The New Scientist magazine has published this short video of early science film (from the BFI National Archive) to coincide with the Films of Fact exhibition at the Science Museum and the book of the same title by Tim Boon.
The video is a peculiar hodge-podge (goodness knows what the still from the 1960s BBC series Tomorrow’s World is doing in there), and early cinema clearly isn’t the commentator’s strong point, but you do get Tim Boon sneaking in a few words of wisdom, plus clips from F. Martin Duncan’s now legendary Cheese Mites (1903), Percy Smith’s time-lapse masterpiece The Birth of a Flower (1910) and and his perenially eye-popping The Acrobatic Fly (1908). Somewhat less scientifically, you also get a glimpse of one of my all-time favourite film titles, Edison’s Laura Comstock’s Bag-Punching Dog (1901), plus other Edison clips whose presence is difficult to comprehend.
For information on book, exhibition and filmmakers, see the earlier Seeing the Unseen World post.
John Ford’s Bucking Broadway (1917), from Europa Film Treasures
It’s here at last folks, Europa Film Treasures, the long-awaited online archive of assorted gems and oddities from film archives across Europe, created by the continually wonderful Lobster Films of Paris.
It’s a collection of truly disparate material, fiction and non-fiction, live action and animation, short and feature-length, ranging from 1898 to 1999. There are films from Austria, Denmark, Finland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the USA and more. Participating archives include the Deutsche Kinemathek, Det Danske Filminstitut, GosFilmoFond, Filmarchiv Austria, the Scottish Screen Archive, the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive, Lobster Films itself, and many more, though several archives only contribute the one title (and some, such as the BFI, which had previously announced that they would be contributing, have not done so – yet).
And what will you find there? Well, there are early actualities by Danish cinematographer Peter Elfelt, pornography from Austria, Biblical lands film from 1906 (these are some of the films shown at Pordenone in 2007 when they were thought to be of an earlier date – see this post – clearly more identification work has been done since then), dance films, a Russian fish processing factory documentary, comedies (including Max Linder), trick films, science fiction (Walter Booth’s The Airship Destroyer from 1909, an important film listed here under a German title, Der Luftkrieg der Zukunft), Spanish newsfilm, Russian Yiddish drama, one of John Ford’s first Westerns Bucking Broadway (1917) – the only non-European title on view, the extraordinary Der Magische Gürtel (1917) – tracking the trail of destruction wreaked by a German U-Boat, French public health films, abstract animation from Viking Eggling, Soviet puppet animation, and more, much more.
This is a wonderful treasure trove, certainly highly eclectic. Some may be disappointed not to find a greater range or more familiar material, but they should be encouraged to explore. They will be amazed and delighted, I hope. Each film comes with credits, background description (in somewhat quaint English, clearly translated none too comfortably from French), and the films are all shown in Flash. A library of documentation and teaching resources are promised soon. There are a number of search options, allowing you to search by archive (the search option says Films), time period, country, genre etc, but finding an individual title (especially as few are in English) is a little laborious. And it’s available in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian.
There’s background information on the European-funded project in an earlier post. Up to 500 titles are promised eventually (there’s around fifty up so far), so clearly it’s a site to visit again and again. There were reports that the funding would only support the site for a year – and then what? I’ll try to find out. Meanwhile, go explore.
I’ve been reading (well, skimming through) Philip Hoare’s Spike Island, which is a poetic, not to say rococo history of the Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley, Hampshire. This is a building with a rich cultural history centring around its role during the First World War, where it was home to many casualties of the war, including Wilfred Owen, and became well known for treating victims of shell shock.
