There’s no such thing as a bad home movie

Frame still of Mavis and Margaret Passmore (holding a piece of 35mm film), from the Passmore family films, c.1903, held by the BFI National Archive

So says John Waters, and while we’ve probably all sat through some relative’s earnest document of their holiday abroad and wished that some of the panning shots of scenery could have been a little shorter, he has a point. Home movies aren’t to be judged by the usual film rules. They are made for an interior purpose; every frame speaks to a select family audience which alone can decode the film’s particular references. And yet, as time passes, and such films turn up in archives, they then speak in a different way to us all, as we see the manners, the customs, the backgrounds, the clothing, the choice of subjects, that make these films such rich social historical documents. Moreover, in other people’s home lives, we see our own. In all these respects, there can be no such thing as a bad home movie.

Image from a Kinora portrait record of the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and his son Edward, c. 1912, from www.jates.co.uk

Home movies are as old as cinema. They were produced throughout what was the silent era in commercial cinema, and continued to be shot silent for several decades thereafter. Some have argued for the scenes of their family life filmed by the Lumière brothers in 1895-96 to be the first home movies, but these were studied compositions for commercial consumption. However, cameras and projectors were soon aimed at the amateur market – indeed, in those first years of cinema some believed that the real money would be made by targeting the home. After all, the Kodak camera had shown where the business lay for still photography. Probably the first motion picture device for amateur use was the Birtac, a camera-printer-projector utilising 17.5mm film, introduced by Birt Acres (hence the name) in 1898. The Biokam, developed by Alfred Darling and Alfred Wrench followed in 1899. Gaumont in France came up with the Chrono de Poche, using 15mm film, in 1900. The Lumières themselves were behind the Kinora, a hand-held, flick-card viewer for which you could either have films made of your family as a ‘portrait’ in a studio, or film them yourself with camera using paper negatives (it was patented in 1896 but the first Kinora camera for amateur use appeared in 1907).

See a QuickTime movie of a Kinora in action, from the Royal Collection

Other such systems followed, employing narrow gauges which were cheaper and easier to handle. Initially the film used was flammable nitrate, but in 1912 there came the Edison Home Kinetoscope using 22mm safety film, and in the same year the Pathéscope, or Pathé Kok, using 28mm safety film. However, these were mostly for showing commercial films in the home, and it was 9.5mm film (introduced 1922) that was the format taken up most avidly by amateurs seeking to shoot their own films, though 16mm (introduced 1923) was used by the wealthy, and some of the first home movies in archives are those shot by the well-to-do upper middle class in the 1920s. A rival to 9.5mm that would soon overtake it in popularity was 8mm, introduced in 1932, and Super 8 appeared in 1965.

Thomas Edison with his Home Kinetoscope, introduced 1912, from Adventures in Cybersound

35mm was rarely used for home movies, such was the expense (and the fire hazard), but some examples exist, including what I think must be the earliest surviving home movies, those of the Passmore family of Streatham, filmed 1902-1908 and held in the BFI National Archive. They are a delight (they were shown at the Pordenone silent film festival in 1995). Home movies have grown in importance for film archives, or rather film archives have grown up which value such productions highly because of the way they record people and place. The smaller, or regional film archives around the world, are preserving a picture of our private selves which is likely to be rather more highly valued by future generations than the progressively quaint commercial entertainment films that still dominate moving image archiving philosophy generally.

All of which leads us to Home Movie Day. This is an international event, now in its sixth year, and for 2008 it falls on 18 October. Home Movie Day celebrates amateur film and amateur filmmaking through a wide number of events held locally at venues across the world. The events provide ordinary people with the opportunity to see home movies, show their home movies to others, to discover about home movie heritage, and to learn how best to care for such films. This year there are events taking place in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and at many points across the USA. The Home Movie Day site provides information on all the events and the home movie day ethos. In the UK, there will be events in Manchester and London. This is the blurb for the London event:

On Saturday October 18, archivists and film lovers around the world will take time out of the vaults to help the public learn about, enjoy, and rescue films forgotten with the advent of home video. Home Movie Day shows how home movies on 8mm, Super8 and 16mm film offer a unique view of decades past, and are an essential part of personal, community, and cultural history.

