Live searching

The British Library (the noble institution where I happen to work) has been engaged for some time in a major project with Microsoft digitising some 100,000 books from the nineteenth century. Around 30,000 of these have now been made public available through Microsoft’s Live Search facility (to UK users only). I haven’t investigated this collection to see what possible texts on moving images it might contain, but the news has drawn my attention to Live Search as research source, which I’d quite overlooked.

You will find many digitised historical texts there, as well as current texts where there is limited access (e.g. to 10% of the content), much as you do with Google Books. In truth, the two resources offer much the same results and extras, but I find Live Search superior for the clarity of layout, ease of navigation, the linkages offered, and the word searching. Click in a search term such as ‘cinematograph’ - 1,860 hits - and for each title you get the book record, publication information, hyperlinks to where the search term appears in the digitised text, links to World Cat (if you want to find it in a library somewhere), and where available the opportunity to download the book from the Internet Archive. It is this latter option that particularly appeals, because it offers a far better means to search through texts on the Internet Archive than the Internet Archive provides itself (there you can only search titles and a limited synopsis). Hence many more titles turn up with relevant material for early film studies, including texts not directly about the movies but which have handy incidental information. I’ll be bringing you the results of some of these in future posts.

In the dock

Cinematograph theatre in Lordship Lane, London, in 1913, from http://commons.wikimedia.org

Let us celebrate the Bioscope’s imminent passing of the significant milestone of its 100,000th visitor (hurrah) by looking at a major new research resource for British historical studies in general which offers some minor but intriguing opportunities for the early film historian.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online is just that - a fully searchable edition of digitised texts from London’s central criminal court, with details of 197,745 criminal trials. These are trial reports originally published for general consumption. Previously this remarkable resource (a collaboration between the Open University, and the Universities of Hertfordshire and Sheffield, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Big Lottery Fund) covered the years 1674-1834. Now the collection has been augmented by texts of trials going up to April 1913 (when the printed Proceedings ceased publication). This makes it an obvious boon for historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a wealth of social detail alongside the intrinsic interest of the trials themselves. It is also a source of huge interest to family historians, who are exploring with nervous/eager anticipation to see if any of their forbears ended up in the dock (I’ve found one such forbear, but happily he was merely a witness to a crime). It is easy and helpful to use, and utterly engrossing to read.

So, given that the records go up to 1913, what is there for the film historian? Well, not a huge amount, but enough to merit further exploration by somebody. There are both cases which involve motion pictures, and cases where the accused or witnesses attended film shows which are recorded as part of the evidence.

For example, consider the case of Manuel Goldberg, alleged user of counterfeit coinage, from 8 January 1907. We get this evidence from one of the witnesses:

LOUISE VALLERS, wife of Henry Vallers, 129, Whitechapel Road, E. We keep a Bioscope Exhibition. I was there on the evening of December 22 last, between five and six, when prisoner came in on see the exhibition. The charge for admission was one penny. He tendered a half-crown. The people pay at the door as they enter. This is the coin marked by myself. I took it and gave him two separate shillings and fivepence change. He said to me, “Are there no tickets?” I said, “No,” and he went to the door again and beckoned to another man to come in. The other man came up, and he also gave me a half-crown for his admission, for which I gave him two and fivepence change. This is the one. I looked at them, being two half-crowns looked suspicious. I tested both of them with acid, and found they were bad. The second-man kept by the doorway, but the prisoner walked right to the end of the shop and sat down and waited for the exhibition. When the second man noticed that I saw the coins were no good, he took to his heels and ran away. I then closed my shop door and sent for a constable. I went up to prisoner, and said, “This half-crown ie no good to me,” and detained him till the other people in the shop had left. I gave him the coin back again. He simply said, “Not” and gave me a two shilling piece and ten halfpennies for his half-crown. A constable came in and I gave him in charge.

This is incidental evidence of a very early cinema in London, from which we learn its location, ownership, the price of admission, the ticketing policy, and the fact that, interestingly, the owner refers to the business as a shop (many early cinemas in London were simple shop conversions). He was found not guilty, by the way.

