Forgotten Silver (1995)
The world of film is unfair. For every great filmmaker, another has been lost to time. The documentary Forgotten Silver is about one of these forgotten filmmakers. Made by New Zealand filmmakers Peter Jackson and Costa Botes, released in 1995, this project is a joint search for a man who never really made it: Colin McKenzie.
Forgotten Silver, a project that serves as an archaeological search for the beginnings of film, is a guide through the life of McKenzie. McKenzie, a filmmaker with enormous creativity, ingenuity and passion, who despite all his talent was ruined by his circumstances. As a child he made his first camera, created the first tracking shot, and later invented synchronized sound. Everything he did, he did years before anyone else even came up with the idea. The dedication he had to his art was enormous. At some point, he left for the middle of nowhere to build a huge set for the greatest project of passion of his life: a film adaptation of the Biblical story Salome. Yet, despite all this, McKenzie was still left behind in history. Thanks to Forgotten Silver, he gets his well-deserved place in film history as a pioneer after all these years.
Perhaps you find this whole story a bit suspicious, looking at the archive material (a plane that wobbles back and forth in the air with a tad bit too much enthusiasm before it crashes), or the things that happen to Colin McKenzie are just a bit too bizarre, or you secretly think you recognize his face from Lord of the Rings, but something is not quite right about this documentary. There is one small detail that still needs to be mentioned:
It's all fake.
Now it's a shame that I didn't have the full experience with this film, because I knew from the beginning that it was fake. I'm very curious when or if I would have realized it, if I wasn't aware of this fact. The archive material, made by Costa Botes, which he did by shooting the film normally, but then making the film reel look older through a chemical process, is convincing at times. But if you have seen more old material, you will realize that it is not always fully accurate. The stories about Colin McKenzie are bizarre, but thanks to this fake archive material and the interviews with experts, it does get a layer of credibility. Effective, because when the film came out, it caused a controversy, because the film was never labeled as a mockumentary, and people felt cheated when they found out that it was all fake.
Forgotten Silver is a special project. Unfortunately I did not find it equally entertaining over the span of 54 minutes(I found the fluctuation between the Salome production and working for money very boring, and I experienced the addition of an almost entire Salome film as unnecessary), but I find the meaning that you can give to this project extremely fascinating. Even more so, when you realize that it was not even the intention of the creators to fool people. It’s also nice to see references to real people. The set that McKenzie supposedly builds for Salome is reminiscent of Cecil B deMille’s set for his film The Ten Commandments. Cecil B deMille, like McKenzie, made Biblical retellings, and his film set was hidden under the dunes in California for 94 years. So McKenzie’s story is not not that crazy after all! The idea that New Zealand could have been an important force in early film history is also not impossible.
Now, as it was then, Forgotten Silver is a commentary on how history is shaped. It challenges us to look critically at what we consume, even our trusted sources of truth: documentary films. Even the jumpscare that was - and is - Harvey Weinstein takes on new meaning 20 years later. Something that was obviously not intended in 1995, but which serves as a moment of realization that even the biggest assholes and liars are sometimes in plain sight, and you should not blindly trust these important media figures, and therefore the media. Nobody should ever be put on a pedestal. His presence in a film about the erasure and rewriting of people in history is almost obvious.
Even if you already know the truth, the mockumentary is an entertaining project. In an industry built on illusion, Peter Jackson and Costa Botes have pulled off a powerful trick. And who knows, maybe somewhere in a shed, in a dusty box, there is still a lost Colin McKenzie waiting to be discovered.