User reviews

Peter Jackson and Costa Boeates decided to make this great mockumentary about a man called Colin McKenzie, a man who invented such things as color film, audio film and above all, made the first full length feature movie.

Apparently it was quite a successful hoax in New Zealand, people really did buy it. And I really can't blame them, as most of the fabricated film material really looks like almost hundred years old, almost destroyed film.

And there are some very convincing famous film people, like Sam Neil, telling their knowledge of this McKenzie.

Even the tone of the film isn't actually very funny, even thought there are some things in it that are so absurd, that they make you laugh.

Over all well made mockumentary.

This life of a forgotten New Zealander at the dawn of movies is very knowing and loving. Its weirdly right on target with the way things were done by the maverick film makers of the day. Its also very funny and touching and a really good way to spend 53 minutes. I'm baffled that people actually thought this was real since there are numerous clues, nay, out right examples of why this couldn't be real, how the young film maker made movies years before anyone else is actually quite silly.

If can see this on the DVD since the extras add to the magic of the film. Chief among them is the making of documentary that tells you and shows you how they did what they did. In strange way thats even better than the film itself.

That said this is probably a renter rather than a keeper, but it should be on the must see list especially f you love old movies and movie history.

Colin Mckenzie was a brilliant New Zealand filmmaker who FINALLY got his due from Peter Jackson's brilliant documentary, "Forgotten Silver". Mckenzie seems to have inspired Jackson quite amusingly, because you can totally see some of the elements used from his 'Salome', (Which I attended the world premiere of it's restoration) in his Lord Of The Rings Trilogy. In Forgotten Silver, Jackson intertwines footage from Griffiths' early movies and his masterpiece Salome, with interviews and a fascinating trek into New Zealand wilderness to try to find the sets used in 'Salome'. It's all quite interesting and absorbing. I admire Jackson for unearthing this silent movie master (which actually I knew about before this movie came out), and await when Salome comes out on DVD!

ps Yes, I did get the joke ;)

Documentary is all about taking real life and shaping it into a story. 'Forgotten Silver' suggests that real part doesn't even have to be real, as long as the story's good.

I watched this again tonight - probably the 4th or 5th time I've seen it since it was first screened as an (allegedly) true doco back in 1996. Despite knowing the whole thing was cod, I was quite surprised to find tears in my eyes as NZ pioneer film-maker Colin McKenzie accidentally filmed his own death in Spain, so drawn was I into the story.

Once you strip away the hype over the hoax factor, what's left is just a great story about a struggling film maker facing and almost overcoming insurmountable obstacles to create a work of mad genius. Anyone expecting belly laughs from 'Forgotten Silver' is probably going to be disappointed, because viewed as a story, this isn't a comedy - it's a tragedy. It's no wonder so many people were sucked into believing it when it first screened - the Colin McKenzie saga has an emotional depth which is heartbreaking.

Bonus points for a brilliant musical score, some superb technical effects (especially the corroded, bubbling, self-destructing nitrate film; most filmmakers would have settled for a couple of cliché tramlines to make the footage look old), and the gorgeous Thomas Robbins as Colin McKenzie.

I vividly remember the first time I watched this movie. The lead up to the finding of the old films was without any obvious clues, so it wasn't 'til the Richard Pearse footage that we became seriously suspicious. My husband is a forensic photographer so the digital imaging to get the date off the newspaper was a dead giveaway to us. The eleventy seven dozen eggs was another big pointer. From then on we treated the whole thing as a lark and just revelled in the imagination that is Peter Jackson's trade mark.

We were of course, greatly impressed with the enormity of the project and could only surmise that the actors in the "Salome" movie were also conned into thinking they were filming a real movie and didn't know the truth until the 'doco' came out. Either that or Peter Jackson has a loyal entourage that kept a secret which could never have survived in any Hollywood arena.

I look forward to even more of Peters work.....