You’ll find many an account of the experiments and therapies for shellshock at Netley and elsewhere, from the sentimental to the Freudian. What concerns us here is the contemporary film record. One of the most notable films of the First World War, by what ever criteria you care to mention, is War Neuroses: Netley 1917, Seale Hayne Military Hospital 1918, made by Pathé (British branch) in 1918, which Hoare covers in some detail. War Neuroses shows the psychotherapeutic treatment of shell shock victims at Netley and Seale Hayne (Devon) military hospital, featuring the treatments undertaken by Doctors Arthur Hurst and J.L.M. Symns of the Royal Army Medical Corps. The catalogue of the Wellcome Trust Moving Image and Sound Collection describes the film thus:
Shows the symptomatology of “shell-shock” in 18 British “other rankers” and its treatment by two leading R.A.M.C. neurologists in two British military hospitals towards the end of the First World War. Captions tell us the men’s names, rank, medical condition, details of their symptoms and how long it took to complete the cure, which in one case was in two and a half hours. Clinical features shown include a variety of ataxic and “hysterical” gaits; hysterical paralyses, contractures and anaesthesias; facial ties and spasms; loss of knee and ankle-jerk reflexes; paraplegia; “war hyperthyrodism”; amnesia; word-blindness and word-deafness. Although there are no precise details of the kind of treatment given, apart from the description ‘cured and re-educated’ we do see a little physiotherapy and hypnotic suggestion in treatment, and of ‘cured’ men undertaking farm-work, drill and a mock battles entitled ‘Re-enacting the Battle of Seale Hayne / Convalescent war neurosis patients’.
At least three versions of the film exist. There are copies at the Wellcome, the BFI National Archive and the Imperial War Museum, but the ones to draw your attention to here are the versions held by British Pathe (currently managed by ITN). Pathé were the original producers, but not everyone might think to find it in the British Pathe online newsreel library, but there it is – or there they are – available for free download, albeit in low resolution.
Private Ross Smith (above), facial spams, and Private Read, hysterical gait, swaying movement and nose-wiping tic
There are five parts of the films on the British Pathe site: War Neuroses Version A reel 1, War Neuroses Version A reel 2, War Neuroses version B reel 1, War Neuroses version B reel 2 and Wonderful Shell Shock Recovery. For some impenetrable reason only two come up if you type in the words ‘war neuroses’ into the search box; type ‘netley’ instead and you’ll get all five. As indicated, there are two versions available (Wonderful Shell Shock Recovery is a fragment repeating scenes from the other films). The different versions, however, appear to be simply re-edits of the same material, with Version B being the most complete, with opening titles and scenes of some patients that Version A lacks. In its fullest form the film last around 25 mins. It is necessary to download the films (i.e. they won’t play instantly), with the site requiring you to fill out personal details before you do so.
The film demonstrates the symptoms of those suffering from shell shock, and are often quite heartbreaking. Private Preston, aged 19, we are told suffers from ‘Amnesia, word blindess and word deafness, except the the word “Bombs!”‘ He is shown sitting up in bed talking to one of the doctors, the key word is spoken, and immediately hides under the bed, and only reluctantly coming out again. Private Meek, aged 23, suffers ‘complete retrograde amnesia, hysterical paralysis, contractures, mutism and universal anaesthesia’. We see him seated in a wheelchair outside the hospital, legs rigid, leaning sideways, mvoing in awkward jerks and biting his thumb, while a nurse attends to him. It is a characteristic of War Neuroses that we see see before-and-after cases. So, after unseen treatment, we next meet Private Meek walking stiffly towards a group of patients weaving baskets (his peace time job), and later walking completely normally.
There are numerous such examples, the men shown with various forms of uncontrollable nervous spasms, next shown moving more or at less at ease, their return to normality sometimes illustrated by their performing tasks around the hospital as occupational therapy. One of the most distressing sequences is that of an unnamed patient (illustrated at the top of this post) suffering from hysterical pseudo-pseudohypertrophic muscular paralysis. We see the man in a dormitory, dressed only in a loin cloth. He walks with pathetic, angular awkwardness in a circle, before falling down, unable to get up without huge struggle. Next we see him in hospital uniform, walking calmly towards the camera. The reassuring scenes of rehabilitation seem almost as disturbing as the scenes of affliction. How can such mental wounds be healed so easily?
