kangaroo into the waves, pursued by laughing children.

The Royal Spanish Wedding (series): Automobile Fête before King Alfonso and Princess Ena (1906; UK; Félix Mesguich). A southern sun. A motorcade of people in hats, the vehicles decked out in flags and umbrellas. The other vehicles covered in flowers. One car is halted and reprimanded. Another breaks down. Men and women stand to gesture—to us? to an unseen crowd? Great clouds of exhaust fumes rise into the hot sky. A brass band plays as the fleet of cars stands and watches others pass by. Women in huge hats and veils hold umbrellas up to offset the heat. A driver is handed a glass of water. From a balcony, the royal couple stand and watch.

Lace Making (1908; UK; Cecil Hepworth). Outside a small house, women are at work. Their hands move with impossible speed over the lace. (A cat walks up to a woman, its tale raised in greeting, and rubs by a skirt.) The oldest woman makes uncertain eye contact with the camera, then immediately looks down. We see other women’s faces. A woman with lopsided glasses holds our attention. She’s talking to us, smiling and jokes. The camera holds on her for a long time. It’s immensely moving, this immediacy of the past, and these lips speaking to us in silence. It is the suspended life of the past. Another shot of the leather ball over which the lace is made. In this close-up, the cameraman’s shadow falls into frame. Just as we watch the woman’s hand make the lace, we see the cameraman’s hand crank the camera. It’s a spellbinding detail. Just as we admire the amazing lacework in close-up at the end, so we admire the work of the camera. In a final shot, the group of older women walk towards us. Just as the woman with glasses is about to reach us, the film ends.

The Robber’s Ruse, or Foiled by Fido (1909; UK; A.E. Coleby). Mother and daughter, a well-appointed room. The mother leaves, under the eyes of a suspicious older woman outside. (At one side of the frame, a dog observes the scene.) The child, home alone, answers the door to the apparently fainting old woman. She helpfully offers her a glass of spirits, but then the intruder disrobes to reveal himself as a man. Through a keyhole, the child observes him begin his nefarious work. The child escapes into the garden but is caught and brought back and tied up. The dog barks, breaks free, runs—summons a policeman. (Front the little gardens of the terraced houses, women stand by and watch the filming take place.) The burglar is foiled, the dog joining in with the policemen in wrestling the man to the ground. Mother, daughter, and dog are eventually reunited before the camera. The child grins delightfully right at us, as happy to have her mother and doll and dog today as she was in 1909.

Day 5: Summary

What an absolutely delightful programme. I wrote on Day 2 of the delight in seeing the background world of Wilhelmine Germany in Harry Piel’s films, and here we have a much wider and more deliberate looks into the world as it was at the dawn of the twentieth century. The “actualities” are especially wonderful. Dalmeny to Dunfermline is an utterly captivating film. I love early cinematic documents like this, where the camera glides through the past. (And yes, it helps that I love travelling on public transport and sitting gazing out of the window. It’s an exquisite pleasure over any distance of travel.) The deserted streets are haunting and beautiful, the glimpses of faces who look in surprise or suspicion at us, the sense of never quite knowing what’s coming next. Even the glitches in continuity, the nibbling of decay at the frame—all these things convey the past and the passage of time, and our place in history too. Then there are the utterly unexpected moments of surprise for us. In Sanger Circus Passing though Inverness, there is a moment when one of the elephants trotting unattended along the street turns to its left toward the little crowd watching it go by. The animal reaches out with its trunk towards one of the children. I found this little gesture, lost long ago and recaptured here, absolutely heartbreaking. It’s a gesture of curiosity, of fellow feeling, of one creature reaching out to another. It’s beautiful and sad, and it invites other questions from our own vantage point in time. What was the fate of the elephant? Where was it born? Where did it die? Were elephants buried? And what became of the child? He must have come of age during the Great War—did he survive? Did he remember the elephant that reached out to him that day in 1899?

The “fiction” films are just as capable of delight, but a kind of delight rooted in the haphazard, on-the-fly method of filming. In all the films—fiction or not—there are bystanders who look with bemused curiosity at the actors performing or the film crew filming. Real life c.1900 is everywhere in a way that intrudes delightfully on any pretence of fiction. The performers themselves are part of the life and time we see on screen; it’s just that they’ve stepped out of the crowd for a moment to do a turn. Then the cameras will stop, and they’ll step back into the crowd, into the life that the bystanders are living, into the time and culture that they share with everyone on screen. I’m sure I could go on about these films—and many other such early productions—forever, for they captivate and intrigue in a way that many later fiction films cannot. So, what a privilege to watch them, with a lovely and sensitive piano accompaniment by John Sweeney. Another great day at Pordenone—from afar.