To fully appreciate this film, you must consider two things. First, this is a MOCumentary. It is not a real story, but instead something created through the imagination of a very rich storyteller. Second, this film was released to the general New Zealand public without them knowing that this was a mocumentary and they completely felt that it was a real occurrence. They took the bait … hook, line, and sinker. It reminded me of the fear that Orson Welles was able to conjure when he did 'The War of the Worlds' broadcast in 1938. Welles was able to create a mythological occurrence that was packaged so well that audiences bought it. This is the same with Peter Jackson's creation, Forgotten Silver. Jackson's attention to detail and excitement behind this project is seen with every digitized photo, every sound bite, and every word of the story.

The great idea behind mocumentaries is that you have the opportunity to create a world from the ground up. I think this was an aspect that I thoroughly enjoyed about this picture was every creative angle that Jackson took with his characters. They were flawed, but in a good way. They were real, yet in a sense very cartoonish. They gave you this dream about life that is normally missing in most films, yet these guys were never alive for you to believe in. It was funny how deeply rooted you could become with this film until you had to pull yourself away and say that it was just a work of fiction. For anyone to say that about a film means that the filmmaker is doing a spectacular job. The only director that I can think of that closely able to pull this off today is Christopher Guest, but even in his work you can tell that it is a mocumentary from the beginning. Jackson never gives you the opportunity to find the truth. Everything he hands to you has been researched and tested giving us the chance to believe in our man Colin throughout all of it.

Perhaps what I am trying to say here is that Jackson doesn't just create a story, he creates a world filled with emotion and chaos. It is easy to create a story, books are released everyday, but to put visuals with this story AND build a main character that the average Joe can relate to is much harder. While only pushing 60 minutes, Jackson had quite a bit of work on his hands. This was not an easy project. Jackson not only had to play director, but also put himself into the film that I think only helped build the mirage of truth. You kept forgetting that he created this story, yet was in it himself. It honestly takes away that feeling of cinematic rubbish that Hollywood releases daily and builds a true story.

The interventions between Harvey Weinstein, Sam Neill, and Leonard Maltin only help build more of that 'truth' to the film. You hear these men from the industry talk about this fictitious man named Colin McKenzie, you begin to believe that perhaps he was alive and Jackson is just trying to tell the truth.

While I have spoken heavily about the amazing fake factoids that Jackson disperses through the film, what I found funny was the type of humor that Jackson placed intermittently throughout the film. The idea of Stan the Man is brilliant and his 'Rodney King' moment proved that it is always possible for history to repeat itself. The jail time that Colin faced due to his 'smut' film had me rolling in my seat. The exuberant size of the extras needed for this film kept me smiling throughout. There was just something about this humor that made me excited about my educational background.

Finally, I would like to say that the fact that the New Zealand public never realized that it was a mocumentary should already prove the worthiness of this film. I do not see why it didn't receive more press than it did, but this has been the biggest film enjoyment of the week. I remember a line from a film that went something like this, 'The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist'. Think of this line as you witness Jackson's film Forgotten Silver. It will make you curious.

Overall, I thought that this film was beautiful. Midway through this film you will loose track of reality and think that you are watching a true documentary, and that is when you can realize that you have a master director giving you a perfect 'gem'. This was not a film filled with violence and annoying Gollems, but instead cunning wit and satire. Jackson continually proves that he can handle so much more than just The Lord of the Rings with this film. No CGI is needed to see the imagination and brilliance behind this visionary. For those of you that are huge Lord of the Rings fans, you may not enjoy it as much, but for me this was Jackson in his truest form.

Bravo!

Grade: ***** out of *****

This mockumentary starts out tame but becomes slowly more and more ridiculous. Despite being completely fictional, it shows his story quite well and in an engaging and unfolding way.

Peter Jackson's take on Kiwi film history is an amusing mockumentary highlighted by some incredible recreations of silent and early filmmaking. Jackson clearly knows the language of the silent era, brilliantly recreating it in all it's 24 FPS glory. The make up looks right, the 'keyhole' shots look right,

and Salome itself is an astonishing tribute to Griffith's Intolerance. Stan the Man adds a welcome touch as the world's unfunniest silent clown. At 53 minutes, Forgotten Silver isn't tempted to stretch it's conceit too far. A real treat for cinephiles.

