The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Kino DVD (left) and Republic Pictures Home Video laserdisc, from Steven Hill’s Movie Title Screens Page
Now here’s an epic undertaking, which some (most) may dismiss as mad, while the dedicated few may admire for its imagination and method. When I used to work as a cataloguer adding records to the BFI’s database, I used to ponder how useful – or at least interesting – it would be to have a frame grab of the title of a film appearing on the front page of a film’s record. It would help pinpoint the correct way of describing the film (except for such notorious example as Manhattan, which has no opening title, or Olivier’s Henry V, whose opening title is something quite different – go check), the source of possibly the most ruthlessly accurate of all film reference books, Markku Salmi’s National Film Archive Catalogue of Stills, Posters and Designs (1982). Even now (I will confess it), whenever I see a film title, something in me thinks, how useful if someone were to collect those. Ridiculous, yes, but surely useful, somehow.
And dang me if someone isn’t doing just that. Welcome to Steven Hill’s Movie Title Screens Page. Hill has taken on the task of publishing screen grabs of every film title frame that he can, mostly from VHS and DVD copies, giving title, year, director, image source, aspect ratio and Amazon link. Several films are represented more than once for different release versions. It’s arranged alphabetically, with no search option unfortunately, so there’s no immediate way of finding which silent titles are included, but silents there are. On quick inspection I found The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The Cat and the Canary, The Manxman, The Adventure of Prince Achmed, The Gold Rush, The Golem, The Last Laugh, The Ten Commandments, Waxworks, London After Midnight (no kidding, it’s there) and many more.
Steven Hill has apparently been working on this for eleven years, and receives contributions from others dedicated to the cause. The Movie Title Screens page is but one section of his personal site, which has several other film sections, of which Fay Wray Pages has the most relevance to silents.
Anyway, a magnificent undertaking in its own way. And I’m sort of glad that he decided to take on the task, and not me.
The latest addition to the Bioscope Library is a welcome example of a modern film scholarship text made freely available online. Thomas J. Saunders’ study, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany, looks at the American film in Germany during the Weimar period. German films of the 1920s have been much championed and studied, in part as alternatives to American films of the period, but the focus here is on the considerable impact American comedies, serials, society dramas and historical epics had in Germany, and the debates they occasioned on the influence of cinema and the perils of Americanisation. Films covered include The Ten Comandments, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ben Hur and Greed, and the image and impact of Jackie Coogan, Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd, Rudolph Valentino, Chaplin, Keaton and ‘slapstick’ in general. The book therefore looks at cultural and industrial relations between Germany and America in 1920s, through the prism of popular cinema, bringing together economic history, reception studies, film studies and social history.
The book has been published online in chapterised, word-searchable, web form as one of the California Digital Library’s eScholarship Editions, a welcome initiative to make sample scholarly text freely available online to demonstrate its range of publications. Another example from the same source, already in the Library, is Charles Musser’s Before the Nickelodeon. Academic publishers, where they are rich enough to do so, are increasingly experimenting with multi-platform strategies, making texts available in print, online by subscription or to a restricted group (many of the eScholarship Editions are available only to University of California staff and students), and a few titles (or sample chapters) available free to the public. It breaks down barriers, demonstrates the flexibility of text, encourages discovery. More such forward-thinking initiatives, please.
Opening tomorrow at the BFI South Bank is the first month in a planned six-month retrospective of the work of Charlie Chaplin. The BFI National Archive, in partnership with the Cineteca di Bologna and Lobster Films, is restoring all of Chaplin’s films made for the Keystone company in 1914, as a follow-up to its earlier work on the Chaplin Mutuals. All of the surviving Keystones (Her Friend the Bandit remains lost) are being shown over August and September in nine programmes, as follows.
Here’s the blurb from the BFI site (and programme booklet):
The life of Charles Chaplin is the cinema’s greatest ‘rags-to-riches’ story. Bryony Dixon of the BFI National Archive presents a season of his early films showing how Chaplin became the world’s first movie megastar.
