Picture Perfect: Landscape, Place and Travel in British Cinema before 1930 / Edition 2

by Byrony Dixon, Laraine Porter

Overview

The British cinema has drawn extensively on our national landscapes. Filmmakers have explored the entrenched myth of an idyllic rural tradition, intimately bound up with a popular definition of national heritage. Conversely, within a documentary-realist framework, they have looked at the contemporary urban aesthetic, derived partly from a Victorian tradition of social investigation.
 
The fifth in a series of volumes from the annual British Silent Cinema Festival held in Nottingham (and the first to be published by Exeter), this collective study offers an original treatment of the relationship between pre-1930 cinema and landscape. The Nottingham festival from which this collection derives brought together a group of leading specialists – practitioners, academics and individual researchers – who between them provide a detailed investigation into the national cinema before the sound era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781905816002
Publisher:	University of Exeter Press
Publication date:	03/16/2007
Series:	Exeter Studies in Film History
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.17(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Laraine Porter is the Director of Broadway cinema and media centre in Nottingham, and co-ordinator of the British Silent Cinema Festival held annually in Nottingham; she has co-edited four previous volumes based on work presented at these festivals. Bryony Dixon is Curator of Silent Film at the British Institute’s National Film and Television Archive; she co-programmes the British Silent Cinema Festival, and manages the BFI’s current Chaplin project.

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Picture Perfect

Landscape, Place and Travel in British Cinema before 1930

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By Laraine Porter, Bryony Dixon

University of Exeter Press

Copyright © 2007 Laraine Porter, Bryony Dixon
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85989-938-3

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CHAPTER 1

Location, Location, Location

The Sixth British Silent Cinema Weekend

Bryony Dixon

A central ambition of the British Film Institute is to provide better access to the collections of the BFI National Archive, which means that we need to know as much as possible about the films in our care. Early films in particular do not often come into the collection with contextual information. We need to develop this knowledge not only by our own internal procedures but also by bringing together those who have a particular research focus in order to give meaning and context back to films of the period, which are otherwise known only by date, title and a one-line synopsis. From these concentrated communal studies at the Festival we can give proper curatorial backing to the future presentation of these films.

In the field of silent British cinema the value of this strategy has been borne out time and again. The six British Silent Cinema festivals organized by the partnership of the BFI and the Broadway Cinema have resulted directly in the programming of other screenings and conferences. The festival of 2003 on the theme of location, place and landscape was no exception. Having been very much inspired by the pioneering work of festivals such as the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone and the Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna it was with a real sense of achievement that I was able to present programmes of British silent film at both these festivals in 2004. This was due almost entirely to the work done by the extended family of the British Silent Cinema festival. Perhaps even more importantly, the festival was largely the proving ground for the first ever retrospective of British Cinema of the Twenties at the National Film Theatre (NFT). This kind of work, along with the massive publicity generated by the Mitchell & Kenyon Project, has been responsible for a shift in attitudes by commissioning editors and there have now been several television productions on early British cinema including The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon, The Lost World of Friese-Greene, Silent Britain and Hollywood Holmfirth.

Now that university lecturers are more aware—through attending the festival—of the source materials, British silent films are being taught in a proliferation of degree and postgraduate courses. Many British silent films have been digitized for delivery on the BFI's Screenonline so that the images, and just as importantly, the curatorial information is recorded and retained for future use and enjoyment. The organizers of this festival have had this aim from the start, a permanent record of its researches, discoveries, enthusiasms and pleasures. This book is a vital part of this process.

Location and the British Silent Film—Highlights of the Festival

Over the five days of the festival we screened over a hundred films with the specific intention to examine whether the old adage that British cinema was studio bound had any currency based on an actual viewing of the films. Here below are some of the highlights of a very illuminating festival.

Feature Films and the Use of Location

Of the feature films The Lure Of Crooning Water (1920) was the surprise hit of the festival. We knew from Christine Gledhill's work that Guy Newall was both an interesting director and naturalistic performer, working with his future wife, Ivy Duke. It is a surprisingly modern film, given its early date. The country location is used to great effect as a metaphor for a natural morality in stark contrast to the deceptions of the city. One charming, if slightly alarming, scene sees the elegant urbanite reclining in a hammock (while everyone else on the farm is working), teaching the farmer's baby how to smoke.

