The nightside of Japan

As evidence of the value of Live Search for searching across the texts of books digitised by the Internet Archive (see previous post), here’s a passage from The Nightside of Japan, by Taizo Fujimoto, published in 1914. It’s a travel book on Japan written for a Western audience by a Japanese writer, and it includes this marvellously vivid portrait of attending a cinema show in Tokyo at this time, complete with benshi narrator, interval acts and food sellers.

The Asakusa is the centre of pleasure in Tokyo. People of every rank in the city crowd in the park day and night old and young, high and low, male and female, rich and poor. It is also a haunt of ruffians, thieves, and pickpockets when the curtain of the dark comes down over the park. All houses and shops along each street in the park are illuminated with the electric and gas lights. The most noisy and crowded part is the site of cinematograph halls. In front of a hall you see many large painted pictures,
illustrating kinds of pictures to be shown in the hall, and, at its entrance, three or four men are crying to call visitors: “Come in, come in! Our pictures are newest ones, most wonderful pictures! Most lately imported from Europe! “Men of another hall cry out: “Our hall gives the photographs of a play performed by the first-class actors in Tokyo; pictures of the revenge of Forty Seven Ronine!” Tickets are sold by girls in a booking-box near the entrance of each hall; they are dressed in beautiful uniforms, their faces painted nicely, receiving guests with charming smiles. Most of the Japanese carry geta (clogs) under their feet, instead of shoes or boots, and specially so are the females. When you come into the door of a hall, tickets are to be handed to the men, who furnish you zori (a pair of straw or grass-slippers) in place of your geta, and you must not forget to receive from them a wood-card marked with numerals or some other signs the card being the cheque for your clogs. When you step on upstairs you are received by another nice girl in uniform, who guides you to a seat in the hall. Now the hall is full of people; it seems that there is no room for a newcomer, but the guide girl finds out a chair among the crowd and adjusts it to you very kindly. Pictures of cinematograph are shown one after another, each being explained by orators in frock or evening coat. Between the photograph shows performance of comic actors or jugglers is given. After the end of each picture or performance there is an entr’acte of three or five minutes, and in this interval sellers of oranges, milk, cakes, sandwiches, etc., come into the crowds, and are crying out: “Don’t you want oranges? Nice cakes! New boiled milk! etc., etc.” The show of cinematograph is closed at about 12 P.M., and all people flow out of the hall. Where will they go hence? Of course most of them go to their home, but a part of them young fellows among others runs to the Dark Streets of the park, or Yoshiwara, the licensed prostitution quarter near the park.

The Nightside of Japan is available from the Internet Archive in the usual range of formats (PDF, DjVu, TXT), and contains a few more references to cinematographs. More such gems as I find them.

Papers Past

Papers Past, http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz

Yet another digitised newspaper collection, but this is one of the best I’ve yet come across. It is Papers Past, the National Library of New Zealand’s website which boasts one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals, covering the years 1840 to 1915, all of it freely available.

The site is a model of clarity and usefulness. It features forty-four newspapers (twenty-three of them word-searchable so far) from all regions of New Zealand, from The Daily Southern Cross to the Wanganui Herald. There is a simple search option and and advanced option, which allows filtering by date, paper and content type (articles, advertisement or illustration captions). And there are plenty of relevant results for the early film researcher. The word ‘kinetoscope’ gets 312 hits; ‘kinemacolor’ gets 168; ‘bioscope’ scores 1,133. Nor is all the content restricted to New Zealand news, as many of the results are news reports from around the world (particularly UK and USA).

There are many useful but unobstrusive extra features, such as the option to have preview images; to sort results by best match, date, title (article or newspaper) or content type; a search history facility; and a welcome use of ‘breadcrumbs’ (a line of links below the top menu to show you where you are on the website). Just about the only thing to criticise is some amusing slips with the OCR (optical character recognition), so that Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion gets translated as The House in Motion. And, yes, it lets you see the underlying OCRed text as well as the image of the scanned document.

Plus the whole site is available in English or Māori.

A first-rate resource.