Next, this simple case report from 20 April 1909:

THOMPSON, William (31, operator), pleaded guilty of stealing two spools and four cinematograph films, the goods of Herbert Crow; also to stealing two spools and six cinematograph films, the goods of Horace Liver and another; also to stealing three cinematograph films, the goods of Frederick Weisker and another.

He confessed to a conviction for felony in 1906 in the name of Albert Storer. Several other convictions were proved, dating back to 1891. It being stated that another charge against him was pending, he also pleaded guilty to that in order that the Court might deal with all matters against him up to date.

Sentence, Two years’ hard labour on each indictment, to run concurrently.

And so on. It is necessary to use a variety of search terms to find relevant material. I’ve found evidence (as it were) using Bioscope, Cinematograph, Cinema, Biograph, Film (though look out for errors in the optical character recognition - a lot of ‘films’ should actually be ‘firms’) and Picture Palace. With the latter you get many glimpses of the regular habit of cinema-going at this time. Use the term Living Pictures, and you find the trial of the renowned anachist group behind the ‘Houndsditch Murders’ and the Siege of Sidney Street, as in this testimony from Luba Millstein :

When I got back to No. 59 Dubof was there; I cannot remember what time he left. Later that night Trassjonsky and I went to see some living pictures. On returning she and I were staying in the back room; Fritz and Trassjonsky lived there together. About midnight I heard two people coming upstairs. On my going to the front room door and knocking Fritz told me I must not come in. A little later the men left and I went with Trassjonsky into the front room and there saw the body of Gardstein lying on the bed. I heard a conversation between Fritz and Trossjonsky. Fritz told her that Morountzeff was wounded…

The only name from the British film industry that I’ve come across is J. Brooke Wilkinson, the future head of the British Board of Film Censors, who in December 1911 was a witness in a case of forgery.

As someone who is researching cinema-going in London at this period, the Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online is an absolute treasure trove to me. But there are other aspects there well worth pursuing, particularly relating to bankruptcy and fraud. Or maybe you’ll just what to find out if those rumours about great-grandfather’s criminal past are really true or not…

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.

Kansas Board of Review Movie Index

Following the item a couple of months back on the New York State Archives’ film censorship records, let’s now turn our attention to the Kansas Board of Review Movie Index.

The index covers all films assessed by the Kansas Board of Review, 1910-1966, for which some change was demanded prior to public screening - ranging from from cutting of brief scenes to the banning of entire films. The original index, held on 3×5 index cards, lists the date, number of reels, title, film company and whether accepted, rejected or to be accepted only with specified eliminations to be made. Cards for films with such eliminations contain a detailed description of the portions to be censored, and it is these that make the online version of this index so fascinating.

The Movie Index site explains the procedure:

In its earliest existence, the board was required to “Approve such film reels, including subtitles, spoken dialogue, songs, other words or sounds, folders, posters and advertising materials which are moral and proper” and to censor films that were “cruel, obscene, indecent or immoral, or such as tend to debase and corrupt morals.” The board accomplished this daunting task by requiring that all films to be shown in the state first be passed by a board of three censors. This board had the power to remove any scenes that it felt met the aforementioned criteria. The board also could ban films in toto (as it did with D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation from 1915 to 1923 for “inciting racial hatred and sectional bias”). After being reviewed and edited, the film was then tagged with a unique serial number that identified the film as having been reviewed and passed.