The purpose of the physical and psychotherapeutic treatment was not simply to cure, but to make the men literally fighting fit once more. Four-fifths of men who had been entering hospital suffering from shell shock were unable to return to military duty; the military authorities wanted to reverse this. What happened to the named and nameless soldiers seen in War Neuroses? One hopes fervently that none were returned to the battlefield. So what to make of the final scene from the film, where patients are shown taking part in a re-enacted battle scene: ‘The Battle of Seale Hayne, directed, photographed and acted by convalescent war neurosis patients’? Innovative psychodrama aimed at a final cure, or rehabilitation for war? Have we seen an actuality record, or a dramatisation of recovery to satisfy the wishes of those who chose to commission the film?
I don’t know enough of the history, either of the film (no one knows who the cameraman was, or much at all about the film’s production) or of the treatment of shell shock. It’s a subject that some have written about in great depth, yet it seems a subject where we still have much to learn. The film – which I urge you to see – provides no answers, only asks searching questions. Which is what films are there to do, whether they realise it or not.
Update (April 2009): A higher resolution copy of the film is available from the Wellcome Trust site, at http://catalogue.wellcome.ac.uk/record=b1667864~S8, as complete film and as four segments, plus a detailed catalogue record. Also, British Pathe is no longer managed by ITN Source.
Film medical realizat de profesor G. Marinescu (1898-1901)
Some you will know that as well as keeping the Bioscope bubbling along I manage other sites, including Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema, which I co-edit with Stephen Herbert. The site is based on our 1996 BFI book, Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey, and documents the lives of 200 or more people who were active in motion pictures before 1901. We keep the information up-to-date, add new names and resources, and the reason for this notice is that we’ve just added a new feature: links to Victorian films online. We haven’t got into hosting our own films (yet), but where there are freely available films, on YouTube, American Memory and such like, we’ve added links to the relevant individual’s entry on the Who’s Who.
We’ve also created a Films Online page in our Resources section, which offers a selection of films (all from YouTube so far), demonstrating the great variety of the form. For example, not everyone considering films of the late nineteenth century would think to include the works of the Romanian Gheorge Marinescu, whose studies of the movements of patients suffering from severe nervous diseases you can see included in the above compilation film (itself clearly post-1901).
We’ve tried to keep to legitmately available titles only, so there’s nothing from the Lumières (all still in copyright) or Georges Méliès (the only stuff available online has all been ripped from commercial DVDs). But we’ll add more where we can. One last point – all of the films that we show or link to relate to the individuals’ career pre-1901, so we don’t show anyone’s work from a later period. Do take a look.
Realmilitaryflix is the ungainly name for a remarkable new source of online video. The site has been put together by US Air Force combat camera veteran John Corry, who began building up a collection of war films while producing a television series in 1991. The site comprises 650 films (with 1,200 more promised by the end of the year), and ranges from the First World War to Iraq and Afghanistan today. Military enthusiasts can scour the decades of conflict; here at the Bioscope we concentrate on the silent material from the 1914-1918 conflict, which is significant enough in itself.
There are some thirty titles so far, most of them American official films of one kind or another, shot by the U.S. Signal Corps or produced by the propaganda outfit, the Committee on Public Information. Care has been taken to give correct titles and to determine dates, locations and regiments. I’ve not yet had the chance to view them all, but here’s a quick guide to some of the highlights:
Actualities of the World War
Realmilitary flix says “If you only watch one WWI film, make it this one”, and it’s not far wrong. This dynamic four-part compilation was made up of American military film after the war, and the material was expertly edited to form a general narrative of American participation in the war 1917-1918. Its correct title appears to be Flashes of Action, and the National Archives and Records Administration’s ARC catalogue identifies it as c.1921 (many of these films of this site are duplicated in NARA, and some of the descriptions come from NARA’s records). It is filled with vivid scenes of the kind we expect to see of the war, leavened with plenty of human detail.
War As It Really Is
This 1916 production is a single person’s effort – the redoubtable Donald C. Thompson, an independent and resourceful American cameraman who filmed British, French, Belgian, Russian and German troops over 1914-1916, speaking volumes for his diplomatic abilities. He was with the French army at Verdun, where he was wounded, and from which conflict much of this film derives. The quality of the footage is evident throughout, while some of it is startling – apparently close shots of trench warfare (one should always be suspicious of footage where the cameraman would have been in peril e.g. being positioned above the trenches), the shooting of a spy (before and after), and shots of corpses and skeletons.
