Film Reviews by Tim Megarry

This is a film about an imagined homosexual relationship and should be seen as such since it entirely misconstrues historical reality and ignores intellectual history. Mary Anning is a little known but highly important early palaeontologist who provided material that ultimately served to debunk age-old religious-based views of nature. In the hands of Darwin and Wallace Anning’s fossils were potent evidence for evolution by natural selection. Anning’s work showed conclusively that in another biological era – that we now call the Jurassic – there were flora and fauna that had entirely vanished from the Earth. She was thus to make a major contribution to an intellectual revolution that has reshaped our world since it refuted prevailing biblical fundamentalism which held that the Earth was a mere six thousand years old and that all of nature had appeared within days of “God's creation”.

Francis Lee’s fantasy film is based on the assumption that the lack of any proof of Anning’s heterosexuality must imply her homosexuality. But lack of evidence is not evidence of absence. Asexuality, or just plain celibacy, was the norm for the unmarried and all but universal for women before the twentieth century with a host of very painful sanctions for any transgression and yet Lee has ascribed Anning with the sexual repertoire of a porn star.

Yes, Ammonite is nice to look at and the characters are sympathetic, but the film says almost nothing about the state of nineteenth century science or Anning’s revolutionary contribution – as a female scientist – which has the effect of trivialising her role as a lone working-class woman. It is rather like making a film about Beethoven’s forlorn love-life and forgetting to mention his music.

Dr Tim Megarry

Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927), once considered lost but now mostly restored, ranks as a supreme masterpiece of silent cinema which sits proudly alongside the work of WD Griffiths, Pabst, Eisenstein and Lang. It relates Napoleon’s childhood, his involvement with the French Revolution and concludes with his Italian campaign of 1796 and thus biographically remains an unfinished work. But Gance prefigures Hollywood epics forty years into the future in this landmark of film making. Napoleon is innovative and exhilarating in its use of new techniques, on location and in the cutting room, which carry forth a complex and compelling storyline that subtly interweaves an intimate personal narrative with historical events. The sheer scale and ambition of this five and a half hour long film is stunning. Hundreds, if not thousands of actors were involved and a three screen viewing presentation, that anticipates Cinerama and CinemaScope, has been fully reconstructed in the film’s final act. Such pioneering techniques are enhanced by long montage and optical sequences which set a new agenda for cinema. Kevin Brownlow is to be thanked and admired for his painstaking work over so many years in rescuing, conserving and editing this version of Gance’s masterpiece. Carl Davis’s rousing musical score is as monumental as the film it accompanies. Deriving from Hayden and Mozart but mainly from Beethoven the music gives the film the epic quality it deserves. Napoleon must surely be rated as a milestone in cinema history and should become required viewing.

Tim Megarry

This is a great screen classic not to be missed by anyone seriously interested in cinema. Griffiths was a pioneer who established epic film making which set an agenda for the following fifty years.

However, the version of Intolerance on the DVD that I have just returned is atrocious and would have made Griffiths weep! This was a big budget film with superb photography and a special musical score to be played accompanying the silent film when released in 1916. I have seen and heard this twice over the years and can vouch for the fact that it easily matched all cinematography until the 1960s. The DVD however is an utter travesty: in many places the wrong projection speed has been used, the picture quality is mostly soot and whitewash and almost certainly this version has been taken from an old scratched exhibition print with appalling loss in quality. The titles in many parts are unreadable and the musical accompaniment is entirely unrelated to the action on screen.

What a shame, this is a masterpiece ruined by Philistines who understand nothing about film history and should never have been issued in such a manner: it will only alienate viewers and underline the prejudices of those who like to ridicule silent film.