The year is 1910 and you work in a factory in the North West region of England where you are given a week off every year. So where do you take your vacation? During the Edwardian era, most working class people preferred to spend their leisure time at the seashore and Blackpool was one of the most popular resort towns for the working class. Frolicking in the surf, fairground rides, penny arcade amusements, live entertainment/musical revues, and the famous lights of Blackpool were all part of the attraction along with affordable lodgings and restaurants. It was only natural that such a popular destination would become the setting for one of the most famous British plays of the 20th century. Hindle Wakes, written by Stanley Houghton, was first performed on the stage in 1912 and would go on to enjoy numerous film and TV adaptations in the subsequent decades. Maurice Elvey would direct two silent versions (one in 1918, the other in 1927), a 1931 sound version was directed by Victor Saville and a remake entitled Holiday Week appeared in 1952 while TV versions premiered in 1947 (featuring Wendy Hiller as the heroine), 1950, 1957 and 1976 (co-directed by June Howson and Laurence Olivier). Of all the versions, however, most film critics and movie historians tend to favor Hindle Wakes aka Fanny Hawthorne, the 1927 adaptation spotlighting American actress Estelle Brody in possibly her most famous role.
Continue readingTag Archives: Dziga Vertov
Witchcraft Through the Ages
How to best describe the 1922 Swedish film Haxan (also known as Witchcraft Through the Ages) by Danish director Benjamin Christensen? While not a conventional documentary by anyone’s standards, it is not a traditional narrative film either and straddles several genres in its exploration of witchcraft and the black arts from the Dark Ages up to 1921.
Continue readingA Paean for Terra Firma
From an early age I developed a fascination with film but it wasn’t until college when my film interests expanded beyond American cinema to include international films and more specialized genres like underground, silent, documentary and exploitation movies. A Film History 101 course at the University of Georgia, curated by a drama professor, was partly responsible for that due to his eclectic overview which sampled the early work of Sam Fuller (The Steel Helmet, Park Row), Fritz Lang silents (Die Nibelungen: Siegfried & Kriemhild’s Revenge), the roots of Neorealism (La Terra Trema) and Hollywood studio system gems (George Sidney’s Scaramouche, An Affair to Remember). What made one of the strongest impressions, however, were examples of early Soviet cinema like Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera. And my favorite of them all was Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth (Russian title: Zemlya, 1930), the third film in a trilogy that included Zvenyhora (1928) and Arsenal (1929). Continue reading

