Some news of the 10th Festival d’Anères, an annual festival of silent films which takes place in the Hautes-Pyrénées, France. This year’s festival will run 7-11 May, and while the full programme has not been published as yet, the featured performers and filmmakers will include Fritz Lang, Luitz-Morat, Jean Epstein, Donald Crisp, Buster Keaton, André Antoine, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, D.W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, Jacques Feyder, Gennaro Righelli, Nemesio M. Sobrevila and Vsevolod Pudovkin.
The festival is new to me, but the site has useful information on past festivals, including programme details, lists of all films shown, directors featured and musicians. More news on the programme when I get it.
The project is looking at the origins of the syndication or marketing of an author’s rights across several media, so common today, which it locates in the 1920s and 1930s. The aim of the colloquium is to draw together research from different disciplines to examine the extent of cross-media cooperation between media professionals, agents, and authors and ask how the past has shaped practices of the present day.
And here’s the programme, which has plenty on the cross-relationship in Britain between popular literature and film in the silent era:
Panel 1
Prof Alexis Weedon (University of Bedfordshire)
Some observations on cross-media co-operation in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s
Dr Vincent L. Barnett (University of Bedfordshire)
Elinor Glyn. The Novelist As Hollywood Star
Dr Mary Hammond (University of Southampton)
Hitchcock and Hall Caine: the Victorian Bestseller on the Silent Screen
Panel 2
Dr Amy Sargeant (Reader in Film, University of Warwick)
Frederick Britten Austin: Boy’s Own Stories, Girls’ Romances and Interwar Politics
Nathalie Morris (University of East Anglia)
Eminent British Authors and the Stoll Film Company
Dr Caroline Copeland (Napier University)
Katherine Cecil Thurston’s Chilcote
Panel 3
Dr Simon Frost (Institute of literature, media and cultural studies, University of Southern Denmark)
A Toga Tale of Ingomar the Barbarian: in print, in drawing rooms, at fairgrounds and in Hollywood
Dr Lawrence Napper (University of Greenwich and at King’s College, London)
‘Not over-exercising our intellectual powers in the choice of subjects’: The Gainsborough scenario department, 1929-31
Panel 4
Dr Simone Murray (recorded presentation from Monash Australia)
What Are You Working On?: the shifting role of the author in an era of cross-media adaptation
Prof Juliet Gardiner
Talk: Contemporary adaptation of Atonement
No indication on the colloquium web page as to when it starts or ends, or whether those panels overlap, but it does tell you that it is priced at £30 standard; £20 members/concessions, that the venue is Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E, and that spaces are limited so early booking is advisable.
Registration forms are on the site, and more information can be got from Jon Millington, Events Officer, Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; tel +44 (0) 207 664 4859; Email jon.millington [at] sas.ac.uk.
Hot on the heels of that last post on the East Finchley Phoenix comes news of a one-day event at Birkbeck College on London’s screen history. Organised by the University of London Screen Studies Group, in association with the London Screen Studies Centre, Birkbeck College and Film Studies journal, the event on Friday 14 March brings together a range of recent work on London’s heritage of film production and particularly reception. Here’s the programme:
London Screen History
Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London WC1
9.30–18.00 Lecture Theatre B33
Ian Christie: Introduction
Michele Daniels: The Coming of Talking Films to London, 1928-29
Jude Cowan: ‘The First Film Studios at Ealing: Warwick Trading Company 1907-1909 and Barker Motion Photography 1909-1918’
Pierluigi Ercole: ‘Little Italy on the brink: London Italians and War Films, 1915-1918’
11.00-11.30 tea and coffee
Brigitte Flickinger (Heidelberg): ‘Living and leisure: Cinema-going in London in the 1910s and 1920s – a view from outside’
Luke McKernan (British Library): ‘Children’s cinemagoing in London before WW1’
13.00-14.00 Lunch
Charlotte Brunsdon (Warwick): ‘Shaping the Cinematic City: Three London Journeys’
15.00
Toby Haggith: Early London housing films
Angela English, Jenny Davison: ‘Their Past Your Future and working with London community groups’
Roland-Francois Lack: ‘Still Point of the Turning World: Piccadilly Circus in Film’
16.30-17.00 Tea and coffee
John Sedgwick (London Metropolitan): ‘The commercial significance of London’s West End cinemas’
Richard Gray (CTA): ‘London’s cinema buildings’
The programme has been published a bit late in the day, but it’s a terrific line-up (your humble scribe notwithstanding), so do come along (there’s a small charge for tea and coffee) and see if we can get the audience to outnumber the speakers, at least by a little bit.
