Pen and pictures no. 1: Thomas Hardy

Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1913), from www.thomashardyfilms.com

Time for a new series, I think. And its theme is the crossover between literature and film, looking at how the silent cinema tackled the works of assorted authors - and how authors came to terms with this strange new medium, which challenged their claims upon the popular imagination, frequently mangled their works as screen entertainments, yet also offered riches, either through selling the rights or through contributing their own screenplays. It’s an engrossing history, where every author’s experience is just that little different to anyone else’s. And we’ll start with Thomas Hardy.

Hardy seems so much a Victorian (if late Victorian) author, that it comes as a bit of surprise to release that he lived long into the era of film - long enough to see, somewhat to his bemusement, his novels adapted as films. There were four silent films made of Hardy’s work: Tess of the D’Urbervilles (US 1913), Far from the Madding Crowd (UK 1916), The Mayor of Casterbridge (UK 1921) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (US 1924). Details of each can be found in the ‘Lost Hardy Adaptations’ section of the website Thomas Hardy: The Films Page.

The entertaining story of Hardy’s personal engagement with film is told in Matthew Sweet’s book Inventing the Victorians. Hardy was first approached by a film company in 1911. The Warwick Trading Company, a British business, wanted to film Tess of the D’Urbervilles, offering Hardy ten per cent of the gross turnover. Hardy told his agent:

I should imagine that an exhibition of successive scenes from Tess (which is, I suppose, what is meant), could do no harm to the book, & might possibly advertise it among a new class.

Scarcely overwhelming enthusiasm at the prospect of seeing his work filmed, though Hardy did sign the contract (the film did not get made). He also accepted money from Hubert von Herkomer, the artist turned filmmaker, who wanted to film Far from the Madding Crowd and The Mayor of Castebridge. Neither was produced, and Hardy was onto a nice little earner without a film having made it to the screen.

It was the Americans who first put Hardy on the screen. Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players produced Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 1913, with Broadway actress Minnie Maddern Fiske as a somewhat mature Tess - she had first played the role on stage in 1895 - David Torrence as Alec and Raymond Bond as Angel Clare. The film was shot in New England, and generally given an American look throughout, as well as having a softened ending (Tess goes to prison rather than being hanged). Hardy attended a press screening of the film at Pyke’s Cinematograph Theatre in London’s Cambridge Circus (today a fashionable bar named after its former cinema owner, the Montagu Pyke) on 21 October 1913. Matthew Sweet records Hardy’s bemused reaction:

It was a curious production, & I was interested in it as a scientific toy; but I can say nothing as to its relation to, or rendering of, the story.

In other words, the movies had produced some kind of bewildering aberation (at least as far as his work was concerned), but it was hard to complain about the money.

The clash between old arts world and new continued with Far from the Madding Crowd, made in 1916 as a five-reel feature by the British company Turner Films, whose great star was the American actress Florence Turner. Turner played Bathsheba Everdene, and her regular co-star Henry Edwards was Gabriel Oak. As with all other Hardy silents, the film is lost, and all we can glean from reviews is that the film did not look like it was filmed in Wessex. This was undoubtedly true, but films of literary properties needed to be true to their own medium first, not to the printed page, a lesson that was starting to be learned as films grew longer and the movie industry grew more assertive, and became richer.

Such riches, and such attitudes, were evidenced by Metro Pictures, which optioned Tess for an astonishing $50,000, but the next Hardy film came from a far humbler source, the Progress Film Company of Shoreham-by-Sea on England’s south coast. The tale of the artist/theatrical community in what was affectionately known as ‘Bungalow Town’ is charmingly told on the Bungalow Town website. The Mayor of Casterbidge was made there in 1921, directed by Sidney Morgan and starring Fred Groves as Michael Henchard. Hardy was receiving more and more offers from film companies, and seems to have selected according to the degree to which the treatment indicated a sympathetic understanding of his original. For the Progress proposal he wrote:

The general arrangement seems as good as is compatible with presentation with cinemas.

