More from the Marchioness

June 23, 2007 By in Filmographies, Scripts, Women 5 Comments

I’ve found more information on Gwladys, Marchioness of Townshend, who wrote some scenarios for the Clarendon Film Company, and an interview with whom was given in an earlier post.

The new source of information is her autobiography, It Was – and It Wasn’t, written in 1937. This tells us a little more about the agreement she made in 1912 with Clarendon to produce scenarios for them, and gives us more film titles than I had listed.

She seems to had always had an interest in films, which included considering investing in cinema buildings, and she had written articles on aspects of film before she made a deal with Clarendon:

I had been keenly interested in the Cinema Theatre and its possibilities at Maidenhead, and in 1912 I entered into an arrangement with the Clarendon Film Company of Charing Cross Road, to produce a series of picture plays; the first play, A Strong Man’s Love, being well received by the public and the Press. The House of Mystery followed. These were the first cinematograph dramas to give the author’s name, and I was the first peeress to write for the Cinema.

Were these the first films to credit the scenarist (as opposed to a playwright)? I don’t know. It might be Anita Loos, whose first film for D.W. Griffith was The New York Hat (1912), or Harriet Quimby, wrote wrote five scenarios for Griffith in 1911, but was either credited on screen? But I think Gwladys is on solid ground when she says she was the first peeress who wrote for the screen. Fascinatingly, she names two others who wrote scenarios after her – the Countess of Warwick and the Countess of Roden. I know nothing of either.

Next she gives interesting information on how much she was paid:

The late Sir George Alexander and I believed in the artistic future of the Cinema. At that time I considered its moral and ethical possibilities limitless, and it is interesting to compare the views of the Gaumont Company in 1913 as to the prices paid for scenarios, with the money of 1935. In 1913 a representative of the Gaumont Company told an interviewer that, “on the whole, the scale of payment is not high, and the picture dramatist does not expect – at any rate, he does not receive – anything like the renumeration of his brother, the real dramatist. The royalty system exists, but it is not general, the plot usually being bought outright. The average price is that of a short magazine story, but many ideas are disposed of for half a guinea apiece.” At that time I was paid £300 for writing six film plays, but, fortunately for authors, prices have increased considerably since then.

After an aside on the importance of the cinema as a force for education, she describes how she used a model theatre in her garden – together with cardboard cut-out nuns for her film The Convent Gate – to work out how scenes should appear. Then, after comments on the need for appropriate music for silent films, she concludes thus:

After my first film play was produced by the Clarendon Film company, the same company produced another – When East meets West. This completed a series of seven film dramas commissioned by the same company during a period of two years – A Strong Man’s Love, At the Convent Gate, The House of Mystery, Wreck and Ruin, The Love of an Actress and The Family Solicitor. All these sound most melodramatic now, but had their little success in those days.

I hadn’t come across some of these titles, but all were produced, so here’s a complete filmography for her, with slightly mocking descriptions taken from Denis Gifford’s British Film Catalogue:

A STRONG MAN’S LOVE (2,095ft)
Released January 1913
p.c: Clarendon
dir: Wilfred Noy
story: Marchioness of Townshend
cast: Dorothy Bellew … Elizabeth
Crime. Vicar’s daughter elopes with actor who kills manager and is acquitted by barrister who loves her.

THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY (2,090ft)
Released April 1913
p.c: Clarendon
dir: Wilfred Noy
story: Marchioness of Townshend
cast: Dorothy Bellew … The Girl
Crime. Fake ghost, gas chamber, and raid on den of 50 coiners by 100 policemen.

THE CONVENT GATE (2,175ft)
Released September 1913
p.c: Clarendon
dir: Wilfred Noy
story: Marchioness of Townshend
cast: Dorothy Bellew … Marie St Clair
Drama. Jilted bride recovers sanity after being saved from fire.

THE LOVE OF AN ACTRESS (3,000ft)
Released August 1914
p.c: Clarendon
dir: Wilfred Noy
story: Marchioness of Townshend
cast: Dorothy Bellew … Actress
Evan Thomas … Peer
Drama. Film actress feigns drunkenness to repel peer but saves him from suicide after he takes to drink.

WRECK AND RUIN (2,755ft)
Released August 1914
p.c: Clarendon
dir: Wilfred Noy
story: Marchioness of Townshend
cast: Dorothy Bellew
Drama. Foreman saves mill owner from flood caused by striking workmen.

THE FAMILY SOLICITOR (2,772ft)
Released September 1914
p.c: Clarendon
dir: Wilfred Noy
story: Marchioness of Townshend
cast: Dorothy Bellew … The Girl
Crime. Lawyer forges earl’s will so that his indebted son may inherit.