Paul Cuff

South: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic (1919; UK; Frank Hurley)

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition left Plymouth on 8 August 1914, a few days before Great Britain declared war on Germany. Leading the expedition was Sir Ernest Shackleton, whose goal was to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. His ship, the Endurance, held 28 men, 69 dogs, and a cat. One of those men was the Australian photographer, Frank Hurley. As the ship sailed south, first to Buenos Aires, then to South Georgia, and finally into the Weddell Sea, Hurley filmed a record of the voyage. By the end of 1914, the Endurance was in the midst of thickening fields of ice and a long way short of its destination. Soon the ship was imprisoned and adrift in the frozen water—and Frank Hurley clung on to his film even as the expedition looked as though it might be doomed…

South: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic (1919; UK; Frank Hurley)

The opening title is a painted design, complete with portrait of Shackleton, the Endurance, and a small group of penguins. It thus unites the film’s subjects: a record of one man’s most famous exploit, the record of a ship’s fate, and a glimpse of Antarctic nature. The opening text says the film presents “a wonderful and true story of British pluck, self-sacrifice and indomitable courage”. (The text made somehow safer, softer, by the painted icicles, by the painted penguins standing like a kind of audience at the bottom of the frame.)

Portraits of the leaders: Shackleton, Captain F. Worsley, Lieutenant J. Stenhouse, Captain L. Hussey. The men are smiling, laughing; Hussey his playing his banjo. It’s informal, matey, but the men are in military uniform, linking their bravery with the wider bravery of the war. Now the men are shown in Antarctic dress, against the painted snows of a studio; they smile, aware of the comic falseness of this show they’re putting on for the camera.

But here is reality: the Endurance setting off from Buenos Aires. (See that stern? You can recognize it from the photographs taken in 2022, 3,000m below the surface—where now resides the bodily ghost of this living image.) The world as it was, in late 1914.

On board, the camera captures the awkward limits of the deck and the dozens of dogs whose kennels line the sides. The watery horizon bobs in the background. The dogs are being fed. The dogs are being groomed. Puppies born are sea are introduced to the pack. The dogs are seasick. (Suddenly, that madly bobbing horizon attains more significance.) A dog called “Smiler”. The title asks us to “watch carefully” to see him smile. (It’s a mad grimace, not a smile.) But I like being addressed in this way, enjoined to notice something that the crew noticed 112 years ago—and being able to see it on screen, and to be curious and amused as the crew were curious and amused 112 years ago.

Here is Hercules, “the strongest dog in the pack”. We are asked to watch his condensed breath to see how cold it was: to get a sense of the feel of the air, the density of the cold. And here is that breath, longed since exhaled, still blooming white on film. Odd, and oddly moving, to watch the rate of a dog’s breath, the motion of his living body—all this time later.

Shackleton takes a reading from the sun, his eyes almost glancing into camera as he looks up from the binnacle. The film has many of these curious awkwardnesses: of the crew members going about their business, but suddenly becoming aware that they are now performers, performing for the camera, for audiences, for the future, for all eternity.

Icebergs glow green. The sea is pale grass. But just as the landscape feels distant, apart, somehow lacking or ungraspable in its paleness—the ice often a kind of visual absence on screen—Hurley captures the most extraordinary series of shots in the film. He must have climbed the mast, have clung on with his legs as he held and cranked the camera with his hands. Thus, he looked down to the foremost part of the Endurance. We see another man, a blue silhouette, legs akimbo, straddling a tiny platform suspended from the bowsprit. And below him, the ice-covered sea. Hurley knows he’s got the perfect shot: look at the way the shadow of the bowsprit is at the bottom left of frame. The shadow serves to show the nature of the ice below it, to emphasize the hoped-for momentum of the ship. It’s also a kind of image being produced by the ship: the ship and its shadow is a neat metaphor for the very film we are watching. Look how the top corners of the frame are rounded by the aperture: the close border intensifies our concentration on the front of the ship. What follows is a sequence of spliced-together shots wherein the whole drama of the voyage is contained in a single image. Can the ship keep going? How long will the ice break and make way for the vessel? The man on the bowsprit looks over his shoulder. You realize he’s sat facing the ship, to observe the hull’s stability in breaking the ice. Under him, the blank ice splits to reveal the deep blue of the sea. The marvels of toning, here: the colour dye clings to the black tones of the image, leaving the highlights untouched. So the sea is deepest blue, and the gradations of the ice—from bright white to tainted blue—are shown in the range of tone. It renders the drama of ice tangible in colour: you can feel how thin is the ice, but also get a sense of how cold is the sea.