From the Victorian workhouse and the south London slums to the heights of Hollywood and movie stardom, the life of Charles Chaplin is cinema’s greatest ‘rags-to-riches’ story. It is less well known that the 20th Century’s greatest screen star was already a celebrity on this side of the Atlantic before he ever made a film. The fact is that we would never really have known the degree of Chaplin’s genius if he had not gone into films and if they had not survived.
The BFI National Archive, together with the Cineteca di Bologna and Lobster Films, is restoring all of Chaplin’s earliest films made for the Keystone company in 1914. These fascinating films document Chaplin’s rapid progress as a screen performer and director as well as furthering our acquaintance with a host of great comedians such as Mabel Normand, Roscoe Arbuckle, Edgar Kennedy, Ford Sterling, Al St John and Mack Sennett himself. The films – which have previously been seen only in mutilated copies – are brought back to life by painstaking restoration.
After acting in several Keystone films, Chaplin took control and directed most of his films thereafter. After 35 films for Keystone, Chaplin negotiated a better deal for himself with the Essanay Company and had a high degree of control over his comedies. He began to refine his character and further developed the ‘little tramp’ persona during his stay with the Mutual Company in 1916/17. It is during this period that many of his best-loved films were made. Chaplin described those years as the happiest of his life. In the following years Chaplin produced fewer but longer films for First National and in 1921 directed his first feature, The Kid.
This film more than any other laid the ghosts of his London childhood. Shortly after its release and after seven years of solid hard work and 72 films, Chaplin decided to go home for a visit. His reception on arrival in England was astounding.
Chaplin continues to be an important figure for us in Britain. His early films can illuminate our irretrievably lost comic traditions – they are an important part of our cultural heritage despite being made in the US. His life and works tell us about the development of screen comedy, about his adaptation of the music hall comedy of 19th century Britain to the 20th century American film, as well as recording the development of an individual artist and performer of genius.
As David Robinson, Chaplin’s biographer says, “The clothes he wears may have come from American sweat-shops; the streets in which he moves are at once no city and every city, but the origins of that hat and cane, boots and baggy pants, and shabby tenement streets, are unmistakably to be sought in his boyhood London.”
And here’s a list of the Chaplin Keystones being shown over August and September:
Programme 1: 9 & 13 August Making a Living Kid Auto Races in Venice, Cal. Mabel’s Strange Predicament Between Showers A Film Johnnie
Programme 2: 16 & 20 August Tango Tangles His Favourite Pastime Cruel, Cruel Love The Star Boarder
Programme 3: 23 & 26 August Mabel at the Wheel Twenty Minutes of Love Caught in a Cabaret Caught in the Rain
Programme 4: 28 & 30 August A Busy Day The Fatal Mallet The Knockout Mabel’s Busy Day
Programme 5: 6 & 10 September Mabel’s Married Life Laughing Gas The Property Man The Face on the Bar Room Floor
Programme 6: 11 & 13 September Recreation [fragment only] The Masquerader His New Profession The Rounders The New Janitor
Programme 7: 14 & 16 September Those Love Pangs [incomplete] Dough and Dynamite Gentlemen of Nerve His Music Career
Programme 8: 20 & 22 September His Trysting Place Getting Acquainted His Prehistoric Past
In all these notices of upcoming silent festivals and the like, I’ve neglected two major American events in the calendar. So, as a quick catchup…
Cinecon
The Cinecon 44 Classic Film Festival takes place over Labor Day weekend, 28 August 1 September, in Hollywood. The festival feature nearly thirty silent and early sound features and multiple short subjects, with an emphasis on titles rarely given public screenings. This year’s lineup include Douglas Fairbanks in The Mollycoddle (1920), UCLA’s recent restoration of Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914), Harold Lloyd in The Freshman, Larry Semon in Spuds (1927), Lon Chaney in a resotration of the long-lost Triumph (1917), Tom Mix in Sky High (1922) and Hobart Bosworth in The Blood Ship (1927).
