Connecting the dots: La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, a musical score and censorship

Reviewed by: The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film Laura E. Nym Mayhall (bio) The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film, edited by Vanessa Toulmin, Simon Popple, and Patrick Russell; pp. 201. London: British Film Institute, 2004, £15.99, $25.00. The last decade has been an exciting one for students of British cinema. A virtual explosion of scholarship has explored questions of genre and identity through compelling [End Page 560] overviews of cinema's first century and in-depth studies of particular decades of British film production. Cinema's origins, however, have received much less attention. The decades between the first exhibition of film in Britain (1896) and the 1920s remain mysterious, documented primarily by classic works by Rachel Low and John Barnes and a burgeoning yet fragmentary periodical literature. This collection, published by the British Film Institute, offers a new approach and should serve as a model of how film scholarship, when truly interdisciplinary, can contribute significantly to our understanding of the evolution of film and film culture in the first decade of the new medium. The Lost World is built around the 1994 discovery, in the basement of a shop in Blackburn, England, of some 826 uncored rolls of nitrate film from the first decade of the twentieth century. Research determined that the twenty-eight odd hours of negative were shot by Sagar Mitchell (1866–1952) and James Kenyon (1850–1925), the photographer and furniture dealer, respectively, who released films under the trade name "Norden Films" between 1899 and 1913. A four-year collaborative partnership between the British Film Institute and the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield culminated in this collection of essays and a DVD highlighting selected films from the collection, released in 2005. Mitchell and Kenyon were known previously for their "fake" Boer War films, and the discovery of this "lost" Mitchell and Kenyon footage substantially expands our knowledge of their company's productions and affords us a multi-regional, rather than national, framework for understanding British film production in its early years. The book is divided into three sections. Section one describes the discovery of the films, explains the process of archiving them, and situates Mitchell and Kenyon alongside other late-Victorian and Edwardian film producers, such as the more familiar Cecil Hepworth. Notable is Patrick Russell's essay, which explicates the archival process as "fundamentally a cultural, not a solely physical or administrative" one (12). Russell skillfully delineates competing interests in the process of archiving film: the needs of potential users, issues of intellectual ownership, and contemporary audiences' experiences of the films all shape the decisions archivists make. Section two explores why the films were made, how they were exhibited, and what they can tell us about cinema-going practices of the Edwardian era. Stephen Bottomore locates the Mitchell and Kenyon collection within an international context of "local films," which he defines as films with "considerable overlap between the people appearing in the film and those who watch it or are intended to watch it" (33). In conjunction with Tom Gunning's essay on the relationship between the history of cinema and the emergence of the working class "onto a new stage of visibility," this section of the book suggests that early cinema owed much to the era of the music hall and popular theater. Early cinema, Gunning argues, was based on a relation between viewer and film involving direct address: here, people "were shot in order to be recognized, filmed for the pure delight of seeing themselves and others" (53). Essays by Vanessa Toulmin and Richard Brown reiterate this point as they chart the network of connections between exhibitors and audiences. Janet McBain takes the development of this argument further, arguing that the Mitchell and Kenyon collection provides "evidence of a direct link between the experiences of the first generation of film exhibitors on the fairground, and their successors in the picture palaces of the 1910s and 1920s" (111). Section three presents a variety of methods for using the films as historical evidence. Two essays in particular rethink the genre of the actuality in British cinema [End Page 561] history. Andrew Prescott draws...

