British silent cinema festival

February 13, 2008 By urbanora in Festivals

Chicago (1927)

The first news has been published of the feature films and main events taking place at this year’s British Silent Cinema Festival. As usual, the festival is being held at the Broadway, Nottingham, and runs 3-6 April.

This year the main theme is ‘Rats, Ruffians and Radicals: The Globalisation of Crime and the British Silent Film‘. The festival is a mixture of films, papers and special presentations, and usually pulls of the trick of attracting both an academic and an ‘enthusiast’ audience. Anyway, here are some of the delights on offer:

Chicago (USA 1927), sparky silent film version of the story that later became the musical Chicago. Directed by Frank Urson under supervision of De Mille this is a vibrant telling of the tale of Roxie Hart and her attempts to beat a murder rap in the most cynical city in the world. See the film that inspired the musical that inspired the film of the musical …

Red Pearls (UK 1930), Walter Forde’s psychological drama about a Japanese merchant who tries to drive his victim mad by sending him letters from beyond the grave.

Henry Edwards’ The Bargain (UK 1921) starring Chrissie White and actor/director Edwards in a tale of fraud, deception and family ties as a man purporting to be a long lost son returns from the Australian outback to claim his inheritance from his dying father.

At the Villa Rose (UK 1920), director Maurice Elvey’s classic locked-room murder mystery set in the fashionable and decadent expatriate community in Monte Carlo.

Die Carmen von St Pauli (Germany 1928), German director Erich Waschneck’s brilliant drama set in Hamburg’s dockside gangland featuring German stars Willi Fritsch and the delicious Jenny Jugo – who rivals Clara Bow for sheer screen presence. The film also shows there is more to German film than expressionism.

René Clair’s Le Fantôme du Moulin Rouge (France 1924) combines Grande Guignol, surrealism and playful avant garde film tricks. It’s the tale of a man whose spirit is released from his body to allow him to torment and trick his family but ultimately there’s a race against time when his spirit needs to get back into his lifeless body before the autopsy begins …

The Whip (USA 1917): more horse nobbling courtesy of Maurice Tourneur, based on the famous British stage play by Cecil Raleigh and Henry Hamilton. In the words of the legendary Tallulah Bankhead: “The Whip was a blood-and-thunder melodrama in four acts and fourteen scenes imported from London’s Drury Lane Theatre. It boiled with villainy and violence. Its plot embraced a twelve-horse race on a treadmill (for the Gold Cup at Newmarket), a Hunt Breakfast embellished by fifteen dogs, an auto-smash-up, the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks, and a train wreck with a locomotive hissing real steam. It boasted a dissolute earl and a wicked marquis, and a heroine whose hand was sought by both knave and hero. It was a tremendous emotional dose for anyone as stage-struck and impressionable as our heroine.”

The Hill Park Mystery (Denmark 1923) (aka Shattered Nerves) features a detective trying to clear the name of a woman accused of murder, who finds matters complicated when he becomes romantically attached to his client.

Other highlights will include episodes from The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and tales from The Old Man in the Corner, Luke McKernan’s illustrated presentation to mark the centenary of the 1908 Olympics in the UK, a session on Melodrama along with a packed programme of presentations, screenings and social events.

So, yes, I’m one of the star turns (on Saturday the 5th), giving a glossy show on film and the Olympic Games, 1900-1924, with special attention given to the the London Games of 1908, whose centenary it is, of course. As for the feature films, there’s some fascinating choices there, though the British content seems a bit elusive in places. The festival website doesn’t have any programme details as yet, but further information will get published here in due course.

European film treasures

February 12, 2008 By urbanora in Archives and museums, Online videos

Florence Turner in Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914), from http://creative.bfi.org.uk

Announced today is a plan by Lobster Films of Paris, with a number of partner organisations, to release up to 500 film titles from thirty-seven European archives, online and for free, with 50% funding from the European MEDIA programme, which is all about expanding markets for films and exposing content to new audiences. The partners include the British Film Institute and the Danish Film Institute. The project, European Film Treasures, launches in April.