Home Movie Day returns to London this year at the Curzon Soho cinema bar. It’s a free event and open to everyone. There will be a Film Clinic, offering free film examinations by volunteer film archivists from the British Film Institute, Wellcome Library and BBC, who will check the film for any damage and deterioration, and offer advice about how to store film in the home.

After examination, the films can be passed to one of the projectionists, who will be continuously screening home movies throughout the day.

You don’t need to bring a film to attend and enjoy the event; everyone has a chance to win prizes generously donated by the BFI and Wellcome Collectionjust by viewing any of the films on the day. Prizes include BFI DVDs and tickets to the IMAX.

The archivists can also offer advice about preserving films in film archives around the UK and transferring films to other formats such as DVD so they’remore easily watchable in the home.

Don’t throw your films away; bring them to Home Movie Day!

The London event takes place at 12-5pm at the Curzon Soho, 99 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 5DY. For more information, contact Lucy Smee, at Dearoldsmee [at] gmail.com. The Manchester event takes place at the North West Film Archive.

The history of amateur film remains underwritten, though work has been done of late to remedy this. You could start with by Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann’s Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (2007), or seek out Zimmermann’s earlier Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (1995). There’s also Alan Kattelle’s Home Movies, A History of the American Industry, 1897-1979 (2000).

For the cameras and projectors designed for amateur use in the ’silent’ era, the best source is Brian Coe’s The History of Movie Photography (1981), while the Kinora is covered by Barry Anthony in The Kinora – motion pictures for the home, 1896-1914 (1996). For images and information on narrow gauge film formats from the early period, visit the excellent (if increasingly out of date so far as its name is concerned) One Hundred Years of Film Sizes.

To find out about the work of regional film archives in the UK, visit the Film Archive Forum website. Film Forever is a good online guide to the preservation of films at home. Our history is in your hands.

Pen and pictures no. 4 – Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh (right) and John Greenidge in The Scarlet Woman

The subject of the latest in our series on literary figures and silent film is unusual in that his significant engagement with film preceded his first book publication. Evelyn Waugh was twenty-one, had just come down from Oxford, and was working on a novel, The Temple of Thatch (which was never to be completed), when he became involved in films.

Waugh was both fascinated and repelled by cinema. He professed a lowly opinion of films and commercial film production, but he was a compulsive filmgoer throughout his life (as his diaries reveal), and was fascinated by the narrative qualities of the medium. Such qualities he admired when appropriated in the literary works of others (Ronald Firbank, Graham Greene), and encouraged in other would-be writers, as in this 1921 exhortation to his friend Dudley Carew:

Try and bring home thoughts by actions and incidents. Don’t make everything said. This is the inestimable value of the Cinema to novelists (don’t scoff at this as a cheap epigram it is really very true). Make things happen. … Whatever the temptation, for God’s sake don’t bring characters on simply to draw their characters and make them talk. Fit them into a design. … It is a damn good idea. Don’t spoil it out of slackness or perversity but do MAKE THINGS HAPPEN. Have a murder in every chapter if you like but do do something. GO TO THE CINEMA and risk the headache.

Waugh found inspiration in films not for pictorial values as such, but in what he saw films could offer in terms of narrative design and continuity, of montage, propulsion, and changing fields of vision. Moreover, Waugh the satirist was inspired by film’s propensity for exposing falsity through display. As George McCartney (in Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition) puts it, ‘the medium’s peculiar perceptual qualities seemed to express just those unquestioned assumptions of his age that he most wanted to satirize’. Waugh would first experiment with filmic devices in his fiction in the 1926 short story ‘The Balance’, which uses scene directions and titles in the manner of a silent film, but before then he had engaged directly in exploring film’s potential to expose human folly.

