Category Archives: Online videos

Focus on Film

August 18, 2007 By in Archives and museums, Non-fiction, Online videos, War, Women

Focus on Film

The Learning Curve is a free online teaching and learning resource provided by the UK’s National Archives (formerly, and far better known as, the Public Record Office). It brings together a range of archive materials around key historical themes, and this includes film. Its Onfilm resource has recently been revamped and renamed Focus on Film.

This now comes with 150 film clips, all of them downloadable and re-usable, and the site now has its own online editing tools, in The Editor’s Room. The National Archives does not hold film itself (selected British government films are preserved by the BFI National Archive on its behalf), so it uses film from Screen Archive South East, the BFI, the Imperial War Museum, British Pathe and the BBC.

Focus on Film

There are several silent film clips available. There is an absolutely delightful film of Folkestone in 1904, with people just being themselves, parading up and down the streets, having fun at the beach, fooling before the camera, dressed on their Sunday best. It’s long been one of my desert island films (it has no known producer or title, and goes by the supplied title of Edwardian Folkestone), and I strongly recommend it (how drearily the teaching notes on the site describe it: “The roller coaster ride reminds us of the primary aim of early film-makers, profit via entertainment”). Scarcely less delightful nor more absorbing in its social detail is a 1920 tour through the streets of Canterbury, taken from the back of a moving vehicle.

There are newsreel films of the suffragettes, including the infamous film of the 1913 Epsom Derby in which Emily Davison runs on to the race-course and is killed. There are several film clips for the First World War, including key sequences from the great documentary testament The Battle of the Somme (1916). Somewhat peculiarly, there are also clips of a modern actor telling us about the experience of the Somme, which together with clips elsewhere of actors giving us vox pops on life in the Tudor and Stuart periods may end up confusing a few schoolchildren. There’s also footage from Ireland in 1916 (The Easter Rising) and 1920s.

The quality of the downloads is good (QuickTime Pro is needed if you are going to retain a copy), and the suggested activities (for PC or interactive whiteboard) and editing facilities are fascinating. Note that the site states: Teachers and students are granted a limited, non-exclusive licence to use the film clips for non-commercial educational use only and may not re-publish materials without permission of the copyright holder.

Well worth a look.

Broken Blossoms

August 11, 2007 By in Music, Online videos 5 Comments

This has already got a mention in the comments to the post on the upcoming Lillian Gish Film Festival, but it’s well worth highlighting. It’s an extract from D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) with a radical score from Brian Traylor, which featured at the festival. The use of electronica, noise, and the absence of anything melodic might prove to be a bit of a challenge over a period of time, but I find something quite hypnotic about it in this extract form at least. Others may beg to differ?

There are two other clips posted by Traylor on YouTube:

Swirling noises represent the assorted miserable options in life available to Lillian Gish.

Look out here for the electronic growls representing Donald Crisp’s speech.

Downing Street posts silents

August 5, 2007 By in Non-fiction, Online videos, People, Politics


Who’d have thought it? Downing Street is posting silent films on YouTube. It’s true. DowningSt is a registered YouTube member and has posted some 50-60 videos on YouTube, including a selection of Topical Budget silent newsreels from the collection held by the British Film Institute. This one shows Conservative PM Andrew Bonar Law (not one of the more celebrated British prime ministers) introducing his new cabinet to the newsreel cameras in 1922 – absolutely fascinating for the differing reactions from the ministers to this unprecedented intrusion from the media. (Adding comments has been disabled, by the way, should you have wished to express your rage – or heartfelt approval – at Bonar Law’s handling of the economy in 1922).

Others available from DowningSt on YouTube include MR BALDWIN AND ‘OLD BERKELEY’ (Stanley Baldwin with a hunt), NOW FOR THE PREMIERSHIP STAKES! (Baldwin electioneering), and LLOYD GEORGE RESIGNS (the fall of the Lloyd George Liberal government in 1922). I’m particularly fond of a 1921 Topical Budget film showing Lloyd George at Chequers in 1921, DOWNING ST IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, deftly filmed by Fred Wilson (in the dim and distant past I wrote a book on Topical Budget, and I’m always pleased to see it getting continued screenings). There was a real art to the best of the silent newsreels, as for any other kind of silent film production.

One oddity – all of the Topical Budget items posted by DowningSt are without a soundtrack, yet three of them come from the 1992 BFI Topical Budget video release, which had excellent music by Neil Brand. Shame.

