Tag Archives: Silent films

Rex Ingram, pageant master

February 5, 2012 By in Filmmakers Tags:

Rex Ingram and Alice Terry, from http://www.rexingram.ie

Rex Ingram (1893-1950) was the most romantic of film directors. Certainly he was one of the few directors who looked as though their rightful place was in front of the camera rather than behind it (he began his film career as an actor). One of the great imaginative Hollywood filmmakers of the early 1920s, he is also viewed as one of the leading figures in the diasporic Irish cinema, and James Joyce helped immortalise him by referring to Ingram in Finnegans Wake as ‘Rex Ingram, pageant master’ (the full sentence is a long and frankly incomprehensible one, but the paranthetical reference says ‘his scaffold is there set up, as to edify, by Rex Ingram, pageant-master’).

It is certainly appropriate that a new website dedicated to Ingram should have a .ie ending rather than .com, even if he was your typical Irishman in exile (he left the country aged 18 and never returned). Rex Ingram has been created by Ruth Barton, a lecturer in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin, and it’s good to see an academic produce a site which can be seen as much as a fan site as a scholarly resource. It gets the balance just right.

The site introduces him as the ‘handsome, strong-willed visionary was responsible for a succession of films for Metro Pictures, later M-G-M, that topped the box office and were hailed as masterpieces by the critics’, director of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalyse (1921), the man who made stars of Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro, husband of the actress Alice Terry who appeared in most of his films, a man with a bohemian social life, and a perhaps not unwilling victim of the arrival of the talkies.

A biographical section is fullest part of this work-in progress site, and covers Ingram’s early life in Ireland (he left in 1911), his time as an actor with Edison (as Rex Hitchcock, his birth name) then as an increasingly admired scriptwriter, to his directing career which began in 1914, first with Universal and then Metro, where his great film included Hearts are Trumps (1921), The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), Where the Pavement Ends (1923), The Prisoner of Zenda (1922) and Scaramouche (1923). Ingram rebelled against the strictures being introduced by Louis B. Mayer at what was now M-G-M and decamped to the South of France where he made Mare Nostrum (1926) and The Magician (1926). His style became increasingly personalised and undisciplined, he split from M-G-M, and then the arrival of sound flummoxed him and he retired from the motion picture industry after Baroud (1932).

The site also covers Ingram’s parallel experiences as a sculptor, artist, art collector and writer (he produced two novels), and his artistic legacy, inspiring David Lean and mentoring the young Michael Powell at his Riviera film studios. There is a picture gallery and a resources page, though with just the one link to an article and mention of Liam O’Leary’s biography of Ingram, it’s clear that this site is going to develop much further. It’s odd that there is no filmography – it would certainly help to make the site all the more definitive.

Rex Ingram is but one output of a project led by Barton to build upon Liam O’Leary’s research, with a hoped-for cataloguing of the O’Leary papers at the National Library of Ireland, an exhibition and film retrospective, and then maybe a new biography. Anyone who can help with the research, partiularly anyone with resources which might be added to the site should get in touch with Barton.

Welcome to the Bioscope

February 4, 2012 By in Bioscope Tags: 8 Comments

The Bioscope is five years old today, and it’s time for a change. We have had the same template all that time, and though it had its plain virtues I’ve wanted for a while to give the site a fresh look, while not upsetting the general balance of things too greatly. So here is the new look.

As you will see, we have the same name, the same subtitle, the same banner, and the same features (with a few tweaks) down the right-hand side. The search box is now positioned top left. The top menu has been simplified. Instead of the old Calendar, Conferences and Festivals sections, there is now an Events section (which is the renamed Calendar) with sub-menus for Conferences and Festivals. So no information has been lost, indeed the Conferences section now has a (hopefully) handy listing of past conferences with links.

The Library section remains as before, with main part a listing on freely available e-books on silent film, and sub-categories for Catalogues and Databases, Directories and Journals also available online, now with a clearer drop-down menu to guide you to the right section.

Other changes will be made over the next few weeks as I get used to the template and maybe make a few small cosmetic changes. I’m aware that the FAQ section is in needed of a refresh, and I also need to check all of the links on the righ-hand column, a number of which are now defunct.

If you are new to the Bioscope, then a particular welcome to you. This is a website (in the form of a blog) dedicated to providing information on early and silent film. We range widely in our interests, from pre-cinema technologies through to the modern silent film today, with strong emphases on research and online resources. There is an overview of the site on the About page, which includes a lsting of some of the key informational posts we have produced in the past. Browsing through some of these will give you an idea of what we’re about. We also have a Twitter feed, Flickr site, YouTube channel, a Vimeo channel and a daily news service (courtesy of Scoop it).