Here’s a Reuters press report:

PARIS (Hollywood Reporter) – Where do you go if you want to watch rare archive films such as a 1916 document about life on a German submarine or John Ford’s 53-minute Western “Bucking Broadway” from the following year?

Until now, the answer would have been a trip to one of the film archives that house these prints, respectively London’s Imperial War Museum and the French Film Archive.

But that is about to change with the launch in April of a Europe-wide video-on-demand platform bringing together content from 37 film archives and cinematheques across the continent. And the good news for film buffs is that it’s free.

European Film Treasures, as the site will be known, is the brainchild of Serge Bromberg, founder of Paris-based historic film and restoration specialist Lobster Films. The European Union’s MEDIA Program has pledged to put up half of the approximately 500,000 euros ($725,000) needed to fund the project for its first year.

European Film Treasures is hoping to tap into a chunk of the huge audience for free on-line video sites like YouTube and Bebo. “The difficulty today is not so much to find old films and restore them, it’s finding an audience for them,” Bromberg says. “These are some of the best films shot in Europe over more than 80 years, but it’s often difficult to convince people to see films like these.”

Each partner archive will propose films, and a jury of historic film specialists will decide which to include on the VoD site based on criteria such as historical interest and artistic quality. Footage will be accessible for streaming only, not download, but the site may in the future extend to associated DVD sales.

Films will be available in their original language with translation where needed into English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

The site is expected to launch with about 100 titles, but the aim is to include as many as 500 films once fully loaded. Lobster is coming up with original music to accompany silent films.

It took two years to convince all the archives to come on board. “They thought it was a good idea but considered it was impossible. The idea is not just to show their films, but also to present the archives and their work,” Bromberg says.

The only major national archive that decided not to be represented was from Belgium. “That is to their great shame,” Bromberg opines.

Bryony Dixon, curator (silent film) at the British Film Institute’s National Archive, says that VoD is a well-adapted platform for these early and short films, which are otherwise difficult to program. “Theatrical, you may get a few thousand viewers. On the Web, you can get hundreds of thousands or even millions. If you put it out there, people will find it. You get that long-tale effect.”

As with the other partner archives, the BFI is not putting in any financing but simply making films available. “We’re in a good position to do that as probably the biggest film archive in Europe,” Dixon says.

Among films the BFI is submitting are “Daisy Doodad’s Dial,” a 1913 British-made comedy starring U.S. actress Florence Turner, and a rare film of a French boxing champion. “We’ll pick things that have appeal, like the boxing film, which will be really interesting for the boxing community because it’s not seen before,” Dixon contends.

For its part, the Danish Film Institute is submitting a 1923 Danish film that is one of the earliest examples of a viable talking film; an animated sausage commercial film from the mid-1930s that uses Dufay Color, a mosaic screen additive system that predates Technicolor; and a raunchy 1910 one-reeler about Copenhagen nightlife.

“These are films that we restored recently. They’re all entertaining films, one about color and cinema, one about sound and cinema. It’s broadening people’s idea of the development of cinema,” said Thomas Christensen, curator of the DFI.

“It’s great that there’s this kind of channel for content that is otherwise sitting fallow in the archive,” said Christensen. “I don’t expect it to become a blockbuster phenomenon. It might never be more than marginal but it’s an interesting channel to be represented on. I think this is very much a transition time, and we have to explore the possibilities.”

This is exciting news, though it doesn’t explain where the other 50% of the money has come from, or what happens after the first year. Also, some of those films may have been already made available online elsewhere (Daisy Doodad’s Dial is being offered by the BFI for free downloading on its Creative Archive site). But the more exposure the better, because it is all about finding those new audiences.

So roll on the 1910 scenes of raunchy Copenhagen nightlife, and shame on Belgium.

Update (June 2008): The site is now available, from www.europafilmtreasures.eu. An initial review of the site fom The Bioscope is here.

What happens next?

February 11, 2008 By urbanora in Exhibitions, Photography, Pre-cinema

Sleep with me series, Pihla, Nanna Saarhelo, 2007, from PM Gallery

Occasionally on the Bioscope we look to cinema’s roots in chronophotography, optical toys, magic lanterns and such like, and a new exhibition has just opened which both takes us back to chronophotography and up to the present day.