19th Century British Library Newspapers

www.bl.uk

You will have to be a member of a UK university of college of further education, or else a visitor to the British Library (St Pancras or Colindale), but if you are one of those lucky souls you will be able to make use of 19th Century British Library Newspapers, the latest digitised newspaper resource. This is a collection of 2,000,000 pages from forty-eight newspapers and journals which ran during the period 1800-1900. For copyright and trademark reasons, the project (funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee, which has paid out millions for a number of mass digitisation projects designed to benefit UK HE/FE) had a cut off date of 1900.

Of the forty-eight titles that were selected (none could be titles still running today, such as The Times or Guardian), these cover the 1890s period when motion pictures first came on the scene:

Aberdeen Journal (Coverage: Jan 06, 1800 - Jun 30, 1900)
Baner Cymru (Coverage: Mar 04, 1857 - Dec 29, 1900)
Belfast News-Letter (Coverage: Jan 01, 1828 - Dec 31, 1900)
Birmingham Daily Post (Coverage: Dec 04, 1857 - Sep 29, 1900)
Bristol Mercury (Coverage: Jan 04, 1819 - Jun 25, 1900)
Daily News (Coverage: Jan 21, 1846 - Dec 31, 1900)
Derby Mercury (Coverage: Jan 02, 1800 - Dec 26, 1900)
Era (Coverage: Sep 30, 1838 - Dec 29, 1900)
Freeman’s Journal (Coverage: Jan 01, 1820 - Sep 29, 1900)
Genedl (Coverage: Feb 08, 1877 - Dec 25, 1900)
Glasgow Herald (Coverage: Feb 04, 1820 - Dec 31, 1900)
Goleuad (Coverage: Oct 30, 1869 - Dec 26, 1900)
Graphic (Coverage: Jan 01, 1870 - Dec 29, 1900)
Hampshire/Portsmouth Telegraph (Coverage: Jan 06, 1800 - Dec 29, 1900)
Illustrated Police News (Coverage: Jan 05, 1867 - Dec 29, 1900)
Ipswich Journal (Coverage: Jan 04, 1800 - Dec 29, 1900)
Jackson’s Oxford Journal (Coverage: Apr 03, 1762 - Dec 29, 1900)
Leeds Mercury (Coverage: Jan 03, 1807 - Dec 31, 1900)
Liverpool Mercury (Coverage: Jul 05, 1811 - Dec 31, 1900)
Lloyd’s Illustrated Newspaper (Coverage: Nov 27, 1842 - Dec 30, 1900)
North Wales Chronicle (Coverage: Oct 04, 1827 - Dec 29, 1900)
Northern Echo (Coverage: Jan 01, 1870 - Dec 31, 1900)
Pall Mall Gazette (Coverage: Feb 07, 1865 - Dec 31, 1900)
Preston Chronicle (Coverage: Jan 01, 1831 - Dec 02, 1894)
Reynolds’s Newspaper (Coverage: May 05, 1850 - Dec 30, 1900)
Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post (Coverage: Jan 02, 1800 - Dec 29, 1900)
Western Mail (Coverage: May 01, 1869 - Dec 31, 1900)

This is a sensational selection, which should certainly lead researchers beyond the obvious and familiar to some of the other major newspapers of the day (The Daily News, The Graphic) as well as neglected local newspapers. Digitisation is not just about making things easy, but about opening up new avenues of enquiry, enriching the learning experience. Particularly exciting for film researchers is the digitisation of The Era, the theatrical trade journal, which is a marvellous source of information on the early film business in Britain. Music halls and theatres were the usual exhibition outlets for the first films, and The Era is rich is advertisements, reviews, and articles on the new phenomenon.

I tested out the Bioscope’s favourite test keyword, Kinetoscope, and got 431 hits. As an example of the riches on offer, here’s a review of the very first film exhibition in Britain, the Kinetoscope show at 70 Oxford Street, London. A press showing was held on 17 October 1894, and this report appeared the day after in The Daily News:

