Cinema at the Periphery

Introduction: A Peripheral View of World Cinema

1 Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, Belén Vidal Introduction A Peripheral View of World Cinema The revision and questioning of established canons has been the driving force behind some of the most innovative theory and practice in film history . Released to coincide with the celebrations of cinema’s centenary, Peter Jackson and Costa Botes’s mockumentary Forgotten Silver (New Zealand, 1995) illustrates this point with a disarming flair. The film opens with Jackson standing in front of an abandoned, overgrown shack in provincial New Zealand. A neighbor of his parents has reportedly called him to check out some decaying film cans left there by one Colin McKenzie, an enterprising kiwi filmmaker originating from the rural area who died in 1937 at the age of forty-nine. What emerges from Jackson’s inspection of the cans is a discovery that turns the entire history of cinema as we know it upside down. As per Jackson’s account, we gradually begin to realize that key technological discoveries driving the evolution of the cinematic medium have been, in fact, the fruit of the independent endeavors of this pioneering New Zealander. McKenzie’s work, clips of which are featured in the film, was apparently filmed on a film stock that, having since been affected by various degrees of nitrate decomposition, looks technically convincing. Backed by such persuasive evidence and by supporting highbrow commentary from the likes of film historian Leonard Maltin, mogul Harvey Weinstein, and New Zealand’s own Sam Neill, Jackson proceeds to credit McKenzie with the independent and accidental discovery of the film camera at the age of twelve, in 1900. McKenzie’s discovery, consequently, allows him to capture on film the early aviation attempts of other ingenious New Zealanders, who, apparently, managed to fly a few months before the Wright Brothers! Other idiosyncratic discoveries and inventions attributed to McKenzie include film stock 01 Iord_Part 1.indd 1 12/17/09 10:10 AM 2 I N T R O d u C T I O N (produced from raw eggs); the technique for recording sound (in 1908); color film stock made using local berries (in 1911); tools of cinematographic narration such as montage and the close-up; key film genres such as the slapstick comedy and the epic costume drama, as well as pioneering production breakthroughs such as international financing deals (with the Soviets), the use of extras and of stand-in shooting locations (across the Pacific). Forgotten Silver constructs a witty alternative take on the history of the cinematic medium, where all key events are attributed to one single person who belongs to a singular and peripherally positioned nation.1 It is a clever proposition that challenges entrenched canons of film historiography. However , what if a Colin McKenzie had actually existed? What would have happened if it turned out that all these innovations were indeed introduced in the context of sidelined cinematic traditions? Would not such an alternative historiography then turn upside down all tacit conventions of who are the leaders and who the followers in world culture? Would this not also impact upon what are currently considered the center and periphery of world cinema ? Would it compel us to acknowledge that there are multiple possible avenues to an artistic status quo, and that the outer peripheries could be as ingenious as the universally acknowledged centers on which the spotlight usually lands? Ironically, less than a decade later, Peter Jackson, the man behind the hoax, transcended the confines of his island’s national cinema to reposition himself centrally when he became the best-known New Zealander in Hollywood with his blockbuster trilogy The Lord of the Rings (New Zealand/uSA, 2001–3). unlike the films of his imaginary predecessor Colin McKenzie, Jackson’s films would play simultaneously on hundreds of screens around numerous territories. At the same time, however, there are still filmmakers around the world whose work exists in a singular mode. The hoax of Forgotten Silver is all the more plausible because the circumstances in which McKenzie’s forgotten work might have been created are not hugely different from the conditions of infrastructural dearth in which many filmmakers from the periphery work today. Even in our present age of advanced communications, important alternative efforts can easily remain obscure, due to an absence of international exposure and distribution. The fiction that structures Forgotten Silver has its historical counterpoint in the subject matter of the documentary Al-Film al-Mafkoud/The Lost Film (Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Lebanon...