What Happens Next? is an exhibition dedicated to the photographic sequence. It takes as its inspiration the work of the nineteenth century photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, whose sequence photography – or chronophotography – of the 1870s/80s did so much to inspire the creation of cinema. The exhibition runs at the PM Gallery in West London 8 February-15 March 2008, and it explores the work of artists working in sequence photography from the nineteenth century to today. The artists featured are John Blakemore, Julie Cassels, Matt Finn, Steffi Klenz, Mari Mahr, Edweard Muybridge, James Newton, Nanna Saarhelo, Andrew Warstat, Sally Waterman and Cary Welling.

Coinciding with the exhibition is an article on Muybridge in this week’s New Scientist magazine (only an extract is available online). It’s a thoughtful piece (certainly a lot more thoughtful than its dire title, ‘Lights, camera, action!’ would seem to promise), with more emphasis on Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope discs that one normally finds. The Zoopraxiscope was Muybridge’s proto-animation device, whereby he transferred some of his photographic sequences in silhouette form onto the edges of a glass disc so that they could be projected as fleeting animated images.

What Muybridge did not do was ever show his photographic sequences themselves as projected images in motion – he wasn’t able to. And yet how often to we see something like the animated sequences featured in this video?

This short piece on the exhibition has been posted on YouTube by the New Scientist, which rather goes to show that there are some limits to its knowledge of science. Muybridge’s photographic sequences were never seen in motion like this. To make them move he had to produce silhouettes derived from the photographs, making him a genuine pioneer of the animation film. The pure photographs he only displayed like so:

Ascending Stairs

Of course, it is hugely tempting to animated Muybridge’s images, as has been done ever since Thom Andersen’s 1975 film Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer. Animated Muybridge sequences are found all over the Web, and have become an iconographic staple. But they falsify history – unless one argues that they display what Muybridge wanted to have displayed but was unable to achieve himself. In which case, they are a form of virtual history, which is all well and good, so long as we do not foget the true one.

As What Happens Next? demonstrates, chronophotography or sequence photography is alive and well today, practiced both as an art and as a science (either equally appropriate for Muybridge), for a sequential series both demonstrates a process and betrays a narrative. Chronophotographic sequences were used to striking effect for analysis in the BBC’s coverage of the last Winter Olympics, and there are numerous artists’ sites which display the possibilities of the medium. Some choice examples include P.J. Reptilehouse, Sequences, and my particular favourite, David Crawford, who photographs sequence of people on tube trains and at airports.

There’s also this review of What Happens Next?, which connects Muybridge with The Matrix, on the Telegraph‘s website.

When the Barbican put on Molly

February 10, 2008 By urbanora in Music, Performers, Screenings 2 Comments

Molly Picon in East and West (Ost und west), from Barbican Film

The home for silent film in London is now the Barbican centre, whose Silent Film and Live Music continues to demonstrate imaginative programming in the titles selected and the music chosen to accompany them.

Apart from highlighting the current series, I wanted to draw particular attention to the film showing on Sunday February 17, Ost und West (East and West) (Austria 1923). This features Molly Picon, the great star of Yiddish stage and screen, and gives me the opportunity of reproducing the splendid still above. The diminutive, round-eyed Molly Picon (1898-1992) was a New York Yiddish theatre star, on the stage from the age of six, and massively popular among Jewish and on-Jewish audiences in the 1920s. She made made a handful of films in the 1920s and 30s, before returning to the screen more regularly in the 1970s (she’s most familiar to general audiences for playing the matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof). Ost und West is the earliest of her films that survives. I’ve not see the film (yet), so here’s the Barbican’s blurb for it:

Featuring Molly Picon, one of the great stars of Yiddish cinema, it tells the story of streetwise New York flapper Mollie, who travels to her cousin’s wedding in a traditional Polish shtetl. Contrasting sophisticated city values against those of simple village life, the film contains classic scenes of the irrepressible Picon lifting weights, boxing and teaching young villagers to shimmy, and eventually meeting her match in a young yeshiva scholar.