One of Waugh’s Oxford friends, Terence Greenidge, was an enthusiastic member of the university’s cinema club and had acquired a 16mm camera. Greenidge made several satirical amateur films in early to mid-1920s, including 666, The Mummers, and The Cities of the Plain, in the first and third of which at least Waugh acted, for the latter as a ‘lecherous black clergyman’. None of these films is known to survive. Greenidge later wrote of the new-found enthusiasm for cinema among Oxford undergraduates at this time:

After ‘The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari’ had been shown in our city there was only one topic of conversation at gatherings of the Aesthetic individuals for several weeks to come. Finally undergraduates began to turn to the big task of film-production itself. Various nomadic groups made several vigorous little burlesques, negligible from the point of view of artistic quality, but capable of raising a good laugh in the University clubs wherein they were shown – and at any rate films.

One of Greenidge’s films does survive, however: The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama. As the titles of the lost films indicate, religion was a favourite target, and for The Scarlet Woman Waugh provided the scenario, as well as acting in the film. It is a ribald satire on the Roman Catholic church, concerning as it does the attempt of the Dean of Balliol to convert the English monarchy to Catholicism. Waugh was of course to convert to Catholicism just a few years later, which gives The Scarlet Woman a particular piquancy, the final rebellious assault of one more drawn to the religion than he knew.

With £6 put up by each of the leading performers to finance the production, filming started in July 1924 and lasted largely until September, though the film was not ready for showing until November 1925, when it received its premiere in Oxford. We know a fair bit about the film’s production, from Waugh’s autobiography A Little Learning and the diaries, where he wearily records that he was quite disgusted with how bad it was. However, such disdain has an air of show about it: in A Little Learning, his brief account of the film’s production does refer to ‘the fun of our venture’, particularly noting his father’s delight in the amateur theatrical nature of the filming, recognising his own possessions being used as props. In the film Waugh acts his two parts with gusto. He plays the Catholic Dean of Balliol, a real figure of Waugh’s acquaintance whom he had come to despise, depicting him as a blonde-wigged homosexual with designs on the Prince of Wales; Waugh also plays the impecunious peer Lord Borrowington. Other performers John Sutro as Cardinal Montefiasco, Waugh’s writer brother Alec Waugh, as the cardinal’s drunken mother, Lord Elmley as the Lord Chamberlain, Guy Hemingway as the Pope, John Greenidge as the Prince of Wales, and Terence Greenidge as a Jesuit priest.

Elsa Lanchester and Evelyn Waugh in The Scarlet Woman, from An Evelyn Waugh Website (www.abbotshill.freeserve.co.uk)

What makes the film exceptional, apart from Waugh’s contribution, is the appearance of the young Elsa Lanchester. The same age as Waugh, the precocious Lanchester ran a London club called The Cave of Harmony, which Waugh often frequented. Playing the drug-addicted actress Beatrice de Carolle, who attracts the Prince of Wales away from the lascivious Dean, she clearly demonstrates the talent that would see her in Hollywood ten years later, married to Frankenstein’s monster. The film was shot in Oxford, on Hampstead Heath, and in the Waugh family’s Hampstead back garden. Waugh recalled that his publisher father was delighted at this new extension of the notion of amateur theatricals:

My father fully appreciated the fun of our venture … he delighted to find the cast at his table and when the film was shown him took particular satisfaction in recognising his own possessions. ‘That’s my chair’ … ‘Take care you don’t break that decanter.’

The film was first shown at the Oxford University Dramatic Society, where the future composer Lennox Berkeley provided the music accompaniment with gramophone recordings. A second screening was requested by the Society of Jesus at Campion Hall. Showing that the Catholic Church could take a joke, Father C.C. Martindale sanctioned a subtitle that remains on the print: ‘Nihil Obstat – projiciatur – C.C. Martindale SJ’. It was only ever shown among friends and private groups. Greenidge retained a copy, exhibiting it from time to time, and it resurfaced in the 1960s and is now preserved by the BFI National Archive.