WHEN EAST MEETS MEET (3,000ft)
Released February 1915
p.c: Clarendon
dir: Wilfred Noy
story: Marchioness of Townshend
cast: Dorothy Bellew … The Girl
Crime. Indian fakir hypnotises officer’s daughter and explodes gas bulbs from afar with electric rays.

None of these films is known to survive today.

Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee

June 22, 2007 By in Events, Non-fiction, People

Mr Hunt

110 years ago, on 22 June 1897, Queen Victoria processed through London to mark sixty years of her reign. Numerous motion picture cameramen were positioned around the route, including Birt Acres, Robert Paul, R.J. Appleton, Dr J.H. Smith, Alexandre Promio (filming for Lumière), Henri Lavanchy-Clarke, Alfred Wrench and John Le Couteur. A number of these short film survives, mostly in the collection of the BFI National Archive. Ten years ago I put together a commemorative show which combined the surviving films with photographs from around the route and actors reading our eye-witness testimony from Mark Twain, Edward Burne-Jones, Molly Hughes, G.W. Steevens and others. Recently I revived the show, and this is just a bit of advance notice that it will be featuring at this year’s Canterbury Festival, on Friday 19 October, with Stephen Horne on the piano, Neil Brand (away from the piano for once) taking the male parts and Mo Heard the female parts, with me as narrator. Booking opens 13 August!

The image above shows a section of the crowd in the stands outside St Paul’s Cathedral, where the main ceremonies took place (the Queen being too infirm to scale the steps and go inside). In the centre of the photograph you can see the camera and tripod of Mr Hunt, one of Robert Paul’s team of cameramen. And you can see footage taken by Paul himself (positioned on the other side of the square, in this QuickTime video clip from the New Zealand Film Archive.

West End Live

June 21, 2007 By in Events, Exhibitions

West End Live

This weekend, why not come to Leicester Square (should you be in London) and see West End Live, billed as “Free for all the family, this spectacular event includes performances from top West End shows alongside a variety of other musical acts. There will be a host of interactive displays and exhibits for a fun-filled action packed day.” Billed among all this fun for the family, which includes a Saturday Morning at the Pictures event organised by the BFI, you will find the Moving Pictures exhibition of film production and exhibition in London before the First World War, hosted by London’s Screen Archives. I was involved in the research for this, so do pop by if you can. You’ll find it in the same marquee as the BFI and Film London. Failing that, the exhibition returns to Westminster Archives Centre thereafter until the end of June.

Any questions?

June 20, 2007 By in Bioscope, General

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I’ve added a new section to The Bioscope, and taken one away. The deleted section is Publications, which was done in a hurry and never updated. One day it will return, in a hopefully far better form.

The new section is Questions. If you have any questions on early and silent cinema, particularly if you have a research interest in some aspect of silent film, and it isn’t being covered by regular posts, do use the comment box on the Questions page (unfortunately it isn’t possible to set up a proper enquiries form within a WordPress blog). I’ll answer what I can, or find someone who can (such as one my co-contributors), and post the results where appropriate. If you’d rather contact me privately, then of course you can (contact details on the About page).

What the first movie goers saw

June 19, 2007 By in Audience, Online videos

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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.

Mander and Mitchenson

June 18, 2007 By in Archives and museums, Resources, Theatre 3 Comments

The world famous collection of theatre memorabilia gathered together by Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson has now published an online catalogue. The collection comprises over two thousand archive boxes containing playbills, posters, programmes, engravings, cuttings and production photographs of London and British regional theatres. There are files on every actor and actress of note in the British theatre, and sections on circus, dance, opera, music-hall, variety, dramatists, singers and composers, together with many engravings and pictures.

Inevitably, there is much that relates to the cinema, especially the early years of cinema. There are few documents themselves available online, but judicious use of the catalogue fields yields gems. There is a Search Everything option, and individuals fields for Names, Titles, Subjects, Dates and Keywords. Each search result provides a Brief Details and a Full Description. This is where the useful stuff lies – some thorough catalogue descriptions, such as this for the Palace Theatre in London’s Cambridge Circus, an important venue for Biograph films in the late 1890s/early 1900s, and host to occasional film shows thereafter:

Palace Theatre (Cambridge Circus, London) Collection

Resource code: GB2649-MM-TL-PLC
Title: Palace Theatre (Cambridge Circus, London) Collection
Format: Set plans and designs; Documents (production); Ephemera eg. daybills and flyers; Programmes; Drawings; Prints; Photographs (production); Photographs (venue); Photographs (miscellaneous); Negatives; Postcards; Music scores; Song sheets; Libretti; Autographs; Ephemera eg. tickets; Published material; Scrapbooks; Periodicals; Press cuttings; Correspondence; Manuscripts; Ephemera; Photocopies

Description: The Palace Theatre opened on 31 January 1891 as the Royal English Opera House under Richard D’Oyly Carte. It changed its name to the Palace Theatre of Varieties in 1892, and specialised in music hall/variety productions, hosting the Royal Command Variety Performance in 1912. From c1914 it began staging revues, as well as the occasional cinema shows in the 1920s and 1930s. In recent decades it has produced a large number of musicals.