Hardy was invited to see the film in production (it was filmed in Dorset, which may have helped secure his approval), and so enjoyed the peculiar experience of seeing his characters come to life, as it were, writing in a letter:

This morning we have had an odd experience. The film-makers are here doing scenes for “The Mayor of C” and they asked us to come as see the process. The result is that I have been talking to the Mayor, Mrs Henchard, Eliz. Jane, & the rest, in the flesh … It is a strange business to be engaged in.

The last film to be made of his work while Hardy was still alive was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in 1924. This was a top-notch Hollywood effort (evidenced by that $50,000 payment for the rights), with Blanche Sweet as Tess, Conrad Nagel as Angel Clare and Stuart Holmes as Alec. Scenes were filmed in Dorechester, but Hardy never saw the film. Given that the film updated much of the action to the 1920s, with motor cars and nightclubs, it is perhaps best that he did not. Interestingly, it seems to have been made with two endings, exhibitors being given the option whether to choose Tess being hanged or Tess escaping the gallows.

And that’s Thomas Hardy and film. He displayed an intriguing tension in his letters between keenness to profit from the film rights and concern over how his work was represented. In Hardy’s personal engagement with the motion picture industry we see films move from being a peculiar distraction which might help book sales, to a medium which challenged the author’s hold upon the work of his imagination. Meeting the Mayor of Casterbridge in the flesh must have been an unsettling experience - evidence that the creative work had a life outside the printed page on which it first appeared.

None of the Hardy silent films are known to exist (there are rumours of a surviving fragment of the Progress Mayor of Casterbridge). Apart from Matthew Sweet’s book and www.thomashardyfilms.com, check out T.R. Wright’s Thomas Hardy on Screen or Paul J. Neimeyer’s Seeing Hardy: Film and Television Adaptations of the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, each of which tells much the same story about the silent films.

Despite having lived until 1928, Hardy does not seem to have been filmed himself. The nearest we get is film of his funeral, which you can see on www.britishpathe.com.

Vittorio Martinelli RIP

Vittorio Martinelli

Anyone who has attended one of the marvellous festivals of archive or silent film that the Italians have in such profusion will recognise Vittorio Martinelli (1926-2008). Even if you don’t know his many books of film history, he was a regular sight at Pordenone and Bologna. His death was announced recently, and there are fulsome tributes (in Italian and English) on the Pordenone website, include a fine tribute on PDF from film historian Ivo Blom. Martinelli is best-known for the multi-volume filmography of Italian silent cinema, Il cinema muto italiano, that he co-edited with Aldo Bernardini. He also wrote extensively on other national cinemas. Every nation seems to have produced these dedicated, principled documenters of our silent heritage (John Barnes, Denis Gifford, Einar Lauritzen, Henri Bousquet, Herbert Birett), believers all in the value of the accurate, comprehensive list. Will we see their like again in the next generations, or have we now the filmographies for silent film history that will sustain our subject for the future?

Now with added movies

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.

Colourful stories no. 5 - The Brighton School

Davidson-Jumeaux two-colour system from 1904, blue-green image on the left, orange image on the right

We might note, in passing, that almost all these pioneers were living in Brighton and that they were all in their individualistic and several ways certain that they, and they alone, had inventions worth a fortune. Why did they not collaborate? Were they mutually acquainted? We shall probably never know.

So wrote Adrian Klein, author of the exceptional history and technological survey, Colour Cinematography, first published in 1936. For it is an intriguing fact that most of the pioneers of colour cinematography in what we can call the pre-Kinemacolor era were located in and around the Brighton area, 1898-1906. And in answer to Klein, yes, they were mutually acquainted, some did collaborate, and this is their story.

It was the French film historian Georges Sadoul who first coined the phrase ‘Brighton School’ in the 1940s, to describe a small group of experimenters in motion picture form, among them Esmé Collings, G.A. Smith and James Williamson, who were based in the Brighton and Hove area. The notion of a ’school’ is a misleading one, though it has proved an enduring term in early film studies, but there was undoubtedly a grouping of like-minded filmmakers, photographers and technicians, larger in composition than Sadoul realised, and dedicated mostly not to innovations in film form to please future film historians, but in a holy grail for the new film industry, colour cinematography. The chief ‘members’ were Alfred Darling, William Norman Lascelles Davidson, Benjamin Jumeaux, Edward Grün, Otto Pfenninger, William Friese-Greene, Charles Urban and George Albert Smith.

