`Forgotten Silver': A Clever Impostor

Movie review XXX 1/2 "Forgotten Silver," directed by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes. Varsity, today through Monday. 53 minutes. No rating; suitable for general audiences.

One of my favorite oddities from this year's Seattle International Film Festival is back for a brief engagement at the Varsity. It's a work of demented genius, created by people who may know more about movies and film history than is perhaps healthy for anyone.

In obsessive and utterly convincing detail, "Forgotten Silver" presents the life story of Colin McKenzie, a pioneering New Zealand filmmaker who made the world's first talkie feature (two decades before "The Jazz Singer"), invented an early form of color, and created a 1917 biblical epic on the scale of D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance."

Spectacular film clips from this cast-of-thousands classic, titled "Salome," are shown to testify to McKenzie's ambitions. Also present are scenes from that 1908 talkie, which unfortunately featured non-subtitled Chinese actors and therefore never caught on.

Co-directed by Peter Jackson, the New Zealand filmmaker who made "Heavenly Creatures" and "The Frighteners," and film critic Costa Botes, who directed several episodes of the cable series "The Ray Bradbury Theatre," the movie enlists several film experts to testify to McKenzie's greatness.

Jackson himself opens the film with the announcement that he has found an archival treasure equal to discovering "Citizen Kane" in an attic. Leonard Maltin appears to announce that McKenzie belongs in the pantheon of great artists and innovators, Miramax's Harvey Weinstein describes "Salome" as the greatest film discovery of the past half-century, and New Zealand's best-known actor, Sam Neill, acknowledges McKenzie's importance to world cinema.

There's barely a hint of a put-on in any of this - although the presence of a Russian named "Alexandra Nevsky" arouses suspicion, as does the digital enhancement of a newspaper that supposedly proves that McKenzie filmed the first flight of a New Zealand aviator six months prior to the Wright Brothers' breakthrough at Kitty Hawk.

The final credits are just as deadpan. The New Zealand Film Commission is thanked for the "restoration" of "Salome," and Hannah McKenzie and The Colin McKenzie Trust are given credit for contributing to the production.

Did the McKenzies really exist? Could New Zealand have been so far ahead of Hollywood's technical innovations? Or have Jackson, Botes, Maltin, Neill and Weinstein collaborated on a "mockumentary" that is the filmmaking equivalent of "This Is Spinal Tap"? It almost doesn't matter whether you believe them or not. The result is so insidiously clever (and successful at manipulating our emotions) that it could make you question every film you've ever seen about filmmaking.

"Forgotten Silver," which was made for New Zealand television (where it reportedly convinced many viewers of McKenzie's existence), runs just under an hour. Filling out the program is Robert Sarkies' amusing short, "Signing Off," the story of an early-1960s radio announcer who is on his way out and will do anything for his first and apparently only fan.