This film could've been made only by someone with a deep love of cinema : an homage to movies, coming from the heart. It's just too bad that Colin McKenzie didn't live to see his work being appreciated ...

Come to tink of it: it's just too bad that Colin didn't live at all. What a loss!

A mockumentary about a New Zealand filmmaker from the silent era being rediscovered. I actually hesitate to call this a "mockumentary" because it's more clever than funny. There are a few low-key gags (mostly centered around a hack vaudevillian named "Stan the Man") but they're not really that amusing. Still, it is a clever production, and Peter Jackson (along with co-director Costa Botes) has an admirable commitment to authenticity. The films are aged beautifully and could definitely pass as forgotten relics. I don't know if cameos from Harvey Weinstein and Sam Neill add all that much verisimilitude, but I could certainly see Leonard Maltin being involved in a documentary like this. I did wonder if there might be a sort of New Zealand inferiority complex at play here, with Jackson and company (consciously or not) wanting to invent a cinematic Kiwi legend of their own. It's a fun little movie that looks like it was fun to make.

... whereas Woody Allen's comparable "Zelig" was ingenious. And hilarious. "Forgotten Silver" is only fitfully amusing, in my opinion. The faked archive footage certainly does capture the feel of the period however.

It's really hard to see anyone taking this documentary at face value. The Great Egg Robbery at the beginning, if nothing else, should surely give that away.

The version of the Salome story in Colin McKenzie's magnum opus is, of course, Oscar Wilde's, not the unsensationalized accounts of SS. Matthew (xiv) and Mark (vi), in spite of all that talk about "Biblical". Yeah, Biblical like Cecil B. DeMille is Biblical. That is just another one of Peter Jackson's jokes.

I took a stab at deciphering the signs we see in Russian, but not much luck there. One does say "Fokusnik", meaning "Conjuror". Need to buy a better dictionary, I guess.

McKenzie's death scene seems to me anyway to allude very obliquely to the famous footage of the anthropologists in South America who filmed their own deaths when they encountered some non-pacified tribesmen. The unplanned look is similar, the distance from the camera about the same, and the camera also ends up on the ground in that shocking film when the cameraman is murdered, if I remember it all correctly. (Some of these details may be wrong. It's been a while since I saw it.) If you haven't seen that particular film, you haven't in fact missed very much. It's a lot like McKenzie's death, not sensational, just unexpected and "real", and therefore shocking, more in its implications than its actuality.

Peter Jackson has a big heart, I think. Even for all the gore and grossness of his films (i.e.; Dead Alive aka Braindead) he always has a very heartfelt moment of sentiment. In this film, it's the loving way McKenzie is treated and the seriousness of his death scene, captured on film. While much of the film has very tongue in cheek chuckles, this part is played very seriously.

Also, as someone who works every day with "forgotten silver", I admire his treatment of the whole subject. For, while McKenzie and his films may be bogus, the plight of old movies is not. I'm amazed at how much footage shows up in attics and basements and garden sheds every year. In just the eight months so far of 1999, we have received at least 30 "new" films; rare and unique items all. And we have films done by people very much like Colin McKenzie. Private, personal projects, most of which never saw the light of day or vanished quickly after their initial release. So much "forgotten silver."

Jackson pull this one great! It is not so believeable as some other mockumentaries (like "Curse of the Blair Witch") but this one is so funny and soo well done !

Some scenes are obviously fake but made me laugh well :) and some are so impressive especially fake silent movies that really looks like 90 years old copies (Jackson himself can be seen as extra in some scenes in "Saloma" oD )! They really did excelent job - I admire all efforts that was put to shoot it.

Relly great and funny movie that just must be seen!

10/10

I first saw MOST of this film on a flight from New Zealand to Australia, but missed the ending when the flight ended before the film. Because I was engrossed with the fine meal and service on NZAir I was suckered into this film up to my neck.