Alfred Darling, from www.victorian-cinema.net

Alfred Darling (1862-1931) was not an experimenter in colour cinematography himself, but he was a technician of genius, whose presence in the area (he lived at 25 Ditchling Rise, Hove) gave huge impetus to the local cinematography industry. His engineering business supplied cinematographic equipment for the Warwick Trading Company, the major British film business of the late 1890s/early 1900s era. It was he who constructed Bioscope cameras and projectors for Warwick, and who supplied much of the equipment used by his experimenting neighbours.

The Kammatograph, from www.victorian-cinema.net

Captain William Norman Lascelles Davidson (c.1871-c.1944), formerly of the 4th Battalion The Kings (Liverpool) Regiment, was an enthusiastic amateur inventor, pursuing the goal of both colour photography and colou cinematography. He claimed to have spent £3,000 in his quest (multiply figures from the early 1900s by 100 to have an idea of equivalent costs today). His first patent for a putative three-colour cinematography system was issued in 1898, which he followed by with a patent for a three-colour still photography method the following year. No working model emerged from either, but in 1901 he teamed up with his neighbour Dr Benjamin Jumeaux to work on the Kammatograph, a filmless device which recorded motion pictures in a spiral on a disc, invented by Leo Kamm. They experimented with two colour filters, instead of three, an inspiration that may have come from the man who probably processed their films - or else he was to take the idea from them - their near neighbour G.A. Smith. Other experiments followed in 1903 and particularly 1904, with their invention (B.P. 7,179 of 1904) which employed twin prisms creating a blue-green and orange record with the pictures side by side, exposed simultaneously (see illustration at top of this post). But the results demonstrated were criticised for poor definition and unnatural colour effects. Davidson then took on William Friese-Greene as his employee, and other demonstrations would follow in 1906, with similar lack of practical success. Davidson then fades out of the picture, still something of a mystery figure.

Mystery three-colour experiment (c.1903) believed to be by Davidson and Jumeaux, part of the Will Day collection, Cinémathèque française

Computerised synthesis of what the above colour record might have looked like

Dr Benjamin Jumeaux (c.1852-?) is still more of a mystery. He lived in Southwick, just outside Brighton, as did Davidson and Smith. He was born in Ceylon (Sir Lanka), of Anglo-French parentage. In the 1901 census he is described as a physician, surgeon and artist. He is named on patents alongside Davidson, but also had patents issued under his own name, demonstrating that he was not simply a financier to the experiments. Included in the Will Day collection at the Cinémathèque française is an extraordinary piece of film, 82mm wide, with three parallel black-and-white images, each registering a red, green and blue image. The Cinémathèque has identified this as Davidson-Jumeaux, apparently through evidence suplied by a perforator, but I have come across no evidence of such a film featuring in their public demonstrations.

Dr Edward F. Grün, or Grune, also lived in Southwick, and was close friends with G.A. Smith. His hobby was inventions in colour photography, and he became briefly celebrated in 1902 for his invention of a ‘fluid’ lens, with coloured fluids within the camera lens itself. Ingenious but pointless, the idea did not catch on. Grün’s would feature as a key witness in a 1913 court case between Kinemacolor and a rival colour system, Biocolour, where his muddled testimony revealed his uncertain grasp of technology as well as events. More on that story in a later post.

Otto Pfenninger colour photograph of Brighton beach, 1906, from Royal Photographic Society

Otto Pfenninger (1855-?) was Swiss-born, but living in Brighton by the 1890s, where he ran a photography business. He became closely associated with the other Brighton experimenters, especially Davidson and Jumeaux, whom he assisted in some form, but his prime interest was always still photography. He wrote on his experiences in a book, Byepaths of Colour Photography (1921) published under the pseudonym O. Reg, from which the rare (unique?) frames of a Davidson-Jumeaux two-colour experiment in 1904 at the top of this post derives. He devised his own three-colour still photography system, demonstrated by the photograph above of Brighton beach in July 1906.

