Films on Film – Prog 4: Not Quite Hollywood: Britain and Canada

Will Day: The Evolution of the Film (GB 1928). Photo: Direction du patrimoine cinématographique du CNC.

Will Day: The Evolution of the Film (GB 1928). Foto di Valerio Greco. Teatro Verdi, 11 Oct 2019. Source: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019 / Flickr.

Will Day: The Evolution of the Film (GB 1928). Foto di Valerio Greco. Teatro Verdi, 11 Oct 2019. Source: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019 / Flickr.

Will Day: The Evolution of the Film (GB 1928). Foto di Valerio Greco. Teatro Verdi, 11 Oct 2019. Source: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019 / Flickr.

Will Day: The Evolution of the Film (GB 1928). Foto di Valerio Greco. Teatro Verdi, 11 Oct 2019. Source: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019 / Flickr.

Will Day: The Evolution of the Film (GB 1928). Foto di Valerio Greco. Teatro Verdi, 11 Oct 2019. Source: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019 / Flickr.

Will Day: The Evolution of the Film: Episode 6 (GB 1928). Zoetrope. Foto di Valerio Greco. Teatro Verdi, 11 Oct 2019. Source: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019 / Flickr.

Will Day: The Evolution of the Film: Episode 6 (GB 1928). Zoetrope. Foto di Valerio Greco. Teatro Verdi, 11 Oct 2019. Source: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019 / Flickr.

Films on Film Prog. 4. Foto di Valerio Greco. Teatro Verdi, 11 Oct 2019. Source: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019 / Flickr.

Films on Film Prog. 4. Foto di Valerio Greco. Teatro Verdi, 11 Oct 2019. Source: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019 / Flickr.

Films on Film Prog. 4. Foto di Valerio Greco. Teatro Verdi, 11 Oct 2019. Source: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019 / Flickr.

Films on Film Prog. 4. Foto di Valerio Greco. Teatro Verdi, 11 Oct 2019. Source: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019 / Flickr.

Films on Film Prog. 4. Foto di Valerio Greco. Teatro Verdi, 11 Oct 2019. Source: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019 / Flickr.

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone.
Films on Film.
Grand piano: Stephen Horne.
Teatro Verdi, e-subtitles in Italian by Underlight.

THE INVENTOR OF KINEMATOGRAPHY (Gaumont Graphic No. 1059) (GB 1921)
prod: Gaumont Graphic. uscita/rel: 16.5.1921. copia/copy: 35 mm, 73 m [226 ft], 2’08” (20 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, Bois d’Arcy.

Dimitrios Latsis (GCM): "On 5 May 1921, during a heated discussion about the future of British cinema convened by former Minister of Information Lord Beaverbrook, William Friese-Greene, a by-then forgotten pioneer who had shot some of the very first moving pictures during the pre-Kinetoscope years of 1888–1891, got on his feet to raise an objection to the proceedings and suffered a fatal heart attack at age 65. Because of the dramatic nature of his demise the representatives of the British film industry, seized no doubt by a deserved if temporary sense of guilt, sought to honor his memory as “the Inventor of Kinematography” (still inscribed on his grave at London’s Highgate Cemetery) by observing a moment of silence in several cinemas and organizing a grand funeral for him, in which Will Day, the pioneering collector and early cinema historian, took an active part. The Gaumont Graphic newsreel captured the funeral on 13 May 1921, with Friese-Greene’s coffin topped by a film projector and a screen on which one can read “The End.”" Dimitrios Latsis (GCM)

AA: Memorable (repeating Dimitrios Latsis's observation above): William Friese-Greene receives a true cinephile's funeral with a flower-covered film projector directed towards a screen-shaped flower arrangement with the letters THE END written in flowers. Visual quality: duped, soft.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE FILM. SIDELIGHTS ON CINEMA HISTORY. EPISODES 1–7 (Pathé Pictorial no. 534, 535, 540, 547, 548) (GB 1928)
regia/dir: Wilfred [Will] Day. prod: Pathé Pictorial. dist: British Pathé. uscita/rel: 6.–10.1928. copia/copy: 35 mm, 382 m, 17’30” (20 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, Bois d’Arcy.