This short sequence—occupying barely a minute on screen—is doubly arresting for the sense of time it captures. Hurley splices four shots together, letting each run directly into the next. As the breaks in the ice draw attention to the space being traversed, so these filmic cuts are fissures in time. Slabs of history appear in each shot or are erased in the gaps between.

Next, we see the bow ramming its way through the ice. It’s not as dramatic as the previous shots, but then you realize that Hurley must have suspended himself from the same place on the bowsprit we have just seen filmed from the mast—and suddenly the very act of filming provides the drama. There are eleven shots in this sequence: it must have proved a more illustrative set-up for Hurley to demonstrate the mechanics of the ships progress.

When Hurley cuts back to the view from the mast, the sequence as a whole attains even greater weight: for now when the ice splits before the bowsprit, the film carries with it the impetus from the last shots. The audience is given more of a sense of the stubbornness of the Endurance, the way it bludgeons its way forward. There follow more shots from the mast, each following directly from the last. At one point, you see the shadow of the mast from which the scene is filmed swing across the bottom of the frame: the ship is changing direction, the sun passing over its shoulder. And as it does so, a split in the ice flashes darkly through the ice. (I think I could watch these miraculous shots forever, they’re so hypnotic.)

Hurley casts his eye over the side: a view of seals mobbing their way through the water. And now huge icebergs; they are as wide as whole regions, as high as mountains; the water on the sea, combined with the orange tinting, gives them real mass on screen. Now the image is blue-tone-pink, a combination I always love to see—though here the effect is lessened by the fact that Hurley uses it to colour a still, rather than moving images. Already the film is running out of film to record its adventures. It’s a kind of visual arrestment that augers the spatial arrest of the Endurance. The film continues until it becomes stuck fast.

Indeed, the very next shot is of the icebound ship, borne aloft on frozen waves. Closer views show the crew at work, pickaxing the ice in a vain attempt to make a channel for the Endurance to escape. Huge saws appear, each pulled and pushed by half a dozen men. Then the ship pulls back, gaining space to charge. We see Shackleton on the bow, looking anxiously down into the waters. The ship’s “charge” looks pitifully slow: we’ve seen the men at work, and know what effort it has taken to break up even this much ice. The Endurance swings toward the camera, whose presence suggests a kind of full stop, a point where the ship surely can’t pass. And it doesn’t. Instead of filming the inevitable halt, Hurley cuts to a title: “All progress at an end”. In the next image, the stillness is captured by a still: the expedition really has come to a halt.

We see the ship in stasis, the crew too—lined up for a photo. (Hurley is the only absentee, the title tells us: again, a reminder of the somehow independent, detached existence of the camera.)

A new life, of obdurate isolation. Water must be taken from the frozen snows and brought on board. We see the endless manual labour of keeping life going. Life keeps going onboard, too: here are a new batch of puppies, which will spend their whole lives in and around this same space.

Animals also come in the form of our first glimpse of live penguins: a surreal group of onlookers to the marooned crew. But it is to the dogs that Hurley keeps on returning: we see them being taken to work on the sleds, and it is the dogs who enable the film’s only land-based tracking shots. The camera is perched on a sled, watching the teams race along the ice. Now the dogs are playing with the crew, being manhandled for the camera to show off their size and thickness of hair.

What kind of film is Hurley now making? The expedition has come to a halt. We see the ship stuck by day, and by night we see a still (taken “with eighteen flash lights”) of the ship’s ghostly form in the blue-black intensity of permanent night. What else can Hurley film? We see a primitive tractor at work, but it looks more like play: the vehicle is puny beside the Endurance, punier still in midst of the frozen wasteland. So Hurley shows us dredging for underwater life (which a title reassures us is of great scientific importance), and a man sifting the catch. Creatures too small to show on film are imprisoned in jars that will never reach a laboratory.

The ship is being lifted out of the sea by the mounting ice. The process is too slow to film, so Hurley shows us the aftereffects: the ship being tilted, twisted, jostled. All hope is lost, a title relates (how much time passes between shots, here?) and the dogs are among the contents of the ship being slid via canvas sheets onto the ice for safety. More shots, the time between which marks the slow death of the Endurance: we see successive views of the ship, lower and lower in the frozen water, her masts snapping and tumbling, then sawn for wood by the crew.

The film, too, breaks down. Not only are we given still photographs instead of moving images, but we are given paintings instead of stills. The most miraculous part of the expedition goes entirely unfilmed: the crews’ slog across the ice, the setting sail on small boats, the landing on Elephant Island, the parting of the crew into two groups, Shackleton’s journey over 1,300 kilometres to South Georgia to get help, and the return to Elephant Island to rescue the last group of the crew.