William Friese-Greene, from www.victorian-cinema.net

William Friese-Greene (1855-1921) had had a long association with Brighton through his business partnership with Esmé Collings before he moved from Essex to 203 Western Road, Brighton in 1905. Here he became the paid employee of Captain Davidson, whose experiments were conducted at 20 Middle Street, Brighton. Friese-Greene already had a patent for a three-colour cinematography system in his name from 1898, and issued another with Davidson in April 1905 (B.P. 9,465 - it employed a beam-splitting prism), which he would subsequently boast was the ‘master patent’ for colour cinematography. It was of no such thing, but the full story behind Friese-Greene’s vainglorious efforts to invent colour cinematography must receive full treatment later in this series.

Charles Urban

Charles Urban (1867-1942) was not an inventor nor a resident of Brighton, but he was a major figure on the scene, and the most important person in colour cinematography in the period up to the First World War, for his championing of Kinemacolor. Urban had first become interested in colour cinematogaphy when Edward Turner and Frederick Lee (subjects of an earlier post) came to his Warwick Trading Company in 1901 looking for financial support for their three-colour system. When Warwick the company lost interest, Urban took on the financing of the project himself. Turner died in 1903, but, undeterred, Urban passed on the development work to his close associate G.A. Smith. Urban came down to Brighton every weekend (or so he claimed) as Smith’s experiments progressed, making himself an honorary ‘Brighton School’ member. Much more on his history is to follow.

George Albert Smith, from www.victorian-cinema.net

And then there is George Albert Smith (1864-1959), long-lived enough that he might have corrected Adrian Klein, had he a mind to. He lived in Brighton and Southwick, and had already enjoyed a colourful career as mesmerist, showman, filmmaker and film processor for the Warwick Trading Company. He had worked with Lee and Turner, he knew all about the two-colour experiments of Davidson and Jumeaux, he knew all the others, knew what they had done right and all the more importantly what they had done wrong. In particular, he had taken note of the two-colour experiments of Davidson and Jumeaux, and thought he knew how he could make such an idea work, not least by application of his superior knowledge of sensitising photographic materials.

So tune in next week, for the invention of Kinemacolor.

Recommended reading:
Luke McKernan, ‘The Brighton School and the Quest for Natural Colour’, in Vanessa Toulmin and Simon Popple (eds.), Visual Delights - two: Exhibition and Reception (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2005)

The Anima lodge

Too many topics and too little time. There are so many subjects I have tucked away for research at some time, but many of them I will never get round to tackling. So the best thing to do is to offer them up in their raw state here on The Bioscope, in the hope that they may interest someone else sufficiently to take up challenge.

A case in point is the Anima lodge. I’m unlikely ever to get to the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, and indeed I would hardly know where to start, freemasonry being an entirely closed book to me. But the intriguing story nevertheless is that there was a British freemasonry lodge for those in the film business, and it was established in 1912. I have, from I know not where, a list of the subscribing members of the Lodge 1912-1920, and a fascinating document it is too.

These were the founder members (links are to the Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema and London Project websites):

• Edward Thomas Heron [publisher of the Kinematograph Weekly]
• J. Brooke Wilkinson [secretary of the Kinematograph Manufacturers' Association and later of the British Board of Film Censors]
• Edwin Houghton Rockett [inventor and general jack-of-all-trades]
• Frederick Arton [managing director]
• Francis William Baker [managing director of Butcher's Film Service]
• Will Day [film equipment supplier and later film historian]
• Matt Raymond [Lumière operator, exhibitor, and future master of the Anima lodge]
• W. Firth [not known]
• George Henry Smith [British representative for Vitagraph Company of America]
• James Charles Squier [can't remember, involved in production]
• Charles Urban [producer, particularly of Kinemacolor]
• A. Pearl Cross [executive]
• John Frank Brockliss [film distributor]

