Coming Soon to a Hall Near You: Some Notes on 16mm Road-show Distribution in the 1930s

Abstract

In this report I wish to concentrate upon the non-theatrical distribution of commercial, travel and interest films in the mid to late 1930s, one of the many subjects to emerge following recent research on a collection of Dufaycolor non-fiction films from the 1930s, held by the British Film Institute (BFI). Largely unseen since the 1950s, the films raise many interesting questions, around the collection itself, and on the wider level of general non-fiction filmmaking outside the Griersonian school in the 1930s. I am keen to explore the relationship between commercial or travel films and the films of the documentary movement, a subject which I have begun to consider elsewhere,1 and one of the levels on which links do occur is that of distribution, since both Grierson and the commercial filmmakers relied upon similar non-theatric avenues to reach their audiences. As the result of a grant from the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies, I have been viewing and researching the BFI’s Dufaycolor Collection. From around 1936 to 1939 the British firm of Dufay-Chromex, formerly Spicer-Dufay (British) Ltd, was the only British company capable of rivalling the American giant Technicolor in the field of professional colour cinematography. Held in the BFI’s National Film and Television Archive at Berkhamsted are over seventy films shot in the colour processes which they developed, mostly material deposited by Dufay-Chromex itself in the mid 1950s. Apart from two features, Radio Parade of 1935 (1935) which was shot partly in Dufaycolor, and Maurice Elvey’s Sons of the Sea (1939), which was the only feature shot entirely in the process, the films held at the BFI are, for the most part, travelogues and commercial short films, and sometimes both. The educational, travel, industrial and commercial films shot in Dufaycolor were produced by independent companies