German Film of the WWI Sea Commerce Raider “Moewe”
This, as it says, is a German-produced film, made in 1917, which was captured by the Allies and subsequently released as The Notorious Cruise of the Raider ‘Moewe’. It follows the German raider ship Moewe as it captures Allied shipping, several examples of which are shown sinking. Its breezy tone comes over as all the more startling having the matter-of-fact titles translated into English.
British WWI Film on the Mideast and other Naval Operations
This is British official film taken in Palestine and Mesopotamia 1917-1918. There is some very impressive footage here, including a gunboat firing on the Tigris and striking aerial photography of a British convoy at sea. It ends with famous, iconic footage of General Allenby entering Jerusalem in December 1917, with fleeting glimpses of Lawrence of Arabia (in military uniform), if you know where to look.
T.E. Lawrence and General Allenby, shown in British WWI Film on the Mideast and other Naval Operations, from http://www.realmilitaryflix.com
And there’s much more: demonstrations of gas warfare, the operation of observation balloons, the construction of dummy soldiers as camouflage, radio operations, black troops, and the peace treaty negotations at Versailles in 1919. As indicated, one should always take care assessing the authenticity of war footage from this era – the cameramen were frequently brave, but they were severely limited by both equipment and army officialdom, and of course had to preserve their own lives. Overly dramatic footage (always consider where the cameraman was positioned when the film was taken and then ask why he wasn’t killed) may show genuine action but may equally have been staged. That said, there seems relatively little fakery here, just much startling footage intercut with skilfully-shot scenes of the mundanities of warfare which somehow bring it home all the more to us today.
All of the titles are available in Flash, and look OK blown up to full screen. One notable last point to make – all of the contemporary films of the war are shown silent. Go explore.
Pathécolor machine printing room, from F.A. Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They are Made and Worked (1912)
As films grew longer, and their production increased, through the 1900s, so the idea of adding colours by hand became uneconomic. A mechanised system was required, and at around the same time that experiments were taking place in Britain to develop natural colour motion pictures, in France first Pathé and then Gaumont started developing processes for the mass production of multi-colour-tinted film prints through the use of stencils. This was a labour-intensive process (employing mostly female operatives – see pictures above and below) which could only be carried out by well-capitalised businesses with international distribution, and in the mid-1900s France dominated the world’s motion picture business. Hence France became the home of artificial motion picture colour.
Women workers preparing Pathécolor films, from Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked
Pathé introduced its stencil colour process in 1905, but the system in principle was not new, having been adopted from methods used for colouring postcards and wallpaper. A number of prints of any one film title would be made, each representing the different colours to be employed in the eventual film (i.e. a film featuring red, green, blue and yellow would require four original prints). The areas in each of the original prints to be coloured would be marked out and cut with scalpels. Each cut-out print would be laid over the final projection print and each colour would be applied in turn. 600 women were employed at the Pathé factory by 1906 to produce colour prints in this way.
However, great mechanisation was soon brought in, led by Henri Fourel, who ran the Pathé colour studio in Vincennes. In 1908 Pathé introduced a pantograph mechanism to improve production. A master print would be rear-projected onto a ground glass screen, one frame at a time, which enabled the operator to have a far clearer view of the image. She would then move a pointer over the screen, marking out the area to be treated with one colour. The pantograph allowed for greater precision of line, and a needle at the other traced marked out the corresponding area on a second print. This would be repeated for each colour required. It was painstaking work, and still very labour-intensive, with an estimated 300 women operators employed. About one metre of film per colour was produced in an hour. When all the stencils had been cut, the gelatin emulsion was removed from each and they were then run in turn through a staining machine in precise registration with the master print. The cumulative result was a finished print stained in multiple colours – or rather multiple prints, since at least 200 colour copies had to be produced to make the system economic.
