Chang

Kru, wife Chantui and their three children live a fairly subsistence life in this silent film set amongst the wilderness of the Siamese forest. Here they try to peacefully co-exist with nature - providing they keep their livestock in an heavily fortified coral and build their home high up on stilts where coconut milk and freshly milled rice sustains them. A visiting leopard makes short work of his animal's defences though, and he decides that he must ensnare this beast before it eats him out of house and home (and quite possibly family, too). He carries on cultivating his land using a water buffalo whilst their pet - a perfectly wild - monkey makes short work of the larder and Chantui weaves herself a basket. Night-time brings an a operation that might make Noah's ark look straightforward as they get their animals snug, and hopefully safe for the night. Sadly, more bad news awaits them in the morning when they discover that the buffalo went for an early morning stroll and encountered a tiger! What of the leopard, though? Will it take the bait and find self ensnared too? Kru realises he needs help so travels to the local village to get help building more, sometimes quite complex, traps and tracking down the beast of prey. Pits, nets, razor sharp bamboo spikes. Battles lines are drawn as man hunts beast and beast hunts man. There's something authentic about this. Aside from some pretty risky natural world photography, we see that the ingenuity and weaponry of man is usually more than a match for the instinctive power of those wild creatures who are simply no match for ropes and the bullet! Until, that is, an herd of elephants prove that even bullets won't stop everything and the villagers must resort to camouflage and stealth to drive and contain this marauding menace! At times it's quite exciting to watch and it builds well to a dangerous and chaotic if, I felt, entirely unsatisfactory denouement. All sorts of critters feature here and it's worth watching to illustrate just how nature gets on when mankind is part of it's matrix, not all of it. "Brain outweighs brawn". Pity, that, sometimes.

In the 1932 classic "King Kong," the protagonist is a filmmaker who has made a living traveling to remote locations with exotic backgrounds to film wildlife adventures. Hence he journeys to Skull Island where he's heard a gigantic ape is living. The Kong backstory closely resembles the team made up Merian C. Cooper, who produced the original "Kong" 1932 movie, and his cameraman Ernest Schoedsack, when they received funding from Paramount Pictures to film their adventures in northern Thailand. Part-owner Jesse Lasky of Paramount was so impressed by the pair's previous effort where they followed a Persian tribe's migration, 1925's "Grass," he had his studio pay them by sponsoring the trip to this Asian country.

His instincts were spot on since the April 1927 release of "Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness" was received with great acclaim and rousing rounds of applause from packed theater audiences nationwide. The feature film was constructed as a documentary. If the viewer didn't know better, the two Americans capture the reality of a remote tribe living off the land in the jungles of Thailand as true-to-life.

But like most documentaries produced during the time, "Chang," which means 'Elephant" in Thai, was manipulated by the two filmmakers to fit their intended framework drawn up before they even arrived on the scene. The documentary's main character, Kru, was the guide for them and arranged for his family (besides a stand-in for his wife) and his friends to play the parts of members of a society that had long abandoned the practices displayed in the movie. Kru's background included not only being a guide, fisherman, hunter and trapper, but he was a practicing preacher as well as a carpenter.

Nonetheless, it was dangerous work for Cooper and Schoedsack to film the breathtaking wild animal footage. Cooper was at the ready with a gun when needed if the tigers, lions and elephants being photographed up close decided to lunge at the pair. Such a scenario played out on one occasion when a tiger approached uncomfortably too close to them. Another particularly dangerous set-up was when, using director John Ford's technique, Schoedsack dug a hole and positioned his camera to capture the rampaging elephants literally trampling over the planks lined above him. The weight of the heavy animals nearly broke the wood situated precariously just inches from his head.

The 18-month shoot was an ordeal for Cooper, who battled a case of malaria throughout the shoot. The production crew was forced to prepare for daily early morning filming since the animals were mostly active during the coolness of the day. They became lethargic in the afternoon and sought shelter as the Thai heat overtook the jungle. The humidity was so common that it wrecked havoc on the film stock and equipment, which had to be maintained on an hourly basis.

The manipulations of the producers are clearly shown in several sequences. The cross-cutting edits between man-hungry animals who corner the natives up a tree and the medium shots of the natives hanging waiting for relief shows the two scenes were clearly filmed separately. In the climatic sequence where a herd of elephants are stampeding and crushing the village's houses, the producers built miniature flimsy buildings and rounded a bunch of baby and juvenile elephants to make the model huts appear bigger than they really were. In another sequence, the crew tied up a baby elephant underneath a rickety tall hut and waited for the mother to come storming onto the scene. Sure enough, the irate adult elephant in a rage destroyed the building like it was balsa wood to free her baby.

"Chang" is still as thrilling of a movie to see today as it had been when it first premiered. Once the documentary was ready for release, Paramount wanted to use the reactions of animals caged in zoos looking at the projected film for publicity purposes. But studio executives were disappointed that so few zoos took up the offer. The recently established Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, holding its first Academy Awards in 1929, nominated "Chang" as one of three pictures for 'Unique and Artistic Productions.' The category was the only time the Academy listed it. But at the time it was considered as prestigious as its other category, 'Outstanding Picture.' In retrospect, "Chang" is the only documentary to ever have been nominated as a Best Picture.

There is more than a little irony in seeing a film that is so much like an anthropological field work, but with a superimposed plot structure and characterization that we now find unacceptably corny. The music is marvelous, by the famed Thai group Fong Naam, and the ethnographic details are rich.

A combination of a nature documentary and a staged drama about life in the jungles of Southeast Asia in the 1920s. Multiple and brutal dangers present challenges to a little family living apart from their village...life goes on despite hardship. How did they get some of the shots? The film will make you wonder about how life used to be before there were today's modern conveniences...it is very much kill or be killed. There is some comic relief...Bimbo steals the show. Easy to see the embryonic shots that evolve into King Kong a few years later. Worthy of the nomination received for best film of its class that year. Highly recommended.

Previously Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack made Grass, a very great silent documentary inspired by the success of Nanook of the North (which they hadn't even seen when they were flying off to the Middle East to film the long migration of a group of nomads). Grass was a real documentary, with little staging. Nanook, however, had a lot of staging, and has suffered a ton of criticism since its first release because of it. No matter how clearly Nanook is staged, Cooper's and Schoedsack's Chang is a hundred times more staged.

I don't care. It's an amazing film. Call it a fictionalized documentary, or a fudged one. Whatever. Chang is an awesome movie. The story is gripping, the cinematography is great, and the filmmaking in general is wonderful. I'm sitting there wondering how the hell they got these shots of tigers and elephants and stuff. I'm thinking Carl Denham, the risk-taking filmmaker from their own later King Kong. This whole movie seems like a preparation for King Kong. A couple of the scenes are repeated there. This may be preparation, but it is as amazing in its own way. 10/10.