Best Pictures #2: 1927/28 (1st) Academy Awards, Unique & Artistic Picture Nominee: Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927)

by A.J.

1927/28 (1^st) Academy Awards, Unique & Artistic Picture* Nominee:

Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927)

Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, a silent film from 1927, had only one nomination at the first Academy Awards for Unique and Artistic Picture. Since at the time of the first Academy Awards, the Unique & Artistic Picture category and the Outstanding Picture category were considered equal, Chang can be considered to be the only documentary ever nominated for Best Picture. Unique & Artistic Picture is certainly the right category for Chang because it is, if anything, a unique picture. Directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack spent several months in the jungles of northern Siam learning about the native Lao people and their way of life in preparation for their documentary for Paramount Famous-Lasky. The result is an exciting and entertaining picture about Kru, a Lao tribesman, his family, and their daily struggles to live deep in the unconquerable jungle.

I think the best way to describe Chang is as a quasi-documentary since many, if not all, of the scenes are staged reenactments. Kru is a real Lao tribesman, he was the guide for Cooper and Shoedsack on their expedition in northern Siam. His children in the movie are his actual children, but his wife, Chantui, is actually the wife of a fellow tribesman. The Kru family home is a hut built on stilts deep in the jungle away from the main village. Lao homes are actually built on stilts to keep jungle animals out, but the house we see was built specifically for the film and the interior is a separate set. Staged reenactments were not uncommon in documentaries of the silent era; the technique was used notably in Nanook of the North from 1922, which is nearly universally thought of as the predecessor to modern documentaries. If audiences and critics at the time knew about the staging of scenes, they did not mind as Chang was a hit with both.

Many scenes in the movie are reenactments of things Cooper & Schoedsack witnessed, but did not capture on film. There is no scene that is a complete fabrication, except maybe for the scene of a monkey dropping coconuts on stampeding elephants which is the only scene of the movie not shot in Northern Siam (it was done in New York’s Central Park Zoo). Other moments of humor come from certain animals having their own dialogue cards. There was a script written for Chang, but it had to be thrown out due to the unpredictability of the wild jungle animals. The scenes with the jungle animals are the highlight and tragedy of Chang. Kru’s livestock is being killed by leopards, so he enlists the people from the main village to help him in a hunt. The hunting techniques used by the tribesmen are accurate; rifles, spears, deadfalls, pitfalls, and wooden decoy men are all deployed. The leopards and two tigers we see killed in the hunt are real animals that were killed for the film.

However, it should be noted that the Lao people do not kill tigers, according to the DVD commentary by filmmaker and author Rudy Behlmer. The Lao people believe tigers to be possessed by evil spirits that would exact horrible revenge on anyone who killed one, so the rate of death by tiger was very high for the villages of Northern Siam. They would only hunt a tiger if it carried off too many babies. Cooper told the natives that he would bear the responsibility for the deaths of the tigers and any vengeance the evil spirits would unleash. My only solace in seeing those leopards and tigers killed is that they actually were a menace to the people of the region and Cooper and Schoedsack were told by a missionary that the number of people killed by tigers had decreased greatly after their filming in the jungle was done.

Still, I find incredible excitement in the scenes with the tigers. First, a tiger emerges slowly from the dense jungle to drink from a stream. Later, we see a group of hunters running away from a tiger and climbing up a tree in a shot that is almost certainly staged. However, there is no way the wide shot of a hunter up in a tree with the tiger prowling below could be staged. In another shot the camera looks down from a tree and a tiger jumps up, its face filling the screen. A shot that feels even more dangerous when you realize that it was done without the aid of zoom lenses (there were none). Schoedsack was up in the tree on a platform setting up a different shot with his hand cranked camera when a tiger bounded up mere feet, if not inches, from the platform.

The climatic elephant stampede was achieved with much planning and cooperation between the filmmakers and the natives. The tribe used elephants that had been trained as livestock. A low angle shot looking up at the legs of stampeding elephants was captured by Schoedsack in a pit dug by the tribesmen and covered with logs and a low turret that they assured him would hold under the weight of elephants. Cooper and Schoedsack had respect for the native peoples and it shows from the amount of cooperation they received and in the portrayal of the Lao people. In an era of motion pictures when casual racism was, well, casual and political correctness was not even the wild idea of a fantasist, Cooper and Schoedsack show us a non-exploitative portrayal of a people and culture far from Hollywood.

Though scenes may be staged, Chang still creates an authentic feeling of the life of Kru and his family living in the jungle. And, yes, Chang should be thought of as a documentary. In some ways Chang can be looked at as a forerunner to Disney’s short nature documentaries of the 1950s and 60s and the current Disney Nature film series which create a familiar narrative from hours and hours of documentary footage and seek to impart a message of environmental awareness to the audience. Chang is the story of a family living a vastly different way of life than the audience, but also delivers the message that the jungle and nature in general, despite all of mankind’s innovations, is unconquerable. I can’t think of too many documentaries I’d describe as thrilling the way an adventure movie is thrilling while also being informative and entertaining. This is certainly not a well-known film, but fortunately it is readily available on DVD. The sense of adventure and awe of wild beasts and the untamable natural world that Cooper and Schoedsack capture here would be evoked six years later with incredible effect on a much grander, and completely fictional, scale in the duo’s 1933 film King Kong. 

Nominee: Paramount Famous-Lasky

Producer(s): Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack 

Director(s): Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack 

Screenplay: N/A

Cast: Kru, Chantui

Release Date: April 29th, 1927

Total Nominations: 1, including Unique & Artistic Picture

*The first Academy Awards had two categories for Best Picture: Unique & Artistic Picture and Outstanding Picture. The Outstanding Picture category is widely considered to be the forerunner to Best Picture since the Unique & Artistic Picture category was discontinued the following year. Since at the time each category was thought of equally as the top award, I have included the Unique & Artistic Picture nominees as Best Picture nominees.