Although Birth of a Nation was accepted for public exhibition in Kansas, it could only be so following eliminations made, as the Index record demonstrates:

The Birth Of A Nation
Date of Review: 1923-11-27
Company Name: States Rights
Starring: Not Stated
Notes: Film was approved with elimination. Sam Silverman submitted a sound version on 3/23/31 which was examined and disapproved 11/12/31 because of tendency to debase & corrupt morals.
Contains Smoking? Not Stated
Eliminations: Reel 2: Reduce to flash mulatto woman on floor with bare shoulders. Reel 2: Eliminate scene of Stone embracing mulatto woman. Reel 4: Eliminate scene of soldier piercing body of fallen man with bayonet. Reel 5: Eliminate scene mulatto woman fondling arm of Stone. Reel 9: Eliminate closeup of negro’s face looking through trees. Reel 9: Reduce scenes of negro chasing girl. Reel 11: Reduce scenes of Lynch holding Elsie and looking sensually at her.
Box Number: 35-06-05-12

You can search by film title, company name, performer, specific elimination (the term “negro” brings up thirty-two hits) and date range - just searching on 1910-1929 alone brings up 4,638 hits. A first rate resource, compiled by volunteers it seems, to whom all praise.

So far as I know there aren’t any other American state censorship records available online, apart from New York and Kansas, but I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who can tell me otherwise.

Where the wild things are

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.

19th Century UK periodicals

Here at the Bioscope, when highlighting digitised resources, we tend to go for those that are freely available to all. However, it is worth pointing out some of those which are restricted to subscribers, institutions or educational users, either because you the reader may fall into such categories, or they may be resources that you can find (or request that they be subscribed to) at your local library.

Which leads us to 19th Century UK Periodicals. This new resource describes itself as “a major new multi-part series which covers the events, lives, values and themes that shaped the 19th century world.” It’s being published in stages, and Series 1, on New Readerships, provides access to close to 100 periodicals, mainly based on the collections of the British Library and the National Library of Scotland. Five series are planned, across 600 journals, the others being Empire, Culture, Working Life and Knowledge.

New Readerships is dedicated to the changes and influences in political and rural life, children’s literature and leisure, and includes such varied journals as The Northern Star, The Satirist, British Women’s Temperance Journal, The Boy’s Own Paper, Country Gentlemen, Pick-Me-Up, Little Wide Awake, Fun, Ladies Fashionable Repository, Bailey’s Monthly Magazine of Sport, and Punch.

And there is plenty there for the early film researcher. Using our trustworthy test search term of Kinetoscope, we get 115 hits, starting with The Sporting Times facetiously noting the appearance of “Mr Edison’s latest little toy” in its edition of 20 October 1894, through to The Turf, on 13 October 1900, noting that the racehorse Kinetoscope would be running at the two mile Handicap Hurlde Race at Sandown on Saturday. I’m sure there’s an interesting paper to be written on the undistinguished racing career of Kinetoscope, whose naming after a contemporary technology anticipates Sanyo Music Centre and others of that ilk by several decades.

Other terms such as Cinematograph (215 hits), American Biograph (175 hits), Mutoscope (31 hits), Animatograph (11 hits) or Bioscope (6 hits) bring up results that are fascinating not only for the incidental bits of concrete information they provide (particularly through advertisements), but also for they way they demonstrate how the idea of the medium swiftly became pervasive. You knew about the moving pictures through your light reading, before you might have had any chance to see them.

As an example of what can be find, he’s an intriguing little insight into perceptions and expectations of the medium. The Country Gentleman (27 January 1900, p. 103) is commenting on films at the time of the Anglo-Boer War:

Though several of our variety theatres announce exhibitions of war pictures, they are in reality nothing of the sort, but merely cinematograph pictures of the combatants preparing for the fight, or places of special interest at the present time, such as Pretoria, Kimberley, Mafeking, etc. Sightseers who believe they are going to witness an actual battle have hitherto been disappointed. But in the future this is likely to be altered, for the Warwick Trading Company, through their assistants at the front, have just received a consignment of films representing actual battles, skirmishes, etc., and these photographs are now being rapidly developed. Within a few days, therefore, all of us will doubtless have an opportunity of seeing what an actual battle looks like, and gain some idea of the horrors of warfare.

Fascinating to see that desire for the horrors of warfare to be served up as entertainment in the variety theatres, and the use of term ’sightseers’ to describe proto-cinemagoers.

You can find out more about 19th Century UK Periodicals from the publishers, Gale. It’s not freely available, and do note these sorts of resources are aimed at (and priced at) institutions, not individuals. So go seek out your local institution.

