A Personal History of British Cinema: The Silent Years
Positioned as a world empire at the end of the Victorian era, Britain was economically and culturally well-placed to accommodate a new innovation that would help to change everything. Britain’s foregrounding at the very beginnings of cinema history was an opportunity to be one of the pioneers, which time has proven it never fulfilled. The Frenchman Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince’s two-second British short Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) was filmed in Leeds and is now credited as the true birth of the moving-image. His disappearance in 1890 meant he was forgotten in film history as his planned exhibitions in Britain and the U.S. never happened. The first moving pictures to be developed on celluloid film were made by British inventor William Friese Greene in London’s Hyde Park in 1889. Though Thomas Edison and particularly the Lumière Brothers, Auguste and Louis, brought cinema to public consciousness with their screenings of ten shorts in Paris in 1895, including La Sortie de l'Usine/Lumière à Lyon Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, it was an Englishman, William K.L. Dickson (born in France of British parents), employed in the New Jersey laboratories of Thomas Edison, who invented the Kinetograph, the first practical method of cinematography, and the Kinetoscope that was to revolutionise motion pictures.
When it emerged that Thomas Edison hadn't patented the Kinetoscope in Britain, Birt Acres (known as Birtac and born in America of British parents) and partner Robert W Paul pioneered their own version of the Kinetoscope in Britain in 1895 by purchasing and taking apart an original copy in order to make their own version, hence becoming collectively the first to develop a working 35mm camera in Britain. They were soon to fall out over the camera's patent but not before they made the first British film together, Incident at Clovelly Cottage in February 1895. In 1896, Paul pioneered in the UK a system of projecting motion pictures onto a screen which coincided with the advent of the projection system devised by the Lumière Brothers.
At this time, there were subsequent experimenters in this new wonder movement springing up in Brighton, Leeds and Bradford. In Brighton this movement consisted of George Albert Smith, James Williamson, Alfred Darling and A Esme Collings, while in Leeds and Bradford, cinematographic apparatus were being produced as early as 1896. Soon several British film companies had opened to meet the demand for new films, such as Mitchell and Kenyon in Blackburn. Attack on A China Mission (James Williamson,1900) was based on the true story of a rebellion at a Chinese missionary and has subsequently been considered a major leap in its grasp technique, style and content. Michael Brook (BFI, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/520615/index.html) says 'In The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, historian John Barnes claims it had "the most fully developed narrative of any film made in England up to that time"'. This early pace-keeping culminated in another rare innovative film Rescued By Rover (Lewin Fitzhamon, 1905), the first film where disparate shots were linked like a jigsaw puzzle, thus teaching early film audiences how to comprehend edited film.
Due to these early innovations, British Cinema could (albeit briefly) claim to be leading the way in the film world. However, despite the industry enjoying a boom as it developed further in the 1910s, productions soon lapsed and films made in Britain became progressively second-rate. By the 1920s, the British film industry experienced its first recession, augmented certainly by US competition and commercial practices but also, arguably, by its own lull in creativity. However, aside from Alfred Hitchcock’s early work in Britain, there were a few exceptions of well-produced, if not so ground-breaking, films like Shooting Stars (Anthony Asquith, 1928) and the work of director Maurice Elvey, particularly Murder in the Red Barn (1913), At The Villa Rose (1920) and Hindle Wakes (1927).
In his sleeve notes to the British Film Institute release of Hindle Wakes (BFI Publishing), Philip Kemp (1997) says ‘In general, British silent movies have a dismal reputation’ and also says they were ‘crudely photographed’ and exploited the so-called stars of the day. Moreover, these early films never quite outgrew a childlike amateurism and the miracle of a filmstrip with pictures on it. Hindle Wakes was an adaptation of a play by Manchester playwright Stanley Houghton, first staged in 1912, with the film a superior update of Elvey’s own 1918 version. A standard melodrama, set in a Lancashire mill town during the annual Wakes Week holiday, it was daring for its day as it depicts an independent woman, the working-class Fanny (Estelle Brody) who has the same idea of a non-committal relationship when she goes on an illicit vacation with the mill-owner's playboy son, Allan (John Stuart). Maurice Elvey shot the film on location in Lancashire and Blackpool, and his style is fluid and airy, free from the shackles that accompanied early talkies. Also, unlike many of his contemporaries, Elvey made the transition to sound well and directed until the late 1950s.
Although British Cinema was losing out to the now dominant force Hollywood by the middle of the decade, and by 1926 only 5% of films shown in Cinemas were British as compared to 25% in 1914, it did at least seek to redress this decline by creating the Cinematograph Films Act 1927 which introduced protective measures including requirements for cinemas to show a certain percentage of British films. The paradox was a quick recovery of British production inthe late 1920s and into the sound era, culminating in an all-time high of 192 films produced in 1936. However, the high quota for films meant many were of a very poor standard and the overall status of British Cinema, despite all the good intentions, went backwards again. However, many British film-makers like Michael Powell and Alfred Hitchcock were learning their craft in these films which would culminate in their later works.
Anthony Asquith had been influenced by German cinema, particularly the filmmaker E.A.Dupont and his internationally renowned Varieté (1925) and can arguably attributed in helping British Cinema to catch up on other cinematic nations by the late 1920s. Asquith was certainly responsible for two more classics of the British silent era, Underground (1928) and especially A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), both shot by Stanley Rodwell. The influential zeitgeist was now coming in the opposite direction as E.A. Dupont shot his (1929) in Britain. Piccadilly is now considered one of the pinnacles of British cinematography (cameraman Werner Brades), transforming a melodramatic story into something magical with the aid of art director Werner Brades.