Dimitrios Latsis (GCM): "Will Day was likely cinema history’s first systematic collector. The devices, optical toys, and inventions he assembled were first put on display at the Science Museum in London in 1922, and were eventually acquired by the Cinémathèque française in 1959, where they still form the crown jewels of the world’s largest public collection of cinematic and pre-cinematic apparatus. But Day was much more than a collector: he was an integral part of the early British film industry since its Victorian days, and an enthusiastic lecturer and writer on cinema history (though admittedly not up to today’s historiographical standards, and with a nationalist bent, like many of his contemporaries). When his collection came to France its holdings were split according to format (papers, devices, and films) among the Cinémathèque and the CNC, and as a result the full context of Day’s activities as an idiosyncratic historian of the medium’s early days and prehistory has not come to the fore until recent years."

"Beyond the nationalistic and somewhat opportunistic fashion in which Day organized and promoted his collection – his asking price for the collection when it was first put up for sale in 1930 was £10,000, the equivalent of £4 million today – he also used it in his activities as an educator and film producer. He sought to incorporate the footage he collected in documentary films and chronicled their history in his unpublished manuscript, 25,000 Years to Trap a Shadow. He lectured and presented demonstrations, following in the footsteps of Muybridge, Marey, Dickson, and others who had combined edification and scientific popularization in their public appearances."

"The next logical step was for him to film these demonstrations, and that’s exactly what he undertook to do in 1928 for the Pathé Pictorial newsreel in a series of short episodes entitled The Evolution of the Film. Sidelights on Cinema History (the total number varies, with five cited on the British Pathé website, and seven listed by the CNC but without screening details). An Anglo-centric chronicle with only occasional side-trips to French pioneers of the medium, the brief snippets survey the contributions of R. W. Paul, William Friese-Greene, Joseph Plateau, Charles-Émile Reynaud, Thomas Edison, Georges Méliès, and the Lumières, as well as lesser-known figures like Félicien Trewey and Alexander S. Jones, through demonstrations of their inventions, including the Kinora, the Animatographe, the Praxinoscope, the Cinématographe, the Matagraph, the Phenakistiscope, the Thaumatrope, and the Zoetrope. As a contemporary to Grimoin-Sanson’s L’Histoire du cinéma par le cinéma, Day’s film (the only surviving complete copy, both at the same French archive), provides a well-researched and interactive show-and-tell from the other side of the Channel, while also functioning as an early incarnation of the kind of object-based learning that museums of cinema foster to this day." Dimitrios Latsis

AA: Will Day's fascinating demonstration of many marvellous machines of moving images.
Episode 1: flipbooks and many machines without identificatory titles.
Episode 2: le Cinématographe Lumière, the train arrives at the station.
Episode 3: the Animatograph demonstrated.
Episode 4: William Friese-Greene, Kinora, flipbooks, Edison films (typically reproduced at the wrong speed, in slow motion), Lumière's train (typically with the wrong date) (this episode repeats already seen footage from a different source).
Episode 5: broad and narrow gauges, Méliès projector.
Episode 6: Zoetrope (see images above). Magic.
Episode 7: the darkroom.

ONE PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS: THE PLANT BEHIND THE PICTURES (The Plant) (CA, 1920s)
prod, dist: Ontario Motion Picture Bureau. copia/copy: DCP, 6′ (da/from 35 mm, 382 m [1253 ft]); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa.

Dimitrios Latsis (GCM): "The long history of Canadian non-fiction and government-sponsored filmmaking includes the 1917 formation of the world’s first state-owned film production service, the Ontario Motion Picture Bureau (OMPB). Inaugurated at the height of World War I, this predecessor of the much better known National Film Board was essentially tasked with producing peace-time “propaganda” and instructional films for farmers, schoolchildren, and recent immigrants. These films were pretty straightforward mini-illustrated lectures aimed at a largely illiterate but (so the commissioning bureaucrats hoped) impressionable audience of rural Canadian citizens, so they very rarely exhibit any of the stylistic flourishes or self-reflexivity that would become the hallmarks of the post-Griersonian cinéma-vérité that took root in Canada after the Second World War. Rather, the OMPB cranked out “scenic” and “process” one-reelers promoting Canadian scenery and natural resources, or following the manufacturing process within a Fordist assembly-line logic."

"The reel that contains The Plant Behind the Pictures follows that logic in celebrating the country’s industrial infrastructure and productivity, with sequences of the Canadian National Railways, Bell Telephone Company of Canada, General Motors of Canada, and Canadian General Electric. What is remarkable, however, is that midway through the reel, a different kind of “assembly line” is introduced, in a six-minute self-contained segment of the OMPB’s own film laboratory. Directly contemporary and similar in structure to Eastman Kodak’s A Movie Trip Through Filmland (1921), this segment guides the spectator through the “post-production” chain of negative assembly, development, drying, final assembly, and slide and art-title departments. Film is thus presented as a product and a process similar to all the others in the basic outlines of its production, yet distinct in being the only one that could show its own coming-into-being." Dimitrios Latsis (GCM)

AA: A solid documentary account of producing a screen-ready print from a negative.