Film Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) Napoleon, directed by Abel Gance (BFI, 2016) 10 Rillington Place, directed by Richard Fleischer (Sony Pictures, 2011, and Amazon Video) Frenzy, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (Universal Studios, 2006, and Amazon Video) Notting Hill, directed by Roger Michell (Universal Studios, 1999) Passport to Pimlico, directed by Henry Cornelius (Ealing Studios Comedy Collection, Anchor Bay, 2005 or Mr Fat-W Video, 2016) Their Finest, directed by Lone Scherfig (not yet on DVD) Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuarón (Universal Studios, 2009, and Amazon Video) Metro-Land, directed by Edward Mirzoeff (Upfront Entertainment, 2014) Underground, directed by Anthony Asquith (BFI, 2013) I am writing this Chronicle in the midst of a stay in London, a good place to see films and a good place to study them, thanks to the library, viewing rooms, and Screenonline website of the British Film Institute (BFI). London also was and is a good place to shoot films, including a few that in plot have nothing whatsoever to do with the British capital, such as Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, which was made partly in a disused gas works in the East End suburb of Beckton, with two hundred palm trees brought onto the set for the Vietnam scenes. I learned this fact while visiting the Imperial War Museum’s exhibition, “Real to Reel: A Century of War Movies,” one sign of a healthy ongoing interest in the cinema and cinematic history here. Another sign is an extraordinary number of film screenings accompanied by scores performed live by major London orchestras. In the concert hall this season audiences have been treated to such films as Psycho with Bernard Herrmann’s music, Alan Bennett’s comedy The Lady in the Van with George Fenton’s, and Brief Encounter with the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto. I will miss, alas, a coming world premiere, the performance of Shostakovitch’s up-to-now lost solo piano score for Kozintsev and Trauberg’s Soviet silent New Babylon, from 1929, but I have had the chance to see two other silent classics accompanied by scores newly composed for them. In the autumn, in a world premiere, the BBC Symphony played Neil Brand’s music for the 1922 Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks, while the Philharmonia Orchestra played Carl Davis’s music for Abel Gance’s great 1927 epic Napoleon, with the eighty-year-old Davis stoutly conducting. Both these films, swashbucklers in different ways, are strongly recommended. A DVD of the Brand-accompanied Robin Hood is said to be in the [End Page 462] works, while right now you can order a Blu-ray DVD of Napoleon. Fair warning, though: it will need to be a British, Region 2, DVD, namely the four-disc box set from the BFI which offers, in addition to the Davis score and many extras, Kevin Brownlow’s superb restoration of the film itself. To watch the discs in this set (and a few other British DVDs I will be recommending in this Chronicle) you will need to get hold of an all-region player or a computer program like VLC. One more fair warning: seeing Napoleon on DVD, even in the BFI’s splendid edition, will not replicate the experience which I was lucky enough to have, watching it on a big screen, in the midst of a packed and noisily appreciative audience in the Royal Festival Hall. At the conclusion, when Napoleon achieves victory in Italy and Gance uses his Polyvision process to expand his perspective on the triumph to three side-by-side screens, simultaneously tinting them in a patriotic bleu-blanc-rouge, the hall’s grand organ joined the Philharmonia to produce a truly overwhelming sound. In the audience we would have cried out Vive l’Empéreur! if we thought voices could be heard in the din. What about screen work set in London, portraying London? Here I am not thinking of studio-shot historical works like Olivier’s Henry V (Shakespeare’s Southwark) or Hytner’s The Madness of George III (periwigged Westminster), nor of cliché depictions of the city, plentiful as these are onscreen, and sometimes witty, as for example in Trainspotting. There the...

Book Review| December 01 2004 Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film Darryl Jones. Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film. London: Arnold Publishers, 2003. $55.00 cloth; $19.95 paper Richard John Ascárate Richard John Ascárate Richard Armstrong is an Associate Tutor affiliated with the British Film Institute (BFI). His book Understanding Realism was published by BFI in 2004. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2004) 58 (2): 64. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2004.58.2.64.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Richard John Ascárate; Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film. Film Quarterly 1 December 2004; 58 (2): 64. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2004.58.2.64.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2005 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

A comparatively new medium, film can be used for a range of discussions about the ways in which history is recorded, edited, shaped, and remembered; it is also useful for teaching contemporary interpretation of older literatures. Like historical fiction – or works of art more generally – movies with historical themes are most productively studied in their broader contexts, alongside, and in conjunction with, written sources. The classroom provides a perfect venue for such study. While reading and analyzing older texts, students can also be taught to read films for their authenticity, their accuracy or inaccuracy of detail in portraying the past, and for effective (or ineffective) use of purposeful or intentional anachronism, among other approaches. Film enhances the study of texts; careful reading of texts may, in turn, lead to more critical evaluation of film.