Positioned as a world empire at the end of the Victorian era, Britain was economically and culturally well-placed to accommodate a new innovation that would help to change everything. Britain’s foregrounding at the very beginnings of cinema history was an opportunity to be one of the pioneers, which time has proven it never fulfilled. The Frenchman Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince’s two-second British short Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) was filmed in Leeds and is now credited as the true birth of the moving-image. His disappearance in 1890 meant he was forgotten in film history as his planned exhibitions in Britain and the U.S. never happened. The first moving pictures to be developed on celluloid film were made by British inventor William Friese Greene in London’s Hyde Park in 1889. Though Thomas Edison and particularly the Lumière Brothers, Auguste and Louis, brought cinema to public consciousness with their screenings of ten shorts in Paris in 1895, including La Sortie de l'Usine/Lumière à Lyon Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, it was an Englishman, William K.L. Dickson (born in France of British parents), employed in the New Jersey laboratories of Thomas Edison, who invented the Kinetograph, the first practical method of cinematography, and the Kinetoscope that was to revolutionise motion pictures.
When it emerged that Thomas Edison hadn't patented the Kinetoscope in Britain, Birt Acres (known as Birtac and born in America of British parents) and partner Robert W Paul pioneered their own version of the Kinetoscope in Britain in 1895 by purchasing and taking apart an original copy in order to make their own version, hence becoming collectively the first to develop a working 35mm camera in Britain. They were soon to fall out over the camera's patent but not before they made the first British film together, Incident at Clovelly Cottage in February 1895. In 1896, Paul pioneered in the UK a system of projecting motion pictures onto a screen which coincided with the advent of the projection system devised by the Lumière Brothers.
At this time, there were subsequent experimenters in this new wonder movement springing up in Brighton, Leeds and Bradford. In Brighton this movement consisted of George Albert Smith, James Williamson, Alfred Darling and A Esme Collings, while in Leeds and Bradford, cinematographic apparatus were being produced as early as 1896. Soon several British film companies had opened to meet the demand for new films, such as Mitchell and Kenyon in Blackburn. Attack on A China Mission (James Williamson,1900) was based on the true story of a rebellion at a Chinese missionary and has subsequently been considered a major leap in its grasp technique, style and content. Michael Brook (BFI, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/520615/index.html) says 'In The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, historian John Barnes claims it had "the most fully developed narrative of any film made in England up to that time"'. This early pace-keeping culminated in another rare innovative film Rescued By Rover (Lewin Fitzhamon, 1905), the first film where disparate shots were linked like a jigsaw puzzle, thus teaching early film audiences how to comprehend edited film.
Due to these early innovations, British Cinema could (albeit briefly) claim to be leading the way in the film world. However, despite the industry enjoying a boom as it developed further in the 1910s, productions soon lapsed and films made in Britain became progressively second-rate. By the 1920s, the British film industry experienced its first recession, augmented certainly by US competition and commercial practices but also, arguably, by its own lull in creativity. However, aside from Alfred Hitchcock’s early work in Britain, there were a few exceptions of well-produced, if not so ground-breaking, films like Shooting Stars (Anthony Asquith, 1928) and the work of director Maurice Elvey, particularly Murder in the Red Barn (1913), At The Villa Rose (1920) and Hindle Wakes (1927).
In his sleeve notes to the British Film Institute release of Hindle Wakes (BFI Publishing), Philip Kemp (1997) says ‘In general, British silent movies have a dismal reputation’ and also says they were ‘crudely photographed’ and exploited the so-called stars of the day. Moreover, these early films never quite outgrew a childlike amateurism and the miracle of a filmstrip with pictures on it. Hindle Wakes was an adaptation of a play by Manchester playwright Stanley Houghton, first staged in 1912, with the film a superior update of Elvey’s own 1918 version. A standard melodrama, set in a Lancashire mill town during the annual Wakes Week holiday, it was daring for its day as it depicts an independent woman, the working-class Fanny (Estelle Brody) who has the same idea of a non-committal relationship when she goes on an illicit vacation with the mill-owner's playboy son, Allan (John Stuart). Maurice Elvey shot the film on location in Lancashire and Blackpool, and his style is fluid and airy, free from the shackles that accompanied early talkies. Also, unlike many of his contemporaries, Elvey made the transition to sound well and directed until the late 1950s.
Although British Cinema was losing out to the now dominant force Hollywood by the middle of the decade, and by 1926 only 5% of films shown in Cinemas were British as compared to 25% in 1914, it did at least seek to redress this decline by creating the Cinematograph Films Act 1927 which introduced protective measures including requirements for cinemas to show a certain percentage of British films. The paradox was a quick recovery of British production inthe late 1920s and into the sound era, culminating in an all-time high of 192 films produced in 1936. However, the high quota for films meant many were of a very poor standard and the overall status of British Cinema, despite all the good intentions, went backwards again. However, many British film-makers like Michael Powell and Alfred Hitchcock were learning their craft in these films which would culminate in their later works.
Anthony Asquith had been influenced by German cinema, particularly the filmmaker E.A.Dupont and his internationally renowned Varieté (1925) and can arguably attributed in helping British Cinema to catch up on other cinematic nations by the late 1920s. Asquith was certainly responsible for two more classics of the British silent era, Underground (1928) and especially A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), both shot by Stanley Rodwell. The influential zeitgeist was now coming in the opposite direction as E.A. Dupont shot his (1929) in Britain. Piccadilly is now considered one of the pinnacles of British cinematography (cameraman Werner Brades), transforming a melodramatic story into something magical with the aid of art director Werner Brades.
posted by Steven Yates at 3:11 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home