[OPENING OF BRITISH INSTRUCTIONAL FILMS STUDIO] (GB 1928)
prod: British Instructional Films. uscita/rel: 11.1928. copia/copy: 35 mm, 254 ft, 3’44” (18 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: BFI National Archive, London.

Dimitrios Latsis (GCM): "Just like its counterparts in Canada (the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau) and Germany (the Ufa-Kulturabteilung), British Instructional Films was founded right after the end of World War I, and benefitted from the subsequent introduction of the 16 mm format in 1923. BIF’s founders H. Bruce Woolfe and A. E. Bundy were pioneering producers of non-fiction in the pre-Grierson era, but operated within a late colonial context in which BIF came to specialize in geographic, scientific, and nature films, including its successful “Secrets of Nature” series (1922–1933; after which the series transferred to Gaumont-British Instructional). Its films later formed the backbone of the Empire Film Library. By the early sound era the company was large enough to build its own production facilities at Welwyn Studios in Hertfordshire. The studio was part of the larger Welwyn Garden City development designed by architect Louis de Soissons, and was inaugurated in November of 1928 with Secretary for the Colonies L. S. Amery officiating. Ultimately BIF was one of the many victims of the transition to sound, and was absorbed into the larger British International Pictures in 1931." Dimitrios Latsis (GCM)

AA: The mighty imperial film company British Instructional Films opens a new studio in Welwyn Garden City. In the same year 1928 BIF co-produced Shiraz to be followed by A Throw of Dice.

SECRETS OF A WORLD INDUSTRY – THE MAKING OF CINEMATOGRAPH FILM (Vanity Fair Pictorials, Issue 13) (GB 1922) [estratto/excerpt]
prod: Walturdaw Company. uscita/rel: 1.1922. copia/copy: 35 mm, 481 ft, 7’49” (18 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: BFI National Archive, London.

Dimitrios Latsis (GCM): "Along with The Plant Behind the Pictures (Canada) and Kodak’s A Trip Through Filmland (United States), Secrets of a World Industry represents a backstage tour of a different kind into the inner workings of the movies: the focus here is on the manufacture of celluloid, “a scientific process involving wide knowledge and hard work and, [by 1921] one of the first industries in the world,” as an early intertitle informs us. Following the “assembly line” format of the earlier shorts, we are given a sequential and highly detailed overview of the process: from puncturing the sprocket holes into the film strip, processing and printing the exposed negative, and striking and editing the positive prints, to boxing up and shipping those prints for distribution. As was the case in the hand-coloring process of early films, the majority of workers featured here are women, showcasing the hidden female labor that enabled the circulation of film (including this example) for more than a century. The short was produced by Walturdaw, one of the first British film companies, specializing in the manufacture of film cameras and projectors in addition to producing educational and information films. Although the company had long ceased production, they continued as distributors until 1924; Secrets of a World Industry was released as part of Issue 13 of a recently launched but ultimately short-lived cine-magazine called Vanity Fair Pictorials." Dimitrios Latsis (GCM)

AA: The scientific management of producing film.

AROUND THE TOWN AND EVERYWHERE, Issue 118 (estratto/extract): BRITISH FILM STARS AND STUDIOS (GB 1921)
regia/dir: ?. cast: Reginald Bromhead, W. P. Kellino, C. C. Calvert, Josephine Earle, Billy Bevan. prod: Around the Town Ltd. / Gaumont Company. dist: Gaumont Company. uscita/rel: 10.1921. copia/copy: 35 mm, 185 ft, 2’30” (20 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: BFI National Archive, London.

Dimitrios Latsis (GCM): "Around the Town started as a weekly entertainment cinemagazine produced by Gaumont that specialized in scenes from current stage shows. It was therefore natural that Issue 118 branch out into the movie business, or its homegrown iteration in Britain at any rate. While the “town” mentioned in the newsreels title was always London, this installment showcased the Gaumont Studios at Shepherds Bush. As in the Hollywood filmed studio tours that followed throughout the 1920s, the company’s production facilities are highlighted, while executives, directors and stars are shown at work. Here, studio head Reginald Bromhead is seen at his desk discussing scenes with producers W. P. Kellino and C. C. Calvert. Calvert is then shown arranging a close-up of Josephine Earle, an American actress who moved to the UK in 1917 and appeared in many Gaumont films, including four Calvert films in the British Screencraft series. Patriotic attempts to establish and promote a homegrown British film industry on a scale similar to Hollywood in the 1920s (albeit often with French and American capital and stars) were haphazard and ultimately unsuccessful, leading to the Cinematograph Films or “Quota” Act 1927. As for Gaumont, the Bromhead brothers, Alfred Claude [A. C.] and Reginald, bought out the French interests in 1922 with funding from Isidore Ostrer, inaugurating a productive period for the Lime Grove Studios at Shepherd’s Bush, where some of the most prominent British films were shot under the Gaumont-British and subsequently Rank Organization regimes." Dimitrios Latsis (GCM)