Cinesation
The Cinesation film preservation festival takes place Film Preservation Festival 25-28 September, at the Lincoln Theatre, Massillon, Ohio. It also showcases silents and early sound features. The programme (particularly the short subjects) is still being finalised, but among the promised titles are Kenneth Harlan and Viola Dana in The Ice Flood (1925), Ken Maynard in The Grey Vulture (1926), Madge Bellamy in Soul of the Beast (1923), Oliver Thomas in Everybody’s Sweetheart (1920), Sessue Hayakawa in The Typhoon (1914), Lillian Gish in Sold for Marriage (1916), Constance Talmadge in Her Sister from Paris (1925) and the silent version of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).
Showing at the National Theatre in London 12-15 August as part of its ‘Watch this Space‘ summer festival of outdoor entertainment is Movieplex, an entertainment that tells the story of a forgotten pioneer of Indian cinema, one Shanta Rao Dutt (1881-1987). Dutt, it seems, led a remarkable life. In 1896, when aged just 15, he witnessed a Lumière brothers’ film screening at the Watson’s Hotel, Bombay. Instantly struck by the magic of cinematography, Dutt – a porter at the hotel – discovering the unattended machine spooled with film ready for a demonstration the following morning, could not resist having a go for himself, and shot a film of the baby son of his landlord (‘negotiations are currently in progress between the Lumière estate and the Dutt family to release this print from the Lumière archive for public exhibition’). The prank got him fired from the hotel, but led him to pursue the Lumières to France.
There he was briefly employed by the brothers, before being fired for taking an unauthorised time lapse film. Undaunted, he worked for a time with Georges Méliès, before acquiring his own cinematograph camera. He returned to India in 1900, making films of his trip along the ay, then made a film of his brother Jeevan’s journey to Fiji as a bonded labourer (the only copy of the film was lost in a shipwreck). Dutt next took on commission from the British Raj, filmed in Japan, then went to England where he worked as a newsreel cameraman from Pathé, before joining British intelligence during World War One. He shot a film, The Docker and the Rose, in Liverpool in 1920, marrying its heroine. A copy was rediscovered in 2006. The Dutt family travelled to the Soviet Union in 1927 and met Eisenstein, then in 1933 Shanta founded the Movieplex company. He was knighted in 1945. The family continued its entrpreneurial activities, with one family member opening a cosmetic firm, and another opening the Movieplex Emporium on London’s Tottenham Court Road in 1975, selling VHS players. Shanta died in 1987, aged 106.
OK, enough of all this. You can follow the whole convoluted story, with chronology, genealogy, filmography and business promotions on the Movieplex site. The whole thing is a fiction, but one on which an extraordinary amount of effort has been spent. Aside from the main website and exhibition, there is a blog where an academic earnestly discusses Dutt’s films, a MySpace site from a young American fan who thinks Dutt was ‘some dude’, and a WordPress blog from a woman who says she is related to Dutt’s wife and has been researching the family history. Most brazenly, there is the previously ‘lost’ film The Docker and the Rose, an extract from which has been published on YouTube by the Liverpool Echo, which would appear from this press report to have fallen entirely for the story.
A 1920s tape discovered two years ago in a Wallasey antique shop was the inspiration for a major piece of outdoor art.
Movieplex is based on the work and life of lost filmmaker Shanta Roa Dutt and a nine-minute silent film, Docker and the Rose, which he made in Liverpool.
It was specially commissioned by Liverpool Culture Company and premieres in the city as part of The Imagine Festival which takes place next week.
The film was found in 2006 in the drawer of an Edwardian display box bought from an antique shop in Wallasey.
It was bought by Ajay Chhabra, co-artistic director of arts company nutkhut, who was in Liverpool with wife Simmy for the performances of Bollywood Steps.
He said: “My wife and I found the tape when antique hunting and borrowed equipment to watch it.