The British Film Institute Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (bio) [Errata] Founded in 1933, the British Film Institute (BFI) celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2008, making it the most long-standing government-sponsored arts organization in Britain. It is also the oldest film-related institution of its type in the world. It is not only the oldest but also unique, since nowhere else does one find so many functions synthesized and indeed synergized into a single organization. The BFI started small. In its first year its government grant was £4,500—equivalent perhaps to £100,000 ($200,000) today, but still not very much. But it grew. It took over an educational magazine called Sight & Sound. It began to collect books and other printed materials, film stills, and actual films. In 1935 it created the National Film Library, consisting on the one hand of films to be preserved for posterity and on the other hand of a lending collection of must-see films for colleges and film societies. During the war its premises were bombed but the [End Page 126] collections survived. Then, after the war, its dynamic new director, Denis Forman, persuaded the government to provide premises on London’s South Bank for a National Film Theatre (NFT) where archive and other films could be shown. Karel Reisz was hired as programmer. Gavin Lambert, soon joined by Lindsay Anderson, was brought in to turn around Sight & Sound and make it a spearhead of combative film criticism. A film appreciation department was set up (later renamed education). A small fund was established to aid experimental film production. The lending collection was hived off from the rest of the National Film Library and the Library (renamed National Film Archive in 1955) concentrated increasingly on preservation and on building up a small cache of restricted access viewing prints. Although it had vastly expanded its public reach, the BFI remained poorly funded throughout the long period of Conservative rule from 1951 to 1964. The NFT’s premises were rent-free, but it received no revenue funding and was expected to break even on its running costs—though it rarely did so. The Archive could collect and store films but had very little money to spend on active conservation. The lending collection, which might have been a money-spinner, was ineffectively managed, though it did at least send films out to the provinces, in other respects badly served by the BFI. In 1961, the BFI made a policy decision to include television under its remit, but it was some while before it could really commit any serious resources to TV-related activity. The return of a Labour government in 1964 provided welcome relief. Between 1965 and 1969 government funding increased nearly threefold, with some of the new money being devoted to expanding the education service but most of it going into supporting a network of so-called Regional Film Theatres spread across the country. More money was made available to the BFI Production Board (successor to the Experimental Film Fund). It also became possible to put an end to the fiction of a totally self-supporting NFT, which in 1971 acquired a second screen and was hard put to cover its costs. Then in 1974, a catastrophic explosion at a chemical plant near the village of Flixborough in Humberside, which killed twenty-seven people, alerted the government’s attention to the dangers of many sorts of chemicals, including nitrate film. Since nitrate is not only highly flammable but also liable to decay, this tragedy was a godsend to the archive, which was able to embark on a program of duplicating all its nitrate holdings onto acetate, making numbers of viewing copies in the process. Meanwhile the BFI was riven by ideological disputes. Under the leadership of Paddy Whannel, the Education Department turned itself in the late 1960s into a powerhouse for new ideas on film, which put in question the “art cinema” culture expressed in the pages of Sight & Sound and in NFT programming. In 1970, a group of BFI members calling themselves the Members Action Committee (I was one of them) challenged the BFI’s priorities and practices, notably the rather ineffectual Regional Film...