This demonstration of the stencil colour process is taken from Brian Coe’s The History of Movie Photography. The original film is on the left; then follows (L-R) the stencils cut for each colour (top row) and the application of that colour (bottom row) for red, blue, brown, green and yellow respectively.
The Pathé system produced images of frequently exquisite quality, with a notable precision of colour. Colours were not applied to every kind of film, but generally to those kinds of films which it was felt would be best enhanced by colour: exotic travelogues, costume dramas, magical films etc. Such films would be billed as the highlight in cinema programmes, and were more expensive for exhibitors than common film titles. As indicated, the industrial, labour-intensive process could only be supported by major producers with extensive distribution, and Pathé’s only rival in stencil colour was to be Gaumont, which came up with a similar process around 1908.
An unidentified fragment of a Pathé stencil colour film, date uncertain (c.1910?)
Another stencil colour example, from the same collector, again undated (early 1910s probably) and location unknown. Anybody recognise the building and gardens?
Pathé and Gaumont would continue with stencil colour into the 1920s, and the finest examples of their art are among the treasured items of the world’s film archives (there is a particularly strong collection at the Nederlands Filmmuseum). Stencil colour films have also inspired a growing body of academic work looking at the aesthetics and meanings of early colour. Strongly recommended is Tom Gunning’s essay ‘Colorful metaphors: the attraction of color in early silent cinema‘, originally published in the Italian journal Fotogenia (there is a version online in English), which looks at the special nature of early colour, seen in the context of the use of colour in other media (posters, books, advertisements etc.). For Gunning, it was not that the stencil colour films were more true to nature, but that they were an attraction in themselves, offering a ‘sensual intensity’, acting as a ‘signifier of fantasy or as a metaphor’.
However, just as Pathé introduced its improved colour system to the world in 1908, a rival system from Britain was announced, which did not use artificial colour but instead boasted that only its photographic colour was true to nature. The commercial and ideological (i.e. in debates over reality) between the systems that would later be known as Kinemacolor and Pathécolor will be covered in a later post.
Further reading:
Bregtje Lameris, Pathécolor: “Perfect in their renditions of the colours of nature”, in Living Pictures vol. 2 no. 2 (2003)
Brian Coe, The History of Movie Photography (1981)
While planning an overview of silent film and modern music accompaniment for you, I came across Vox Lumiere, a concept so bizarre that it more than merited a post of its own.
Vox Lumiere is a music theatre company which specialises in presenting a combination of silent film and rock opera. While a silent classic plays in the background – so far their repertoire features Metropolis, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Peter Pan, The Phantom of the Opera and a ‘greatest hits’ package’ – singers and dancers enact the drama and a five-piece rock band does what five-piece rock bands tend to do. Musically, going by their promo video above, it’s not quite my taste, but clearly some people like the concept, to judge from their press reviews, and they’ve come up with something novel which in its way articulates the modern appeal that the iconography and emotion of silents can engender.
The Vox Lumiere website provides you with video clips, sound clips, photographs, information about the company, a calendar of events (catch them next in Shreveport, Louisiana in November), and the chance to buy T-shirts and baseball caps. So that’s everything covered really.
As said, it’s not going to be everyone’s taste, and the juxtaposition of the kind of low rent rock music you only get in rock operas with silent movies (which don’t necessarily need this sort of help to gets their effects across) is peculiar, if not alarming. But it wins points for originality, enthusiasm, and for demonstrating that silents remain an inspiration – and an inherently theatrical medium.
(The title of the post is taken from a line in their promo video, by the way)
2 A.M. in the Subway (1905), Japanese Acrobats (1904) and The Boys Think They Have One on Foxy Grandpa, But He Fools Them (1902), from http://www.open-video.org
There are a number of online video collections out there designed for university use which feature lectures, demonstrations, educational documentaries etc. One that has been around for some time is the Open Video Project, which is hosted by Internet2 in America, and aims “to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities.” It comprises a number of collections from around the world such the University of Maryland HCIL Open House Video Reports, Digital Himalaya, NASA K-16 Science Education Programs and the HHMI Holiday Lectures on Science, but for our purposes what is interesting about the site is the Edison Video section.
