Film medical realizat de profesor G. Marinescu (1898-1901)
Some you will know that as well as keeping the Bioscope bubbling along I manage other sites, including Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema, which I co-edit with Stephen Herbert. The site is based on our 1996 BFI book, Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey, and documents the lives of 200 or more people who were active in motion pictures before 1901. We keep the information up-to-date, add new names and resources, and the reason for this notice is that we’ve just added a new feature: links to Victorian films online. We haven’t got into hosting our own films (yet), but where there are freely available films, on YouTube, American Memory and such like, we’ve added links to the relevant individual’s entry on the Who’s Who.
We’ve also created a Films Online page in our Resources section, which offers a selection of films (all from YouTube so far), demonstrating the great variety of the form. For example, not everyone considering films of the late nineteenth century would think to include the works of the Romanian Gheorge Marinescu, whose studies of the movements of patients suffering from severe nervous diseases you can see included in the above compilation film (itself clearly post-1901).
We’ve tried to keep to legitmately available titles only, so there’s nothing from the Lumières (all still in copyright) or Georges Méliès (the only stuff available online has all been ripped from commercial DVDs). But we’ll add more where we can. One last point - all of the films that we show or link to relate to the individuals’ career pre-1901, so we don’t show anyone’s work from a later period. Do take a look.
German prisoners of war in Donald C. Thompson’s War As It Really Is (1916), from www.realmilitaryflix.com
Realmilitaryflix is the ungainly name for a remarkable new source of online video. The site has been put together by US Air Force combat camera veteran John Corry, who began building up a collection of war films while producing a television series in 1991. The site comprises 650 films (with 1,200 more promised by the end of the year), and ranges from the First World War to Iraq and Afghanistan today. Military enthusiasts can scour the decades of conflict; here at the Bioscope we concentrate on the silent material from the 1914-1918 conflict, which is significant enough in itself.
There are some thirty titles so far, most of them American official films of one kind or another, shot by the U.S. Signal Corps or produced by the propaganda outfit, the Committee on Public Information. Care has been taken to give correct titles and to determine dates, locations and regiments. I’ve not yet had the chance to view them all, but here’s a quick guide to some of the highlights:
Actualities of the World War
Realmilitary flix says “If you only watch one WWI film, make it this one”, and it’s not far wrong. This dynamic four-part compilation was made up of American military film after the war, and the material was expertly edited to form a general narrative of American participation in the war 1917-1918. Its correct title appears to be Flashes of Action, and the National Archives and Records Administration’s ARC catalogue identifies it as c.1921 (many of these films of this site are duplicated in NARA, and some of the descriptions come from NARA’s records). It is filled with vivid scenes of the kind we expect to see of the war, leavened with plenty of human detail.
War As It Really Is
This 1916 production is a single person’s effort - the redoubtable Donald C. Thompson, an independent and resourceful American cameraman who filmed British, French, Belgian, Russian and German troops over 1914-1916, speaking volumes for his diplomatic abilities. He was with the French army at Verdun, where he was wounded, and from which conflict much of this film derives. The quality of the footage is evident throughout, while some of it is startling - apparently close shots of trench warfare (one should always be suspicious of footage where the cameraman would have been in peril e.g. being positioned above the trenches), the shooting of a spy (before and after), and shots of corpses and skeletons.
German Film of the WWI Sea Commerce Raider “Moewe”
This, as it says, is a German-produced film, made in 1917, which was captured by the Allies and subsequently released as The Notorious Cruise of the Raider ‘Moewe’. It follows the German raider ship Moewe as it captures Allied shipping, several examples of which are shown sinking. Its breezy tone comes over as all the more startling having the matter-of-fact titles translated into English.
British WWI Film on the Mideast and other Naval Operations
This is British official film taken in Palestine and Mesopotamia 1917-1918. There is some very impressive footage here, including a gunboat firing on the Tigris and striking aerial photography of a British convoy at sea. It ends with famous, iconic footage of General Allenby entering Jerusalem in December 1917, with fleeting glimpses of Lawrence of Arabia (in military uniform), if you know where to look.