“We couldn’t believe what we had found.
“We decided we wanted to make it into a piece of outdoor art. Simmy and I enjoyed our time in Liverpool with Bollywood Steps so much and had made a number of friends, so we approached the Culture Company with the idea.
“They were very keen and commissioned us to go ahead. It seemed only right that a film made and based in Liverpool should come home in the Capital of Culture year.”
The specially commissioned piece of outdoor art features two containers, one with memorabilia from the Dutt family’s many films and history and the second a miniature cinema which shows the nine minute silent comedy.
A 1920s tape? Others have bought the story seemingly hook, line and sinker – for example, the Liverpool Post, Screen India and The Hindu. Even Manchester’s the North West Film Archive, as quoted in the press reports, has been ‘closely involved in the conservation and digital conversion of the film’, though one assumes they were rather less fooled than the papers and are playing along with the game.
What is going on here? The people behind the mischief are called nutkhut, a London-based ‘creative organisation’. Nutkhut in Sanskrit means ‘mischievous’, and nutkhut have applied considerable ingenuity to spinning a tale of enterprise and adventure, with just enough attention to plausible detail (the journey to Fiji, the VHS emporium in Tottenham Court Road) to dupe the unwary. In particular, the ‘lost film’ clips shows how many cannot tell an original from pastiche. Some of the publicity hints as an aside that not all may be as it seems, and the Movieplex website itself carries warning words on its banner – ‘The truth is never quite what it seems’. Others seem not to have realised this.
Why has it all been done? Apart from the impetus of Liverpool as a ‘City of Culture’ in 2008 (it was co-commissioned by Liverpool Culture Company Ltd), the show (or installation, or whatever exactly it might be) takes its inspiration from a general fascination with, but also confusion about, popular Indian culture in the West. There’s a story there of an independence of spirit, mixed with elements of film history vaguely known many, that has a quirky appeal. But is it good to publish so much false history? Will some hapless student end up trying to investigate The Docker and the Rose, or writing Dutt into a history of early Indian film? Is early film history just a game after all?
Movieplex plays at Theatre Square, the National Theatre, London 12-16 August, and Crawley Town Centre, 21-24 August. Exact times and other details are on the Movieplex site.
Last year an unexpected and boldly-named addition to the world’s silent film festival was the 1st International Silent Film Festival, held in Manila in the Philippines. Well, one year on and here comes the 2nd International Silent Film Festival, to be held 26 August-8 September. Films are shown accompanied by live bands and again with ‘original scores’ (whatever that might mean). Here’s the programme:
FILMS WITH LIVE MUSIC
7pm, Shang Cineplex Cinema 1, Shagrila-la Plaza
Aug 26 The Black Man with a White Soul (El negro que tenía el alma blanca), Spain
music by Novo Concertante Manila
Aug 27 Cascading White Threads (Taki-no-shiraito), Japan
music by Bob Aves
Sep 2 Faces of Children (Visages d’enfants), France
music by JackRufo with Yosha
Sep 3 The Oyster Princess (Die Austernprinzessin), Germany
music by Noli Aurillo (with Louie Talan, Wendel Garcia and Kakoy Legaspi
Sep 4 Cabiria (Italy)
music by Caliph8 (with Malek Lopez and Matt Deegan)
FILMS WITH ORIGINAL SCORE
7pm, Shang Cineplex Cinema 1, Shagrila-la Plaza
Aug 28 Erotikon (Czechoslovakia)
FILMS WITH ORIGNAL SCORE
5pm, Listening In Style, 5/F Shangri-la Plaza
Aug 29 The Black Man with a White Soul (El negro que tenía el alma blanca), Spain
Sep 5 Cascading White Threads (Taki No Shiraito), Spain
Sep 6 Faces of Children (Visages d’enfants), France
Sep 7 The Oyster Princess (Die Austernprinzessin), Germany
Sep 8 Cabiria (Italy)
The International Silent Film Festival is back with a bigger and better lineup! This year, original participants Goethe-Institut Manila, Instituto Cervantes and Japan Foundation are joined by the embassies of the Czech Republic, France and Italy in treating moviegoers to screenings of classic silent films scored live by local bands. In addition, some of the films will also be shown with the original score in Listening In Style.