It’s been an interesting five years, during which I have written enough words to fill five books – which is both worrying and heartening. Sometimes I wonder at all this energy devoted to the ephemeral online world, but then I reason that each new post gets more views per day than most of the academic papers I have written have had readers over years, which must mean something. And then I do have my moments when I wonder what the point of it all is, indeed why the focus on silent films when there are other things in this world that divert me quite as much, and at such times I have thought of closing the site down. But then someone makes a comment saying that they like a particular post, or I meet someone at some film event who says how the find the Bioscope useful, and I realise I must press on.

So thank you, gentle readers. Do let me know your thoughts about the new site. It should look better on today’s bigger screens (though I am defiantly holding on to my Academy ratio laptop for as long as I can), and there small additions like the email and print options which I hope will be useful. I am always open to suggestions for new features, subjects of posts, events to promote (with a tendency towards the international), and resources to highlight. I don’t know if the Bioscope will continue for another five years, but the next target is a million visitors, which all being well we should attain some time later this year.

So we press on.

Tears from laughter

February 2, 2012 By in Obituaries, Poetry Tags: 3 Comments

“This merriment dangling from terror…”: Harold Lloyd in Safety Last

The death has been announced of the Polish poet and Nobel prizewinner Wisława Szymborska. Her best-known connection with film is her poem ‘Love at First Sight’, which is believed to have been the inspiration for Krysztof Kieslowski’s film Three Colours: Red. However, in the same 1993 collection, The End and the Beginning, there is another Szymborska poem, ‘Slapstick’, which wryly considers silent film comedy as a metaphor for the human condition. We have reproduced this poem on the Bioscope before now, but it’s such a favourite of mine that I’m taking the liberty of posting it here once again on this sad occasion.

If there are angels,
I doubt they read
our novels
concerning thwarted hopes.

I’m afraid, alas,
they never touch the poems
that bear our grudges against the world.

The rantings and railings
of our plays
must drive them, I suspect,
to distraction.

Off-duty, between angelic –
i.e. inhuman – occupations,
they watch instead
our slapstick
from the age of silent film.

To our dirge wailers,
garment renders,
and teeth gnashers,
they prefer, I suppose,
that poor devil
who grabs the drowning man by his toupee
or, starving, devours his own shoelaces
with gusto.

From the waist up, starch and aspirations;
below, a startled mouse
runs down his trousers.
I’m sure
that’s what they call real entertainment.

A crazy chase in circles
ends up pursuing the pursuer.
The light at the end of the tunnel
turns out to be a tiger’s eye.
A hundred disasters
mean a hundred cosmic somersaults
turned over a hundred abysses.

If there are angels,
they must, I hope,
find this convincing,
this merriment dangling from terror,
not even crying Save me Save me
since all of this takes place in silence.

I can even imagine
that they clap their wings
and tears run from their eyes
from laughter, if nothing else.

I can warmly recommend Szymborska’s poetry in general – gentle, witty, accessible and wise. Her New and Collected Poems are published by Roundhouse, and there’s a fine Selected Poems published by Faber.

Pathé and time

January 30, 2012 By in Non-fiction, Resources Tags: 3 Comments

http://www.britishpathe.com (showing timeline option)

We return from our antipodean adventures with a number of developments in the silent film world to tell you about, the first of which is British Pathé’s new website. The company that now bears the name British Pathé has little connection with the original Pathé firm – the Pathé newsreel library in Britain was purchased by some venture capitalists a few years ago, but they have worked hard to raise the profile of the collection. This has included a high profile for Pathé clips on BBC television following a special footage deal, and the recent BBC4 television series on the history of the Pathé library.

British Pathé has also made energetic use of social media, blogging and tweeting with the best of them in a commendable effort to engage an online audience with archive film. This has now led to a re-designed website in which blog, Twitter feed and Facebook presence (6,634 people like them) are prominent on the front page alongside thematic selections of newsreel and cinemagazine footage. The British Pathé library amounts to some 3,500 hours (90,000 clips) ranging from the 1890s to the 1970s, and following a Lottery-funded grant in the early 2000s the whole collection was digitised and has been made freely available (in low resolution) to all ever since.

We have written about the non-fiction and (surprisingly enough) fiction films to be found on the Pathé site before now. What is new about ths site which is of particular interest to us is a timeline feature, which enables the researcher to select any time period, from one year to another by the use of a simple slider tool, making it easy to identify film from whichever part of the silent era interests us. The timeline tool doesn’t appear on the front page, but if you put in any search term, or simply click on ‘Search’ without having entered any term at all, you are taken to the search results page and the timeline appears. Use this to select the period 1890-1930, and you’ll find 16,875 relevant clips waiting for you. Alternatively, search for everything, then go to the Advanced Filters option on the right-hand side and select Videos with No Sound (there are 41,092 of them).