T.E. Lawrence and General Allenby, shown in British WWI Film on the Mideast and other Naval Operations, from www.realmilitaryflix.com
And there’s much more: demonstrations of gas warfare, the operation of observation balloons, the construction of dummy soldiers as camouflage, radio operations, black troops, and the peace treaty negotations at Versailles in 1919. As indicated, one should always take care assessing the authenticity of war footage from this era - the cameramen were frequently brave, but they were severely limited by both equipment and army officialdom, and of course had to preserve their own lives. Overly dramatic footage (always consider where the cameraman was positioned when the film was taken and then ask why he wasn’t killed) may show genuine action but may equally have been staged. That said, there seems relatively little fakery here, just much startling footage intercut with skilfully-shot scenes of the mundanities of warfare which somehow bring it home all the more to us today.
All of the titles are available in Flash, and look OK blown up to full screen. One notable last point to make - all of the contemporary films of the war are shown silent. Go explore.
Pathécolor machine printing room, from F.A. Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They are Made and Worked (1912)
As films grew longer, and their production increased, through the 1900s, so the idea of adding colours by hand became uneconomic. A mechanised system was required, and at around the same time that experiments were taking place in Britain to develop natural colour motion pictures, in France first Pathé and then Gaumont started developing processes for the mass production of multi-colour-tinted film prints through the use of stencils. This was a labour-intensive process (employing mostly female operatives - see pictures above and below) which could only be carried out by well-capitalised businesses with international distribution, and in the mid-1900s France dominated the world’s motion picture business. Hence France became the home of artificial motion picture colour.
Women workers preparing Pathécolor films, from Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked
Pathé introduced its stencil colour process in 1905, but the system in principle was not new, having been adopted from methods used for colouring postcards and wallpaper. A number of prints of any one film title would be made, each representing the different colours to be employed in the eventual film (i.e. a film featuring red, green, blue and yellow would require four original prints). The areas in each of the original prints to be coloured would be marked out and cut with scalpels. Each cut-out print would be laid over the final projection print and each colour would be applied in turn. 600 women were employed at the Pathé factory by 1906 to produce colour prints in this way.
However, great mechanisation was soon brought in, led by Henri Fourel, who ran the Pathé colour studio in Vincennes. In 1908 Pathé introduced a pantograph mechanism to improve production. A master print would be rear-projected onto a ground glass screen, one frame at a time, which enabled the operator to have a far clearer view of the image. She would then move a pointer over the screen, marking out the area to be treated with one colour. The pantograph allowed for greater precision of line, and a needle at the other traced marked out the corresponding area on a second print. This would be repeated for each colour required. It was painstaking work, and still very labour-intensive, with an estimated 300 women operators employed. About one metre of film per colour was produced in an hour. When all the stencils had been cut, the gelatin emulsion was removed from each and they were then run in turn through a staining machine in precise registration with the master print. The cumulative result was a finished print stained in multiple colours - or rather multiple prints, since at least 200 colour copies had to be produced to make the system economic.
This demonstration of the stencil colour process is taken from Brian Coe’s The History of Movie Photography. The original film is on the left; then follows (L-R) the stencils cut for each colour (top row) and the application of that colour (bottom row) for red, blue, brown, green and yellow respectively.
The Pathé system produced images of frequently exquisite quality, with a notable precision of colour. Colours were not applied to every kind of film, but generally to those kinds of films which it was felt would be best enhanced by colour: exotic travelogues, costume dramas, magical films etc. Such films would be billed as the highlight in cinema programmes, and were more expensive for exhibitors than common film titles. As indicated, the industrial, labour-intensive process could only be supported by major producers with extensive distribution, and Pathé’s only rival in stencil colour was to be Gaumont, which came up with a similar process around 1908.
An unidentified fragment of a Pathé stencil colour film, date uncertain (c.1910?)
Another stencil colour example, from the same collector, again undated (early 1910s probably) and location unknown. Anybody recognise the building and gardens?
Pathé and Gaumont would continue with stencil colour into the 1920s, and the finest examples of their art are among the treasured items of the world’s film archives (there is a particularly strong collection at the Nederlands Filmmuseum). Stencil colour films have also inspired a growing body of academic work looking at the aesthetics and meanings of early colour. Strongly recommended is Tom Gunning’s essay ‘Colorful metaphors: the attraction of color in early silent cinema‘, originally published in the Italian journal Fotogenia (there is a version online in English), which looks at the special nature of early colour, seen in the context of the use of colour in other media (posters, books, advertisements etc.). For Gunning, it was not that the stencil colour films were more true to nature, but that they were an attraction in themselves, offering a ’sensual intensity’, acting as a ’signifier of fantasy or as a metaphor’.