Most unexpected of the features was A Couple of Down and Outs (1923) a Dutch version of a British film preserved by the Netherlands Filmmuseum, introduced (and sportingly translated!) by Ivo Blom. This rare example of a film dealing with a pessimistic aftermath to the First World War surprised everybody in the audience. A demobbed cavalry soldier is reunited with the cavalry horse he cared for during the war just as the horse is being abused by its new owner. Man and horse go on the run and are finally cornered by the police who astonishingly, and spontaneously, turn a blind eye on his crime in solidarity with an ex-serviceman. He escapes back to the rural idyll of a country estate, here a refuge from the viciousness of the modern industrial world.

Other features with a strong focus on location were Henry Edwards's Owd Bob (1924), Mist in the Valley (1923) and Boy Woodburn (1922). This last, directed by Guy Newall again, is one of the better horse-racing dramas, a genre very popular with the British public and little written about as yet. Cecil Hepworth too, was one of the greatest exponents and exploiters of the English rural scene. What remains of his 1921 film Tansy formed an interesting companion piece to Andrew Higson's presentation on Comin' Thro' the Rye (1923), which made a convincing case for the heritage film strategy adopted by many British filmmakers in order to differentiate the look of their films from the American mainstream. It is no coincidence that the beautiful British landscape is so much on show in the films of this era—it made sound business sense.

Town and Country, Travel and Transport

The British countryside was often portrayed in film as timeless and idealized. The rural setting was used to highlight the corruptions of progress as represented by urbanization. It should be noted that there is no hint of wilderness here. This is not the virgin territory of the American West; the rural settings in most British films are well managed and manicured, a very English Garden of Eden (with, one suspects, fairies at the bottom). Similarly, in non-fiction films location was a major selling point. The same strategies were used as for drama and the traditional tourist destinations were accentuated, Cornwall and the South-West, the Lake District, Scotland, Wales and, of course, Shakespeare Country.

A programme of travelogues from the BFI National Archive illustrated the great variety of travel and location related films in the silent period, from advertising films to early panoramas (the earliest from Stonehenge in 1900), from Charles Urban's agricultural industrials to corporate documentaries, cinemagazines (some in beautiful stencil colour) as well as tourist films sponsored by the railway companies. The most beautiful of the travelogues from the 1920s, the unique The Open Road (1925) presented by Jan Faull of the BFI, takes you on a tour round the British Isles by car using Claude Friese-Greene's experimental colour process.

A variety of settings figured in the presentations, an urban one in David Robinson's tour of Chaplin's real London background. Mike Hammond and Jude Cowan both covered the sensationalist London of early melodramas. Amy Sargeant beautifully illustrated the British preoccupation with the French Riviera that featured in many novels and plays as a site for playfulness and deceit. Tony Fletcher contrasted dramas from both urban and rural locations in relation to social issues. Patrick Keiller also focused on the urban landscape and modernization. Ivo Blom showed how filmmakers followed the well-trodden trails of travel writers in Iceland, The 'movement and landscape' programme, my personal favourite, featuring the surreally beautiful Burnham Beeches (1909) and A Day in the Hayfields (1904) provided the kind of sumptuous viewing experience that you might get from staring out of the windows of a train on a bright Edwardian summer's day.

Another central theme of the weekend was travel and transport-to which we devoted a whole day, with Luke McKernan and Stephen Herbert's excellent 'Taking to the Air', a history of aviation on film. Phil Carli covered the heroic age of the transatlantic liners, James Taylor, the R101 airship disaster, followed by Frank Gray on Phantom Rides, Neil Brand on trains and Peter Allen on motor racing. This was rounded out with a screening of The Wrecker, an early sound movie of 1930 about a train robbery.