AA: Many aspects of film production in a short cinemagazine item: from deal-making to shooting a film star with a softening filter in a close-up to a display of the energy plant that supplies the studio.

RUNNING A CINEMA (GB 1921)
regia/dir, sogg/story, anim: Dudley Buxton. prod: Frank Zeitlin, Kine Komedy Kartoons. uscita/rel: 10.1921. copia/copy: 35 mm, 457 ft, 6’30” (18 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: BFI National Archive, London.

Dimitrios Latsis (GCM): "One of the rare films to look behind the scenes of film exhibition, Running a Cinema (part of a series entitled “Memoirs of Miffy”) is doubly unique for doing so by way of animation. Our hero, Miffy, reads an advertisement of a cinema for sale. He then takes over, and in a fast series of visual gags performs the duties of a manager, commissionaire, and ticket seller. The automatic orchestra and projector are then shown, followed by a mock program of attractions consisting of a newsreel (“The Weakly Budget”), a burlesque nature film (“The Mule and the Butterfly”), and a Western serial (“Dirty Dick’s Destiny”). With its strong mise-en-abyme, the film follows in the tradition of Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Edison, 1902) while anticipating later comedic gems such as Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924). But more than that, with its gentle mockery of film programming norms it shows how attuned the general population already was to the inner workings of the movie business by the 1920s."

"Dudley Buxton (1884–1951) started as a comic illustrator and postcard artist who went into cartoon propaganda films during World War I. While Donald Crafton is right to call out their “abysmal level of narrative inspiration,” in this series of films Buxton was among the first to utilize the cel animation method outside the United States. Although the series was short-lived, Buxton kept Miffy alive as a comic-strip character in provincial newspapers across the UK into the 1930s." Dimitrios Latsis (GCM)

AA: An animated spoof about running a cinema.

MEET JACKIE COOGAN (GB 1924)
regia/dir: ? photog: ? cast: Sir Oswald Stoll, Dennis Stoll, Jackie Coogan, Jack Coogan, Sr., Jeffrey Bernerd, Joan Lockton, Maie Hanbury, Henry Victor, Harry Beasley. prod: Stoll Film Company. uscita/rel: 25.9.1924. copia/copy: 35 mm, 941 ft, 11′ (16 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: BFI National Archive, London.

Bryony Dixon (GCM): "In 1924, three years after he had starred in Chaplin’s The Kid and two since he’d wrung hearts with his portrayal of Oliver Twist, Jackie Coogan toured the world on a so-called “Children’s Crusade” to bring relief to orphans caught up in the troubles in the Near East. He crossed from New York to Europe on the S.S. Leviathan and stayed at the Savoy in London. In a great coup for the British film industry Sir Oswald Stoll secured a visit by the Hollywood star and his father to the Cricklewood studios (where Asquith’s Shooting Stars would later be filmed), in the process allowing the British public a rare glimpse behind the scenes. We get a guided tour of the various spaces and get a feel for life on the lot, including a glimpse on the set of The Sins Ye Do, directed by Fred LeRoy Granville. Studio staff and the public waiting outside seem thoroughly star-struck." Bryony Dixon (GCM)

AA: Jackie Coogan has true star presence in this guided tour to the largest film studios in Britain.

CUT IT OUT: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A CENSOR (GB 1925)
regia/dir: Adrian Brunel. sogg/story: Adrian Brunel, Edwin Greenwood, J. O. C. Orton. photog: Henry Harris. mont/ed: Ivor Montagu. cast: Adrian Brunel (sindaco/Major Maurice Cowley), Henry Harris (Izzy Panhard, l’operatore/the cameraman), John Orton (Rudge Z. Whitworth, il regista/the director), Lionel Rich (il cattivo/the villain), Edwin Greenwood (Harper Sunbeam, il censore/the censor), Miles Mander, Mrs. Miles Mander. prod: Michael Balcon, Gainsborough Pictures. dist: W & F Film Service. uscita/rel: 11.1925. copia/copy: 35 mm, 1211 ft, 19′ (18 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: BFI National Archive, London.