The German contribution to the festival is the 1919 Ernst Lubitsch film “The Oyster Princess (Die Austernprinzessin)”. In it, a pampered American oyster tycoon (Victor Janson) decides to find a prince to marry his daughter (Ossi Oswalda),but things don’t go quite as planned. Along the way, there are mishaps, misunderstandings and a foxtrot sequence that must be seen to be believed. Director Ernst Lubitsch was said to have “the Lubitsch touch”, a hard-to-define quality that makes his films masterpieces of sophisticated comedy. As this early and rare film makes clear, the Lubitsch touch was present almost from the beginning. Accompanying the film is a live score by legendary guitarist Noli Aurillo.
Other films to watch out for in the festival are “Cabiria” from Italy, “Erotikon” from the Czech Republic [sic], “Cascading White Threads” (Taki-no-shiraito) from Japan, “The Black Man With A White Soul” (El negro que tenía el alma blanca) from Spain and “Faces of Children” (Visages d’ enfants) from France.
The festival has grown in ambition from last year when there were just three titles screened, and it is impressively cosmopolitan in its range (interestingly, no American titles have been programmed). Further details on the Goethe-Institut Manila site.
As regular readers will know, the Bioscope tries to keep an eye on the various newspaper and journal digitisation projects taking place around the world, some commercially-driven, some undertaken with public money. One long-awaited project has been the Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program, which has just reached the Beta test stage.
The National Library of Australia, in collaboration the Australian State and Territory libraries, is undertaking a huge, long-term programme to digitise out of copyright Australian newspapers. The aim is to produce a free online service allowing full-text searching of newspapers published in each Australian state an territory, from 1803 (when the first Australian newspaper was published, in Sydney), to 1954, when copyright kicks in (intriguingly late).
The programme is ongoing, but on 25 July a Beta service was released to the public, offering 70,000 newspaper pages from 1803 onwards, with additional pages to be added each week (as of 8 August there are 91,577 pages available). The service is very much in test mode, and they request that users provide feedback (while bearing in mind that the service is not official as yet).
So, how do we go about using it, and what is there to find on silent film? Simple search options are by any word within a text (uncorrected OCR), newspaper title (currently eleven on offer), state and date (with an attractively laid-out calendar option). You can use inverted commas to search on a phrase. The many advanced search options include combinations of terms, range of dates, length of article, and the option to search under types of article – advertising, detailed lists etc., family notices, news, and illustrated. You can also sort results by relevance, earliest or most recent date. In short, all the useful options that you would hope to see.
Article display page
Search results give a list of article titles with the name of the newspaper, date, page number and the first few lines of OCRed text. Most usefully, you are also given links for the same search term to the Australian National Bibiliographic Database and Picture Australia. The Article Display page, as illustrated above, shows the article with the search term highlighted, a zoom option and option to see the full page. On the left is the uncorrected OCR text, and options to add your own tags or comments (if you are logged in). And you can print, save as PDF, or save as image. Which pretty much covers everything.
On film subjects, there is plenty – though with some surprising gaps, probably explained by the absence of those editions yet to be digitised. Inevitably, there much to be found on the early Australian film business itself. So, our traditional text term ‘kinetoscope’ yields only two hits (both from the 1920s). ‘Charlie Chaplin’ scores 927, ‘Mary Pickford’ 600, ‘Norma Talmadge’ 175, ‘Kinemacolor’ 32, ‘Vitagraph’ 123, ‘Cinematograph’ 685, and so on. Turning to Australian silent films, good subjects to investigate include ‘On Our Selection’ (280, but that includes stage versions and the 1932 sound film as well as the 1920 silent), ‘West’s Pictures’ (281 for a renowned exhibitor), ‘Frank Hurley’ (83 for Australia’s national photographer), ‘Australasian Films’ (79 for the leading native film company) and ‘Raymond Longford’ (27 for the film director).