However, just as Pathé introduced its improved colour system to the world in 1908, a rival system from Britain was announced, which did not use artificial colour but instead boasted that only its photographic colour was true to nature. The commercial and ideological (i.e. in debates over reality) between the systems that would later be known as Kinemacolor and Pathécolor will be covered in a later post.
Further reading:
Bregtje Lameris, Pathécolor: “Perfect in their renditions of the colours of nature”, in Living Pictures vol. 2 no. 2 (2003)
Brian Coe, The History of Movie Photography (1981)
While planning an overview of silent film and modern music accompaniment for you, I came across Vox Lumiere, a concept so bizarre that it more than merited a post of its own.
Vox Lumiere is a music theatre company which specialises in presenting a combination of silent film and rock opera. While a silent classic plays in the background - so far their repertoire features Metropolis, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Peter Pan, The Phantom of the Opera and a ‘greatest hits’ package’ - singers and dancers enact the drama and a five-piece rock band does what five-piece rock bands tend to do. Musically, going by their promo video above, it’s not quite my taste, but clearly some people like the concept, to judge from their press reviews, and they’ve come up with something novel which in its way articulates the modern appeal that the iconography and emotion of silents can engender.
Vox Lumiere’s interpretation of Metropolis, from www.voxlumiere.com
The Vox Lumiere website provides you with video clips, sound clips, photographs, information about the company, a calendar of events (catch them next in Shreveport, Louisiana in November), and the chance to buy T-shirts and baseball caps. So that’s everything covered really.
As said, it’s not going to be everyone’s taste, and the juxtaposition of the kind of low rent rock music you only get in rock operas with silent movies (which don’t necessarily need this sort of help to gets their effects across) is peculiar, if not alarming. But it wins points for originality, enthusiasm, and for demonstrating that silents remain an inspiration - and an inherently theatrical medium.
(The title of the post is taken from a line in their promo video, by the way)
2 A.M. in the Subway (1905), Japanese Acrobats (1904) and The Boys Think They Have One on Foxy Grandpa, But He Fools Them (1902), from www.open-video.org
There are a number of online video collections out there designed for university use which feature lectures, demonstrations, educational documentaries etc. One that has been around for some time is the Open Video Project, which is hosted by Internet2 in America, and aims “to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities.” It comprises a number of collections from around the world such the University of Maryland HCIL Open House Video Reports, Digital Himalaya, NASA K-16 Science Education Programs and the HHMI Holiday Lectures on Science, but for our purposes what is interesting about the site is the Edison Video section.
This features 187 Edison production from the Library of Congress, dating from the 1890s and 1900s. Many early Edison titles are, of course, available from the LoC’s own excellent American Memory site, but the majority of the titles here are not on the better-known site. Among the varied titles only available here are A Ballroom Tragedy (1905), A Nymph of the Waves (1903), A Wake in “Hell’s Kitchen” (1903), Dog Factory (1904), Fights of Nations (1907), Gordon Sisters Boxing (1901), International contest for the heavyweight championship–Squires vs. Burns, Ocean View, Cal., July 4th, 1907 (1907), Princeton and Yale Football Game (1903), a series of films on the United States Post Office, films of the Westinghouse electrical works in 1904, and films from the St. Louis Exposition of 1904. And many more.
Basic cataloguing information is provided, though there are some peculiar errors with dates from time to time, and the presentation is rudimentary apart from some helpful synopses. There is little information available on the collection overall, so nothing to explain the significance of Edison films or why these titles - predominantly actuality - have been chosen. All are available as freely downloadable MPEG-1s, with the same frustratingly small image size as one finds on the American Memory site. But let us not be churlish - here is a wonderful selection of titles, many of them unfamiliar and indicative of the range of Edison production, including comedies, dramas, variety acts, sports films, travel films, and sponsored industrial work. Well worth exploring.
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 browin (by place, subject, biography and decade) are all exemplary, and the catalogue descriptions are spot on.
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.
Yarmouth Fishing Boats Leaving Harbour (1896), from www.youtube.com/user/BFIfilms
The appearance of the above film on the BFI’s YouTube site has inspired me to revive the Lost and Found strand on this blog (film collections once lost that have now been recovered), and to tell you something of the remarkable story of the Henville collection.