The music comes from Lemez Lovas of Oi Va Voi and guest musicians Moshikop and Rohan Kriwaczek, taking in “traditional klezmer to contemporary electronica, from liturgical melancholy to party pop kitsch and from vaudeville to breakbeat.” Directed by Sidney M. Goldin and Ivan Abramson, the film is screening at 16.00 and runs for 85mins.

http://www.amazon.co.uk

For anyone interested in the history of Yiddish film, the essential source is J. Hoberman’s Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Wars (1991), which apart from its commendable written content, is just one of the most beautifully-produced books on film history that I know. Check out also Sylvia Plaskin, When Joseph Met Molly: A Reader on Yiddish Film (1999) (Joseph being the Polish director Joseph Green), Judith N. Goldberg, Laughter Through Tears: The Yiddish Cinema (1983), or Eric A. Goldman, Visions, Images and Dreams: Yiddish Film Past and Present (1984).

Other titles being screened in the Barbican series are:

9 March – On Our Selection (Australia 1920) – homely, landmark Australian comedy-drama about the pioneering Rudd family. With piano accompaniment by Neil Brand.

3 April – Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (USA 1927) – King Kong creators Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B Shoedsack’s classic dramatised documentary set in the jungles of Thailand (and producing background footage that went on to pad out a number of Tarzan movies). With live accompaniment by Italian group Yo Yo Mundi.

20 April – The St Kilda Tapes – a collection of silent films from the Scottish Screen Archive, including the topical St. Kilda – Britain’s Loneliest Isle (1923-28), Da Makkin O’ A Keshie (1932), and A New Way to a New World (1936), all set to music by acoustic guitarist David Allison.

4 May – Nanook of the North (USA 1922) – the so-called first documentary film (if you’ve got a couple of hours I’ll give you chapter and verse on how wrong all the text books are), directed by poet of cinema Robert Flaherty. Music from the Shrine Synchrosystem, featuring Max Reinhardt, DJ Rita Ray, world music kora master Tunde Jegede and Ben Mandelson on guitars, which ought to steer us away from the siren temptations of too much authenticity (like Flaherty?).

17 May – The Wind (USA 1928) – one of the cast-iron classics of silent cinema, Victor Sjöström’s visual masterpiece stars Lillian Gish living a hard life in dust-bowl Texas, and is guaranteed to convert even the stoniest-hearted sceptic into acclaming silent cinema. With the Carl Davis symphonic score (sadly, not with actual orchestra).

1 June – The Passion of Joan of Arc (Denmark 1928) – somehow not convinced even by The Wind? Carl Theodore Dreyer’s astonishing, overpowering work, with Falconetti as Joan, will do the trick. With music by In the Nursery.

15 June – Stella Dallas (USA 1925) – classic weepie from Henry King, starring Ronald Colman, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Belle Bennett. Remade with Barbara Stanwyck in 1937, but this is the version to see. With piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne.

Through Savage Europe

February 9, 2008 By urbanora in Non-fiction, Publications, Travel and exploration

Harry de Windt

Just added to the Bioscope Library is Through Savage Europe: Being the narrative of a journey (undertaken as special correspondent of the “Westminster Gazette”), throughout the Balkan States and European Russia. This is an account of a journey through the states of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Servia (as the book has it), Bulgaria, Rumania and Russia in 1907. This was the area that was soon to experience conflict through the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, then to be the powder keg that helped start off the First World War.

Of interest to us is that the author, journalist and adventurer Harry de Windt, took a motion picture cameraman with him. This was John Mackenzie of the Charles Urban Trading Company, to whom De Windt refers throughout:

My sole companion was Mr. Mackenzie, of the Urban Bioscope Company, a canny Scotsman from Aberdeen, possessed of a keen sense of humour and of two qualities indispensable to a “bioscope” artist – assurance and activity. Nothing daunted my friend when he had once resolved to secure a “living” picture, and I trembled more than once for his safety in the vicinity of royal residences or military ground. For the bioscope was a novelty in the Balkans and might well have been mistaken for an infernal machine!

