Chang

Thanks to those other reviewers for filling in the background to what is now an antique-- but no less fascinating-- oddity. The movie reflects a time period when enterprising (and intrepid) filmmakers like Cooper and Schoedsack were discovering the audience potential for semi-documentaries showing exotic peoples and locales.

Here it's an adventure in northern Siam (Thailand). The rough storyline follows a Laotian family and villagers as they compete against a fierce jungle for livelihood. As expected, scenes are filled with wild beasts and clambering natives. Some scenes are obvious pandering —the gamboling monkey, the cute baby; others are pure spectacle—the rampaging elephant herd, the marauding big cats. Of course, much of the animal spectacle-- though not the killing-- is familiar in our age of 24-hour cable TV. Still, seeing how the natives cope under primitive conditions remains fascinating.

A couple points, I think, are worth noting. Though the exact locale is not pin-pointed on a map, the location appears roughly within what has since become known notoriously as The Golden Triangle (northern convergence of Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam). Whatever its status in 1927, the Triangle has grown into one of the world's biggest sources of heroin-grade opium. I can't help wondering whether the advance of a money economy has since turned villagers like those of the movie into cash-crop farmers.

Also, the movie's theme writes confidently of the jungle's permanent presence. Eighty years later with new waves of extractive technology, and I wonder if that permanence is as assured now as it was then. Looks to me like the rainforests are under industrial siege and may well be losing their presence in the face of human advancement. A rather ironical turn of events.

Neither of these points is meant to detract from the overall excellence of the film. However, I don't think the movie should be viewed as a dead historical document. Instead, it can be used as an informative lens for looking at the age-old struggle between man and nature.

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.

This is a thoroughly amazing and brilliant film, that strangely enough not too many of the newer film-buffs have seen, despite the universal fame of Cooper and Shoedsack due to 1933's legendary "King Kong." Actually, they were almost as famous before that. When "Chang" came out in 1927, pre-King-Kong, post-Flaherty's-Nanook and Cooper and Shoedsack's own earlier "Grass," it became one of the most popular films ever made. The reason is simple: unlike the moderately successful, equally brilliant but more national-geographic-like and meditatively paced "Grass," (plenty of people may have accidentally stumbled upon it and seen it looking for films about Marijuana!) which deals with the emigration of Persian Nomads away from the winter and towards the land that has "Grass," this one is set in the middle of a sweltering, friggin' jungle in Siam (Thailand today), amidst wild animals, and has non-stop danger and adventure from beginning to end, not to mention a hilarious sense of humor.

The Thai woman in the film is actually not the spouse of Kru, the main actor, who was Cooper and Shoedsack's interpreter, but the wife of someone else living there. All these people were acting in the film without ever having seen a movie in their lives, reacting to these incredible events as they happened. Tigers, Leopards, rice farmers in the middle of a jungle running up coconaut trees to escape from them, Monkeys named Bimbo, and of course, Changs (meaning Elephants in the local language of Siam), and the big Chang/Elephant herd stampede, one of the greatest sequences ever filmed by anyone--all this is in Cooper and Shoedsack's film, which they shot all by themselves, with NO CREW, NO LIGHTING EQUIPMENT, and a 70,000 dollar budget which went up only to about 95,000 when the film took a little longer than expected, and they put some money in out of their own pockets which the studio later reimbursed. The new music by Bruce Gaston is absolutely brilliant, using a combination of traditional Thai music and modern sounds but never sounding trite or superficial. So many silent films suffer from bad, endlessly repetitive soundtracks that make you want to tear your hair out, this restored version of "Chang" on Image DVD isn't one of them. Rent it off the Internet or just go ahead and buy it, it's worth every penny, has a good transfer, an informative commentary track, and believe me, it's one of those films that you'll want to watch over and over again.

Chang (1927)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

A rather remarkable and at times eye-opening documentary about a family living in the deep jungles of Northern Siam. The film follows their daily lives and shows us how they work, live, play and eventually hunt game. CHANG has been called a documentary but I do wonder how much "story" actually went on and it sure seems that a lot of the footage was probably shot and prepared in such a way that the filmmakers could tell a more dramatic story. That's certainly not a negative thing or a strike against the movie because there's no question this film is rather incredible considering when it was made and some of the footage that they gathered. I'm sure some people might be bothered by some of the animals that are killed but the way I look at it is that the people living in these villages were fighting for their lives so it's understandable that they'd kill the creatures that were trying to kill them. The filmmakers are quite respectful as we never see any of the actual deaths on screen so those sensitive to the material won't find anything graphic. I think the animal footage is some of the most amazing that I've seen. When you think of various animal footage from this era you think of poorly done stock footage but there were several times during the film that I was stumped as to how they got the shots that they did. The tiger hunt sequence is certainly one of the highlights of the film as it appears several times that the camera is right in the path of the beast. Another memorable moment comes at the end when the chang (elephants) stampede. There are countless animals on display from bears to snakes to anteaters to tigers and of course the elephants. Seeing these creatures in their natural homes was quite a bit of fun and it was also a reminder of how dangerous these things could be. The most interesting thing about this film is seeing how certain people lived during this time. Going into these jungles just makes one grateful that they weren't born there and at the same time you have to watch this and wonder if you could have done the things the people in these villages did.

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.