FIGURE 1. Bryony Dixon, curator of silent film, British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive. > victoria duckett:Thank you, Bryony, for agreeing to talk with me today. I thought we would begin with an explanation of what you do professionally. What do you do, what is your post, and what is your job? > bryony dixon:I'm one of the curators at the BFI National Archive, which is the United Kingdom's national collection of film. I'm one of a team of curators. There are curators that specialize in all different subjects and categories of the archive. We have, broadly speaking, fiction, nonfiction, and television. Then there are two “odd” curators: one deals with artists, film, video, and I deal with silent film, because it is a sort of category in and of itself, and there are slightly different issues, perhaps, with dealing with silent film in terms of how you might treat it. It also accounts for a good, solid block of cinema's history, film's history. > vd:Has there always been silent film curation? You're a curator, you're a programmer; do you restore? > bd:Yes, we do all that. Each of the curators does all aspects of the job, which used to be—in former days, before about 2005 [when the curatorial unit was formed]—done in a different way. It used to be a kind of linear method, so you'd have somebody acquiring the films, you'd have somebody doing technical work on the films, you'd have people doing things like cataloguing, and then you'd have someone at the end doing things like access, programming, taking it out and about in the world, doing educational work, and that kind of thing. What the reorganization into a curatorial model did was to give people specialist subjects. So now, if I am doing silent …

Guest Editors' Foreword:Digital Humanities and/in Film archives Dimitrios Latsis (bio) and Grazia Ingravalle (bio) The continuous redefinition of the role and purview of archivists and curators of moving image media has been driven, in no small measure, by the development of digital tools and networks. To better understand this shift and start mapping its current impact on archives and film preservation, this special issue of The Moving Image assembles perspectives from leading curators, archivists, academics, and digital humanists who have developed innovative platforms to disseminate the work done in moving image archival collections. They provide new tools and resources for both research and pedagogy, share best practices, discuss opportunities for collaboration, and address challenges from leading digital humanities (DH) projects in the audiovisual archival field. Most of these projects are still in progress, so the reader will find that this collection of feature articles and Forum pieces signals the current developing status—or "iterative" nature, to quote Charles Tepperman—of the digital humanities. The contributions compellingly reflect the state of the field, while still leaving open critical questions for future discussion. One such question is certainly whether DH methodologies and tools advance new epistemologies and practices for research in film and media studies and in archival moving image collections. While our contributors reject the idea that by incorporating (partially) automated tasks, DH methodologies lend increased scientific credibility to media analyses and histories, they all highlight the heuristic value of its applications. As the articles in this special issue emphasize, many of the tasks involved in DH projects (creating a database, segmenting a film sequence, annotating, selecting variables, etc.) in fact force us to interrogate established vocabularies, prompting us [End Page xi] once more to (re)define, for instance, "race film," a film "shot," or an "archival record." The digital humanities, as these examples show, encourage interinstitutional and interdisciplinary collaborations among scholars and archivists, inviting them to open up the results of their work to awareness, criticism, and debate. Particular focus is placed on outreach initiatives that give access and visibility to nonfiction, amateur, and nontheatrical film: programming, platforms for user-contributed content, crowdsourcing, and original ways of annotating, sharing, and cross-referencing time-based media. We also address pedagogy that utilizes primary sources, facilitates (under)graduate research, and encourages broader stakeholders, such as K–12 instruction and local and community-based organizations. Shane O'Sullivan approaches these goals by exploring institutional projects that in the last fifteen years have granted access to British audiovisual archival materials for education. O'Sullivan particularly concentrates on the pioneering work of current British Film Institute (BFI) head of education Paul Gerhardt and the collaboration between the BFI and Kingston University on a pedagogical project teaching students to reuse moving image archive material in video essays. Philipp Dominik Keidl expands a thorough consideration of the exhibition strategies of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne into a broader consideration of what media archaeological thinking and practices can mean outside the purview of academia, specifically as enabled by digital technologies and environments. An expanded and crucially public iteration of media archeology can stand as an equal partner and generator of discourse that leads to more conceptual contributions to film and media history. Liliana Melgar Estrada, Eva Hielscher, Marijn Koolen, Christian Gosvig Olesen, Julia Noordegraaf, and Jaap Blom collaboratively survey different video annotation and editing tools widely used in media studies and production. The authors examine two kinds of video software, ELAN and NVivo, to analyze a sequence from People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak et al., 1930). They assess the advantages and drawbacks of each, along with the larger implications for moving image scholars, professionals, and archivists. What would a digital humanities approach to film colors look like? In answering this question, Barbara Flueckiger reflects on the ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors project at the University of Zurich, an extension of one of the best-known DH projects to deal with film history, the Timeline of Historical Film Colors. With computer-assisted tools, such as video annotation and a database of color patterns from a wide array of films, FilmColors aims to merge quantitative and qualitative approaches to demonstrate what [End Page xii] a...