Relatively little is said of Mackenzie’s actual work (he left before de Windt went on to Russia), but the interest is in his very presence, in the tie-up with a British newspaper (the Westminster Gazette), and in the Balkans as a topic of sufficient interest to audiences at home to justify the expense of organising such a venture. Here is the motion picture medium as a news and documentary force, bound up with the other news media, reporting on a remote locality of pressing interest to British audiences (Urban had sent out a cameraman to the same area in 1903 to film a Macedonian uprising against the Turks) who could read it up in the papers and then, suitably briefed, see it all with interested eyes on the motion picture screen.

For the record, this a list of the films taken by Mackenzie (sadly, none is known to survive today):

Roumania: Its Citizens and its Soldiers (22 scenes, 420 feet)
Herzegovina, Bosnia and Dalmatia (22 scenes, 710 feet)
Montenegro and the Albania Alps (14 scenes, 350 feet)
Life and Scenes in Servia (17 scenes, 435 feet)
Bulgaria and its Citizens (18 scenes, 800 feet)
Bulgarian Infantry (18 scenes, 410 feet)
Bulgarian Cavalry and Artillery (17 scenes, 415 feet)

Mackenzie would go on to become a leading Kinemacolor cameraman, shooting many of the earlier productions demonstrating the colour process.

Through Savage Europe is available from the Internet Archive in DjVu (14MB), PDF (38MB), b/w PDF (17MB) and TXT (439KB) formats.

CineFiles

February 7, 2008 By urbanora in Resources

CineFiles is the film document image database of the Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, California. The database comprises reviews, press kits, programme notes, newspaper articles and other documents from the Archive’s library collection. The documents cover world cinema, past and present. Over 25,000 films are represented, and their target figure is 200,000 documents, with more being added daily.

You can search by document (under title, author, date or publisher, or for documents about specific films, people, or subjects) or filmographic data (under title, subject, genre, director, year, country, or studio). There doesn’t seem to be any easy way of isolating silent films (typing in ‘silent’ into the subject field only brings up three titles), so you will have to search by title, director or specific year for the best results.

The collection is particularly strong on Russian and Soviet cinema, so, as an example, the record for Protazanov’s Pikovaia dama (The queen of spades) (1916), erroneously given as a Soviet Union production (in 1916 the country was still Russia), provides the researcher with the following:

Title: Pikovaia dama (The queen of spades)
Director: Protazanov, Iakov Aleksandrovich
Country of Prod.: Soviet Union
Year: 1916
Language: Russian
Production Co.:
Genre: Adaptation, Horror
Subject: Gamblers — Drama, Ghosts — Drama

Related Documents:

1. Silent witnesses — excerpt – Tsivian, Yuri – British Film Institute – 1989 – 3 pages – – book excerpt

View full description of this document
View page images: Pg. 1, Pg. 2, Pg. 3

2. Costumes and classics – – National Film Theatre (London, England) – 1990 Feb 04 – 1 page – – program note

View full description of this document
View page images: Pg. 1

3. Pikovaya dama (the queen of spades) – Borger, Lenny – Variety – 1990 Mar 21 – 1 page – – review

View full description of this document
View page images: Pg. 1

4. Queen of spades – – Mary Pickford Theater (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.) – 1992 Apr – 1 page – – program note

View full description of this document

5. The queen of spades – – Pacific Film Archive – – 2 pages – – program note

View full description of this document
View page images: Pg. 1, Pg. 2

6. The queen of spades – Svolkein, N. – – – 4 pages – – intertitles

View full description of this document
View page images:
Pg. 1, Pg. 2, Pg. 3, Pg. 4

7. The queen of spades – Svolkein, N. – – – 1 page – – intertitles

View full description of this document
View page images: Pg. 1

8. The queen of spades – Bolotnikov, Vladimir – – – 4 pages – – intertitles

View full description of this document
View page images:
Pg. 1, Pg. 2, Pg. 3

9. Mosjoukine — excerpt – – – – 3 pages – – book excerpt

View full description of this document
View page images: Pg. 1, Pg. 2, Pg. 3

The page image references are links to GIF or JPEG images of book extracts, programme notes etc. The document search option has some very useful means to narrow a search, including type of document (advertisement, bibliography, book excerpt, correspondence, obituary etc.), and further options are provided to search by documents with box office information, production costs, illustrations etc. Some of the documents are surprisingly long, though it is a little frustrating that the pages are provided as separate image files rather than brought together, for example in PDF format.