The spice of life

One of the frustrating things for the online early film researcher has been the lack of film reviews available from the film trade press, as opposed to those in newspapers, whose digitised availability has been covered here several times. One exception in the Pacific Film Archive’s Cinefiles database, mentioned recently. Another is the venerable American film journal Variety, a selection of whose archive reviews are being put online.

It’s only a selection, so one hopes that it will continue to grow, but what’s there already is choice stuff, not least because they’ve selected some of the more familiar titles from the silent era. Seaching is either by word or by year, with a calendar of hyperlinks to individual years (some of them divided up into quarters). So, for the earliest year of the archive, 1914, you can find reviews on The Battle of the Sexes, The Escape, Home Sweet Home, Judith of Bethulia, Tess of the Storm Country and Tillie’s Punctured Romance. While for 1923 you get Anna Christie, Safety Last, The Christian, The Covered Wagon, Fury, Hollywood, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Our Hospitality, Peg O’ My Heart, Ruggles of Red Gap, Scaramouche, The Ten Comandments, The Three Ages, The Wandering Jew and A Woman of Paris. Quite a year.

As a sample (from 1923) of what you’ll find, here’s that rarity for the time, Variety saying something positive about a British film:

The Wandering Jew

Stoll. Director Maurice Elvey; Screenplay Alicia Ramsey

Matheson Lang
Hutin Britton
Malvina Longfellow
Isobel Elsom
Florence Sanders
Shayle Gardner

With this Stoll picture Matheson Lang established a right to be regarded as a screen star. Throughout his impersonation of the Jew, condemned to wander through the ages, arrogant, proud, though broken-hearted, ever within reach of happiness, but always overtaken by disaster just as he is about to grasp his heart’s desire, is masterly.

The story follows the Temple Thurston play fairly close. In the opening scenes we see the Jew, Matathias, and his lover, Judith, his reviling of the Saviour on His way to Calvary and the dreadful outlawry which sent him into the world a wanderer. Thirteen hundred years pass and he is among the Crusaders; again a lovely woman loves him, but again fate stands between him and happiness, and so the story goes down the years until at last the Inquisition gives him the peace and eternal rest which before have always been denied him.

Spectacularly, the production is very fine and the subject is treated with great reverence by Maurice Elvey.

Conversely, here’s Variety in 1928 somewhat at variance with posterity, dismissing a film now widely considered to be one of the outstanding masterworks of the silent cinema:

The Wind

M-G-M. Director Victor Seastrom; Screenplay Frances Marion, John Colton; Camera John Arnold; Editor Conrad A. Nervig; Art Director Cedric Gibbons, Edward Withers

Lillian Gish
Lars Hanson
Montagu Love
Dorothy Cumming
Edward Earle
William Orlamond

Some stories are just naturally poison for screen purposes and Dorothy Scarborough’s novel here shows itself a conspicuous example. Everything a high pressure, lavishly equipped studio, expert director and reputable star could contribute was showered on this production. Everything about the picture breathes quality. Yet it flops dismally.

Tragedy on the high winds, on the desolate desert prairies, unrelieved by that sparkling touch of life that spells human interest, is what this picture has to offer. It may be a true picturization of life on the prairie but it still remains lifeless: and unentertaining.

The story opens with an unknown girl, Letty (Lillian Gish), from Virginia, train-bound for her cousin’s ranch, which she describes as beautiful to the stranger, Roddy (Montagu Love), who has made her acquaintance informally.

Roaring, blinding wind and sandstorms immediately frighten the girl. She remains in a semi-conscious state of fright throughout, excepting at the close of the picture.

At Beverly’s (Edward Earle) ranch the girl becomes too popular with Cora’s (Dorothy Cummings) children and is forced to leave. The girl then accepts a proposal from Lige (Lars Hanson), whom she had laughed at the night before. During a round-up of wild horses, brought down by a fierce northern gale, Roddy forces his way into Lige’s home and stays there for the night with Letty.

All in all, a very welcome selection of classic reviews (which goes on up to the present day), which hopefully may be expanded in due course.