Finally, if you visit the Browse page, there’s a list of all the tags (keywords) that have been used to classify items – these include ‘classic movies’, ‘movie stars’ and ‘silent films’, but sadly only one article so far is so described. Time for us all to get tagging.
I’ll be doing a fresh round-up of newspaper digitisation sites some time soon. Meanwhile, go explore.
A call for papers has been issued for the next IAMHIST conference, due to be held in Aberystwyth, Wales, 8-11 July 2009, and incorporating the 3rd Gregynog Media History Conference. IAMHIST, or the International Association for Media and History, is an organisation comprising scholars, filmmakers, archivists and broadcasters interested in the intertwined themes of history and film (and television, and radio, and related media). It holds a conference every two years, and in 2009 the theme is to be ‘Social Fears and Moral Panics’ – certainly something with great potential for those engaged with the silent film era. Here’s how they describe it:
The aim of the conference is to explore both the role of the media in addressing, highlighting or perpetuating social fears, and the mass media itself as a perceived moral agent and/or threat. Topics to address might thus include questions of media content and/or language; concerns about public intrusion; censorship and the freedom of information; the reporting of crimes or disasters; invasion and security fears in times of peace or war; religious, cultural and/or linguistic fears; fears relating to youth or children, or to minority groups; fears relating to particular behaviours, pursuits or leisure activities; ‘golden ageism’.
We welcome paper proposals that address the theme in both contemporary and/or historical perspective; proposals which engage with the theme comparatively (both geographically and temporally); and proposals which engage with theoretical approaches, including the social theory of moral panic.
We also welcome proposals on their work in progress from postgraduate and early-career scholars in the field of media history, including on topics that may not be on the conference theme.
Proposals for complete panels (three themed papers) are welcome, as well as individual paper submissions. Papers presented at the conference should be 25-30 minutes in length and should use illustrative material (for instance film clips) wherever possible.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words per paper should be sent to Dr Sian Nicholas by 14 November 2008 at iamhist2009@aber.ac.uk c/o Department of History and Welsh History, Aberystwyth University, Penglais, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion SY23 3DY, Wales UK.
The conference is being organised by IAMHIST, in association with the Centre for Media History and Departments of History and Welsh History, and Theatre, Film and Television, Aberystwyth University, the Department of Media and Communications, Swansea University, and the journals Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and Media History, with the support of the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.
For further details, see the call for papers on the Aberyswyth University web site. For further information on IAMHIST and its many activities and interest, visit www.iamhist.org. And for the Bioscope’s take on last year’s conference, held in Amsterdam, on empires and such like, go here.
Incidentally, you do wish those planning such events took a look at the calendar (even the Bioscope’s calendar) first. There are now three conferences on history and the visual media taking place in Britain in July 2009 – the others are Visual Empires at the University of Sheffield, and Colour and the Moving Image at the University of Bristol. Come on somebody – show a little consideration, please.
Another day, another silent film festival. This time its New Zealand, and it’s the Silent Film Festival at Opitiki (‘Cinema – just like it was in the olden days’), which runs 5-6 September. Taking place in Opotiki’s Art Deco theatre, the festival encourages attendees to dress up in period style and travel in vintage cars. Piano accompaniment will be provided by Nick Giles-Palmer, and the films are accompanied by period shorts and newsreels courtesy of the New Zealand Film Archive.
