| Day Three: Special Pioneer Award for Independent Spirit |
| This is our second special award given out to a cinematic pioneer. Today, instead of celebrating an inventor, we celebrate a filmmaker who bucked the trends of distribution and content and forged his own path. So let's now recognize a relative unknown for his Maverick sensibilites... |
| The Special Independent Spirit Medal goes to... William Haggar: Great Britain. The announcement is met by...stunned silence. This is the first jaw-dropper. Even the Brits are scratching their heads over this one. After all, if you're going to honor a British Pioneer, what about that Brighton School that everyone went so wild about? The early history of the Cinema is peppered with names for Britain such as James Williamson, Robert W. Paul and Cecil Hepworth (he of that cute dog rescuing cute child flick, Rescued by Rover that everyone went so nuts about.) These are men with an international reputation. Men credited with all sorts of innovations, including beating D. W. Griffith into the editing game. William Haggar? Didn't I see one of his movies at a circus or something? Well yes, if were poor and working class in Britain in the early years of the 20th Century, you probably did. That is one the reasons this Independent Spirit award is going to Haggar. Not only did he make films for ordinary working people, he took those films to the people. |
| The innovators working in the Brighton School were all wealthy family men, attempting to use film as a medium to instill the values of the their background into the unruly masses amongst the city dwellers and working class of the industrial age. While every bit the family man, Haggar couldn't have been more different than his more famous compatriots in background. He was an illegitimate child who was farmed out to a steady stream of aunts and uncles throughout his childhood. By the time he was 18, he had hit the road as a traveling musician and became a stagehand for a traveling company. He never lost his spirit for road life and soon he and his family were operating their own traveling fairgrounds with shooting galleries, a theatre troupe, a photo studio and a Bioscope (yet another early cinematic device). Soon he parlayed his experience of entertaining his core audience of coal miners and their families to make his own films to show, films made for their enjoyment. |
| Much of the cinema coming out of Britain at the time consisted of the condescending attitude of telling the audience of immigrants and working people in the cities "what was good for them." The film industry was active in the temperance movement and many of the films showed a real fear of the poor and immigrants. (You only have to look as far as the most famous film, Rescued by Rover, to see this attitude. I will be discussing the racism in this film in more detail later.) Haggar by contrast wove exciting tales with poor protagonists, and dared to be one of the earliest to suggest that crime among the lower classes might be a function of their economic status rather than an inherent condition. He featured folk heroes and rebels in the films that his audience could relate to. |
| But these are the Olympics after all, so the question remains, how good are the films? Well, one of the reasons that your faithful chairman first became interested in Haggar is that among the films he watched in researching early British cinema, the two by Haggar (The Desperate Poaching Affray [1903] and The Life of Charles Peace [1905]) not only held up well against his more famous countrymen as films, but were also more compelling to watch. While somewhat primitive, Haggar's movies were certainly lively entertainments, mixing high-speed action, humor and suspense. Haggar may not have been as technically advanced as Hepworth, but he seemed to have an innate talent for the use of frame. His frames where bristling with action, with people jumping in and out from surprising places to increase the pace and heighten the suspense. He also had a talent for finding interesting camera angles, that marks him as being more visually sophisticated than perhaps given credit for. |
| However, Haggar was first and foremost a showman and entertainer for and of the working class. Once he brought his traveling show to a group of miners in South Wales, who were in the midst of a long, vicious strike. His daughter later recalled the speech he made: "Ladies and gentlemen, we are amongst you once more, and we have agreed that, although you have been on strike for some time, you should not be deprived of your annual fair. We well know that you have not much money to spare, so we are charging only one penny." So many people crushed in for this brief moment of entertainment amongst months of despair that Haggar and his family reputedly made more money on the first day than they had the previous month. (Proving that you can in fact make a profit by presenting people a product that speaks to THEIR needs at a price they can afford. A lesson to few have learned from, unfortunately.) |
| So, why an Olympic medal for William Haggar? To sum it up: Because he made lively and surprisingly sophisticated films that spoke to the needs and desires of the people rather than trying to tell them how they were supposed to think to fit in with the wealthy British view of society and because he was inventive in his approach in getting those films out to the people, barnstorming the United Kingdom with his circus and reaching those who might never see the insides of a London movie house. William Haggar is a compelling man who has been somewhat lost in time. It's time he was rediscovered, so we at the Cinema Olympics are proud to present him with this medal. |
| So, while the Brits are somewhat miffed at who the medal went to, their representatives in Paris are more than happy to accept the medal on behalf of Queen and Country. The 69 year old Mr. Haggar seemed a bit surprised at his new found elder statesman status, but your Mischievous Chairman swears he saw a little maverick glint in the pioneers eye as he was getting his bum kissed by those who previously wouldn't give him the time of day. Will it now be Sir William Haggar? Who knows, maybe when this is all over, they'll declare a William Haggar day. I know there are some mining families in South Wales who would be happy to celebrate. Anyway, if you're keeping track, the medal count is now: United States 3, France 1, Great Britain 1. |