There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of older original documents (e.g. posters, press materials, lobby cards for silent films) but the database offers a very handy guide to the critical literature (copyright clearance has been obtained for all the page images they publish). It’s plainly set out and simple to use. Go explore.

It’s only nine months away…

February 5, 2008 By urbanora in Festivals

Sparrows, from http://www.cinetecadelfriuli.org/gcm

Let’s not wish away all the joys that 2008 in sure to bring, but the first news on the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (4-11 October) is out.

Among the main festival features will be

Aleksandr Shiryaev (Russian ballet dancer and producer of puppet dance films)
French comedy of the post-war silent era
Hollywood on the Hudson
Viktor Tourjansky
The Griffith Project, 12 (1925-1931)
The Corrick Collection, 2 (Australian collection of early actualities)

And the opening music event is to be a gala screening of the Mary Pickford classic Sparrows (1926), with score by Jeffrey Silverman, performed live for the first time by the Orchestra Sinfonica del Friuli Venezia Giulia, conducted by Hugh Munro Neely.

OK, October is a little time away, but a little closer is the 25 May deadline for applications to sign up to this year’s Collegium at Pordenone. This is a week-lomng programme of study into film history and film archiving with special sessions from notable expert visitors to the festivals. There are twelve places available, and applicants should preferably be under thirty years of age and pursuing education in cinema in some form. Collegians are given free hotel accommodation and breakfast during the week, but are responsible for their own travel arrangements, meals, and all other expenses. More information, including how to apply, from the festival site.

Happy birthday, Bioscope!

February 4, 2008 By urbanora in Bioscope 7 Comments

Yes folks, it was one year ago to the day that the Bioscope first opened its eyes, put its fingers to the keyboard, and produced these words:

Welcome to The Bioscope, the place for news, information, documentation and opinion on the world of early and silent cinema.

And here we are, some 500 posts, 10,350 deleted spam messages, 61,200 visitors and somewhere over 100,000 words later, still dedicated to the cause. And for my amusement, if no one else’s, these are the top twenty posts by number of visits over the past year (excluding visits to sections such as About and Library):

1. Searching for Albert Kahn
2. Paul Merton on tour
3. The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn
4. The Twenties in Colour
5. The Invention of Hugo Cabret
6. Slapstick, European-style – part 1
7. 100 years of the Autochrome
8. Crazy Cinématographe – Travelling Cinema
9. The silent films of Alfred Hitchcock
10. Paul Merton’s Silent Comedy
11. A Tour of the Cinema Museum with Ronald Grant
12. The Great War in Colour
13. Edwardian hoodies
14. Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns
15. The Silent Worker
16. The Bioscope Festival of Lost Films
17. Lost and Found no. 2 – Dawson City
18. Times past
19. Visiting the Volta
20. Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism

So thank you to Messrs. Kahn and Merton for having attracted so much custom, and thank you dear readers for all your comments and collaboration. Let’s hope for new adventures and passions in year two.

Colourful stories no. 5 – The Brighton School

February 3, 2008 By urbanora in Colour, People 4 Comments

Davidson-Jumeaux two-colour system from 1904, blue-green image on the left, orange image on the right

We might note, in passing, that almost all these pioneers were living in Brighton and that they were all in their individualistic and several ways certain that they, and they alone, had inventions worth a fortune. Why did they not collaborate? Were they mutually acquainted? We shall probably never know.

So wrote Adrian Klein, author of the exceptional history and technological survey, Colour Cinematography, first published in 1936. For it is an intriguing fact that most of the pioneers of colour cinematography in what we can call the pre-Kinemacolor era were located in and around the Brighton area, 1898-1906. And in answer to Klein, yes, they were mutually acquainted, some did collaborate, and this is their story.