Hints abound throughout the film that things are not as they seem. The digital enhancement of the date on a newspaper is one of the early clues, but you get dragged along by the sheer magnitude and perfection of the deception. Director Jackson did not think small! His project, like Colin Mackenzie's, was of Biblical proportions!

The Lord of the Rings trilogy may make Jackson a household name the way Star Wars made George Lucas. But this will be my evil little secret, my IQ test for unwitting friends who think they are So Darn Smart.

I'm reminded seeing Forgotten Silver- of course after knowing that it was all a 'hoax' and that there is no filmmaker Colin MacKenzie- of a film where another hoax was played but with real filmmakers, Incident at Loch Ness. In both films the the ones making the film put themselves in the film, and the stories within the film within the films are fantastical and ambitious turns (in Loch Ness, a documentary by Werner Herzog about the search for Nessie, and in Silver, Peter Jackson's search for the elusive location and film cans of the first un-finished feature-length film made in New Zealand). In Forgotten Silver, however, the satire isn't really on high about how a film gets made from start to finish, although it does include that as part of it. It's really out to mock what was so delightful and absurd about the lengths to which filmmakers in the silent era looked to be further and further with their innovations and wild dreams of ambitious epics, but usually succumbed to the easiest thing- making people laugh.

Colin MacKenzie, the "pinoeer" presented in this mockumentary by Jackson and his collaborator Costa Botes, is such a filmmaker, and his up & downs type story is chronicled and inter-cut with the search for the missing film he took twenty years to make and had to hide away as to not have it taken away by the Russians &/or Italian mob. It's also done in a seemingly straightforward documentary way, like seeing one of the PBS specials or something (I'm also reminded of the recent mock-doc Confederate States of America). It ends up not being a laugh a minute really, and I found myself chuckling more than getting full gut-busting laughs like with some of Jackson's more twisted comedies like Meet the Feebles or Dead/Alive. What's amusing more-so to me is that the 'secret' of Colin MacKenzie- and that so many in New Zealand ended up thinking he was for real and did really film his friend beating the Wright brothers to flight by several months and things like that- came under the package of a Peter Jackson product, who before making this had three of his four works as some of the most absurd, low-budget pieces of work to ever come from that corner of the world.

But once that passes, and the idea that the hoax ends up working in showing what is great about the whole evolution and history of careers with directors in movies, as well as the kind of precision in restoring film, while at the same time putting some good touches to lampoon it. This comes out clearest in the actual silent footage itself, where MacKenzie breaks through first with color, but because he (unintentionally) shoots topless natives in the shot, he's thrown in jail after the judges deliberate long enough to watch the footage repeatedly. There's also MacKenzie's bread & butter as he tries to finance his pet project, Salome (the film Jackson and his team are sort of after in present-day), which are the random silent comedies of Stan the Man (Peter Corrigan in hilarious make-up), who goes about hitting people un-suspecting pies, as he figures that attacks that are on the innocent (which happens after he strikes a child in one of his early comedies) could work well, that is, until the Prime Minister is on the scene. And the actual footage shown of Salome is an extraordinarily mix of both goofy and sincere technical feats, as Jackson and Botes go in a fine style at the way the old epics from the likes of Griffith and De Mille, but with the bizarre touches Jackson's best at like with the main female star chopping off a character's head and playing around with it.

All of this is great fun, even if in-between there's a lot of actual sincere stuff put in, also in part fun in being a dead-pan examination of the the ups for MacKenzie (his ill-begotten but always accomplished feats of invention and creation) and downs too (i.e. losing his wife and child during filming his epic, and subsequently dying in world war 1). Stranger still with the picture is that Jackson and Botes almost have a kind of affection for the MacKenzie character- and as the former later displayed with his brawny popcorn epics- that even makes the material not too shallow in terms of approach for the viewer. It also might add frustration, I'd guess, if one didn't know that it was a big gag in the guise of professional historical research. But it ends up working better than I expected, and there's even a gut-bustlingly funny bit at the end as Harvey Weinstein expresses his confidence with his recently trimmed version of Salome, cutting out an hour out of the restored print.