The place of nature in Godard' s late films

The Scottish film-maker Bill Douglas died young – aged 57 – on 18 June 1991. He had been suffering from cancer. On the twentieth anniversary of his death, an event was held in his honour at the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, the research facility and museum at the University of Exeter which stands as a fitting and lasting memorial to this mercurial film-making talent and avid collector of books, memorabilia and artefacts related to cinema and pre-cinema. After a thought-provoking and at times emotional day, the Bill Douglas Centre curator, Phil Wickham, was warmly and deservedly thanked and congratulated for his organisation of this event by Peter Jewell, Bill’s lifelong friend, supporter and cocollector. Peter had first met Bill in 1955 while on National Service in Egypt and they remained close until Bill’s death. This was a day that allowed us to acknowledge the extraordinary talent of one film-maker, to reconsider his legacy for Scottish and British cinema, and to acknowledge his importance as a figure who – through his extraordinary collection – has left a wonderful legacy for anybody interested in the history of cinema and popular culture. Douglas’ films – the autobiographical trilogy My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978), and an epic film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Comrades (1987), were released by the British Film Institute on DVD and Blu-ray in 2008 and 2009, and it is pleasing to know that these extraordinary films will now reach a wider audience.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith is Honorary Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. Among other publications he is the author of Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s (Continuum, 2008), Luchino Visconti (British Film Institute, 2003 [orig. 1967]), L’avventura (British Film Institute, 1997), and the editor of The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford, 1996) and English translations of the works of Gramsci.

In July 2000, the British Film Institute (bfi) completed the transfer of the Peter Worden Collection of Mitchell and Kenyon Films from its place of storage (an unplugged chest freezer in a garage in Blackburn, in the north of England) to the bfi National Film and Television Archive's Conservation Centre (NFTVA) in Berkhamsted, near London. This was one of the largest collections of camera-original nitrate material that had been offered to the archive in over fifty years, and completed stage one of a five-year plan of action agreed on by the bfi with the University of Sheffield in November 1999. The discovery of the collection is one of the most important finds in the field of early British film history and presents film historians with an unparalleled opportunity to examine the entire surviving output (commissions and distributed films) of a northern regional company in the first decade of film production. [End Page 1] In order to fully understand the significance of the collection and the impact this material will have on film research, an introduction to the material, the nature of its discovery, and the rationale behind the restoration and research project will be presented.

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

The British Film Institute (BFI) has been collecting documentation and ephemera relating to the cinema since its own inception in 1933. These collections have grown into a valuable resource for the researcher into cinema and television history, as well as reflecting artistic trends prevailing at the time of production. Although modest when set beside the posters, stills, designs and museum objects held at the BFI, the collections of press or campaign books and general ephemera should not be overlooked.

The British Film Institute (BFI) is funded largely by the UK government. Changing political government support for film will affect the future of the BFI National Library. This library, which is open to the public, provides users with access to one of the world's most extensive collections of documentation on the subject of film and television. The library offers inter alia consultation in the reading room in London and services to remote users via telephone, letter, fax or e-mail. It supports and encourages the use of local and regional resources. A key element is the building of databases of film and television information, which, as well as being available to users, arc used for a range of internal applications that rely on authoritative filmographic data. Emerging strategies for exploiting information and communication technologies for the delivery of resources to remote access points include the development of the BFI website, and a new project known as BFI Online which will deliver moving image materials and a range of supporting documentation in digitized form to a limited number of trial sites.

We must see with our ears; think with our ears; write with our ears. Peter Leonhard Braun [The feature's] task and its destiny is to mirror the true inwardness of its subject, to explore the bounda...