A warning or two is required when using the British Pathé site. The newsreel collection is reasonably well documented from 1918 onwards, but before then the collection is a mishmash of Pathé newsreels, bought-in footage, fiction films, unidentified material and all maner of oddities. A lot of it is not Pathé-produced (there are Lumière, Méliès, Hepworth, Eclair, Eclipse and other productions to be found). Many of these early items have only approximate dates and made-up titles, and often the catalogue records are more enthusiastic than historically informed. This can make Pathé an annoying site to browse, since they seem to know so little about such a significant corner of their collection, but it also provides the potential for some interesting discoveries for the knowledgeable researcher, because there is a lot there that is crying out for proper identification and appreciation.

Here are some of the unidentified fiction films that you might like to try and identify:

It can be difficult finding some of the undated films, since they won’t turn up by using timeline searches, but if you can find just the one fiction film and then search on its keywords, such as comedy or melodrama, then you’ll uncover more of these hidden fiction films.

For non-fiction and standard newsreels of the silent era, the British Pathé site is a joy. There is every personality, incident, location, fad, issue, fashion, talking point, invention and innovation you could wish for, from 1896-1930. With the timeline, categories and keywords, the British Pathé site has become all the more compulsively browsable, even if one could wish for a little less in the way of vague speculation among some of the catalogue records.

Go explore.

Australian journey no. 5 – Rounding up

January 24, 2012 By in Bioscope Tags: 4 Comments

The Topical Budget newsreel shows Amy Johnson returning home to Britain following her epic solo flight to Australia

I will be close to the end of my Australian jaunt by now (he said, typing this on January 15th), and to finish things off, here’s a set of links to past posts on things Australian, which do demonstrate that we’ve been giving some attention to its silent film heritage over the past few years.

  • Things Australian no. 2 (25 Jan 2011) – on the first Australian films and the research of Tony Martin-Jones.
  • Things Australian no. 1 – The Marvellous Corricks (23 Jan 2011) – on the Corrick family on entertainers and their collection of early films.
  • Discovering Australian (and beyond) (31 May 2009) – on the exceptional Australian SBDS portal (now known as Trove) which points the way to online research libraries in the future.
  • For your selection (8 Aug 2008) – researching Australian newspapers online.
  • God’s soliders (3 Nov 2011) – the pioneering use of film in Australia by the Salvation Army (updated for no. 4 in this Australian Journey series).
  • Three types of authenticity (29 Oct 2009) – thought on the Douglas Mawson Antarctic expedition of 1912-13 and the differences between its original film record (shot by Frank Hurley) and television today.
  • australianscreen (14 Sep 2007) – on the silent films to be found on this excellent educational website.
  • Diaries of a working man (16 Aug 2007) – on the charming diaries, available online, of post office clerk Alexander Goodall who witnessed the arrival of the Kinetoscope and the Cinematograph in Australia in 1895-97.

Back soon!

Australian journey no. 4 – The Salvation Army

January 22, 2012 By in Organisations, People Tags:

Here’s another in our series of interim posts on Australia and silent film, while I’m away in that country.

The subject is the Salvation Army, which played a very important part in the early Australian film industry. The video above comes from a DVD made by the Salvation Army today about its founder, William Booth – God’s Soldier. It includes a substantial amount of film of Booth, the founder of the Army, in the early years of the twentieth century, demonstrating how advanced the Army was in using new technologies (film, and as the clip demonstrates, motor cars) to spread the word. The film shows Booth’s motor tour through Britain in 1904 (unfortunately with added-on crowd noises and sound effects) but it was in Australia that the Booth family made such an impact with the visual media of the day.

I wrote a post on this four years ago, and it seems best to reproduce the substance of this, with updating of information and links where needed.

Many social interest groups and charities took an interest in using moving pictures to support their work, almost as soon as films were first made widely available on screen in 1896. None was more active in this area than the Salvation Army, particularly in Australia. There in 1896 Herbert Booth (left), rebellious son of William, joined Joseph Perry, who ran the Army’s Limelight Department. Together they added film to the Limelight Department’s multi-media show of Bible stories and uplifting instruction, which combined magic lanterns, photography, choral singing and sermons to create powerful, and hugely popular, narrative spectaculars. One such show, Soldiers of the Cross, first created in 1900, is sometimes cited as being the world’s first feature film, though in fact it was not a single film but rather a combination of slides, film, scripture and song. Moreover, it was preceded by an earlier effort, the two-and-a-half-hour Social Salvation (1898).