The Scarlet Woman (which runs for 45mins) is both a juvenile jape, and an extraordinary window into the evolution of a satirical mind. Elsa Lanchester’s fevered performance raises it to a level that sometimes matches its pretensions, and makes it watchable today. It is an amateur film in perfomance, costumes, sets, picture quality and so forth, but judged on its own merits it has survived remarkably well. Waugh published his first novel, Decline and Fall, in 1928, and became a Roman Catholic in 1930. In the 1930s he worked for a time for Alexander Korda writing film scenarios (of which the title Lovelies from America indicates the wild improbabilty of any of Waugh’s work ever being produced). He was never involved in film production again, but offered a vicious satire of Hollywood life and the American way of death in his novel The Loved One.

More information on the film’s production can be found on the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter vol. 3 no. 2 (1969), which has much information on its rediscovery in the 1960s and records all of the intertitles, and on the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies vol. 33 no. 2 (Autumn 2002), which has a detailed description of the film’s action. Both are available online. The Scarlet Woman is available on DVD from Charles Linck, P.O. Box 3002 TAMU-C, Commerce, Texas 75429, USA, email linck [at] tamu-commerce.edu (earlier VHS copies were transferred at sound speed; the DVD corrects this). It can also be seen for free by anyone passing through London at the BFI Mediatheque on the South Bank.

City & country

The How and Why of Spuds (1920), National Archives Collection

This year’s Northeast Historic Film’s Summer Symposium takes place 25-26 July, at Bucksport, Maine. Northeast Historic Film collects, preserves, and makes available to the public, film and videotape of interest to the people of northern New England, and holds an annual symposium which focuses on regional film, much of it amateur, and stretching back to the 1920s. This year’s theme is City & Country:

Images and archetypes of the city and the country as seemingly distinct locations and ways of life have remained a potent force in the cultural imagination since the mid 19th century. Even though the transformations of industrial culture and mobility have changed rural and urban landscapes and lifestyles, the ideas and images associated with the City and the Country continues to thrive as traditional poles of modern experience. They are where we anchor the dreams and fears of technology and tradition, and where we are animated by hopes of progress and the comforts of nostalgia. As Raymond Williams noted of this powerful duality, “the contrast of country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society.”

More information as ever from the website.

Pen and pictures no. 3 – J.M. Barrie

There were many authors in the silent era of cinema who dabbled with the film business, usually by having their works adapted for the screen. But some went further. J.M. Barrie, now chiefly known for Peter Pan, and for his custody of the sons of the Llewellyn-Davies family, the ‘Lost Boys’ (as recently retold in the film Finding Neverland), was among the most highly regarded writers of his time, as a novelist and especially as a dramatist. Barrie was fascinated by the cinema. Many silent films were made from his plays, among them Male and Female (1919, based on The Admirable Crichton), Peter Pan (1924) and A Kiss for Cinderella (1926). For Peter Pan Barrie wrote an original script, though it was not used. But Barrie did more than dabble with film scripts – he had been making his own films, which experimented with the relationship between film and theatre, fantasy and reality.

Two of these films were each connected with a combined theatre-and-film revue that Barrie had dreamt up in July 1914, only to abandon. Barrie had become fascinated by the French music hall actress, Gaby Delys, and wanted to write a revue for her that would extend his dramatic capabilities, and which would allow him to experiment with the borderline between cinema and theatre. He made notes to himself that indicate his radical way of thinking:

Combine theatre with cinematography – Cinema way of kissing. Burlesque of American titles, ‘Nope’ & ‘Yep’ – Gaby a chorus-girl, flirts with conductor in pit.