Cast your minds back to 1995. It was the year of the Oklahoma City bombing, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, the Aum Shinrikyo cult relased sarin gas on the Tokyo underground, Jacques Chirac became president of France, Eric Cantona attacked a football fan in the crowd, a new moving image format, the DVD, was announced, and in film archives and cinematheques across the globe those dedicated to film history and numerology sought various ways to mark the centenary of cinema.
It was a busy time for me, as the British Film Institute’s pet early film enthusiast, if not quite expert, with screenings, events, conferences and writing a book on Victorian cinema. And somewhere early on in that manic year, a collection of films turned up. There were some seventeen cans, single reel subjects, non-standard perforations, all readily identifiable as films from the 1890s. Films from the 1890s generally only turn up in dribs and drabs, so seventeen titles in one go was quite a coup. And the archivist who took in the films let me inspect a few (they were in a very fragile state), and one I looked at was clearly filmed at Epsom. ‘Oh no’, I said, ‘it’s another Derby’. We had other early Derby films, all looking very much the same, and it was a pain in the neck trying to tell one from another. I set it to one side…
The collection had come from one Ray Henville, a collector of vintage radios. At an auction he picked up some vintage radios and with them acquired some cans of unidentified films. Henville knew nothing of old film, but one of them featured a sailing boat, so he sent in a photograph to a yachting magazine in the hope that someone might be able to identify it. Happily the photograph was seen by Bill Barnes, film historian and twin brother of John Barnes, author of the esteemed The Beginnings of the Cinema in England series.
Bill alerted that BFI, we took them in, and I ended up trying to identify them. This was a slow process, not least on account of the fragility of the films which meant that for a long period I only had frame stills to go on. But it soon became clear that here was a remarkable collection of films from the 1890s, several of them likely to have been taken by Birt Acres, the first person to take a 35mm cinematograph film in Britain.
Birt Acres filming the 1895 Derby
What distinguished these Acres films was an indistinct frameline and a lack of sharpness to the image. These were characteristics of the Derby film, and the more I looked at it the more I felt that it could be the Derby of 1895, which would make it an extraordinary coup in the centenary year. But how to identity if for certain? There were no contemporary frame stills that I could use to compare, but the angle of the camera matched the position known to have been taken by Acres in the above photograph. Then, having checked race reports and horse racing sources, I looked at the colours of the jockeys (albeit in black-and-white), which matched the winner for 1895, and the fact that it showed a close finish between three horses, such as featured in 1895 but not any other Derby 1896-1900.
It wasn’t quite a eureka moment, and there were arguments against the identification. The film had perforations which suggested it was a later production by Acres’ great rival Robert Paul, who was effectively the producer of the 1895 Derby (it turned out to be a reprint), and once a dupe print had been painstakingly created by archivist João Oliveira and we could screen it, we discovered the film ran satificatorily at 24 fps, when a film shot for the Kinetoscope peepshow (which was the case with the 1895 Derby) ought to have run at 40 fps. There isn’t space here to go into the complexities of this particular argument - suffice to say that one should judge things by what one finds, not what one expects to find, and that though some doubts were raised over the film’s identity I believe I was right, and the discovery recently of further Acres films from this period which similarly run at a speed seemingly too slow for the Kinetoscope tends to verify the original identification.
What is believed to be the Derby of 1895, filmed by Birt Acres
It took a while to identify all the films in the Henville collection, and in some cases original identifications were overturned, but here’s the list of films, with titles in brackets for those still unidentified (links are to their entries on the BFI database):
I remember the Yarmouth film in particular because David Cleveland, then head of the East Anglian Film Archive had asked me what the likelihood was of this, the earliest film taken his region, ever turning up. I said it was next to impossible. A few weeks later, we had a copy. Now it’s on YouTube.
But what is also of interest is what happened next. A huge fuss made was made about the collection, especially the Derby film. The BFI went to town on it. We had reams of press coverage, television news reports, even a mention on Barry Norman’s Film 95. But this in turn raised the interest of the donor, who felt that there had to be great commercial value in these films, and eventually he took back the nitrate originals, with the BFI retaining the dupe copies it had made. The films were put up for auction in Germany, where I think one or two titles were sold (including the Georges Méliès dramatisation of a scene from the Greco-Turkish War, La Prise de Tournavos, I think), and then the remainder went up for auction at Sotheby’s in 2000. As I recall, the collection was bought by a London antiquarian bookdealer apparently without any knowledge of film.