This features 187 Edison production from the Library of Congress, dating from the 1890s and 1900s. Many early Edison titles are, of course, available from the LoC’s own excellent American Memory site, but the majority of the titles here are not on the better-known site. Among the varied titles only available here are A Ballroom Tragedy (1905), A Nymph of the Waves (1903), A Wake in “Hell’s Kitchen” (1903), Dog Factory (1904), Fights of Nations (1907), Gordon Sisters Boxing (1901), International contest for the heavyweight championship–Squires vs. Burns, Ocean View, Cal., July 4th, 1907 (1907), Princeton and Yale Football Game (1903), a series of films on the United States Post Office, films of the Westinghouse electrical works in 1904, and films from the St. Louis Exposition of 1904. And many more.
Basic cataloguing information is provided, though there are some peculiar errors with dates from time to time, and the presentation is rudimentary apart from some helpful synopses. There is little information available on the collection overall, so nothing to explain the significance of Edison films or why these titles – predominantly actuality – have been chosen. All are available as freely downloadable MPEG-1s, with the same frustratingly small image size as one finds on the American Memory site. But let us not be churlish – here is a wonderful selection of titles, many of them unfamiliar and indicative of the range of Edison production, including comedies, dramas, variety acts, sports films, travel films, and sponsored industrial work. Well worth exploring.
The Scottish Screen Archive has released some 1,000 film clips on its impressively-redesigned site. The SSA is Scotland’s national film archive, now part of the National Library of Scotland. It has an excellent record of preserving, contextualising and making accessible a national moving image heritage to a multiplicity of audiences. This latest resource comes courtesy of the Heritage Lottery Fund, and present clips from the 1890s to the 1980s, all integrated into their existing catalogue. The searching and browsing (by place, subject, biography and decade) are all exemplary, and the catalogue descriptions are spot on.
Social films, city films, newsreels, home movies, charity films, advertising films, interest films, documentaries – this is a marvellous collection, not just of Scottish life but of the multifarious forms of the non-fiction film, demonstrating for our period what an important part it plays in what should be our understanding of the silent film overall – somehing of the people, for the people. Go explore.
The appearance of the above film on the BFI’s YouTube site has inspired me to revive the Lost and Found strand on this blog (film collections once lost that have now been recovered), and to tell you something of the remarkable story of the Henville collection.
Cast your minds back to 1995. It was the year of the Oklahoma City bombing, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, the Aum Shinrikyo cult relased sarin gas on the Tokyo underground, Jacques Chirac became president of France, Eric Cantona attacked a football fan in the crowd, a new moving image format, the DVD, was announced, and in film archives and cinematheques across the globe those dedicated to film history and numerology sought various ways to mark the centenary of cinema.
It was a busy time for me, as the British Film Institute’s pet early film enthusiast, if not quite expert, with screenings, events, conferences and writing a book on Victorian cinema. And somewhere early on in that manic year, a collection of films turned up. There were some seventeen cans, single reel subjects, non-standard perforations, all readily identifiable as films from the 1890s. Films from the 1890s generally only turn up in dribs and drabs, so seventeen titles in one go was quite a coup. And the archivist who took in the films let me inspect a few (they were in a very fragile state), and one I looked at was clearly filmed at Epsom. ‘Oh no’, I said, ‘it’s another Derby’. We had other early Derby films, all looking very much the same, and it was a pain in the neck trying to tell one from another. I set it to one side…
The collection had come from one Ray Henville, a collector of vintage radios. At an auction he picked up some vintage radios and with them acquired some cans of unidentified films. Henville knew nothing of old film, but one of them featured a sailing boat, so he sent in a photograph to a yachting magazine in the hope that someone might be able to identify it. Happily the photograph was seen by Bill Barnes, film historian and twin brother of John Barnes, author of the esteemed The Beginnings of the Cinema in England series.
Bill alerted that BFI, we took them in, and I ended up trying to identify them. This was a slow process, not least on account of the fragility of the films which meant that for a long period I only had frame stills to go on. But it soon became clear that here was a remarkable collection of films from the 1890s, several of them likely to have been taken by Birt Acres, the first person to take a 35mm cinematograph film in Britain.