Barrie’s ideas became more ambitious. He organised a ‘Cinema Supper’ at the Savoy Hotel in London, to which he was able to invite such luminaries as the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, Edward Elgar, George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton. His august guests first went to the Savoy Theatre to a series of short sketches written by Barrie and acted by such theatrical greats as Marie Lohr, Dion Boucicault, Marie Tempest, Gerald Du Maurier and Edmund Gwenn, before moving to the Savoy Hotel for supper, Barrie having hired a team of cameramen to film everyone arriving and then seated at their tables. Many apparently had no idea that they were being filmed, though the necessary lighting must sure have raised some questions among some. At one point in the evening Bernard Shaw got up and started delivering a speech haranguing three other guests present, namely G.K. Chesterton, the drama critic William Archer and the philanthropist Lord Howard de Walden, getting so heated as to start waving a sword around. The three he had insulted then all got up, bearing swords of their own, and chased him off stage. This was all a further part of Barrie’s plan, and according to Chesterton, Barrie had ‘some symbolical notion of our vanishing from real life and being captured or caught up into the film world of romance; being engaged through all the rest of the play in struggling to fight our way back to reality’.

The following day came the second part of Barrie’s plans. He had hired a cameraman, and with the playwright and theatre producer Harley Granville-Barker as director, he made a comedy Western, starring Shaw, Archer, de Walden and Chesterton. Chesterton has left us with the best description of this extraordinary little episode:

We went down to the waste land in Essex and found our Wild West equipment. But considerable indignation was felt against William Archer; who, with true Scottish foresight, arrived there first and put on the best pair of trousers … We … were rolled in barrels, roped over fake precipices and eventually turned loose in a field to lasso wild ponies, which were so tame that they ran after us instead of our running after them, and nosed in our pockets for pieces of sugar. Whatever may be the strain on credulity, it is also a fact that we all got on the same motor-bicycle; the wheels of which were spun round under us to produce the illusion of hurtling like a thunderbolt down the mountain-pass. When the rest finally vanished over the cliffs, clinging to the rope, they left me behind as a necessary weight to secure it; and Granville-Barker kept on calling out to me to Register Self-Sacrifice and Register Resignation, which I did with such wild and sweeping gestures as occurred to me; not, I am proud to say, without general applause. And all this time Barrie, with his little figure behind his large pipe, was standing about in an impenetrable manner; and nothing could extract from him the faintest indication of why we were being put through these ordeals.

Chesterton says that the film was never shown, while Barrie’s biographer Denis Mackail suggests that Barrie’s ideas were still half-formed and objections from some of the participants (notably Herbert Asquith, who sent a stern letter from 10 Downing Street forbidding his celluloid likeness from being used in a theatrical revue) caused both films to be withdrawn. However, the cowboy film was shown publicly, two years later at a war hospital charity screening at the London Coliseum on 10 June 1916, where it was given the splendid title of How Men Love. A review of the event indicates that Chesterton’s description of the action is what was seen on the screen, with the added detail that the others hanging from the rope over a cliff were too much even for a man of his great bulk to support, and he was forced to drop them. According to Mackail, a print was still in existence in 1941, but sadly no copy is known to exist today. Happily, this photograph does exist to demonstrate that it was not all just some mad dream:

(Left to right) Lord Howard de Walden, William Archer, J.M. Barrie, G.K. Chesterton and Bernard Shaw, in the middle of making the cowboy film How Men Love. From Peter Whitebrook, William Archer: A Biography

After a revue of his, Rosy Rapture, the Pride of the Beauty Chorus (1915), starring Gaby Delys, had a filmed sequence directed by Percy Nash included in one scene, Barrie turned filmmaker again in 1916. The Real Thing at Last was a professional film production by the British Actors Film Company, for which Barrie supplied the script. 1916 was the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, and among numerous celebratory productions, there was to be a Hollywood production of Macbeth, produced by D.W. Griffith and starring the English actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. The idea of Hollywood tackling Shakespeare filled many with hilarity, and Barrie wrote a thirty-minute spoof which contrasted Macbeth as it might be produced in Britain, with how it would be treated in America. The film starred Edmund Gwenn as Macbeth, and among a notable cast Leslie Henson and A.E. Matthews both have left droll accounts of its production.

