BSA 206 W6 : Forgotten Silver

In class we watched the fake documentary Forgotten Silver (1995) directed by Peter Jackson, it's about a fake New Zealand filmmaker called Colin McKenzie.

At first I didn't particularly like the film, it's also at the start where it plays it the most straight. During this part of the film I felt a certain distaste for what they were doing by essentially rewriting history, it was only once they made it clear that they were aware of how ridiculous this idea was and they started treating it as such that I started enjoying the film. I found it a bit sad at first that New Zealand has to make up an important figure, and it felt like something that Peter Jackson might have daydreamed.

Once the movie gets going I think it's pretty good though, I like the idea and source of comedy, although admittedly I think they could have gone even further with it. At some points I feel like they pace the gags poorly, like the slapstick character who hits a child then pushes a baby's wagon, after which we see him performing more tame, regular pranks which aren't as entertaining or shocking in comparison. Starting with the more extreme ones and leading up to the ridiculous would have worked better in my opinion, and I think this applies to the film as a whole. The first half sees him making crazy discoveries like the close-up or the first tracking shot, and then these inventions dissipate to make way for less over-the-top achievements like filming The Great War. It adds a sense of realism, so I understand why they did it this way, this is how life usually unfolds and a big hurdle for many biopics, but I also feel like from an audience perspective I started losing interest towards the latter half. The usage of 15,000 extras for a battle scene doesn't even feel appropriately large in comparison to what I think the climax of the film is - the building of a city-sized set for his film.

The main character, although never speaking to the audience himself, was actually very likable. I think this is due to a mixture of complete dedication to his craft and naive mistakes or understandable failures. I like the idea that he is kept out of the history books because of small missteps - like filming the first talkie completely in Chinese. It's ridiculous and makes us like the character.

Overall I enjoyed it, just felt that the pacing became a bit limp towards the end, the positive aspect here is that the film sits at a very good running time of 50 minutes. I imagine that Jackson could have stretched this out much further as he tends to do - maybe even showing McKenzie's final biblical epic in it's 3 hour entirety. The greatest appeal about this concept to me is that the filmmakers had the opportunity to create their own fictional history of film, I guess that Jackson probably dreamed up some classic epic type films when he was young and here he has the chance to make it in a way that modern audiences will still find entertaining. I relate to this because I've had similar daydreams and can imagine how fun it would be to make fake films that were supposed to have come out decades ago.

I actually wouldn't mind seeing a sequel type thing to Forgotten Silver, with another NZ filmmaker who just missed out on being in the history books, I wouldn't even mind a documentary on a fake bad filmmaker who had huge ambitions (like Jorodowksy's Dune) that never panned out. These things are fun for both filmmakers and audiences and I'm actually surprised there's not more of it.