And then what? A mystery. Perhaps the films lie crumbling on that same bookseller’s shelves, or maybe they have passed on to other hands, convinced that the great excitement generated by the films’ discovery had to mean that they had a great commercial value. Of course, they did not, except what one might get for them at auction - in all other respects, there was nothing to be made from them. This is a folly which has been repeated again and again, dreaming of treasures when all one is left with is unshowable, inflammable and not even necessarily unique (at least six of the Henville films were duplicated in other collections), fascinating to the specialist but of only passing interest to the general viewer. And arguably of minimal aesthetic interest.
But the duplicate copies remain, and so the 1895 Derby is preserved for posterity, until some bright spark comes along and tells me it was the 1896 Oaks all along…
The mere mechanical construction of a film projector has been overestimated … it was boxing that created cinema.
So someone once wrote (actually it was me), and even if the statement was done for effect, there’s some truth to it. Cinema was created for a purpose, which was to make money by amusing an audience, and many of the first viewers of motion pictures wanted to see boxing. The Edison peepshow Kinetoscope (first exhibited commercially in 1894) recorded several bouts, albeit specially staged for the camera; the first projected film to be shown commercially was the Lathams‘ Young Griffo v Battling Charles Barnett (first exhibited in New York on 20 May 1895); and films first extended for over an hour when Enoch Rector’s Veriscope Company filmed the world heavyweight championship of 1897 between Jim Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons with three camera in parallel, the 63mm film stock being specially designed to frame the full view of the boxing ring - boxing in a very real sense creating cinema.
The history of boxing and early cinema is now to be given its first thorough history with the publication of Dan Streible’s long awaited Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema. Published by the University of California Press next month, the book covers the rich period where the new medium of cinema collided, or colluded, with the ignoble art, as the the former built up its mass appeal and the latter sought to drag itself out of a state of illegality into legimatised entertainment. It’s a story of technical innovation, exploitation, criminality, fakery, brutality, star power, racial tension, and the rise of mass appeal sport and the media in the early twentieth century.
This history has been researched by Streible for many years now, and it seemed for too long that the book would never come out. It ought to be a crossover seller, appealing both to the early film studies community and the sports history afficionados, to go by his previous writings on the subject.
But that’s not all. Because in May the enterprising Reaktion Books publishes Kasia Boddy’s Boxing: A Cultural History. I know nothing of the provenance of this work, but it sounds tempting enough from the blurb:
Throughout this history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers and film-makers have been there to record and make sense of it all. In her encyclopaedic investigation of the shifting social, political and cultural resonances of this most visceral of sports, Kasia Boddy throws new light on an elemental struggle for dominance whose weapons are nothing more than fists. From Daniel Mendoza to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Looking afresh at everything from neo-classical sculpture to hip-hop lyrics, Boddy explores the way in which the history of boxing has intersected with the history of mass media, and sheds new light on the work of such diverse figures as Henry Fielding and Spike Lee, Charlie Chaplin and Philip Roth, James Joyce and Mae West, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Dickens. This all-encompassing study tells us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many.
It probably isn’t going to go into the practical details of how many arc lights the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company employed to photograph indoor fights in 1900, but it does sound like it will give us an eclectic and entertaining cultural history, outlining boxing’s special resonance and appeal, and placing film’s role within that history.
I’ve never been to a boxing match. I can’t watch televised bouts of today. But the history, the characters, the themes of boxing in the past are just so compelling, and - to be honest - the distancing effect of seeing brutal fights only in black-and-white and silently helps sanitise the subject.
To finsh off, here’s an example of how YouTube can serve as an archive bringing life to films you might never expect to see again. Dan Streible himself brought this to the attention of a film archiving list I subscribe to: the Selig Polyscope Company’s 1900 film McGovern-Gans Fight Pictures. It features the lightweights Terry McGovern and Joe Gans, the first native-born black American to win a world title (in 1900). This bout wasn’t for the world title, and it became controversial (and still is, judging from the comments accompanying the film) for Gans reportedly admitting to taking a dive. See what you think.