The Phoenix in East Finchley is believed to be Britain’s oldest continuously running cinema. It was founded in 1910 as the Picturedrome and has operated as a cinema ever since. It has been independently owned for most of that time, and after being known as the Coliseum and then the Rex it became the Phoenix in 1975. It now run by a non-profit-making trust and is a Grade II listed building.
This independent cinema proudly keeps up a tradition of showing independent films, and is now looking back to its roots by showing a season of silents, Into Great Silents – The Best in Silent Cinema. So do go along if you can to support them – on Sunday 9 March they are showing Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger, accompanied by Ivor Montagu’s Bluebottles, with piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne and an introductory talk by film historian Gerry Turvey. Later screenings will be Sunrise (8 June), Pandora’s Box (21 September) and Battleship Potemkin (28 November).
The mere mechanical construction of a film projector has been overestimated … it was boxing that created cinema.
So someone once wrote (actually it was me), and even if the statement was done for effect, there’s some truth to it. Cinema was created for a purpose, which was to make money by amusing an audience, and many of the first viewers of motion pictures wanted to see boxing. The Edison peepshow Kinetoscope (first exhibited commercially in 1894) recorded several bouts, albeit specially staged for the camera; the first projected film to be shown commercially was the Lathams‘ Young Griffo v Battling Charles Barnett (first exhibited in New York on 20 May 1895); and films first extended for over an hour when Enoch Rector‘s Veriscope Company filmed the world heavyweight championship of 1897 between Jim Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons with three camera in parallel, the 63mm film stock being specially designed to frame the full view of the boxing ring – boxing in a very real sense creating cinema.
The history of boxing and early cinema is now to be given its first thorough history with the publication of Dan Streible’s long awaited Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema. Published by the University of California Press next month, the book covers the rich period where the new medium of cinema collided, or colluded, with the ignoble art, as the the former built up its mass appeal and the latter sought to drag itself out of a state of illegality into legimatised entertainment. It’s a story of technical innovation, exploitation, criminality, fakery, brutality, star power, racial tension, and the rise of mass appeal sport and the media in the early twentieth century.
This history has been researched by Streible for many years now, and it seemed for too long that the book would never come out. It ought to be a crossover seller, appealing both to the early film studies community and the sports history afficionados, to go by his previous writings on the subject.
But that’s not all. Because in May the enterprising Reaktion Books publishes Kasia Boddy’s Boxing: A Cultural History. I know nothing of the provenance of this work, but it sounds tempting enough from the blurb:
Throughout this history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers and film-makers have been there to record and make sense of it all. In her encyclopaedic investigation of the shifting social, political and cultural resonances of this most visceral of sports, Kasia Boddy throws new light on an elemental struggle for dominance whose weapons are nothing more than fists. From Daniel Mendoza to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Looking afresh at everything from neo-classical sculpture to hip-hop lyrics, Boddy explores the way in which the history of boxing has intersected with the history of mass media, and sheds new light on the work of such diverse figures as Henry Fielding and Spike Lee, Charlie Chaplin and Philip Roth, James Joyce and Mae West, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Dickens. This all-encompassing study tells us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many.
It probably isn’t going to go into the practical details of how many arc lights the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company employed to photograph indoor fights in 1900, but it does sound like it will give us an eclectic and entertaining cultural history, outlining boxing’s special resonance and appeal, and placing film’s role within that history.
I’ve never been to a boxing match. I can’t watch televised bouts of today. But the history, the characters, the themes of boxing in the past are just so compelling, and – to be honest – the distancing effect of seeing brutal fights only in black-and-white and silently helps sanitise the subject.
To finsh off, here’s an example of how YouTube can serve as an archive bringing life to films you might never expect to see again. Dan Streible himself brought this to the attention of a film archiving list I subscribe to: the Selig Polyscope Company’s 1900 film McGovern-Gans Fight Pictures. It features the lightweights Terry McGovern and Joe Gans, the first native-born black American to win a world title (in 1900). This bout wasn’t for the world title, and it became controversial (and still is, judging from the comments accompanying the film) for Gans reportedly admitting to taking a dive. See what you think.
The film comes from a 1930s or 40s short produced by Forrest Brown, no longer existing in its original 1900 form, so far as is known. Amazing to be able to see such things still, and there’s many more such early fight pictures on YouTube, generally taken from sports shorts made decades later – see, for example, Joe Gans v Kid Herman in 1907 – though many more are lifted from programmes by ESPN, which has the world’s largest collection of archive boxing films, mostly gathered by Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton of Big Fights Inc., who when they weren’t amassing an amazing collection of fight films were managing the young Mike Tyson. Tyson has probably seen more archive films of boxing matches than anyone. He’s going to love Streible’s book, I’m sure.
Silent films continued well into the 1930s in many Asian countries, notably China and Japan, which is why the recently-discovered oldest surviving Korean dramatic film dates from 1934, yet is a silent.