Booth and Perry built a glass-walled film studio at 69 Bourke Street, Melbourne in 1898. The room still exists as a archive and museum maintained by the army, with exhibits on the Limelight Department’s work. Initially they filmed with a Lumière Cinématographe, but by 1901 the were using a Warwick Bioscope. Soldiers of the Cross was exhibited across Australia, but Herbert Booth clashed with Salvation Army command in London, and left the Army in 1902, moving to San Francisco and taking Soldiers of the Cross with him. Perry continued in the film industry, increasingly making secular films, and continued as a film distributor into the 1920s.

William Booth himself made good use of film to propagandise for his cause. He had a film cameraman assigned to the Army, Henry Howse, who went with him to the Holy Land in 1905, and filmed many, if not all, of the early films of Booth featured in the God’s Soldier DVD. The original films are now preserved in the BFI National Archive.

There is an excellent site, Limelight, telling the story of the Limelight Department in Australia, based on a 2001 Australian Broadcasting Commission programme and exhibition. This has extensive information on the people behind the Limelight Department, the films they made and used, their tours, and the broader context of Australian early film history.

The National Film and Sound Archive in Australia has a feature on Soldiers of the Cross, which includes selections of the magic lantern slides that were a part of the show (none of the original film is known to survive, but the show did include some Lumière life of Christ films, which do survive).

The Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema site has biographical entries on Herbert Booth and Joseph Perry.

Much research has been done into the Salvation Army and its use of film in these early years by the American scholar Dean Rapp. His essay, ‘The British Salvation Army, the Early Film Industry and Urban Working-Class Adolescents, 1897-1918‘, in 20th Century British History 7:2 (1996), is well worth tracking down (it’s available online through academic subscription services).

Finally, the Salvation Army continues to make use of moving images, and has an active video unit.

Australian journey no. 3 – The Corricks

January 20, 2012 By in Archives and museums, People Tags:

We have written about the remarkable Corrick Collection before now. The Corrick Family Entertainer were performing troupe comprising Albert and Sarah Corrick and their eight children which toured Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia between 1901 and 1914. Their act incorporated films, some shot by themselves, but mostly selected from the best offerings from French, American and British producers. Around 135 films survive in the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, notable for their high quality and often exquisite colouring.

This video serves as an introduction to the family and the collection, with copious clips showing how the films serve as a primer for any keen to discovery the variety, inventiveness and delightfulness of early cinema. It’s a little odd in that it is entirely silent – not even music – but it is beautifully put together, and gives you all of the essential information, from the family history through to the film’s restoration.

For more information on the Corricks, see the australianscreen overview of the collection, the NFSA’s account of the films’ restoration, with film clips and interviews, or investigate newspapers, photographs, aticles and more on the Corricks via Australia’s peerless Trove database.

(Memo to the NFSA – you do know that the Corrick film in your collection which you continue to promote as Living London, made by Charles Urban in 1904, is in fact The Streets of London, made by Urban in 1906?)

Australian journey no. 1 – Gallipoli

January 16, 2012 By in War Tags:

The first of our mini-posts on Australia and silent film (while we are away visiting the country) doesn’t feature the land of Australia at all. It’s some of the precious footage that survives of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, in which many Australian and New Zealand troops died trying in vain to establish a sea route for Allied forces through to Russia.

The film was shot by British journalist (and later MP) Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. Ashmead-Bartlett’s written reports aroused great passions, and were important in establishing the idea of the Anzac. He took a cine camera with him, and the resultant film, With the Dardanelles Expedition: Heroes of Gallipoli (1916), was shown in England, Australia and America, causing great consternation among the British authorities, for whom Ashmead-Barlett’s words and images were anything but helpful propaganda.

The film was acquired by the Australian War Memorial in 1919, and was restored in 2005 with help from Peter (‘Lord of the Rings’) Jackson. The above video is a three-minute sequence from the twenty-minute original.

Further clips with useful curatorial notes on the film can be found on the australianscreen site, which has a section devoted to Gallipoli on film generally.

An example of Ashmead-Bartlett’s reporting, covering the Anzac landing at Gallipoli, can be read on the Gallipoli and the Anzacs site, with extracts from his diary which mention his use of the cinematograph on the same site.

Film was also taken from the Ottoman Turk side, though it’s unclear by whom. The footage can be found on YouTube, though the original source is unclear, and certainly wasn’t consulted.

Away for a while

January 14, 2012 By in Bioscope Tags: 4 Comments

The Bioscope is going to be a little on the quiet side for the next couple of weeks, as I am heading off for Australia for a wedding, and don’t expect have much opportunity for blogging while I’m there.

However, to ensure that you are not left staring forlornly at the same post for a fortnight, I have set up some mini-posts (bloglets) which have been programmed to appear automatically at two-day intervals, each featuring an Australian-themed video with a bit of background information.

See you all again soon – and many congratulations of course to Liz and Dave.