Description: The papers include depictions of the exterior of the theatre as it was, 1896-c1989, and of the interior, c1903-1912, articles, press cuttings, notes, etc. relating to its history, 1891-20th century, theatre tickets, 1954-1968, a list of productions from 1891 to 1985, an information pack on the completion of exterior refurbishments, 1989, the Summer 1997 edition of Picture House, containing an article, Pictures at the Palace, by Graeme Cruickshank, a booklet, The Royal English Opera House and The Palace Theatre – 100 Glorious Years, An Illustrated Chronology, by George Cruickshank, 1991, programmes relating to charity and Sunday events, 1900-1994, and papers relating to the Royal Command performance of 1 July 1912.

Description: The majority of the material relates to performances and is arranged in chronological order from 1891 to 1999, although a number of items are copies or later reprints of original documents; the earliest original document is dated 1891. It includes a pen and ink sketch of Esther Palliser and David Bispham in La Basoche, 1891, a souvenir booklet issued by the theatre entitled The War by Biograph, 1900, set plans, etc. for The Gay Divorce, 1932, correspondence, set plans, wardrobe lists, technical specifications, etc. relating to a proposed performance of Carissima in South Africa, 1952, and an introductory booklet to the Théâtre Nationale Populaire, 1956. Coverage is particularly good for the following productions: Ivanhoe (1891), The Passing Show (1914-1915), Bric-à-Brac (1915), Vanity Fair (1916-1917), No No Nanette (1925), Heads Up! (1930), Dinner at Eight (1933), Streamline (1934), On Your Toes (1937) including a large number of stage plans, Under Your Hat (1938), Song of Norway (1946), Carissima (1948), King’s Rhapsody (1949), The Love Match (1953), Glorious Days (1953-1954), the Shakespeare Memorial Company’s touring production of King Lear (1955) including typed transcripts of revues, The Sound of Music (1961), Cabaret (1968), Mr. Mrs. (1968), Jesus Christ Superstar (1972) and Les Miserables (c1985-1999).

Language: eng
Conditions of access: By appointment
Acquisitions policy: Possible future additions
Owner: The Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection
Copyright status: Contact Administrator for permissions
Collection located: Jerwood Library of the Performing Arts
Trinity College of Music
King Charles Court
Old Royal Naval College
Greenwich
London SE10 9JF
Keyword: Variety
Keyword: Revue
Keyword: Stage setting and scenery
Keyword: Technical information
Associated name: Palace Theatre, Cambridge Circus, London
Associated name: Royal English Opera House, Cambridge Circus, London
Associated name: Palace Theatre of Varieties, Cambridge Circus, London
Associated name: Théâtre Nationale Populaire
Geographic coverage: London
Collection time span: 1891-1999
Accumulated: 1938 –
Principal collector: Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson
Parent Collection: The Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection

The collection itself is located at Trinity College of Music, Greenwich – contact details from the website.

10,000

June 17, 2007 By in Bioscope 6 Comments

Thanks to the fine people at WordPress, all sorts of statistical stuff comes with this blog’s content management system, and so I am pleased to report that The Bioscope has just passed the 10,000-visitor mark since it began in February of this year. 211 is the record number of visits for any one day (all those people looking for information on Albert Kahn), with somewhere between 80 and 100 as the daily average. There have been 201 posts (most from me – a handful from my co-contributors), 113 comments (could do better) and Akismet has cleared up 1,194 unwanted spam comments.

Thanks for reading The Bioscope, whose archives ought to build up into a useful reference source in time (that’s the plan). If there is information or features on silent film that you’d like to see here (particularly if it’s the sort of thing that can’t be found elsewhere on the Web), let me know.

When the Movies Began…

June 16, 2007 By in Camera operators, Filmmakers, People, Performers, Resources

Kinetoscope

The latest feature to be added to the Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema web site is When the Movies Began. This is a chronology of the world’s film productions and film shows before May 1896. It was originally compiled by Stephen Herbert and published as a booklet by The Projection Box in 1994. This updated and redesigned version incorporates new research, in particular the work of Deac Rossell, and it will be regularly revised and updated. There is also a full introduction and list of references.

Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema is a biographical reference guide to 300 or so people involved in the production of motion pictures before 1901, both behind and in front of the camera. It includes a wealth of supporting resources on the subject of Victorian film (i.e. film during the time of Queen Victoria’s reign), with a growing number of special features, such as When the Movies Began.