What the first movie goers saw

June 19, 2007 By in Audience, Online videos

slate.jpg

This is interesting. An online daily journal, The Slate, has published an article with video slide show on the reception of early films, inspired by the Phillips Collection’s Moving Pictures exhibition on early film and art, currently on exhibition in America. The article, by Jana Prikryl, is entitled ‘What the first movie goers saw’, and it is acompanied by ten films from the 1890s/1900s, a mixture of Lumiere, Edison and Biograph titles, courtesy of Williams College Museum of Art. The text reports on the Moving Pictures exhibition, which it says offers too narow an explanation of sources of inspiration for the first filmmakers, which is undoubtedly true. Interesting, the writer finds the films “oddly modern” because as short clips formed out of a “spirit of improvisation” they are close to the world of YouTube. While one must not be lured into the old belief that early films are naive and accidental – much artifice and deliberation went into even the simplest of actualities – she is right to say that in these mesmerizing clips we can see a “watershed moment in visual culture”, and the YouTube analogy is one worth pursuing (not least in view of the increasing number of early films now popping up there).

The clips include the bodybuilder Eugen Sandow in 1894, the Lumieres’ Feeding the Baby, Edison’s Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show and a Danse Serpentine. All of the clips have thorough credits and acknowledgment of source. Well worth watching, and reading, and pondering.

Joost shows silents

June 19, 2007 By in Online videos, Television and radio

Joost logo

Along with half the online community, or so it seems, I’m one of those testing out the beta version of Joost, the system for distributing television programmes over the Web using peer-to-peer technology. The people who gave us Skype and Kazaa are behind it, and it’s supposed to show how all our viewing habits are going to change by turning your PC into a TV. Well, maybe so, though the much of programming on offer so far ranges from the exotic (Basquetbol de America Latina) to the unnecessary (PokerHeaven TV). But there are some signs there of a more promising future, and who can complain at the programming of the recently-added The Silent Movies Channel? Available worldwide, it features Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (“relive your childhood memories with the silent movies’ four greatest stars” says the Joost 24 site, which is an unlikely claim unless they’re thinking of those Bob Monkhouse programmes that introduced people like me to the silent comedians in the 1960s – today’s generation has Paul Merton doing the job instead).

The Silent Movies Channel is produced by a company called Indivisual, a video-on-demand business licensing a whole range of “quality niche content to on-demand platforms around the world”. What you get, then, is Chaplin’s The Rink, A Jitney Elopement, In the Park, A Night in the Show, Easy Street, His New Job, Police, The Floorwalker and Burlesque on Carmen; Keaton’s Convict 13, The High Sign, The Balloonatic, Neighbors, The Electric House, One Week, The Boat and Daydreams; and Laurel and Hardy in a selection of silent shorts from early in their careers as solo artists – Laurel in Roughest Africa, Mud and Sand, White Wings etc, and Hardy in The Sawmill, Kid Speed, and the pair of them in A Lucky Dog, their first film together (1921, though made in 1919), if not as the paired comic team they were to become.

Quality wise it’s your typical pixellated, just about adequate online video (can’t tell you about the music because the sound wasn’t working on my PC), OK full screen if you sit back enough. However, it’s interesting to see the positive comments that there have been about the Silent Movies Channel from those reviewing the channels available on Joost. This is the sort of stuff, seems to be the feeling, that should be made available to all, which can appeal to all. And it’s a pleasant way in which to while away a lunch hour.

It’s all done with mirrors (well, glass actually)

May 28, 2007 By in Online videos, Pre-cinema


Now here’s an interesting thing. The new pop video for Paul McCartney’s Dance Tonight, just published on YouTube, has been directed by Michel (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) Gondry, and stars Mackenzie Crook and Natalie Portman. And it’s quite a jolly tune with a mandolin. So far so inconsequential, but what is of interest here is that the video employs the Pepper’s Ghost trick, which is of great importance in ‘pre-cinema’ history. Pepper’s Ghost was a clever Victorian stage effect (devised by ‘Professor’ John Henry Pepper) employing glass, mirrors (sometimes) and lighting to make objects – usually ‘ghosts’ – seem to appear on stage. It holds an important place between the Phantasmagoria magic lantern show and the cinema. The trick was achieved by placing a figure off stage, and so lighting it that the light-waves bounced of an angled sheet of glass to create the illusion of the figure appearing in ghostly fashion on a stage. Like so:

Pepper’s Ghost

The McCartney video employs glass in much the same way to produce its ghostly effects. One would suspect that it was all done in post-production rather than ‘in the camera’, but production footage on dazeddigital.com would seem to suggest that they did indeed use glass (not mirrors). It could have been done a whole lot more easily with post-production trickery, but it was clearly done for the delight of the filmmakers – and the publicity.

