By GREG DIXON
The crowd is ebullient. They smile and wave as the camera pans to the Auckland and England rugby league players trotting out on to the field.
The battle is about to begin and the fans ... well, you can see they're roaring their approval - you just can't hear them. The reason? This game is being played in 1914 and the film is, of course, silent.
A crowd of 8000 turned up to the Auckland Domain that July day to watch Football Auckland lose 12-34 to the touring English side - yet we might have forgotten it if it weren't for Roger Stewart.
The Auckland television technician is one of scores of New Zealanders who have donated old films to the ever-growing collection of the New Zealand Film Archive.
And his little bit of footy footage will screen around Auckland from today as the archive's Travelling Film Show rolls into Auckland for seven screenings.
The show, which began touring the country in January, also includes silent and talkie newsreels, the earliest surviving film of an international rugby match (the 1905 "Original" All Blacks playing England) as well as a 1928 romantic comedy filmed around Takapuna and Central Auckland called Takapuna Scandal.
While primarily a showcase for some of the nation's rare and precious films, newsreels and home movies, the free screenings also celebrate the end, in December last year, of the archive's seven-year project to locate and preserve New Zealand film of social and historical significance.
More than 7000 films were discovered by or presented to the archive during the hunt, dubbed the Last Film Search.
Stewart says the rugby league footage had spent many years in an old suitcase in the back shed of his father's home. It was the only local film among his 20-odd reels.
"Being dangerous nitrate film, Dad would never have it in the house. If the back shed burned down that was bad luck, but it wasn't going to be in the house. When we ran the film, the projector was always on the back porch with the picture shining through the window or the door."
Stewart is unsure how his father, Stan, a taxi driver, had come by the film. However his grandfather, Alexander, was a long-time rugby league fan. The footage is some of the earliest made of an international rugby league game.
Rugby historian John Haynes was asked by the archive to authenticate the film, which it thought at first was footage of a rugby match.
Haynes initially believed the film was the earliest of an international rugby league match found in New Zealand, but has since heard of footage of earlier games.
Both Haynes and Stewart find the sequences showing the crowd - around half the length of the short film - the most interesting.
Haynes points to the social cross-section of the crowd - league is often referred to as "working class game," but the film shows bowler hats among the cloth caps - while Stewart is interested in its timing.
"[The game] was played about a month after the First World War began and about nine months before Gallipoli, so many of the men we see in the crowd may well have gone to war."
* The Travelling Film Show will screen at Takapuna today, Mission Bay and Otara tomorrow, Pakuranga on Friday, Waiheke Island on Saturday and Avondale and Auckland City on Sunday. Free tickets are available at Bank of New Zealand branches around Auckland.
National search brings film gems to screen
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