Cheongchun’s Sipjaro (Turning-point of the Youngsters or Crossroads of Youth), directed by An Jong-hwa, was given its first screening in eight decades by the Korean Film Archive, after having been given to the archive by a donor who wishes to remain anonymous. The Archive has a helpful website (in English) with a fine database of Korean films, which supplies this synopsis for the film:
It breaks Yeong-bok’s heart to leave his old mother and younger sister home to leave his hometown. He married into Bong-seon’s family and worked for seven years but when Joo Myeong-goo snatches Bong-seon away, he decides to leave town. Blaming his cursed fate for everything, he gets a job as a luggage carrier in Seoul. That is when he meets Yeong-hee who works in the vicinity. Yeong-ok also leaves home to come up to Seoul after their mother passes away but she cannot find her brother. Instead, she meets Gae-cheol, an old friend from her hometown and also a good friend of Joo Myeong-goo. Yeong-ok loses her virginity to Gae-cheol and when Yeong-bok finds out about this, he gives Gae-cheol and Myeong-goo a good beating and starts working harder for a better tomorrow.
A report in The Korean Times provides some snippets of information about early Korean film, though it’s a little misleading in places.
It tell us that the the oldest (dramatic) Korean film was Uilijeogguto (Fight for Justice), first screened on 27 October 1919, while the first feature-length drama was Weolha-ui Mangseo (The Vow Made below the Moon), directed by Yun Baek-nam and shown in 1923. Neither survives.
The Korean Film Archive says that seven native films were produced between 1910 and 1920, and sixty-one films from 1920 to 1930, of which they hold no examples at all, while between 1930 and 1940, there were seventy-three films produced, but only five are held by the Archive. It finishes off the sorry tale by telling us that around 5,500 films (presumably dramatic films) have been produced in Korea, and some 40 percent are lost.
Cheongchun’s Sipjaro beats by two years the previously oldest surviving film, Mimong (Sweet Dream) (1936), which was itself only discovered in 2005. Let’s hope for more.
Update: There’s a nice piece on the film’s restoration and the work of the Korean Film Archive in this piece from JoongAng Daily.
Congratulations and welcome to the latest silent cinema blog on the block, WSBC – Women and British Silent Cinema. Not so much a blog, though, more a focal point for the growing research interest in women and silent cinema generally. It has information on conferences past and future, and links to external resources, including a promised WSBC Wiki site. Of most interest probably is the long list of British women involved in film in various ways from the silent era (just a handful so far with biographies attached), which covers relatively well known (in this narrow field) figures as Betty Balfour, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Elsa Lanchester, Caroline Lejeune, Blanche McIntosh, Joan Morgan, Alma Reville, Marie Stopes and Virginia Woolf, while also providing many names of which few as yet know anything. I look forward to finding out in due course just who were Mrs K. Beck, Elise Codd, Nellie Tom Gallon, Jean de Kirharski, Edith Nepean and Jane Tarlo.
In the Nursery, the esteemed music duo (twins Klive and Nigel Humberstone) who have produced several scores of silent films, will be premiering their latest score, for Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) at the Sensoria festival in Sheffield on 16 April. This is a new festival of film and music, running 12-18 April 2008, though a full programme has not been publishd is yet, so I don’t know if there will be further silent film/music combinations. The venue for The Passion of Joan of Arc will be Sheffield cathedral, and the box office is now open.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is of course one of the landmark films of silent era, indeed of cinema history as a whole. It is one of those superhuman works where you cannot imagine that the mundanities of filmmaking – camera set-ups, lighting, pauses, retakes, breaks for meals – ever took place. Using extensive use of probing, intense close-ups (no make-up was used), the film is like the history of a soul, quite unlike any other movie (what a vulgar term that is) that you will have come across. Information on the film is extensive, but check out Carl Dreyer’s illuminating thoughts on the production process, with its emphasis on staying true to the documents of the period, on the Criterion site. Dreyer, so it is said, wanted the film to be seen in silence.
In the Nursery’s website has information on their previous silent film scores. These have included Electric Edwardians (the Mitchell and Kenyon DVD collection of early actualities), Hindle Wakes, A Page of Madness, Man with a Movie Camera, Asphalt and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Sound extracts are available as mp3 files. The Passion of Joan of Arc will subsequently screen at Wave Gotik Treffen in Liepzig somewhere between 9-12 May, and at the Barbican in London on 1 June.
The British Film Institute employs so many different outlets for its films these days that it’s difficult to keep up. What with the Mediatheque, Creative Archive, Screenonline, European Film Treasures, filmarchives online, its vast website and MySpace page, alongside the traditional outlets of DVD, book publishing and cinema exhibition, it’s becoming hard to escape their mission to inspire us all. Yet it’s still possible to overlook some of their activities, such is their number, as I’d done until now with their YouTube channel.
