The Marvellous Corricks

I was suspicious that this was going to be a mockumentary - like Forgotten Silver, but I was mistaken, it was the real deal. The Corricks were a real family of vaudeville performers who bought a projector and later a camera and showed films as part of their act, starting in NZ and moving onto Australia and then a world tour.

This was a showing of nine of these films from before 1910, with a piano accompaniment and a narration. The narrator not only described the action but between reels he talked about the Corricks and early film making and projecting, in the age before the film industry and the cinema evolved from chaos into something resembling what we have today. One of the films was so odd that it wasn't even vaguely clear what the story was supposed to be. There were flowers that turned into women who then turned a man into a flower. Apart from the travelogs (including one about London in 1904 without a single motor vehicle or even a tram), most of the films had some form of special effects. It seems that the early film makers were more interested in what was possible than telling stories.

The narration was initially a little wooden but that aside I would recommend this to anyone interested very early films.

Ian's rating 2/5