That’s a notable list of a few of the major figures in the British film business at that time. More joined in subsequent years - I’ll identify them where I can:

• 1913 - Edward Henry Montagu [executive]
• 1913 - Alexander Liddle
• 1913 - E.H. Bishop [managing director]
• 1913 - Walter Northam [executive with Provincial Cinematograph Theatres]
• 1914 - H.S. Chambers
• 1915 - Harold John Fisher
• 1915 - Paul Kimberley [executive]
• 1915 - Albert Simmons
• 1915 - George Henry Saffell
• 1916 - Reginald Charles Bromhead [executive with Gaumont company]
• 1916 - Sidney Thornton Smurthwaite
• 1917 - Thomas Arthur Welsh [producer]
• 1917 - John Pearson
• 1918 - John Charles Ernest Mason [cameraman]
• 1918 - Solomon Gabriel Newman
• 1919 - Robert Chetham
• 1920 - Alfred G. Challis
• 1920 - Edward Maxwell Heron
• 1920 - Samuel Woolf Smith
• 1920 - Ernest Edgar Blake [executive]
• 1920 - E.W. Fredman
• 1920 - Victor Sheridan
• 1920 - Frederick Holmes Cooper [cameraman]
• 1920 - George William Pearson [director]
• 1920 - Chas. J. Miller
• 1920 - Ernest Peall [executive]
• 1920 - Lionel Phillips [distributor]

Well, there’s a fascinating line-up of the famous (in their small world, in their day) and the unknown. Figures like Urban, Wilkinson, Welsh, Kimberley, Pearson, Raymond and Heron were leading figures in the early British film business; many of the others were minor figures then, and are undoubtedly obscure now. What did the Anima lodge do? What advantages might it have brought to those who joined? How did the grand and the less-than-grand figures rub together? What alternative history of British silent cinema might some ingenious researcher draw from this line-up? Sadly, I cannot even tell you when the Anima lodge closed - if it ever closed. Perhaps it lingers somewhere. Someone will know.

Anyone who can identify the roles of the names I haven’t been able to identify, please let me know.

The silent pianist speaks again

Neil Brand

Neil Brand is taking his show The Silent Pianist Speaks - first shown at the Edinburgh Festival - to London. He is appearing for two nights at the Pleasance Theatre, Islington, 22-23 December. What better way to welcome in Christmas. Here’s the press release:

“ASSISTED BY THE TRILLING WIT AND POLISH OF BRAND’S LIGHTNING-FINGERED ACCOMPANIMENT, THE SHEER FINESSE OF EACH SUCCESSIVE SLAPSTICK SELECTION WORKS ITS MAGIC ON THE AUDIENCE AND THE LAUGHTER FLOWS MORE AND MORE FREELY” Telegraph 2007

Fresh from co-starring with Paul Merton in the UK tour of Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns, Neil Brand, one of the world’s foremost silent movie accompanists is proud to present his own critically acclaimed show at The Pleasance Theatre, London for two nights only. The Silent Pianist Speaks is one of most unique and memorable shows you will see. It left both audiences and critics at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe in far from silent awe of the great filmmakers of the Silent Era and the magic of the accompanists who breathed life and sound into their work.

Neil uses clips from some of the greatest moments in silent cinema to illustrate his 25 year career and the special place of music with silent film.

“A RICHLY DIVERTING HOUR OF ENTERTAINMENT - BRAND SHOULD BREAK HIS SILENCE MORE OFTEN” Metro 2007

From the earliest, earthiest comedies and thrillers, through a silent cine-verité classic shot by a young Billy Wilder, which the audience gets to score, to the glories of Hollywood glamour and the sublime Laurel and Hardy, Neil provides improv accompaniment and laconic commentary on everything from deep focus to his own live cinema disasters.

The show culminates in a performance of a film he hasn’t seen, talking through the scoring process as he plays and struggles to make some sense of the film.