For film buffs, Forgotten Silver is a weird kind of satirical keep-sake only Jackson and his Wingnut people could cook up.

Sadly disappointing mockumentary of about the quality and incisiveness of a particularly bad late in the day Saturday Night Live sketch. The humor is flat and the concept runs out of steam early on though it continues flapping for the full hour. The only point of interest on the DVD is the attached documentary on the mockumentary which gives a glimpse into the unattractively self- congratulatory Jackson talking about his use of silent film techniques (embarrassing as they are not convincing) and the amusing comments from New Zealand viewers who actually were fooled (wanting to heave bricks though TV New Zealands window).

Shines an unfortunate light on the weaker parts of TLOTR when we understand Jackson is an unfunny geek with the self-satisfied confidence of a local film poobah made good in the big leagues.

The failure of his humor has obviously benefitted his non-comedic projects ... lets hope he sticks tot hat now that he has his big franchise.

This hour-long documentary details the amazing work of the nearly unknown Colin McKenzie, the first man to film movies with sound or in color. He documented the first man to ever fly (before the Wright Brothers, even!) and filmed a biblical epic on a massive set he built single handedly in the mountainous forests of New Zealand. So why haven't you heard of him? It might be because most people are biased against New Zealand film-makers, or it could be because this movie is entirely fictitious.

The very real, very brilliant director Peter Jackson fashioned this very funny and touching film for New Zealand television, and it's worth checking out for many reasons. First of all, it's technically amazing- the vintage film scenes are very convincing and well thought out. Second of all, the movie is very funny, including the hilarious antics of Stan the Man, a mean spirited prankster who is kind of like Tom Green, only much less annoying because he's silent. Finally, this movie has real heart, and gets you to care about the eccentric MacKenzie. As a bonus, this movie also features (an was co-conceived by) the guy from "Bad Taste" who threw the pine cone at Derik.

This movie is kind of hard to find, but well worth hunting down, especially if you are a fan of Jackson's work (and everyone should be).

Early film history geeks will get the most out of this mockumentary. Forgotten Silver (1995) follows the misadventures of fictional film genius Colin McKenzie, who managed to pioneer sound film, color film, aviation, "Candid Camera" style shenanigans, and the feature film, only to never get his due.

The presence of real archivists and historians complete the illusion that what we are watching is legit. The footage of the films are less convincing, much too mannered even by the heightened standards of the 1910s and 1920s. Much of the biography is hilarious too, underlined by a wry sense of silly humor, almost Forrest Gump like in the intersections of fiction and fact, like the changes the Soviet Union censors wanted to make to McKenzie's biblical epic or how he invented the close-up because of his infatuation with an actress.

Still, my fellow film history nerds will get a big chuckle out of this!

I channel-flicked onto Forgotten Silver just as it started at about 11:00 one weeknight a long time ago. Although totally exhausted from a day at the salt mines, I still couldn't turn off the TV. The story was compelling and convincing with enough irrelevant detail to give it the ring of truth. I was fascinated as fact after fact fell into place with the unmistakable rightness of truth.

It was only the next day, after bemusedly watching a workmate fold over laughing when I related the latest proof that a kiwi had beaten the Wright brothers to it and demanding explanation, that I discovered the whole thing was a complete fabrication. One of the few times since leaving kindergarten I have been completely taken for a ride and the only time I remember enjoying the trip.

If you appreciate a prank on the grand scale then you have to see Forgotten Silver or, better yet, see it with an unsuspecting friend.

It took me the first 10-15 minutes before I realised that this wasn't a documentary, but was in fact a mockumentary. In other words it's all fiction. I loved that fact that the comments by Sam Neill, Leonard Maltin etc made it all seem so real. What a hoot. Well thought out, and well acted. Just love it.