THE KINETOSCOPE

This is the ugly name of a beautiful thing. It is a sort of improved zoetrope. Gazing through a peep-slot in a wooden case the spectator beholds a barber shop, wherein a customer seats himself, is lathered and duly shaved. It is a “living picture” of a new order. To take another example - a skirt-dancer is seen amid her floating drapery, and she bends her knees, travels on her toes, and indulges in a giddy spin. It is just as one sees her on the stage. Again, two pugnacious cocks try conclusions, and as the encounter waxes warm their feathers fly; other peep-slots reveal a blacksmith exercising the muscles of his brawny arm in the fashioning of a shoe; a female acrobat exhibiting some curious contortions; and a disreputable fight in the bar-room of a public-house. The question naturally arises, How is it all done? A general idea of the invention can be conveyed in a few words. Mr. Edison has contrived a camera that will take photographs at the rate of forty-three a second, thereby recording, at imperceptible intervals, the successive phases of movement. If these may be described as snap-shots they are the snap-shots of a photographic Maxim gun. The views are taken on an endless film, and set in such rapid motion that the pictures pass through the field of vision at the rate of two hundred and eighty a minute. Mr. F.Z. Maguire is Mr. Edison’s European representative, and he permitted a private view of the invention last night, at 70 Oxford-street, W., the specimen shown being those indicated above. Mr. Maguire did not say whether the mechanism is susceptible of being reversed. It is conceivable that people would be amused to see the accomplished act revoked, and the clean-shaven man become the man in need of a shave. Mr. Edison is seeking to combine the principles of the phonograph and kinetoscope, so that one may watch the gestures of the orator while listening to the words that have escaped his lips.

Quite a first review. F.Z. Maguire is Franck Zeveley Maguire, one half of Maguire and Baucus, the Edison agents whose British business went on to become the Warwick Trading Company. The Edison films shown include Blacksmith’s Shop, Cock Fight, The Bar Room and Barber Shop. The dancer could be Annabelle or Carmencita, while the contortionist is presumably Ena Bertoldi, although film of her is not usually mentioned among those featured at this first British film show.

So, a wonderful resource, and probably just a little bit annoying to anyone not in UK higher and further education or without easy access to the British Library. There are rumours however of Gale (the company behind the Times Digital Archive) eventually making the resource available to anyone, via subscription.

Motion Pictures 1894-1912

The latest edition to the Bioscope Library is Motion Pictures 1894-1912. This is the Library of Congress catalogue of copyrighted works identified as motion pictures by Howard Lamarr Walls. The catalogue was published in 1953, two years after Motion Pictures 1912-1939 (already entered in the Bioscope Library). The volume was not considered to be a part of the Library of Congress’ Catalog of Copyright Entries, Cumulative Series, although it complemented it, because before 1913 films were not copyrighted in the USA as motion pictures but instead as photographs. Hence Walls had to determine which of the copyright records for photographs 1894-1912 were actually motion pictures, which was ultimately a question of individual knowledge rather than official designation. He found around 6,000 titles. Walls became Curator of the Motion Picture Collection at the Library of Congress, and then at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and his pioneering research was of inestimable value in establishing solid information on the early motion picture in America as a subject of study.

The earliest title is Edison Kinetoscopic Record of A Sneeze, January 7, 1894, which was copyrighted on 9 January 1894. This film, taken by William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, shows Edison worker Fred Ott sneezing. It was a promotional work rather than a commercial release, being used as illustration in a Harper’s Weekly article. It can be found on the Library of Congress’ excellent American Memory site, from where it has been reproduced for this YouTube clip:

The catalogue is available to download from the Internet Archive, in DjVu (4.9MB), PDF (12MB), b/w PDF (5.8MB) and TXT (621KB) formats).

Harper’s Magazine

Another day, another digitised historical journal. This time it is the American general interest monthly Harper’s Magazine, which has been going since 1850.

It has puts its archive, 1850-2007 online, arranged in a singularly helpful manner by rows of years, then months within each year. Articles come up with thumbnails images, title, author, hyperlinked keywords (very useful), and some lines of text marked by whatever keyword you may have used. I spotted numerous film references for the pre-1930 period, including eye-catching articles by Arnold Bennett, Homer Croy, George Bernard Shaw and editor William Dean Howells, plus literary references to the medium in short stories by figures such as Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad and Henry James.

It is particularly elegantly expressed, but it does come at a modest price - $16.97, for a year’s subscription of the journal, which also entitles you to a year’s access to the archive site.