“BRAND’S IMPROVISED PIANO PLAYING ELEVATES SILENT MOVIES FROM CRUDE SLAPSTICK TO SUBTLE BALLET” Guardian 2007

Having trained originally as an actor, Neil has been accompanying silent films for over 25 years performing regularly at the NFT on London’s south bank and film festivals and special events throughout the UK and the world. He is considered one of the finest exponents of improvised silent film accompaniment in the world.

He has written the title music and scores for many TV documentaries including Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns, Silent Britain and Great Britons and scores for over 50 Radio 4 dramas including War and Peace, The Box of Delights, several of the BBC audio Shakespeare Collection plays and Sony award winner A Town Like Alice. Neil is also highly regarded as a writer of radio plays including the Sony-nominated Stan, which he adapted last year to great acclaim for BBC4 TV.

He has appeared with Paul Merton across the UK in Paul’s show, Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns and also across the UK and US with his first show, Where Does the Music Come From? This year he has appeared at Finland’s ‘Midnight Sun’ Festival, Padua Opera House and Kilkenny Comedy Festival.

More details and online booking from the Pleasance website.

Retour de flamme

This short piece on the remarkable Lobster Films of Paris is doing the rounds. Here it is (taken from www.france24.com):

Frenchman Serge Bromberg, saviour of more than 100,000 reels of old films, this week marked the 15th anniversary of a world-touring show with a difference - where he accompanies rescued silent movies on the piano.

A twice yearly Paris event, Retour de Flamme (Return of the Flame) has played New York’s MoMA and travels to India next February before going to Italy and the US for shows in San Francisco and New York.

“I like to say I ‘restore’ the spectator,” he said in an interview. “I bring old movies up-to-date with a presentation and a specially-written musical score, to bring the films alive.

Bromberg’s company Lobster Films, set up two decades ago with fellow film addict Eric Lange, has saved from destruction movies dating as far back as 1895, including film’s first movie with sound - Charlie Chaplin’s first 1914 movie “Twenty Minutes of Love” - and the first movies shot in Palestine (1897) as well as the only Marx Brothers shot in colour.

In the first 50 years of cinema, films were recorded on nitrate stocks, which is inflammable and decays. As no-one had thought at the time of preserving film, much of movie history was lost.

“I pick up films all year, with 99 percent unviewable but there’s always one which is extraordinary and which I want to share,” said the 46-year-old film buff.

On DVD now is 1912 footage of the Titanic before it went down, and a 1931 burlesque titled Stolen Jools, featuring Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

“Fifty percent of the films shot before World War II have been lost,” he added.

Among recently saved treasures are 15 hours of rushes from a 1964 drama featuring the late Romy Schneider and directed by Henri-George Clouzot. The film was never completed and the rushes had been kept at home by Clouzot’s widow Ines.

Another of his 2007 finds is “Bardelys the magnificent” (1926) by King Vidor, starring John Gilbert.

So it’s true, Bardelys the Magnificent has been found, and of course it would be Lobster who found it. All power to them, and three cheers to all film archivists able to accompany their restorations of silent films on the piano. It ought to be a compulsory part of the job.

A Charlie Chaplin Christmas

www.myspace.com/silenttheatre

Talking of lost films, as we have been, today sees the opening in Chicago of A Charlie Chaplin Christmas, a play based around an imaginary lost Chaplin film, A Tramp’s Christmas. The play is a production of Chicago’s Silent Theatre Company, which has the brave and notable mission of creating stage productions inspired by silent movies. Its previous production was Lulu, based on G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box.

A Charlie Chaplin Christmas tells of a production company in the silent era desperate to find production funding. It tells potential backers that is has Chaplin signed up to take part in the film, and then have to make good its promise with a convincing lookalike. One of the inspirations behind the production is the old story that Charlie Chaplin himself once entered a Chaplin lookalike content, and came third. As with Lulu, the Silent Theatre Company performs in monochrome. Sets, costumes and make-up all are in black-and-white (or black or white).

The production is running at the Studio Theater in the Chicago Cultural Center, and runs until January 6. More information, visit the Silent Theatre Company’s MySpace page.