The film comes from a 1930s or 40s short produced by Forrest Brown, no longer existing in its original 1900 form, so far as is known. Amazing to be able to see such things still, and there’s many more such early fight pictures on YouTube, generally taken from sports shorts made decades later - see, for example, Joe Gans v Kid Herman in 1907 - though many more are lifted from programmes by ESPN, which has the world’s largest collection of archive boxing films, mostly gathered by Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton of Big Fights Inc., who when they weren’t amassing an amazing collection of fight films were managing the young Mike Tyson. Tyson has probably seen more archive films of boxing matches than anyone. He’s going to love Streible’s book, I’m sure.
The British Film Institute employs so many different outlets for its films these days that it’s difficult to keep up. What with the Mediatheque, Creative Archive, Screenonline, European Film Treasures, filmarchives online, its vast website and MySpace page, alongside the traditional outlets of DVD, book publishing and cinema exhibition, it’s becoming hard to escape their mission to inspire us all. Yet it’s still possible to overlook some of their activities, such is their number, as I’d done until now with their YouTube channel.
The BFI has contributed to several other YouTube sites, wittingly (e.g. 10 Downing Street and The Royal Channel) or unwittingly (take your pick), but for a few months now it has also had its own channel. And what gems are there.
There are sixty-four titles at present, and all are films which the BFI owns or for which there is no rights claimant, and so there’s an emphasis on silent shorts. Several of these are available from other BFI outlets, and all are featured in the Mediatheque, so the site serves as a taster, and no harm with that. So, for example, there are numerous clips from The Open Road, Claude Friese-Greene’s two-colour travelogue of 1924/25, which has already seen the recent light of day as a television programme and two DVD releases.
So let’s recommend a few old favourites. None more favoured to my mind than Lights and Shades on the Bostock Circus Farm, featured above, an astonishing 1911 production from the Warwick Trading Company (the print comes from a German source, hence the German titles, but it’s nevertheless a British production). I shan’t spoil the surprise - just to let you now that what looks like a conventional interest film about a touring circus and its animals suddenly turns to heart-rending drama…
Oyster Fishing at Whitstable, England
Or here’s another old favourite, Oyster Fishing in Whitstable, England - apparently an American production from 1921, though actually it’s a repackaging of a pre-First World War British film. An old favourite firstly because I was brought up in the fair town of Whitstable (and it hasn’t changed much), secondly because it’s a harmoniously accomplished example of early non-fiction ‘interest’ film, and thirdly because the subject of much of my research work, Charles Urban, the film’s producer, can be seen towards the end as one of a crowd on the beach sampling oysters (he’s the one crouching down on the right, wearing a hat).
The films all come with knowledgeable background descriptions from one or other of the BFI curators (a marked difference to many YouTube offerings). There are newsreels, magazine films, travels films, phantom rides, actualities, a recreation of Kinemacolor (more on that at another time) and much more. There are also several sound films of course (check out Geoffrey Jones’ glorious Snow, a brilliantly edited 1963 piece from the esteemed British Transport Films)). Fascinatingly, the most popular title so far is An Otter Study, with its underwater photography (the titles comes from the 1920s, but the original film was made by Urban’s Kineto company in 1912). Others are bound to feature in later posts. Go explore.
Percy Smith (left), from F.A. Talbot’s Moving Pictures: How They are Made and Worked (1912)
It’s been a long time in coming, but it’s been well worth the wait. Today saw the launch of WildFilmHistory, a site dedicated to recognising 100 years (so they say) of wildlife filmmaking. Produced by the Wildscreen Trust and supported by Lottery funding, this is a multimedia guide to one hundred years of natural history filmmaking, from the pioneering days when stop-motion films of flowers opening wowed them in the music halls to the age of Attenborough and beyond.
The site is biographical in focus, and at its centre are ninety-one (so far) mini-biographies of wildlife filmmakers, twenty-nine of them with accompanying oral history recordings, which very usefully come with PDF transcripts. So you get interviews with the likes of David Attenborough, Hans and Lotte Haas, Desmond Morris, Tony Soper and the late Gerald Thompson, but also the academic Derek Bousé, whose excellent history Wildlife Films investigates our period - more of which below. There’s also a very useful timeline.
