Linda Williams is professor in the Departments of Film and Media and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley

"Sequence by sequence, the picture was planned to seize an audience by the hair, to excite them as no ordinary film had ever excited them. And the magic works today."-Kevin Brownlow

Inspired by Robert Flaherty, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, two independent cameramen-journalists, journeyed to exotic lands to create travelogues that were part documentary footage, part staged scenes, part crowd-pleasing life-and-death adventures. In Chang, they record a family's struggles to farm at the edge of the Siam jungle. It is said to feature over four hundred elephants, tigers, pythons, and “other denizens of the wild.” Cooper and Schoedsack were intrigued by the unknown, the strange, and the dangerous, interests kindled during the First World War. Not surprising, then, that after making Grass (1925) and Chang, they went on to make King Kong, beloved by the Surrealists.