Pepper’s Ghost inspired the appearance of ghostly figures in many early cinema trick films, though the process itself was not employed directly in films – with one exception, an obscure process called Kinoplastikon. More on that another day…

British Pathe at ITN

May 17, 2007 By in Non-fiction, Online videos

ITN Source

Alas, having posted items on the British Pathe newsreel site telling people about the free downloads (with lots of silent material, including some fiction films), the service has changed. The agreement the company had with the Lottery Fund was that it would make its collection freely available online for three years, and then might charge. Well, it’s been a bit more than three years, and the charging has been brought in. It is no longer possible to download low resolution copies for free. Instead you are offered high resolution (512Kb/per sec) copies which can be downloaded for £25 (plus VAT). You can still search the database and view the preview stills for free, but the free downloads have gone.

But do not despair! Because the British Pathe films are also available from ITN Source, ITN currently having the rights to manage British Pathe footage sales. And there, if you go to the Advanced Search option, and select British Pathe from the Collection drop-down menu, you get access to the entire library with free video streams (but not downloads). How long this situation will continue, I’ve no idea, but for now it’s all there to view from ITN – but not to keep.

British Pathe – part two

May 12, 2007 By in Non-fiction, Online videos 1 Comment

British Pathe logo

Some while ago I posted an item on the British Pathe website, concentrating on the silent fiction films that unexpectedly can be found there. Now here comes the follow-up post, on the newsreels and other non-fiction films to be found there.

In 2002 British Pathe, owners of the Pathé newsreel library, put up the whole of its collection, thanks to a grant from the New Opportunities Fund‘s NOF-Digitise programme. It was a controversial decision, because a commercial company was being given public money to do what some felt the company might have done for itself, but others welcomed a new kind of public-private initiative. The result for the public was 3,500 hours of newsreel footage from 1896 to 1970, available for free as low resolution downloads. Later 12,000,000 still images were added, key frames generated as part of the digitisation process. It was, and remains, one of the most remarkable resources on the net, and a major source for those interested in silent film.

Charles Pathé established the Société Pathé Frères, for the manufacture of phonographs and cinematographs, in 1896. A British agency was formed in 1902, and its first newsreel (which was the first in Britain), Pathé’s Animated Gazette, was launched in June 1910. This soon became Pathé Gazette, a name it retained until 1946, when it was renamed Pathé News, which continued until 1970. These newsreels were issued twice a week, every week, in British cinemas, and were a standard feature of the cinema programme in silent and sound eras.

Pathé also issued other films. It created the cinemagazine Pathé Pictorial in 1918, which ran until 1969. Eve’s Film Review, a cinemagazine for women, was established in 1921 and ran to 1933, while Pathétone Weekly ran 1930-1941. There were other film series and one-off documentaries.

All of this and more is on the site. Pathé were distributors of others’ films, some of which turn up unexpectedly on the site. For example, there are some of the delightful Secrets of Nature natural history films made by Percy Smith in the 1920s. There are also actuality films from before 1910 which Pathé seems to have picked up along the way, though not all of them are Pathé productions by any means – for example, assorted films from the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902.

Page from British Pathe site

For the silent period, researchers should note that the collection is not complete. For the First World War and before (what British Pathe calls Old Negatives) the surviving archive is patchy, and the cataloguing records less certain with dates. For the 1920s, the record is substantially complete – indeed, there is unissued and unused material as well as the standard newsreels. These of course show events great and small throughout the decade, with an emphasis on sport, celebrity, spectacle and human interest. Look out in particular for the women’s magazine Eve’s Film Review, a delightful series with an emphasis on “fashion, fun and fancy”. For silent film fans, there are newsreels of Chaplin, Valentino, Pickford, Fairbanks etc. There are all sorts of surprise film history discoveries to be made, such as a Pathé Pictorial on feature film production in Japan in the 1920s.

You can find the British Pathe collection (the company doesn’t use the accent on the e) at other places online. British Pathe is now managed by ITN Source, one of the world’s major footage libraries, and all of its films can be downloaded from that site in the same manner. You can also find many of them on the British Universities Newsreel Database, which is a database of all British newsreels and has substantial information about each of the Pathé newsreels, the people who worked for them, and histories of newsreels and cinemagazines in Britain in the silent and sound eras.

There are also versions of the Pathe delivery for schools – Beyond Pathe, Teaching & Learning with the British Pathe Archive, and Shapes of Time.

It’s a hugely important resource, and it’s all still free, though it’s now beyond the date British Pathe agreed with the New Opportunities Fund to keep the collection freely available to all. Long may it continue to be so.