The film had a director, L.C. MacBean, but according to Matthews, ‘Barrie did all the work – MacBean just looked on admiringly’. The film gained all its humour from the contrasts in the British and American interpretations of Macbeth. In the British version, Lady Macbeth wiped a small amount of blood from her hands; in the American she had to wash away gallons of the stuff. In the British, the witches danced around a small cauldron; in the American the witches became dancing beauties cavorting around a huge cauldron. In the British, Macbeth and Macduff fought in a ditch; in the American Macbeth falls to his death from a skyscraper. The intertitles were similarly affected; a telegram was delivered to Macbeth that read, ‘If Birnam Wood moves, it’s a cinch’. Sadly, no copy (nor even a photograph, it seems) of this happy jest of Barrie’s is known to exist today.

What does exist, however, is The Yellow Week at Stanway. This film was made in 1923, and is a record of a house party held by Barrie at Stanway, the Cotswolds home of Lord and Lady Wemyss, which Barrie rented every summer. Barrie invited his many guests, which on one occasion included the entire Australian cricket team, to take part in theatricals, cricket matches and other such entertainments, and in 1923 he hired a professional cameraman, name unknown, to film a story that he initially called Nicholas’s Dream. Nicholas, or Nico, was the youngest of the five Llewellyn-Davies boys, and a little of their history is required to put the film in proper context.

The five boys were the sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewellyn-Davies, friends of J.M. Barrie and the models for Mr and Mrs Darling in Peter Pan. Both died tragically early, with Barrie assuming the guardianship of the five boys. They were, of course, the inspiration for the ‘Lost Boys’ of Barrie’s imagination, and Michael Llewellyn-Davies in particular became the inspiration for the character of Peter Pan. But the family was to be visited by further tragedy. George, the eldest, was killed in action in 1915, then Michael, Barrie’s favourite, was drowned in 1921. Two of the others, Jack and Peter, moved away from Barrie, and the youngest, Nico, still at school at Eton, stayed with Barrie during holidays but felt Michael’s death deeply and knew that he was no substitute for him.

It is with this background, knowing both Nico and Barrie’s great personal sadness, that we should look at The Yellow Week at Stanway, which records a Stanway house party in 1923 to which Nico invited several of his Eton friends, with a complementary female component made up of friends of the Wemyss family, whose daughter Cynthia Asquith was Barrie’s secretary. She has provided us with a short account of the film’s production:

He [Barrie] was in marvelous form all through the cricket week, and in his most masterful mood – presenting the Eleven with special caps at a speech – making dinner, and summoning from London a ‘camera-man’ to film a fantasy called Nicholas’s Dream, into which he’d woven a part for everyone – a bicycling one for me. He also wrote a duologue for me and sister Mary. It was great fun having her to beguile the Etonians. Pamela Lytton, as lovely as ever, came, too, with her daughter, Hermione.

The film is largely in the standard home movie style (albeit at a time when home movies were a comparative rarity), with some simple trick effects and a distinctive tone of whimsy typical of Barrie, who wrote all of the rhyming intertitles as well as directing the film. It begins with the title, ‘The Yellow Week at Stanway. A record of fair women and brainy men’. The opening shots establish Stanway house and the Wemyss family. Nico Llewellyn-Davies greets the various guests for the Cricket Week, including roughly equal numbers of young men and women.