Dimitrios Latsis (GCM): "A key aspect of the movie business which very rarely saw the light of day (let alone the light of the movie projector) was censorship, deeply entrenched as it was in the distribution and exhibition chains by the mid-1920s, not only in Hollywood but on a global scale. It would in fact have been impossible for any major studio to even contemplate poking fun at the various bodies tasked with policing the industry. However, for the newly founded Gainsborough Pictures, looking to make a mark with its “Gainsborough Burlesque” series, such subject matter was par for the course. After mocking such genres as the travel film (Crossing the Great Sagrada), newsreels (The Pathetic Gazette and The Typical Budget), and the boxing film (Battling Bruisers), director Adrian Brunel and his co-writers were ready to take on the British version of the Hays Office, the infamous British Board of Film Censors. Here called the “The Society for Detecting Evil in Others,” it is represented by the cheerfully named but sour-faced Harper Sunbeam. Sporting his obligatory top hat, Sunbeam clasps a rulebook and proceeds to measure skirt-lengths, rescue a damsel tied to the railway tracks, and excise a scene where a soldier committing “horrific” acts of war is also “bleeding profusely.” While Bryony Dixon has found this admittedly exaggerated depiction of screen morality-in-action “conventional and superficial,” the figure of the censor would remain a fascinating, often maligned and more often mocked, character in British cinema, as the 1995 BBC documentary Empire of the Censors eloquently demonstrates. Cut It Out also marks the first credit (here as editor) of one of the key intellectual figures of the interwar film scene in Britain, Ivor Montagu." Dimitrios Latsis

AA: A spoof of film (self-)censorship. (There has never been government censorship of films in Britain; the film industry has conducted self-regulation).

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE CINEMA? (GB 1925?)
regia/dir, sogg/story: Adrian Brunel? prod: Michael Balcon?, Gainsborough Pictures?. uscita/rel: 11.1925? copia/copy: 35 mm, 296 ft, 4′ (20 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: BFI National Archive, London.

Dimitrios Latsis (GCM): "Although not identified as such due to the lack of credits, this gem of a parody was possibly another entry in the “Gainsborough Burlesque” series directed by Adrian Brunel. Dedicated to another minor if important aspect of film production that audiences rarely gave much thought to, What’s Wrong with the Cinema? sought to attribute much of the blame for the titular malaise to the humble intertitle. Purportedly produced “in three weeks by Ellof A. Grin” for the Stupid Film Company and directed by I. Gotyer Steve with assistance from Jonnie Walker, the film (entirely comprised of title cards) is a compendium of the comedic value of titling with double-entendres galore. The studio’s alliterative promotional bombast in trailers and posters comes in for mockery, as do title conventions that suggest the passage of time. Titles directed at the audience (“grown ups in the auditorium are permitted to hold hands”) might seem a throwback to exhibitors’ concerns during the years of early cinema, while the ever-present hand of the censor is responsible for the omission of “topless native girls” from the program. After this long catalogue of ills (beautifully illustrated in the cards), the film concludes that, after all, “NOTHING is wrong with the cinema – it’s absolutely perfect.” Even this is but the end of Part One, although sadly “Part Two will never be shown…”" Dimitrios Latsis

AA: A fascinating instance of lettrist cinema: a silent film consisting entirely of intertitles. I have nothing to add to Dimitrios Latsis's program note.

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This was the last programme in Dimitrios Latsis's wonderful Films on Film series covering the US, France, Germany and Britain / Canada. It was entertaining to observe how in each country its representatives were portrayed as the (sole / main / first) inventors of the cinema.

Stephen Horne parodied the jingoistic emphasis by pounding "Rule, Britannia!" on the grand piano.

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AA Facebook capsule:

The last installment of Dimitrios Latsis's Films on Film series brought us ten films from Britain and Canada. It began with the end: William Friese-Greene's funeral garland consisted of a flowered projector and screen with the text THE END. Will Day's seven-part film series of his legendary collection was the amazing centerpiece. The best was saved for the last: a Lettrist spoof consisting entirely of intertitles called What's Wrong with the Cinema, produced by "Ellof E. Grin", made "with assistance from Jonnie Walker". Mika Taanila should know about this. In each programme the pioneer status of the respective country (USA / France / Germany / England) was promoted. In this one Stephen Horne parodied the jingoism by pounding "Rule, Britannia!" on the grand piano.

For a cinephile, nothing can beat William Friese-Greene's THE END funeral garland.