We are also denied the story of how Hurley’s film came to survive at all: how Hurley himself broke Shackleton’s orders; how he stripped off and dived into the icy waters swamping the Endurance to rescue sealed containers of filmstock and glass slides. He risked his life to get the film off the sinking ship, and again by jettisoning food to make way for his negatives on the sleds and boats in which they made their perilous journey to safety.

Instead of all this, the film offers a retrospective return to the locations of the unfilmed drama: to the starkly beautiful parts of South Georgia where Shackleton and his five companions came and crossed to reach help. And we see Stromness Whaling Station, as bleak a place as you can imagine: dark wooden huts, trails of smoke, and the steaming carcasses of whales lying in the harbour. We see the stripping of blubber, which is as gruesome as it sounds. It was here that Shackleton first made contact with the outside word. What a strange paradise this dreadful place must have seemed to those men.

As if in answer to the grim sight of hacked-up whales, Hurley returns to living nature: to frolicking seals, to birds of all kinds. Despite the film’s narrative having diverged entirely, Hurley clearly enjoyed some of the shots he took. He finishes one sequence on seals with a long close-up of one scratching its chin and belly, to which Hurley appends the title “End of a perfect day.” There follow many views of penguins: penguins running, penguins staring at the camera, penguins mothering, penguins swimming.

It’s a shock when the film returns to its narrative of Shackleton: for we suddenly get views of the triumphant entry of the crew of the Endurance into Valparaiso aboard a Chilean tug, in May 1916. So much time has passed since we last saw contemporary footage of the crew that it’s hard to reconcile ourselves to the tone of the ending: “Thus ends the story of the Shackleton Expedition to the Antarctic—a story of British heroism, valour and self-sacrifice in the name and cause of a country’s honour. The doings of these men will be written in history as a glorious epic of the great ice-fields of the South, and will be remembered as long as our Empire exists.” So say the last titles, followed by a view of a sunset at sea. THE END.

South is a flawed film, narratively speaking, since it cannot represent the most famous part of the expedition’s story in any but the most inadequate terms: paintings, stills, and summary titles. Of course, the footage was exhibited in a variety of ways in the silent era—including illustrated lectures, complete with narration. We’re also left with more questions that the film (as it stands) cannot, or dare not, answer. What happened to all the dogs once the crews decided to sail for land? (They were all shot, of course.) What happened to the crew when they returned to war-torn Europe in 1916-17? (Hurley himself became a war photographer of great renown; but the others?) What was the effect of the years-long isolation on the crew of the Endurance? (The film cannot scratch the surface of these men’s inner lives.) Later, fictional, films would try to investigate these ideas. But the mere existence of South is a kind of triumph, given that Hurley had been ordered to abandon all his images with the wreck of the Endurance. It is also a triumph of images: the views of the outward voyage and entrapment are spellbinding, and offer an amazing glimpse of what many of the men on screen might have believed was a doomed expedition.

It’s worth noting that among the many extras on the BFI release of the film are nineteen minutes of “unused” footage taken by Hurley. But clearly the footage was used, as it comes complete with the same painted title designs seen in the film itself. (Though the booklet notes say the footage is “tinted and toned”, in fact it is monochrome.) In her liner notes, Bryony Dixon says that “the negatives [of South] were reused multiple times to tell the story in different ways”, including a 1933 sound film, Endurance. So which version does the additional footage come from? The booklet tells us not. It’s a shame the footage was excluded from the 1919 version of the film, as there are some curious scenes. We see more studio footage of Shackleton and co., acting awkwardly for the camera against painted icebergs. Then there is a game of football held on the ice, haunted by the imprisoned silhouette of Endurance in the background. There is closer footage of the crowds in Valparaiso (was it deemed less heroic to see the curious faces in the crowd, staring at the camera?). Then there is a more extended final scene of the sunset at sea. I wondered if the idea of a sunset was Hurley’s dig at the idea of “as long as our Empire exists”. In the alternate version, the sense of humour is underlined: for the sunset is seen through a porthole, the glass of which is then shut, followed by the shutter itself. It’s a kind of double eclipse, and a wittier way—visually, if not thematically—to end the film than is apparent in the 1919 version.

But I mustn’t complain, for the BFI’s presentation of the film is superb: the footage looks beautiful, and Neil Brand’s score (for chamber orchestra) is excellent. Such documentary films can be a very difficult project to score, but Brand keeps up with the images, and makes a coherent whole of the film’s disparate material. My final word must go to Frank Hurley, whose strange, beautiful images still captivate. They, at least, have outlived the Empire.

Paul Cuff