A game of cricket follows, where the umpire appears to be Barrie. A couple of rudimentary trick shots, with people disappearing or riding bicycles backwards come next, before an extended fantasy sequence. Nico is seen to fall asleep in ‘the forest of Arden’, and in his dream he seeks ‘his Rosalind’ but sees all the other house guests pair up without him. Mary Strickland leaves him for Anthony Lytton; another couple walk away when he greets them; another couple hit croquet balls at him; two others cycle past him; even Nico’s dog abandon’s him. Each vignette is accompanied by Barrie’s rhyming titles documenting Nico’s series of rejections.

Nicholas, Antony and Mary –
‘Your offer’s read sir, and declined
I will not be your Rosalind.’

Edward and Pamela –
From the East to Western Ind
To Edward comes his Rosalind.

Sam and Rosemary –
Same drove him off with deeds unkind
And so did gentle Rosalind.

Pasty and Hermione –
If t’were not that love is blind
He’d keep an eye on Rosalind.

Eventually he wakes to find himself petted by all of the women, while the men walk away in disgust.

Following some further general shots, there comes the film’s most intriguing sequence. A title introduces ‘The Pirates’ Lagoon. An intruder’. Barrie and Michael Asquith (Cynthia Asquith’s young son) are seen on a small punt on a pond. The next title reads, ‘Michael the captain could stand when pressed. But drink and the devil had done for the rest.’ Michael and three other children, including his younger brother Simon, are seen in a boat. ‘’Ware the Redskins’, reads the next title, and Michael points a gun and a smaller boy a bow and arrow. ‘Escaping the tomahawks by a miracle’, reads the title, ‘Red Michael reached Stanway by a perilous descent’. Michael is shown climbing through a window. The film concludes with Nico pretending to sleep and embracing an imaginary person; final shots of Stanway and the house guests; shots of Eton school; and concluding with Simon and Michael Asquith waving handkerchiefs through windows in a garden wall.

J.M. Barrie and Michael Asquith in The Yellow Week at Stanway, from www.knebworthhouse.com

The film is jointed, illogical and often plain silly in the manner of many home movies. The two fantasy sequences are notable, however. The ‘Nicholas’s Dream’ betrays some unfathomable and unconscious cruelty on Barrie’s part, depicting Nico as the unloved outsider, rejected by his peers, denied the pleasures of young love. Its allusions to Shakespeare’s As You Like It prefigure Barrie’s later involvement in the 1936 film of the play (the film’s credits read ‘treatment suggested by J.M. Barrie’), with Elisabeth Bergner as a Peter Pan-like Rosalind. The pirate sequence, though brief and not elaborate in any way, is remarkably close in conception to his photo-story The Boy Castaways which was in turn the inspiration for Peter Pan.

The Yellow Week at Stanway is preserved in the BFI National Archive, and you can read the minutely detailed shotlist (penned by yours truly, long ago) on the BFI database. And there is just a fleeting extract from the film available on the Knebworth House website, showing Barrie and Michael Asquith on a punt.

Finally, just for the record, here’s a filmography of films from the silent era made from Barrie’s plays (play’s name where different in brackets), demonstrating just how popular his works were – and how ingenious producers were in renaming The Admirable Crichton:

