The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
This film is part of Free
Club Spirit
The dangers of drinking take on a surreal turn as one of the pink elephants seen by our inebriated hero materializes and thwarts all attempts to get rid of her, even a safari hunter.
Overview
From the collection of:
The hallucinatory delights of drunkenness come to life here in this award winning whimsical film made by members of the Halifax Cine Club in 1964. Having spirited up, Dumbo style, a pink elephant, our bacchanalian protagonist finds himself lumbered with his apparition, which even becomes a member of the club.
Halifax had an especially prolific and inventive amateur Cine Club, which still remains active. The film won the West Riding Ten Minute film competition for the year it was made, 1963 or 1964. It has been claimed that the first recorded use of the term ‘seeing a pink elephant’, as relating to the effects of alcohol, was by Jack London in his autobiographical John Barleycorn 1913. The character may well have been inspired by the Pink Elephants on Parade scene from Disney’s 1941 film Dumbo. This Halifax Club film just predates the psychedelic era when hallucinations were much more associated with illegal drugs, and Timothy Leary suggested that people "Turn on, tune in, drop out".