H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds
by Timothy Hines
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Anthony Piana, Darlene Sellers, Jack Clay, James Lathrop, John KaufmannDirector: Timothy Hines
Producer: Susan Goforth
Writer: Susan Goforth
Cinematographer: Timothy Hines
Editor: Timothy Hines
Writer: Timothy Hines
Producer: Barbara Bauman
Producer: John Gallo
Writer: H.G. Wells
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 179 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-06-08
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Allumination
Movie Reviews of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds
Movie Review: Rediscovered Early Soviet sound/color/animation masterwork confounds audiences today
Summary: 5 Stars
Sometimes artists and scientists are ahead of their times. Leonardo invented the helicopter and a new kind of realism in painting, hundreds of years before we were ready for them; some consider Shakespeare to be the first "psychological realist" in drama, 300 years before Freud. These two of course have been revered through the ages, but sometimes the great innovators are forgotten and only resurrected through chance or the perseverance of a few devoted followers.
Such a one was Timur Hinesikoff (ca 1892-1937?) the director of the great, forgotten (until now) early sound, color and animation masterpiece The War of the Worlds, filmed in the lost community of Nonsensk, located approximately 800 km northwest of Moscow on the shores of the river Doofka, in the summers of 1929 and 1930.
Hinesikoff was apparently an ethnic Latvian, born in South Africa to Marxist radical activists attempting to start a racial revolt in the early 1890s. He seems to have spent his first 6 or 7 years there before being moved to Russia as a refugee after his parents were killed in the Boer war. It is theorized that the shocks he may have experienced during that conflict, the impact of seeing his parents taken away (and possibly, seeing his father shot) before his eyes, may have formed the genesis of his preoccupations with the English socialist writer H.G. Wells and his visions of future-warfare as an adult.
Taken to live in Moscow by his Russian aunt, Hinesikoff learned Russian as a second language and always maintained a proficiency in English, later learning German and French as well. His extended family were members of the intelligentsia, and his uncle Volgon was an inventor and inveterate tinkerer, probably a genius himself who certainly helped spur young Timur on in his experiments with film, sound, and color. Timur encountered such luminaries as Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Kalatozov through whom he learned the rudiments of the film language, but it would be his own inventions of the so-called "Hinesikoff Process" and "Timurkolor" that would make his name in film history.
Without getting too technical, the Hinesikoff Process was an early multiplane camera system that predated Walt Disney's experiments by nearly a decade; even more novel was the inventor/filmmaker's idea to combine both animation and live action, and to film the whole in color. His Timurkolor was extremely variable in quality due to its need for optimal light conditions - the results typically show bright, almost 3-color Technicolor-type hues in bright natural light but a more artificial 2-color or sepia character in lower light conditions. He also had invented a new film type that would allow a much more seamless blend of the animated effects and the live-action footage - or so it would seem. Alas this last element was never quite perfected and thus the effects sequences in War of the Worlds at times look primitive even by 1930 standards, despite the color and the vastly superior sound.
It should be noted that Hinesikoff was working off a vast fortune; despite his own parents' deeply-held Marxist/anti-capitalist beliefs and his attraction to British-style socialism, it either never occured to the filmmaker that he was only able to create his epic through the system he despised, or there was some justification he devised for it. We will likely never know; most of the director's papers seem to have vanished around the time he did, in a Stalinist purge shortly before World War II. And Hinesikoff apparently spent nearly all of his fortune acquiring the worldwide rights to Wells' bestseller and filming it.
Allowances of course must be made with a film of this type, but it may help to know something of the circumstances in which it was made. Given Hinesikoff's insistance on showing the true horrors of war, and the reluctance of Stalin's government to allow him to film in or near any large city - as well as his insistence on making the film in multiple languages to reach the largest possible audience (a not-uncommon practice in the very early days of sound film), the small town of Nonsensk was chosen, and it was the only possible candidate. Nonsensk, in the late 1920s and early 1930s was an artificially created utopian city, little-known outside of the Party in the Soviet Union at the time and not at all known elsewhere; it was in fact a cosmopolitan, multilingual town made up of Marxist and Communist refugees from England, France, and the United States - mostly the latter - and it was funded as a technological experiment. Here Hinesikoff could find his actors, and build his virtual animation studio. Here also he happened to meet his composer, Jamie Hall, whose lush romantic score was reminiscent of Borodin, and his Swedish production designer Eric Nielsen, responsible for so much of the bright, unearthly and very un-English look of the piece - clearly deliberate and meant to throw the viewer off and create a sense of unease.
The actors were, not surprisingly, mostly amateurs with linguistic backgrounds. As Hinesikoff was spending most of his money on his models and animation, and as this was clearly what was most important to him - the film contains an absolutely unprecedented amount of FX work, which would not be equalled in any film made anywhere until the 1990s - great dramatic ability was not always to be found or even looked for. Then, too, we must remember that the exaggerated style evident in such characters as the Writer (Anthony Piana) was more common in those immediate post-silent days - and The War of the Worlds was, in fact, the very first Soviet sound film released. More problematic to modern audiences still will be the length of the film - 3 hours - but taking a close look at what few records survive of the picture's abortive test screenings indicate that this was problematic for the early audiences as well. Hinesikoff's genius at invention and his forward-looking depiction of future-war did not, apparently, gel even in 1930 with his amateurish cast and his rather too literal screenplay.
Also worth noting are the herky-jerky character of many scenes, particularly ones in which animation is involved; whether this is because they were shot silent and never quite properly synched, or because there are actual frames missing (again, not uncommon with Russian film of the period) remains unknown. In fact, for as many ways as the film points forward, and even might be considered avant-garde, in just as many it remains primitive and tied to the early sound era from which it comes - there is precious little camera movement for example, despite Hinesikoff's smaller, more mobile camera and sophisticated sound equipment.
Still, some were impressed, among them the great writer of the original story himself, who soon afterwards embarked on getting many more of his ideas onto the big screen - the 1930s was a good decade for H.G. Wells indeed. And directors such as Eisenstein, Disney and Powell expressed admiration for the virtuoso effects techniques in the 10 years or so that the film remained in limited circulation; and over the succeeding years it seems that a few major filmmakers of modern times (most notably Guy Maddin and Robbie Moffat) have managed to bask in it's novelty as well. Somehow, though, by 1940 it had vanished out of general circulation, and so it remained for 65 years until the director's great-grandson, the American Timothy Hines, brought it back to life in this stunning DVD.
Some cynics have actually suggested, absent proper documentation either on the disc or in any proper university or film archives, that this whole project is in fact a hoax - that there never was a Hinesikoff, that all of what I have just written was in fact made up by film scholars to discredit Mr. Hines, who unfortunately seems to believe that this is, in fact, his own work. While feeling quite sorry for Mr. Hines in his clearly problematic state, I think it quite obvious that no one, sane or not, could actually have made such a film as this in all seriousness in 2005. As a bold experiment with new technology, far ahead of its time in the between-war years, this is an extraordinary achievement; but as a film made 28 years after Star Wars? No one could make up a joke so bad as that.
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