Other Locations

As well as literal locations we also took a look at imaginary and fantastical locations, for it was in this period that the hugely popular 'Ruritanian' romances were adapted for the screen. By the late 1920s several versions of 'The Prisoner of Zenda' and many of Rafael Sabatini's classic swashbucklers had been produced. Time indeed for a spoof. The Vagabond Queen (1930) was made as a vehicle for Betty Balfour, playing a princess and a lovable cockney who are doubles. The film effectively but affectionately ridicules the genre. In a similar vein the lost Sydney Chaplin feature King, Queen, Joker of 1921 plays with the double and Ruritania. Frank Scheide's work on the reconstruction of this film, from the Chaplin Out-takes collection, shows Syd playing the barber-shop scene that brother Charlie later used in The Great Dictator. As we couldn't show much of the film because of pending restoration work, it seemed a good time to show A Little Bit of Fluff (1926), written as a vehicle to launch Syd's career in Britain and costarring Betty Balfour. It is genuinely funny with one particularly painful scene depicting Syd mistaking an adult lady midget for a little girl, with disastrous results.

Special Events

Nottingham itself featured as a location for a special event, the premiere of a specially written monologue by Michael Eaton on Nottingham's own music-hall star Billy Merson. Our traditional public screening in St Peter's Church featured that most unobtainable of all locations, the south pole, in South (1919), the film record of Shackleton's expedition, every bit as atmospheric as it must have been when it was originally shown. The live accompaniment by Neil Brand on piano and Günter Buchwald on violin was serene and maintained the exceptionally high musical standards of this festival.

Our aim at the British Silent Cinema Festival is not only to get the films out of the archives and onto the screen but also to debunk some myths and assumptions about early British cinema. This year's challenge was to ask the question 'Was British silent cinema studio-bound?' The answer is a resounding 'No!' The exploitation of the image of Britain's landscape in film was as strong then as it is now.

CHAPTER 2

On Location in Edwardian Britain

Urban and Rural Violence

Tony Fletcher

The building blocks of the British Welfare State had begun to form in the early twentieth century with the reforms of the Liberal government (1906–15) but it was still a difficult time for many of the population, who had to confront harsh realities. The vital social and municipal issues of the day—old age, poverty, truancy, crime—were readily adopted as prominent or background themes in the new dramatic films that were coming to dominate British cinema. American film archivist and historian Kemp R. Niver has contended that, from the very start, the approach in England was towards realistic films with a 'preponderance of sordid detail'. He stated that the American filmmakers of 1904 often made use of newspaper stories of current events for their scenarios, usually with little thought of conveying a message. He pointed out, in contrast, that British filmmakers portrayed existing social evils by producing documentary-dramas, and that films were additionally characterized by what I have termed a 'violent realism'. This essay examines a number of British realist film dramas dealing with urban, rural and domestic violence made during the early part of the twentieth century, which illustrate Niver's thesis.

Violent Realism

The public in Britain have long had a fascination for the macabre, which was a continual presence at the fairgrounds and waxworks throughout the British Isles. Audiences loved to delve into the minds of murderers as headlined in the sensationalist weekly paper, the News of the World, and paraded through a variety of popular cultural forms. For example, in 1897, at Sadler's Wells, James Berry projected slides relating to his trade—that of the public hangman of 193 convicted murderers. In his autobiography, Charlie Chaplin recalled two childhood experiences which would have been more or less contemporary with the films under discussion:

I was passing a grocer's shop in Camberwell Road and noticed the shutters were up, which was unusual. Something prompted me to climb on the window ledge and look through the diamond hole of the shutter. Inside it was dark and deserted, but the groceries were all there, and there was a large packing-case in the centre of the floor. I jumped from the ledge with a sense of repugnance and went on my way. Soon after, a murder case exploded. Edgar Edwards, an affable old gentleman of 65 had acquired five grocery stores by simply bludgeoning the owners to death with a sash-weight, and then taking over their business. In that grocery shop in Camberwell, in that packing-case, were his last three victims, Mr. and Mrs. Darby and their baby ...