It was the French film historian Georges Sadoul who first coined the phrase ‘Brighton School’ in the 1940s, to describe a small group of experimenters in motion picture form, among them Esmé Collings, G.A. Smith and James Williamson, who were based in the Brighton and Hove area. The notion of a ‘school’ is a misleading one, though it has proved an enduring term in early film studies, but there was undoubtedly a grouping of like-minded filmmakers, photographers and technicians, larger in composition than Sadoul realised, and dedicated mostly not to innovations in film form to please future film historians, but in a holy grail for the new film industry, colour cinematography. The chief ‘members’ were Alfred Darling, William Norman Lascelles Davidson, Benjamin Jumeaux, Edward Grün, Otto Pfenninger, William Friese-Greene, Charles Urban and George Albert Smith.

Alfred Darling, from http://www.victorian-cinema.net

Alfred Darling (1862-1931) was not an experimenter in colour cinematography himself, but he was a technician of genius, whose presence in the area (he lived at 25 Ditchling Rise, Hove) gave huge impetus to the local cinematography industry. His engineering business supplied cinematographic equipment for the Warwick Trading Company, the major British film business of the late 1890s/early 1900s era. It was he who constructed Bioscope cameras and projectors for Warwick, and who supplied much of the equipment used by his experimenting neighbours.

The Kammatograph, from http://www.victorian-cinema.net

Captain William Norman Lascelles Davidson (c.1871-c.1944), formerly of the 4th Battalion The Kings (Liverpool) Regiment, was an enthusiastic amateur inventor, pursuing the goal of both colour photography and colou cinematography. He claimed to have spent £3,000 in his quest (multiply figures from the early 1900s by 100 to have an idea of equivalent costs today). His first patent for a putative three-colour cinematography system was issued in 1898, which he followed by with a patent for a three-colour still photography method the following year. No working model emerged from either, but in 1901 he teamed up with his neighbour Dr Benjamin Jumeaux to work on the Kammatograph, a filmless device which recorded motion pictures in a spiral on a disc, invented by Leo Kamm. They experimented with two colour filters, instead of three, an inspiration that may have come from the man who probably processed their films – or else he was to take the idea from them – their near neighbour G.A. Smith. Other experiments followed in 1903 and particularly 1904, with their invention (B.P. 7,179 of 1904) which employed twin prisms creating a blue-green and orange record with the pictures side by side, exposed simultaneously (see illustration at top of this post). But the results demonstrated were criticised for poor definition and unnatural colour effects. Davidson then took on William Friese-Greene as his employee, and other demonstrations would follow in 1906, with similar lack of practical success. Davidson then fades out of the picture, still something of a mystery figure.

Mystery three-colour experiment (c.1903) believed to be by Davidson and Jumeaux, part of the Will Day collection, Cinémathèque française

Computerised synthesis of what the above colour record might have looked like

Dr Benjamin Jumeaux (c.1852-?) is still more of a mystery. He lived in Southwick, just outside Brighton, as did Davidson and Smith. He was born in Ceylon (Sir Lanka), of Anglo-French parentage. In the 1901 census he is described as a physician, surgeon and artist. He is named on patents alongside Davidson, but also had patents issued under his own name, demonstrating that he was not simply a financier to the experiments. Included in the Will Day collection at the Cinémathèque française is an extraordinary piece of film, 82mm wide, with three parallel black-and-white images, each registering a red, green and blue image. The Cinémathèque has identified this as Davidson-Jumeaux, apparently through evidence suplied by a perforator, but I have come across no evidence of such a film featuring in their public demonstrations.

Dr Edward F. Grün, or Grune, also lived in Southwick, and was close friends with G.A. Smith. His hobby was inventions in colour photography, and he became briefly celebrated in 1902 for his invention of a ‘fluid’ lens, with coloured fluids within the camera lens itself. Ingenious but pointless, the idea did not catch on. Grün’s would feature as a key witness in a 1913 court case between Kinemacolor and a rival colour system, Biocolour, where his muddled testimony revealed his uncertain grasp of technology as well as events. More on that story in a later post.