Here’s the programme:
The Mark of Zorro 1920 ~ 93mins
In old Spanish California, the oppressive colonial government is opposed by Zorro, masked champion of the people, who appears out of nowhere with flashing sword and an athletic sense of humour, scarring the faces of evildoers with his Mark ‘Z’. Meanwhile, beautiful Lolita is courted by villainous Captain Ramon, rich but effete Don Diego… and dashing Zorro, who is never seen at the same time as Don Diego. As Zorro continues to evade pursuit, Ramon puts the damsel in distress…
Fairbanks’ prodigious athletic prowess and tremendous enthusiasm made the original movie a great success and enormous sets gave him plenty of room to swash and buckle in. His astonishing acrobatics amaze even modern audiences, particularly in the film’s climax.
Saturday 6th Sept ~ 7.30pm ~ Main Theatre ~ $14
It – starring Clara Bow 1927 ~ 77mins
Clara Bow, one of the most adorable actresses to grace the silent screen, stars in this delightful romantic comedy. As Betty Lou Spence a shopgirl at Waltham’s Department Store, she falls for her boss, the handsome Cyrus Waltham, Jr. and decides that he is to be her husband. With the help of his friend Monty and her own ‘It’ factor, Betty tries to win the man of her dreams.
Clara Bow’s vitality and sexiness defined the liberated woman of the 1920s and she became one of Hollywood’s brightest lights. Clara was known as The ‘It’ Girl. As well as representing sex-appeal, ‘It’ symbolized the tremendous progress women were making in society. Her dynamic performance as the cute, bubbly, down-to-earth Betty makes this film one of the most charming and entertaining silents as well as providing an interesting slice of history.
Saturday 6th Sept ~ 2pm ~ Main Theatre ~ $14
Venus of the South Seas 1927 ~ 77mins
Visited infrequently by the supply schooner ‘The Southern Cross’ lies the little island of Manea. The owner of the island has made a fortune in copra and pearl but more precious than all these treasures is his adored daughter – Shona, the most skilful diver in the South Seas. Romance blossoms when a yacht anchors in the mystic moonlit harbour and Shona swims out to meet it. A pearl pirate attempts to steal the pearls but is foiled by the young man Shona falls in love with.
Annette Kellerman, who plays Shona, was a champion diver and swimmer who made headlines in 1907 when she was arrested in Boston for wearing a one-piece bathing suit. The exterior scenes were filmed in Nelson, the interior in Christchurch.
Friday 5th Sept ~ 7.30pm ~ Main Theatre ~ $14
Intolerance 1916~3.5hr Spectacular!
Intolerance and its terrible effects are examined in four eras, spanning several hundreds of years and cultures. Themes of intolerance, man’s inhumanity to man, hypocrisy, bigotry, religious hatred, persecution, discrimination and injustice achieved in all eras by entrenched political, social and religious systems, create a spectacular and dramatic epic.
Director D.W. Griffith’s ambitious silent film masterpiece is one of the milestones and landmarks in cinematic history.
Saturday 6th Sept ~ 9.30am ~ Little Theatre
Includes buffet lunch.
Films of Opotiki
From the New Zealand Film Archives – a fascinating historical record of small town NZ.
A special compilation of films made by local electrician & projectionist John Wilkinson, between 1950-1974, forms most of this presentation. A fascinating record of Opotiki life they include films of the Opotiki port and the arrival of MV Waiotahi, dramatic scenes of thermal activity on White Island in 1956, terrible flood devastation in Opotiki and the clean-ups. Street parades, school kids in fancy dress and on floats, marching girls and Opotiki High performing the haka…and more. Another home movie by Ester and Deryk Rogers documents the cultivation of kumara at Maraenui in the 50’s. The programme begins with local personality, Epi Shalfoon, and His Melody Boys (1930) jazz band playing ‘E Puritai Tama e’.
By popular request, the programme concludes with the award winning short film, Two Cars One Night, (2003) made by Taika Waititi, which was filmed in the Te Kaha pub car park.
Friday 5th Sept ~ 1pm ~ Main Theatre ~ $14
Buster Keaton in ‘The Goat’ 1921 ~ 27mins
Madcap chases and hilarious displays of physical agility are the highlights of this frenetic Buster Keaton short. Dumb luck sets some policemen on his trail – after a series of innovative escapes, he gets mistaken for a murderer with a price on his head, which means the people that aren’t chasing him are fleeing from him. Nonstop laughter.