• US 1910 Back to Nature [The Admirable Crichton]
  p.c. Vitagraph Company of America
• US 1913 The Little Minister
  d. James Young p.c. Vitagraph Company of America
• US 1913 Shipwrecked [The Admirable Crichton]
  p.c. Kalem
• US 1914 The Man of her Choice [The Admirable Crichton]
  p.c. Powers
• US 1915 The Little Gypsy [The Little Minister]
  d. Oscar C. Apfel p.c. Fox
• GB 1915 The Little Minister
  d. Percy Nash p.c. Neptune
• GB 1915 Rosy Rapture, the Pride of the Beauty Chorus
  d. Percy Nash p.c. Neptune [for use in the play's stage production (scene six)]
• GB 1917 What Every Woman Knows
  d. Fred W. Durrant p.c. Barker-Neptune
• GB 1918 The Admirable Crichton
  d. G.B. Samuelson p.c. Samuelson
• US 1919 Male and Female [The Admirable Crichton]
  d. Cecil B. DeMille p.c. Famous Players-Lasky
• US 1920 Half an Hour
  d. Harley Knoles p.c. Famous Players-Lasky
• GB 1920 The Twelve Pound Look
  d. Jack Denton p.c. Ideal
• US 1921 The Little Minister
  d. Penrhyn Stanlaws p.c. Famous Players-Lasky
• US 1921 Sentimental Tommy
  d. John S. Robertson p.c. Famous Players-Lasky
• US 1921 What Every Woman Knows
  d. William C. DeMille p.c. Famous Players-Lasky
• GB 1921 The Will
  d. A.V. Bramble p.c. Ideal
• US 1922 The Little Minister
  d. David Smith p.c. Vitagraph Company of America
• US 1924 Peter Pan
  d. Herbert Brenon p.c. Famous Players-Lasky
• US 1925 Peter Pan Handled (Dinky Doodle series) [featured Peter Pan as a character] [animation]
  d. Walter Lantz p.c. Bray Productions
• US 1926 A Kiss for Cinerella
  d. Herbert Brenon p.c. Famous Players-Lasky
• US 1927 Quality Street
  d. Sidney Franklin p.c. Cosmopolitan Productions

Scotland the brave

Scottish Screen Archive

The Scottish Screen Archive has released some 1,000 film clips on its impressively-redesigned site. The SSA is Scotland’s national film archive, now part of the National Library of Scotland. It has an excellent record of preserving, contextualising and making accessible a national moving image heritage to a multiplicity of audiences. This latest resource comes courtesy of the Heritage Lottery Fund, and present clips from the 1890s to the 1980s, all integrated into their existing catalogue. The searching and browsing (by place, subject, biography and decade) are all exemplary, and the catalogue descriptions are spot on.

So, what is here for the silent era? Well, sixty-two clips, all of them non-fiction titles, from 1897 onwards, including many classic gems. For instance, look out for Lord and Lady Overtoun’s Visit to Mcindoe’s Show (1906), a rare early film of the outside of a fairground bioscope show; Dr Macintyre’s X-Ray Film (1896/1909), examples of the X-ray cinematography of Dr John Macintyre; several examples of Scotland’s own silent newsreel, Scottish Moving Picture News (later called British Moving Picture News); the civic record, Glasgow’s Housing Problem and its Solution (c.1919); a family holiday home movie from 1927; film of the building of the Ritz Cinema, Edinburgh in 1929; and St Kilda – Britain’s Loneliest Isle (1923/1928), a classic picture of life on the remote island while it was still inhabited by humans.

Social films, city films, newsreels, home movies, charity films, advertising films, interest films, documentaries – this is a marvellous collection, not just of Scottish life but of the multifarious forms of the non-fiction film, demonstrating for our period what an important part it plays in what should be our understanding of the silent film overall – somehing of the people, for the people. Go explore.

Time Out

The Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium will be held in Maine on 20-21 July, under the title Time Out: Images of Play and Leisure. The symposium will focus on moving images that offer a new historical, cultural, and critical understanding of play and leisure, focusing on images of play and leisure made by amateurs and for noncommercial purposes. The programme of events includes several subjects relevant to silent cinema and pre-cinema. Peter Morelli’s talk “A Night at the Moving Pictures – Before Cinema” looks at pre-cinema entertainments such as the magic lantern and the diorama; Martin Johnson looks at home movies of the 1920s-40s and the intriguing subject of people who turn their faces away from the camera; Ishumael Zinyengere looks at the work of Burton Holmes, pioneer producer of travelogues (he coined the term); Mark Neumann looks at early films of the Grand Canyon. An excellent programme which demonstrates the value of looking at amateur film from the silent film era quite as much as the commercial. More details from the festival web page.