Wild elephants in San Francisco? (a date for your West Coast diary)
By John Roberts
12 December 2009 04:12:00
For those of you with spare time on your hands in the Bay area tomorrow (12/12/09), I can highly recommend popping down to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival at 11.30 in the morning to catch "Chang: A drama of the wilderness".The movie is great not only for it's wild elephant scenes, at one point they destroy a village but as a historical document on two levels - firstly they filmed a wild elephant capture using the kraal method, something only catchable nowadays in darkest Myanmar (and happily so I might add) and secondly as a document of our attitudes towards nature, both in Thailand and in the West in 1927.
The movie is without a doubt a miracle of film making given the technology available in those days shooting in what is an obviously wild jungle but I'm not sure a New York audience would stand in rapturous applause nowadays when a tiger is obviously shot live on the film or a wild baby elephant was dragged from a pit and tied to a house pillar.
I reviewed the movie, and the mahouts' reactions, once before in these 'ere pages.
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| Description |
 11:30 AMCHANG: A DRAMA OF THE WILDERNESS Produced and Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (USA, 1927) Cast: Kru, Chantui, Nah, Ladah, Bimbo Shot entirely in Siam (present-day Thailand), Schoedsack and Cooper's thrilling adventure is clearly the prototype for their later masterpiece KING KONG - and a spellbinding success in its own right. The publicity of the time touted a cast of 500 native hunters, 400 elephants, tigers, leopards, pythons, and other denizens of the wild! Chang is a simple story of one family's survival on their small farm on the edge of the jungle - a way of life that often pits them against forces of nature. The film was nominated (along with Murnau's SUNRISE and Vidor's THE CROWD) for "Artistic Quality of Production" at the first ever Academy Awards. 35mm print from Milestone Film & Video. Approximately 68 minutes. Donald Sosin will accompany Chang on the piano with an original score. Introduced by Merian C. Cooper biographer Mark Vaz. |
| Notes |
| Free admission for children under 12. No ticket necessary! |
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