&
Harold Lloyd in ‘Sailor-Made Man’ 1921 ~ 46mins
Comedy great, Harold Lloyd, plays baseball-mad twerp ‘Speedy’ Swift. When his girl’s father insists that, before he will agree to Speedy marrying his daughter, he must first prove that he can do something more worthwhile than act the playboy, he joins the navy, just like that! Classic slapstick feature-length movie, especially in the final scenes.
Both showing together (total time: 75mins)
Fri 7th Sept – 11am and 4.30pm
Sat 8th Sept – 4.30pm
Sun 7th Sept – 11am, 1pm and 3pm
More details on booking, timetable, and a gallery showing how people have got into the spirit of things in past festivals can all be found on the site.
Southampton: Arrival of Mary Pickford & Douglas Fairbanks, Gaumont Graphic, 21 June 1920, from http://www.nfo.ac.uk
Quietly launched this week (with an official launch due in October) is Newsfilm Online. This is 3,000 hours of UK cinema newsreel and television news content, dating 1910s-2000s, all of it taken from the collection of ITN Source. ITN is the UK’s largest commercial footage library, (if you don’t count the BBC as such), and doesn’t just own ITN news programmes, such as News at Ten and Channel 4 News, but most of the UK’s newsreel archives (Pathe, Paramount, Gaumont, Universal). The 3,000 hours (about 2% of the ITN news collection) have been digitised and made available for free downloading and re-use, so long as you are a member of a subscribing UK institution of higher or further education. Sadly that’s going to leave out a lot of you, but the project was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee, which exists to support UK HE/FE (as we call it in the trade), and the conditions under which the newsfilms were digitised stipulated that they would be available to HE/FE users only.
But despair not, because although you may not be able to see the films, the catalogue records are searchable and browsable by all. And for the silent era, there are 1,241 news stories from the 1910s and 5,091 from the 1920s, making this a marvellously rich resource for historical study, even without the films themselves – not least because you get thumbnail images, like those of Doug and Mary illustrated above. It’s supposed to be every example of the Gaumont Graphic newsreel held by ITN, and shopws how alert the newsreels were to the stories, concerns, fads and personalities of their era. The thumbnails alone excitingly bring the 1910s and 20s back to vivid, varied life.
Remarkably, the publication of Newsfilm Online means that the majority of British newsreels (I’d guess between 80-85%), 1910-1979, are now digitised, encoded and available on the Web in one form or another, albeit with restricted access in some cases (the Paramount and Universal newsreels are the big gaps). That’s a sensational thing to be able to report, achieved in little over five years by a mixture of public money (around £3.5M, at a rough guess, though the £2M that Newsfilm Online cost was for TV news as well as its Gaumont newsreels) and private (no idea how much). The four main sources (with the silent newsreels that they include) are:
British Pathe – including Pathe Gazette, Eve’s Film Review, freely available (low resolution)
British Movietone News – Movietone itself was a sound newsreel, but the site include a rag-bag collection of silent actualities, freely available (low and middling resolution)
Newsfilm Online – includes Gaumont Graphic, movies available to subscribing UK educational institutions only
Screenonline – the BFI online ‘encyclopedia’ has many examples of the Topical Budget newsreel, movies available to UK schools, colleges and libraries only
What a fantastic achievement. Having played a small part in making NfO (as we call it in the trade) happen, I’m just a little bit chuffed to see it published at last. For a record of most British newsreel stories in one place, I warmly recommend the British Universities Newsreel Database (still has some gaps to fill for silent newsreels), which also lists other digitised newsreel collections around the world (Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden – America, alas, lags seriously behind).
Let’s have every newsreel around the world available online – it can be done; it would delight and benefit so many if it could be done.
The Bioscope 