But of greatest value for our purposes are the film clips of early wildlife films. There are thirteen of them (many from the British Film Institute collection):
Das Boxende Känguruh (1895) - Max Skladanowsky’s film of a boxing kangaroo and its trainer Mr Delaware.
Rough Sea at Dover (1895) - Something of a surprise choice, Birt Acres’ self-explanatory film which they argue is “considered by some to be the first natural history orientated film”.
Pelicans at the Zoo (1898) - Pelicans at Regent’s Park Zoo, made by the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, a breathtakingly beautiful film if seen on 35mm (it was originally shot on 70mm), a little more prosiac in Flash.
Spiders on a Web (1900) - A new one on me. This was apparently made by G.A. Smith and features two spiders in close-up, viewed through a circular mask (but no web to be seen). Clearly an extract from a longer film.
St. Kilda, Its People and Birds (1908) - Made by Oliver Pike, this shows both human and animal life on St kilda, off Scotland, at a time when it was still inhabited by people.
The Birth of a Flower (1910) - Exquisite stop-motion photography of flowers opening, complete with stencil colouring, made by the great Percy Smith for Charles Urban.
The History of a Butterfly - A Romance of Insect Life (1910) - A fully-fledged natural history film, made by James Williamson, with a fair bit of nitrate damage to remind us of the precious state in which some of these films survive.
The Strength and Agility of Insects (1911) - Eye-popping pyrotechnics performed by flies, who juggle corks, twirl matchsticks etc. This is actually a re-issue of an earlier film, The Balancing Bluebottle (1908), filmed by our hero of the era, Percy Smith, for Charles Urban once again. No animals was injured during the making of this film (honest).
Secrets of Nature: The Sparrow-Hawk (1922) - One of the famous British Instructional Films series of educational films from the 1920s/30s, this was made by Captain C.W. R. Knight (the site’s synopsis mistakenly says in one place that Percy Smith made the film, though he was associated with many Secrets of Nature productions) (Captain Knight turns up twenty years later as the eagle-tamer in Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going, trivia fans).
Secrets of Nature: The Cuckoo’s Secret (1922) - Another title from The Secrets of Nature, this time filmed by Oliver Pike and produced by ornithologist Edgar Chance
With Cherry Kearton in the Jungle (1926) - Cherry Kearton was the most celebrated naturalist of the era, and with his brother Richard more or less pioneered the art of wildlife photography and then cinematography. This is a ‘greatest hits’ compilation of some of his African natural history films.
Simba (1928) - An African travelogue (extracts only) made by the enterprising American couple Martin and Osa Johnson, blending actuality with staged scenes, and alarmingly also blending shooting with both camera and gun.
Dassan: An Adventure in Search of Laughter Featuring Nature’s Greatest Little Comedians (1930) - Cherry Kearton anticipates The March of the Penguins by several decades.
And so it continues up to the present day, with many marvellous clips which both amaze and cause a sigh of happy nostalgia (Zoo Quest, Jacques Cousteau). A little oddly, the site includes pages for films that they haven’t tracked down yet - these include Oliver Pike’s In Birdland (1907), which they argue was the first true wildlife film (hence the centenary), but unfortunately no copy is known to exist.
This is a very well produced site, on which a huge amount of effort has been expended on clearing and producing the clips, esearching the history, and presenting the interviews. The early film clips are wonderful to see, even if I miss one or two titles that I think should have been there (e.g. Herbert Ponting’s fine penguin footage from his films of Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition). The site opens up the history of wildlife film, demonstrating an interconnected heritage, championing excellence, and encouraging us all to find out more.
So, if you are interested in finding out more, where should you go? Well, as mentioned, I strongly recomennd Derek Bousé’s Wildlife Films (2000). This is a first-rate history of wildlife filmmaking and television production, good not only on the plain history but on the mysteries of the genre, which ever since its earliest days has had to adopt assorted entertainment strategies, particularly storytelling, to make its work palatable to a mass public. It is thoughtful and informative. Also recommended is the similarly thought-provoking Animals in Film (2002) by Jonathan Burt. There’s also the recent BBC publication, Michael Bright’s 100 Years of Wildlife (2007), which is aimed at the popular end of the market, but does at least name check people such as Kearton, Smith and Urban.
WildFilmHistory is a wonderful resource, which promises to grow and welcomes any information on new material that they might use. In the spirit of the great filmmakers it champions, go explore.
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