This film is one of a number of recent films made by the Impossible Theatre Group, based at the Watershed in Slaithwaite, Huddersfield.  The Watershed Workshops are a local charity promoting creative engagement with communities. The Impossible Theatre group are based in Holmfirth, the location of the subject of this film, Bamforth Films. They describe themselves as, ‘a participatory, live and digital arts organisation. We create many types of innovative art works and events involving a wide range of people, offering fresh perspectives on life, contributing to change, helping to develop an active culture.’  

The group was formed in 1984, kicking off with a fascining production linking together the lives of Buster Keaton and Frida Kahlo – and so already taking an interest in early film.  As well as making films, the compnay do live music, theatre and other kinds of performance arts. The film premiered in the PictureDrome cinema in October 2006, and was entered for the 2005 Langsett Independent Film Festival (LiFF).

 

The Group work in all sections of the community, including over the years, victims of crime – through Victims Support, the Probation Service, Youth Justice and others. Especially working with schools and colleges, they recently worked with Newsome Junior School and junior schools in Kirklees. As well as creative projects they also often run workshops on a wide range of topics. In 2009 they put on events as diverse as the more lightweight Chromolab, exploring colour and light, to more serious topics, such as the Holocaust and more recent acts of genocide.  Whilst based in West Yorkshire, they have put on events right across Yorkshire. Their website provides a listing of current and past projects.

 

The group are invariably innovative, as seen in this film, showing the value of imagination over being just 'high tech'. The original idea for the film started at the Phoenix Youth Club, and was made over several months working with a group of local teenagers who were involved in both the research and production. The idea was to make a film that resembled the characteristics of early silent movies, as they put it: ‘humour, clear-cut plot lines, physical comedy, simple camera tricks, cross-dressing - and local talent’.  On this project the film credits thank the Shabang Theatre Adventures for the use of the black and white costumes and special props, and the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund, as part of the ‘Young Roots’ scheme. One of those with the theatre group working on the film, Chris Squires, states that the youth involved gained, ‘new technical expertise, raising personal skills and improving confidence and self esteem.’

 

Apparently the youth participating in the film were unaware of the Bamforth films, despite their being local to Holmfirth. Given that Bamforth stopped making films during the First World War, and their production of saucy postcards – still going – presumably appeals more to an older generation, this is hardly surprising. The Bamforth company made films in two separate periods: from 1898 to 1901 (approximately) and between 1913 and 1915. They are probably Yorkshire’s most important early film company, although they were by no means the only one, and there were many more across the country – see the Contexts for some of their films on YFA Online, especially Some Twins, Kiss in The Tunnel (1899); and for the later period Winky Causes a Small Pox Panic (1914). 

 

The claim that is sometimes made about Bamforth, repeated in this film, that it was the English Hollywood is perhaps overstating the case – especially that Hollywood might have stole some of their ideas from there – or sucked out their creativity. Different filmic ideas were mushrooming right across Europe and the US at the beginning of Hollywood, and everyone was pinching ideas from each other. The face in the sun – representing an unscrupulous Hollywood – is probably inspired by the Georges Méliès’ famous film A Trip to the Moon of 1902.  It is true that Hollywood was just a small village until Cecil B DeMille and Jesse Laske came along in 1913 to make The Squaw Man (1914). From there it very quickly mushroomed into the biggest film production site in the world. In fact the Selog film company had been making films in Los Angeles since 1907. What is true is that its original pioneers, these two and those that soon joined them, were prepared to grab creativity wherever they could find it, paying between $200 to $300 a week for the best actors. It is doubtful though that they ever took anything, or anyone, directly from Bamforth.

 

The inspiration for this film though is clearly as much US comic books as the early films of the Bamforths, especially as adapted for the 1960s Batman and Robin US TV series (probably still running on some TV channel). This starred Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin, and the resemblance between this and the way the filmmakers have produced this film is easy to spot. The Batman TV series has become something of a cult, and it is not hard to see why. Like many other US TV series at the time – the spoof spy comedy series Get Smart which ran around the same time comes to mind – Batman and Robin sent up its original inspiration by camping it up and generally going over the top. The series deliberately took on board features of the original comics, such as Zap bubbles. This film is a kind of spoof of a spoof, with its even more low budget special effects and use of ordinary objects for supposed sinister ones.

 

The connection between film and comics is an interesting one, with each influencing the other. Early comics were strongly slapstick – as was much comedy of the time – and this is seen too in the early films. The comics that came out at the time of the early cinema, such as Chuckles show this, and one, Funny Wonder, even had Charlie Chaplin as a character. The first superhero was Superman, invented by two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and this first came out with DC Action Man Comics in 1938.  Both science fiction fans, Siegel and Shuster’s original ‘bad’ Superman – following the common misconception of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, a very different kettle of fish – was made into the good guy after Hitler came to power in1933.  Batman, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, soon followed in Detective Comics in 1939; and he was joined by the Boy Wonder, Robin, to form the Caped Crusaders the next year in 1940. Since then the dynamic duo have taken on a more darker aspect in the hands of Frank Miller, but their more zany characteristics live on.

 

So too do the films of Bamforth. Coincidently, a docudrama was made linking Holmfirth to Hollywood, called Holmfirth Hollywood, around the same time as this one, in 2006. But in many ways The Dudey Movie stays truer to the fun and improvisatory quality of its inspiration. And it shows that these old films can still inspire a young generation, as well as that a young generation can show how to bring the old films alive again.

 

 

Frank Miller, Batman: the Dark Knight Returns, Titan Books, 1986.

George Perry and Alan Aldridge, The Penguin Book of Comics: A slight history, Allen Lane, 2^nd edition, 1971.

Robert Skar, Home-made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, Random House, New York, 1975.