Birt Acres filming the 1895 Derby
What distinguished these Acres films was an indistinct frameline and a lack of sharpness to the image. These were characteristics of the Derby film, and the more I looked at it the more I felt that it could be the Derby of 1895, which would make it an extraordinary coup in the centenary year. But how to identity it for certain? There were no contemporary frame stills that I could use to compare, but the angle of the camera matched the position known to have been taken by Acres in the above photograph. Then, having checked race reports and horse racing sources, I looked at the colours of the jockeys (albeit in black-and-white), which matched the winner for 1895, and the fact that it showed a close finish between three horses, such as featured in 1895 but not any other Derby 1896-1900.
It wasn’t quite a eureka moment, and there were arguments against the identification. The film had perforations which suggested it was a later production by Acres’ great rival Robert Paul, who was effectively the producer of the 1895 Derby (it turned out to be a reprint), and once a dupe print had been painstakingly created by archivist João Oliveira and we could screen it, we discovered the film ran satisfactorily at 24 fps, when a film shot for the Kinetoscope peepshow (which was the case with the 1895 Derby) ought to have run at 40 fps. There isn’t space here to go into the complexities of this particular argument – suffice to say that one should judge things by what one finds, not what one expects to find, and that though some doubts were raised over the film’s identity I believe I was right, and the discovery recently of further Acres films from this period which similarly run at a speed seemingly too slow for the Kinetoscope tends to verify the original identification.
What is believed to be the Derby of 1895, filmed by Birt Acres
It took a while to identify all the films in the Henville collection, and in some cases original identifications were overturned, but here’s the list of films, with titles in brackets for those still unidentified (links are to their entries on the BFI database):
I remember the Yarmouth film in particular because David Cleveland, then head of the East Anglian Film Archive had asked me what the likelihood was of this, the earliest film taken his region, ever turning up. I said it was next to impossible. A few weeks later, we had a copy. Now it’s on YouTube.
But what is also of interest is what happened next. A huge fuss made was made about the collection, especially the Derby film. The BFI went to town on it. We had reams of press coverage, television news reports, even a mention on Barry Norman’s Film 95. But this in turn raised the interest of the donor, who felt that there had to be great commercial value in these films, and eventually he took back the nitrate originals, with the BFI retaining the dupe copies it had made. The films were put up for auction in Germany, where I think one or two titles were sold (including the Georges Méliès dramatisation of a scene from the Greco-Turkish War, La Prise de Tournavos, I think), and then the remainder went up for auction at Sotheby’s in 2000. As I recall, the collection was bought by a London antiquarian bookdealer apparently without any knowledge of film.
And then what? A mystery. Perhaps the films lie crumbling on that same bookseller’s shelves, or maybe they have passed on to other hands, convinced that the great excitement generated by the films’ discovery had to mean that they had a great commercial value. Of course, they did not, except what one might get for them at auction – in all other respects, there was nothing to be made from them. This is a folly which has been repeated again and again, dreaming of treasures when all one is left with is unshowable, inflammable and not even necessarily unique (at least six of the Henville films were duplicated in other collections), fascinating to the specialist but of only passing interest to the general viewer. And arguably of minimal aesthetic interest.
But the duplicate copies remain, and so the 1895 Derby is preserved for posterity, until some bright spark comes along and tells me it was the 1896 Oaks all along…
Update (2019):
In September 2019 theatre and film historian Barry Anthony uncovered an image taken from the Acres Derby film which clearly corresponds with the print held by the BFI. The image, which is heavily retouched and printed the wrong way round, with the background removed, was found in The Field, 21 September 1895, p. 510, submitted by one IMPECUNIOSUS (a horse-racing enthusiast), who writes that it shows the closing stage of that year’s Derby. In a later issue of the same journal (5 October) Acres complains that the image had been used without his permission. The Field is available on the British Newspaper Archive subscription site.
So it was the 1895 Derby all along. Here are the original image, the image flipped, and a still from the film:
The Bioscope 