And now the Scotsman

I should have spotted this one before now. The first UK national newspaper to make its archive publicly available (as opposed to The Times, which is only available to institutional subscribers) was not The Guardian, but The Scotsman. At http://archive.scotsman.com you can access every issue of the paper 1817-1950. Searching is free and gives you the headlines. To view the full article you need to take out a subscription: a 24 hour pass is £7.95, a 48-hour pass £12.95, a weekly pass £19.95, and so on. Not cheap, but the search system is a good one, and the results promising: over 1,000 hits for the word ‘cinematograph’ between 1895 and 1930, for example.

I’ll do a round up soon of all these online newspaper archives of relevance to silent film research.

Guardian Digital Archive

As promised, The Guardian (1821-1975) and The Observer (1900-1975) newspapers have been placed online from today. The web address is http://archive.guardian.co.uk.

This is another huge boon for research in our area, and I’ve found and downloaded assorted gems from The Guardian already. A powerful eye-witness account of the Bazar de la charité fire in Paris (6 May 1897, p 8), an enthusiastic report on microcinematography (15 August 1903, p. 7), a leader on the rise of the picture theatre (3 July 1911, p 6), a report on Maurice Elvey filming Hindle Wakes (set in Lancashire) (28 October 1926, p 11), a fascinating article on watching films in Moscow in 1927 (5 January 1927, p 16), and a wonderful piece on ‘Flicker Alley’ (17 October 1911, p 14), the name given for Cecil Court, the short London street near Leicester Square, which was the home of London’s early film businesses before they all moved on to Wardour Street.

Its windows show wild-looking mechanical contrivances that, whatever they may really be, always seems so concentrated that one thinks of them as the very intestines of machinery; and the men who go in and out of the doors (usually in groups of four or five with a voluable one a little ahead) having a hustling, sharp-eyed, yet half-whimsical look … The cinematograph trade is yet too young to have evolved a type, but it seemed to me that the denizens of Flicker Alley (as they call this passage) all have something characteristic that marks them off from ordinary men. Possibly the endless films they look at affects the eye-nerves or teahes the mind to think of the eye as something to switch off and on - a glance, a calculation, another look, a “glad eye,” another calculation, and so on. They flicker. Their conversation flickers too, mainly in rapid Yankee slang jerked at a hard pace, a well-known figure there creating the flicker illusion best with an inimitable stutter. They run about all over Europe and America, these quick, handy, cheery people, and some seek to rival the cosmopolitanism of the cinematograph by making their speech a compote of foreign catchwords. You see no old men. The “father of the trade” looks about forty. With them antiquity was last week, and posterity is coming round to look at their films to-morrow.

I wrote earlier that the service would be free for the first month, but I was wrong - it is half price for this month, which means, for instance, that a twenty-four hour pass will cost you £3.97. Use the Advanced Search, not the Simple Search, as it allows you to sort results in date order, and to search across articles, or picitures, or advertisements. Searching itself is free; you pay to see the article, which can be printed or stored in a MyCollection page.

Some quibbles. I couldn’t make images print using Firefox; use Explorer instead. The search results give you an image of the heading of the item, which does not always indicate when it is relevant to your search, and some time is wasted opening up irrelevant pages. Your search word is underlined in blue on the selected documents, which has the unfortunate effect of sometimes obscuring the words underneath. You only get four or five results per page, which is frustrating and makes searching for the right record more of a chore than it should be. You cannot go from an article you’ve viewed to the rest of the newspaper for that day, though there is an alternative browse option which lets you look at the full newspaper for any one day. But you cannot narrow subject searches by day, or even year.

Minor gripes aside, this is a treasure trove. Remember that for most of this time period, the Guardian was based in Manchester, which gives a different slant to its news coverage. Also, despite The Observer search option saying that covers 1900-1975, there seem to be no records available prior to 1932.

Update: The Guardian is currently offering a free introductory 24-hour pass to its Digital Archive, presumably for a short period only.