Otto Pfenninger colour photograph of Brighton beach, 1906, from Royal Photographic Society

Otto Pfenninger (1855-?) was Swiss-born, but living in Brighton by the 1890s, where he ran a photography business. He became closely associated with the other Brighton experimenters, especially Davidson and Jumeaux, whom he assisted in some form, but his prime interest was always still photography. He wrote on his experiences in a book, Byepaths of Colour Photography (1921) published under the pseudonym O. Reg, from which the rare (unique?) frames of a Davidson-Jumeaux two-colour experiment in 1904 at the top of this post derives. He devised his own three-colour still photography system, demonstrated by the photograph above of Brighton beach in July 1906.

William Friese-Greene, from http://www.victorian-cinema.net

William Friese-Greene (1855-1921) had had a long association with Brighton through his business partnership with Esmé Collings before he moved from Essex to 203 Western Road, Brighton in 1905. Here he became the paid employee of Captain Davidson, whose experiments were conducted at 20 Middle Street, Brighton. Friese-Greene already had a patent for a three-colour cinematography system in his name from 1898, and issued another with Davidson in April 1905 (B.P. 9,465 – it employed a beam-splitting prism), which he would subsequently boast was the ‘master patent’ for colour cinematography. It was of no such thing, but the full story behind Friese-Greene’s vainglorious efforts to invent colour cinematography must receive full treatment later in this series.

Charles Urban

Charles Urban (1867-1942) was not an inventor nor a resident of Brighton, but he was a major figure on the scene, and the most important person in colour cinematography in the period up to the First World War, for his championing of Kinemacolor. Urban had first become interested in colour cinematogaphy when Edward Turner and Frederick Lee (subjects of an earlier post) came to his Warwick Trading Company in 1901 looking for financial support for their three-colour system. When Warwick the company lost interest, Urban took on the financing of the project himself. Turner died in 1903, but, undeterred, Urban passed on the development work to his close associate G.A. Smith. Urban came down to Brighton every weekend (or so he claimed) as Smith’s experiments progressed, making himself an honorary ‘Brighton School’ member. Much more on his history is to follow.

George Albert Smith, from http://www.victorian-cinema.net

And then there is George Albert Smith (1864-1959), long-lived enough that he might have corrected Adrian Klein, had he a mind to. He lived in Brighton and Southwick, and had already enjoyed a colourful career as mesmerist, showman, filmmaker and film processor for the Warwick Trading Company. He had worked with Lee and Turner, he knew all about the two-colour experiments of Davidson and Jumeaux, he knew all the others, knew what they had done right and all the more importantly what they had done wrong. In particular, he had taken note of the two-colour experiments of Davidson and Jumeaux, and thought he knew how he could make such an idea work, not least by application of his superior knowledge of sensitising photographic materials.

So tune in next week, for the invention of Kinemacolor.

Recommended reading:
Luke McKernan, ‘The Brighton School and the Quest for Natural Colour’, in Vanessa Toulmin and Simon Popple (eds.), Visual Delights – two: Exhibition and Reception (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2005)

Music for experimental film

February 1, 2008 By urbanora in Avant garde, DVD and Blu-Ray, Online videos

I missed this excellent-looking DVD release from Kino when it appeared late last year, but no harm in drawing attention to it now.

Music for Experimental Film is a collection of avant garde film classics from the 1920s, with music from former Television guitarist and front man Tom Verlaine plus producer/guitarist Johnny Rip. Originally a live show, the DVD features the original films with the music accompaniment for the most played live from a selection of the concerts.

The films featured are:

L’Étoile de Mer (France 1928 12 mins Man Ray)

The Fall of the House of Usher (USA 1928 13 mins James S. Watson & Melville Webber)

The Life and Death of 9413 A Hollywood Extra (USA 928 11 mins Slavko Vorkapich and Robert Florey)

Emak-Bakia (France 1926 13 mins Man Ray)

Rhythmus 21 (Germany 1921 3 mins Hans Richter)

Brumes d’Automne (France 1929 12 mins Dimitri Kirsanoff)

Ballet Mécanique (France 1924 10 mins Fernand Léger)

To judge from the extracts Kino have provided on the YouTube promo (Emak-Bakia, Rhythmus 21 and Ballet Mécanique) the marriage of delicate post-punk guitar and the visual purity of the films (all the better for the occasional scratches and blemishes earned through age) works particularly well. An apposite and haunting combination.