The BFI has contributed to several other YouTube sites, wittingly (e.g. 10 Downing Street and The Royal Channel) or unwittingly (take your pick), but for a few months now it has also had its own channel. And what gems are there.
There are sixty-four titles at present, and all are films which the BFI owns or for which there is no rights claimant, and so there’s an emphasis on silent shorts. Several of these are available from other BFI outlets, and all are featured in the Mediatheque, so the site serves as a taster, and no harm with that. So, for example, there are numerous clips from The Open Road, Claude Friese-Greene’s two-colour travelogue of 1924/25, which has already seen the recent light of day as a television programme and two DVD releases.
So let’s recommend a few old favourites. None more favoured to my mind than Lights and Shades on the Bostock Circus Farm, featured above, an astonishing 1911 production from the Warwick Trading Company (the print comes from a German source, hence the German titles, but it’s nevertheless a British production). I shan’t spoil the surprise – just to let you now that what looks like a conventional interest film about a touring circus and its animals suddenly turns to heart-rending drama…
Oyster Fishing at Whitstable, England
Or here’s another old favourite, Oyster Fishing in Whitstable, England – apparently an American production from 1921, though actually it’s a repackaging of a pre-First World War British film. An old favourite firstly because I was brought up in the fair town of Whitstable (and it hasn’t changed much), secondly because it’s a harmoniously accomplished example of early non-fiction ‘interest’ film, and thirdly because the subject of much of my research work, Charles Urban, the film’s producer, can be seen towards the end as one of a crowd on the beach sampling oysters (he’s the one crouching down on the right, wearing a hat).
The films all come with knowledgeable background descriptions from one or other of the BFI curators (a marked difference to many YouTube offerings). There are newsreels, magazine films, travels films, phantom rides, actualities, a recreation of Kinemacolor (more on that at another time) and much more. There are also several sound films of course (check out Geoffrey Jones’ glorious Snow, a brilliantly edited 1963 piece from the esteemed British Transport Films)). Fascinatingly, the most popular title so far is An Otter Study, with its underwater photography (the titles comes from the 1920s, but the original film was made by Urban’s Kineto company in 1912). Others are bound to feature in later posts. Go explore.
In this our year of colour, here’s a call for papers on a pertinent conference, which comes out of an ongoing three-year research project at the University of Bristol which is examining the histories of Kinemacolor and Technicolor in Britain.
Colour and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive
Conference: 10th July – 12th July 2009, Bristol, UK
Keynote speakers: Tom Gunning (University of Chicago), Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck)
‘An inquiry into colour can take you just about anywhere’ (David Batchelor, Chromophobia, 2000)
Call for Papers: This conference addresses questions emerging through a renewed interest in colour film and as an interdisciplinary subject. The event is part of an AHRC-funded project on colour film, led by Professor Sarah Street. While colour is a fundamental element of film forms, technologies and aesthetics it is rarely singled-out for analysis. The aim of the conference is to extend previous work on colour and to consider its form and functions from a range of perspectives within four major strands: histories and technologies; film theory; philosophies and aesthetics of colour; the ethics, practices and theories surrounding the deterioration and conservation of colour film. In addition to formal conference papers, the event will include screenings of prints from the BFI National Film Archive. We invite proposals which address broad issues raised by colour and the moving image. The conference will provide a forum for discussion which is informed by, and directly addresses, the interrelations of the theory, history and aesthetics of colour film and of moving image technologies in their broadest sense. Proposals which focus on questions of colour in one or more of the following areas are particularly welcome:
– star systems
– reception theory
– pre-filmic, pro-filmic and onscreen spaces
– fantasy, spectacle, realism and/ or ‘natural’ colour
– colour theory
– synaesthesia: theories and practices of the interrelations of colour, sound, music as sensation
– chromophilia/chromophobia
– distanciation and avant garde film
– colour and genre
– film histories and new technologies: video, DVD, small screen technologies as new viewing spaces
– Colour systems including Kinemacolor, Dufaycolor, Chemicolor, Agfacolor, Technicolor, Eastmancolor
We invite abstracts of c.200 words for individual papers or pre-constituted panels consisting of 3 papers to be submitted by 1st September 2008. Please send abstracts to dram-colourconference@bristol.ac.uk. If you prefer to submit your abstract by post, the address is as follows: Colour and the Moving Image Conference, c/o Dr Liz Watkins, Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television, Cantocks Close, Woodland Road, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1UP, UK.
Colour and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive is hosted by the Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television, University of Bristol, UK with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Screenings in co-operation with the BFI National Film Archive, UK and supported by Screen as one of its 50th Anniversary regional events.
The Bioscope 