New York Morning Telegraph

Just found this out on alt.movies.silent. During a 1980s research project on William Desmond Taylor, Bruce Long photocopied the ‘Pacific Coast News’ column of the New York Morning Telegraph, 1914-1922. As Long says:

During the silent film era, the New York Morning Telegraph had more coverage of the film industry than any other daily New York newspaper; its coverage included a weekly column of movie news from Los Angeles, initially titled “Pacific Coast News.” As the film industry in Hollywood expanded, that column also grew in size. Many of the “news items” came directly from publicity agents, but they still provide a useful historic glimpse into Hollywood’s growing silent film industry. Major Hollywood news stories would have been given separate articles instead of a mention inside this column. The columnists of “Pacific Coast News” included Edward V. Durling, Clem Pope, Margaret Ettinger, and Frances Agnew.

Long has now dusted down his photocopies and put them online. They are JPEGs only, and not word-searchable, but it looks like a handy research source for the patient.

Now here comes the Guardian and Observer

Regulars will know that we try and keep up with the steady stream of digitised newspapers collections appearing across the world, which are opening up research into silent film (and a few other subjects besides, of course). The latest is the British newspaper The Guardian, along with its Sunday partner The Observer. This article was published recently in The Guardian’s Media section (with thanks once again to the eagle-eyed David Pierce for alerting The Bioscope):

Every edition of the Guardian and Observer newspapers is to be made available via a newly launched online digital archive.

The first phase of the Guardian News & Media archive, containing the Guardian from 1821 to 1975 and The Observer from 1900 to 1975, launch on November 3.

It will contain exact replicas of the original newspapers, both as full pages and individual articles. and will be fully searchable and viewable at guardian.co.uk/archive.

Readers will be offered free 24-hour access during November, but after this trial period charging will be introduced.

The rest of the archive will launch early in 2008, making more than 1.2m pages of digitised news content available, with Observer content available from its launch as the world’s first Sunday newspaper in 1791.

New reports featured in the archive cover events including the 1793 execution of Louis XVI, the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, and the 1833 abolition of the slave trade, the first and second world wars and the assassination of the US president, John F Kennedy.

“The launch of the archive will revolutionise the way in which users are able to access our historic content, whether for academic research or personal interest,” said Gerard Baines, the head of syndication and rights, GNM.

“The archive will offer historical coverage to both consumers and academics of the most important events recorded during 212 years of publishing history,” GNM added in a statement.

“With microfilm stock and paper copy in danger of degrading beyond repair, the launch of the archive ensures the preservation of the papers’ legacy.”

Silicon Valley firm Olive Software started digitising the archive in December last year.

GNM chose ProQuest CSA to be the exclusive global distribution partner for universities, libraries and corporate accounts.

Rod Gauvin, the ProQuest senior vice-president of publishing, said: “The vivid and fearless reporting by both newspapers has set journalistic standards not only in the UK, but also worldwide.

“Indeed, globally many rely on the Guardian and the Observer for unbiased, thoughtful reporting on events in their own country.”

Fingers at the ready come November 3rd…

Screen heritage survey

Magic lantern slide from the National Media Museum, www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk

A online survey was launched today, to uncover collections in the UK with moving image and screen-related artefacts. It is organised by a body called the Screen Heritage Network (of which the organisation I work for, the British Universities Film & Video Council, is a member). The survey is open to any UK collection with artefacts relating to the moving image and screen-related media which may be accessible to the public or researchers. There are ten categories of artefact being sought:

1. Film production equipment
2. Television and video equipment
3. Animation and special effects
4. Sound
5. Sets and costumes
6. Cinema and projection
7. Magic lanterns, slide projectors and viewers
8. Toys and games
9. Installations
10. Documentation

The information gathered will be used to create the first-ever online database of moving image and screen-related objects in UK collections.

Behind this activity lies a definition of ’screen heritage’ which goes beyond moving picture to encompass the machinery that produces and exhibits them, the culture that supports them, and a notion of ’screen’ that extends beyond cinema and television back to magic lanterns and forward to video games, consoles and the handheld technologies of today.

So the survey, in looking at artefacts, is concentrating on just a part of this vision of what ’screen heritage’ comprises. It’s all most appropriate to the study of silent cinema, and where silent cinema fits in within the broader scheme of things. Do take a look at the project site, and if you know of a museum or other heritage organisation within the UK that ought to be taking part, and which we may have missed, let us know.