Forgotten Silver

1

I'm in a small town called Pukerua Bay

in New Zealand.

Behind me is the house of an elderly lady

called Hannah McKenzie.

I've known Hannah all my life.

She's a very close friend of my parents,

who live just 4 doors away.

In fact, I remember coming to

"Auntie Hannah's" gardens,

as we called her when I was about 7 years

old and playing in these trees over here.

I didn't know a lot about Hannah

McKenzie back then

I knew that she was a widow - her husband

had died many years before I was born.

About a year ago I had

a call from my mother.

She said I should drop in on

Auntie Hannah sometime because

she was wondering if I'd be interested

in a lot of old films that she had stored

in a shed at the bottom of her garden.

I wasn't expecting much.

Hannah described them as a

lot of old home movies that her

husband, Colin, had taken.

I was expecting to maybe find

a bunch of old home movies,

drop them off at the film archive on my way

home and that would be the end of it.

What I found, sitting right here,

was an old chest.

I opened the chest and I found the

most extraordinary collection of films.

These were 35mm films.

The tins were rusty.

There were strange names on them.

"Warrior Season".

Films I'd never heard of.

I had no way of realizing the significance

of these films at the time.

We later discovered they were made between

the turn of the century and the late 1920s

by an extraordinary New Zealander.

A man who has now gotta join the

ranks of the great film pioneers.

A guy called Colin McKenzie.

At the archives we get a

lot of film coming in.

It's family parades, babies on lawns.

A lot of it's very

interesting, historically.

Just on dress, fashion,

and things like this, but.

Colin McKenzie's collection, on the other

hand, is something totally unique.

I got a call from Peter

and he wanted to know if I knew

anything at all about.

Colin McKenzie.

And, I had to say that I

didn't know very much.

The name wasn't totally unknown to me.

I'd come across it in a couple of journals

and a couple of old papers

but there was very little solid

information to relate to him.

Certainly there was no films that were

attributed to him.

We were very luck to get the

film in when we did.

They were starting to

deteriorate quite badly

some of the reels.

And, I think, within 5 years if it

hadn't have been found

it would have disappeared forever.

Imagine if a film

like "Citizen Kane" was to suddenly

come out of the blue.

Really, the discovery of this collection

was that exciting and that intriguing.

It's a treasure trove of films of

major historical importance

not just for New Zealand but worldwide.

This is New Zealand filmmaker is gonna rank

you know - I mean - with the greats,

like D.W. Griffith.

And I think, in some

ways, infinitely better.

I've gotta confess: Colin McKenzie

was just

a name I'd read somewhere in a book,

in a history book

and he didn't have a lot of impact to me

until this great discovery of all his films and

the historical research that's gone with it

and now I am just flabbergasted.

This is just the greatest film

discovery of the last 50 years.

Here was this unknown genius,

who died in obscurity,

and who now belongs, you know,

in the pantheon

of great cinema artists and innovators.

Colin McKenzie had humble beginnings.

He was born on the 7th of February, 1888

in the tiny South Island farming

community of Geraldine.

His father, John McKenzie, arrived in

New Zealand in 1879.

With typical Scottish pragmatism

he built his home and farm the hard way.

John's young wife, Ellen,

found country life difficult.

But she took pride in her

sons, Colin and Brooke.

Colin, the elder of the two, was studious and

introverted, the opposite of his brother.

Yet the boys enjoyed a close bond.

From sunup to sundown they worked

the land with their father.

In whose footsteps they

were expected to follow.

Colin, however, showed no

aptitude for farming.

His interests lay elsewhere.

The boys' uncle, Albert Drury,

owned a successful bicycle shop in Timaru.

It was there, in the workshop,

that Colin discovered his passion

for mechanical invention.

Young Colin would often stay weekends,

tinkering with tools and spare parts.

The boy's imagination needed an outlet.

In the spring of 1900, he found it.

The traveling picture

show had come to town.

It was like a flash from heaven,

starting out of the darkness,

and his whole heart lifted.

He felt this was something he wanted to do

and he would do.

He just followed that big picture show

right around the district.

And where the other kids

had been gorping at the screen

looking at those lovelies

and horses and things.

Colin was at the back of the hall looking

at the magic machine that was doing it all.

The projector.

What fascinates me most about

Colin McKenzie's early films

are not so much the films themselves,

but the technology involved.

I mean this was 1900. 5 years

after the birth of cinema.

You can't walk into the chemist's shop and

buy a movie camera to take home movies.

Aged only 12, Colin built his first

motion picture camera.

Impatient with the hand crank

technology at the time,

Colin mechanized his camera

with great ingenuity.

When Colin rode the bicycle,

his camera rolled,

thus creating the cinema's

first tracking shots.

Colin's later attempt to mechanize

a home-built projector

lept way beyond pedal power.

I don't know who else would have thought

of using steam power to drive a projection

system, but he did. And it worked!

Well, he was clever enough

to make his own film.

He got flax seeds from down at the

swamp at the back of the farm.

And he boiled them and boiled them.

Turned that into cellulose nitrate.

And then he had to find something

for the emulsion and he found eggs.

Not eggs. Egg whites.

He used the egg albumen process,

which they used in the 19th century

for making materials photosensitive.

He adapted that, though,

to use the moving images.

The trouble was, that it took 12 eggs

to make one minute of film.

That's alright as long as

he was making short films.

Colin was caught red-handed.

The precocious boy had been planning

the world's first feature-length film.

Colin's father flew into a rage.

This was an affront to his dignity.

He ranted and he raved, and he smashed

up all of Colin's gear.

Everything was destroyed.

Everything. All his gear. Except the camera,

which his clever mother had hidden.

Living less than 50 miles from the

McKenzie farm was

someone who, like Colin, nursed

extravagant dreams of invention.

His name was Richard Pearse.

In the early years of the century,

Pearse constructed a crude flying machine

and made several attempts to get airborne.

Pearse's exploits have always been

the subject of conjecture and legend.

Some writers believe he flew before the

Wright brothers.

But no reliable proof has existed

that he even got off the ground.

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