CineFiles

CineFiles is the film document image database of the Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, California. The database comprises reviews, press kits, programme notes, newspaper articles and other documents from the Archive’s library collection. The documents cover world cinema, past and present. Over 25,000 films are represented, and their target figure is 200,000 documents, with more being added daily.

You can search by document (under title, author, date or publisher, or for documents about specific films, people, or subjects) or filmographic data (under title, subject, genre, director, year, country, or studio). There doesn’t seem to be any easy way of isolating silent films (typing in ’silent’ into the subject field only brings up three titles), so you will have to search by title, director or specific year for the best results.

The collection is particularly strong on Russian and Soviet cinema, so, as an example, the record for Protazanov’s Pikovaia dama (The queen of spades) (1916), erroneously given as a Soviet Union production (in 1916 the country was still Russia), provides the researcher with the following:

Title: Pikovaia dama (The queen of spades)
Director: Protazanov, Iakov Aleksandrovich
Country of Prod.: Soviet Union
Year: 1916
Language: Russian
Production Co.:
Genre: Adaptation, Horror
Subject: Gamblers — Drama, Ghosts — Drama

Related Documents:

1. Silent witnesses — excerpt - Tsivian, Yuri - British Film Institute - 1989 - 3 pages - - book excerpt

View full description of this document
View page images: Pg. 1, Pg. 2, Pg. 3

2. Costumes and classics - - National Film Theatre (London, England) - 1990 Feb 04 - 1 page - - program note

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View page images: Pg. 1

3. Pikovaya dama (the queen of spades) - Borger, Lenny - Variety - 1990 Mar 21 - 1 page - - review

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View page images: Pg. 1

4. Queen of spades - - Mary Pickford Theater (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.) - 1992 Apr - 1 page - - program note

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5. The queen of spades - - Pacific Film Archive - - 2 pages - - program note

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View page images: Pg. 1, Pg. 2

6. The queen of spades - Svolkein, N. - - - 4 pages - - intertitles

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View page images:
Pg. 1, Pg. 2, Pg. 3, Pg. 4

7. The queen of spades - Svolkein, N. - - - 1 page - - intertitles

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View page images: Pg. 1

8. The queen of spades - Bolotnikov, Vladimir - - - 4 pages - - intertitles

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Pg. 1, Pg. 2, Pg. 3

9. Mosjoukine — excerpt - - - - 3 pages - - book excerpt

View full description of this document
View page images: Pg. 1, Pg. 2, Pg. 3

The page image references are links to GIF or JPEG images of book extracts, programme notes etc. The document search option has some very useful means to narrow a search, including type of document (advertisement, bibliography, book excerpt, correspondence, obituary etc.), and further options are provided to search by documents with box office information, production costs, illustrations etc. Some of the documents are surprisingly long, though it is a little frustrating that the pages are provided as separate image files rather than brought together, for example in PDF format.

There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of older original documents (e.g. posters, press materials, lobby cards for silent films) but the database offers a very handy guide to the critical literature (copyright clearance has been obtained for all the page images they publish). It’s plainly set out and simple to use. Go explore.

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.

Quellen zur Filmgeschichte und einiges anderes

I was delighted to find that Herbert Birett’s site Quellen zur Filmgeschichte und einiges anderes is still active. I lost track of it some years ago, when it seemed to have taken down, but it is alive and well under the more memorable web address www.kinematographie.de. Birett is an assiduous chronicler of German film history, whose speciality is filmographies based on censorship files and other forms of official records. His major work is the book Das Filmangebot in Deutschland, a listing of 17,000 films shown in Germany 1895-1911, which he sells for €70, but there is much of his site that he makes freely available.

There is a title list for all German films 1921-1930; Weimer Republic censorship records 1922-1932; a bibiliography of German film monographs to 1914; a listing of German movie journals to 1920s with notes as to their location in libraries; plus other resources for German sound films. It’s in German, but with some helpful short descriptions in English for each section. Birett’s work is exemplary, and the site is a key resource for the specialist.