Popping the question

Well, here’s a romantic little tale from the gossip columns involving Patricia Arquette (film actress) and Thomas Jane (I haven’t a clue), who proposed to her in the following manner as described in the Philadelphia Daily News:

Last week Thomas Jane told Tattle’s Baird Jones at the premiere party for “The Mist” at NYC’s Rosa Mexicano how he popped the question to wife Patricia Arquette.

“My marriage proposal was very simple,” he said. “I cut myself into a Charlie Chaplin film and rented out a silent movie theater in Los Angeles and invited my wife to be on a date to go see a silent film.

“… When we walked in, the theater was dark and you could not see that it was empty. Then I had the projectionist and the owner laughing and trying to make it sound like there were people there.

“About 20 minutes into it, I cut myself into the film with cards. Chaplin swallowed a whistle and in the movie there was a host of a party who gathered everyone around a piano to sing a song with cards. Then they cut to me with cards and each card said, ‘Will’ ‘You’ ‘Marry’ ‘Me’ ‘Patricia.’ I had dressed myself up like a waiter and Patricia (Arquette) was sitting there thinking to herself, ‘Who is this waiter?’

“… Finally it dawned on her what was going on. She shouted ‘Yes’ at the screen, over and over. Then we had the projectionist run it again just for fun. I kept a copy.”

The Chaplin film in question is City Lights, which features the whistle-swallowing gag which takes place during a party. So how did Mr Jane go about this? Did he really get a print of City Lights, then shoot extra scenes to correspond with those from the original film? Was it all digital trickery? How convincing was it? How much did it all cost? What might the Chaplin estate think?

Brian Coe 1930-2007

Brian Coe

It is sad to have to report the death of Brian Coe on 18 October 2007. To anyone with an interest in the history of the technologies of cinematography or photography his work over four decades has been, and remains, indispensible. He joined Kodak in 1952, where he helped found its education service. He made a particular impact with his writings in the early 1960s which forensically overturned the romantic myths which had seen William Friese-Greene chauvinistically championed as a pioneer of cinematography.

He was Curator of the Kodak Museum from 1969 to 1984, building up the collection to be one of international renown, and curating many pioneering exhibitions. When the collection moved to the National Museum of Photography Film and Television in Bradford, Brian became Curator at the Royal Photographic Society’s collection in Bath. In 1989 he joined the Museum of the Moving Image as special events co-ordinator, organising shows, events and organisations on an extraordinary range of topics, all underpinned by exemplary research and presented with enthusiasm, finding a perfect balance between scholarship and entertainment.

At Kodak he built up not only a great collection but considerable personal expertise, which found lasting expression in his many publications. The remarkable thing about his books is that they have not dated. Twenty or thirty years on they are still relied upon as standard reference works, notable as much for their clarity of exposition as their steadfastly reliable content. They include The Birth of Photography (1976), Colour Photography (1978), Cameras: From daguerrotypes to instant pictures (1978), and the incomparable The History of Movie Photography (1981). This is still the best book on cinema technology that exists, and it is hard to see how it could be bettered. It is particularly strong on early cinema technologies - magic lanterns, the optical toys and chronophotographic experiments of the so-called ‘pre-cinema’ era, the first cameras and projectors, the development of colour cinematography, early widescreen systems, the birth of home movies. Its illustrations have been plundered by countless other sources. Film archivists swear by the book - it used to be (and I hope it still is) standard reading for anyone working at the National Film and Television Archive’s preservation centre. Another gem is Muybridge and the Chronophotographers (1992), a small exhibition book reportedly thrown together in a great hurry, but a handy reference guide that I turn back to again and again.

Sadly Brian suffered a serious stroke in 1995, and took no further active part in the worlds of film and photography to which he had contributed such invaluable knowledge. It was a sad curtailment to a varied and richly productive career, recognised through such honours as his Fellowship of the Royal Society Arts, but leaving him little known to the general film enthusiast. Check out one of his books - they’ll be in the local library or second-hand book store. They look beautiful, and they wisely and reliably inform. Thank you, Brian.