[A]s a boy, [I] stopped at a saloon in the London Bridge Road and asked for a glass of water. A bluff amiable gentleman with a dark moustache served me. For some reason I could not drink the water. I pretended to, but as soon as the man turned to talk to a customer, I put the glass down and left. Two weeks later, George Chapman, proprietor of the Crown Public House in the London Bridge Road, was charged with murdering five wives by poisoning them with strychnine. His latest victim had been dying in a room above the saloon the day he gave me a glass of water.

Both Chapman and Edwards were hanged.

One murder, largely forgotten today, gripped the public attention at the time and was the subject of three 1903 topicals: The Moat Farm Mystery (Gaumont); The Moat Farm Murder (Paul's Animatograph); and The Moat Farm Tragedy (Harrison). On 2 April 1903, a charge of forgery was brought against Samuel Dougal in connection with the mysterious disappearance of Miss Camille Holland over four years earlier. On 27 April, after a long and determined search, the police discovered the body of a woman buried in a filled-in ditch at Moat Farm, Clavering, Essex, where Samuel Dougal and the missing lady had been living for some years. At the inquest, on 15 May, the jury found that she had been killed by a bullet wound inflicted by Dougal on the night of 19 May 1899. On 23 June 1903, Dougal was sentenced to death for her murder and, after confessing his guilt, was executed on 14 July.

Lurid titles, in the fashion of sensationalist headlines, were a feature of film in this period. The following are illustrative of the approach: in 1903, Vengence is Mine (Autoscope); Attempted Murder in a Railway Train (Clarendon); Revenge (Gaumont); A Railway Tragedy (Gaumont); Brutality Rewarded (Haggar); The Lover's Crime (Hepworth); A Den of Thieves (Hepworth); Lured from Home (Mutoscope and Biograph); The Sculptor's Jealous Model (R.W. Paul); The Coiners (Sheffield); Robbery of a Mail Convoy by Bandits (Urban); in 1902, The Maniac's Guillotine (Haggar) and Fight with Sledgehammers (Harrison). Typical of these subjects is A Father's Vengeance (New Century Pictures, 1902), which involved a girl being strangled and thrown in the river. The culprit is then shot by her father. In September 1903, the Sheffield Photo Company produced Robbery of the Mail Coach, a nine-scene historical film involving the chase of two highwaymen, who are eventually shot down from the treetops. In another Sheffield Photo Company film, The Convict's Escape from Prison (October 1903), the police chase the convict, fight with him in a river and finally throw him off a cliff.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Picture Perfect by Laraine Porter, Bryony Dixon. Copyright © 2007 Laraine Porter, Bryony Dixon. Excerpted by permission of University of Exeter Press.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction
   Alan Burton and Laraine Porter

Location, Location, Location: The Sixth British Silent Cinema Weekend
   Bryony Dixon

On Location in Edwardian Britain: Urban and Rural Violence
   Tony Fletcher

The Marketing of Landscapes in Silent British Cinema
   Paul Moody

Narrative and Pictorialism in Post-Pioneer Hepworth Films
   Simon Brown

Pastoral Transformations in 1920s British Cinema
   Christine Gledhill

'The Plucky Girl' and the 'Pigeon to Pluck': Characters, Locations and Entertainment Forms in Rogues of London
   Judith Cowan

Trainers and Temptresses: The British Racing Drama
   Judith McLaren

The First Cameraman in Iceland: Travel Film and Travel Literature
   Ivo Blom

The Anglo-Boer War in North London: A Micro-Study
   Ian Christie

'Everyone's Doing the Riviera' Because 'It's So Much Nicer in Nice'
   Amy Sargeant

The City of the Future
   Patrick Keiller

Cooperation and the Contestation of Public Space
   Alan Burton

Billy Merson's Monologue: Blighted My Life
   Michael Eaton

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Virtually everything in this admirable volume deserves to be noticed." Screening the Past, Issue 22, Jan. 2008 "It is the first of these proceedings to be published by the University of Exeter Press, which offers a new and more attractive design, and the contributons themselves are equally good" Early Popular Visual Culture: 6,3. November 2008

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