BFI Mediatheque
The new Mediatheque at the BFI Southbank (formerly the National Film Theatre) is bringing hundreds of long-forgotten movies and documentaries to visitors, in easy-to-access digital format. Liberated from their dusty vaults, there are real gems here for lovers of London: one of three strands in the first release, of 300 hours of film, is ‘London Calling’.
One absolute gem comes from Lindsay Anderson. He became a maker of feature films during the sixties and seventies, with ‘This Sporting Life’, ‘If’ and the dystopian ‘Britannia Hospital’, but he was a documentary maker first. In the fifties he was producing the kind of short movies you just don’t see anymore. No talking heads, precious little talking in fact - the camera was simply allowed to observe Britain. As part of the ‘Look at Britain’ series, Anderston shot the 40-minute ‘Every Day Except Christmas’ over four weeks in 1956, a beautifully paced black-and-white movie depicting 12 hours in the life of the stallholders and customers of Covent Garden Market. While Covent Garden is now a place of coffee shops, clothes stores and street entertainers, you don’t have to be very old to remember it as a working flower market. It still comes as a shock though to see a lady flower vendor pushing her barrow (real shades of Eliza Doolittle) in the film. A highlight of the Free Cinema movement of the time, it has a soundtrack that is a clever montage of voices, natural sounds and added music. The film hardly needs a narration, though Anderson added one as a concession to the series’ sponsor, Ford Motors.
Another extraordinary example of the Free Film movement was Lorenza Mazzetti’s 52-minute ‘Together’. Set in an East End of bombsites, narrow streets, riversides, warehouses, markets and pubs. It follows two deaf-mute dockers who are completely cut-off from the outside world and are constantly pursued by groups of jeering children. Mazzetti had been a student at the Slade and she used two friends - sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi and painter Michael Andrews - as the two main characters. Lindsay Anderson enters the picture again, helping Mazzetti with the editing and adding a soundtrack. The movie was a phenomenal success, being selected as one of two British shorts for the Cannes Film Festival of 1956.
There are the feature films too, including ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’. First performed at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal in Stratford and written by workshop member Stephen Lewis (who went on to greater fame as Blakey in ‘On the Buses’ and now Smiler in ‘Last of the Summer Wine’). Littlewood used her famed improvisational techniques on the transfer to the big screen. Made on location in Stepney the film thus acquired an amazing realism. This is a true East End of pub goers, spivs, shopkeepers and street people, quite unlike the ‘cockernee’ characters usually grafted onto a feature film. Actors James Booth, Barbara Windsor, Roy Kinnear, Brian Murphy and George Sewell fit right in - Windsor winning the 1963 Best Actress Bafta for her performance. A bemused New York Times reviewer said “This isn’t a picture for anyone with a logical mind or an ear for language. The gabble of cockney spoken here is as incomprehensible as the reasoning of those who speak it.”
‘A Kid For Two Farthings’ meanwhile, penned by Bethnal Green writer Wolf Mankewitz stars East Enders David Kossoff and Alfie Bass in a magical fable of a young boy’s dreams and hopes amidst the harsh realities of life in Spitalfields. Diana Dors, Sid James, Irene Handl and Sydney Tafler are among the other stalwarts of British film on show.
It isn’t just London film makers making use of the city. A couple of weeks back we recounted the story of May Flack in the Chinatown of Limehouse in the 1920s. Hollywood director DW Griffith recreated that Limehouse in his ‘Broken Blossoms’ of 1919. A masterpiece of melodrama, which some critics claim invented the whole ‘film noir’ genre, and which inspired the young Federico Fellini, it was based on Thomas Burke’s collection of short stories ‘Limehouse Nights’. America was indulging in the same terror of Chinese immigration (the ‘yellow peril’) that was infecting the English popular press, and Griffith altered Burke’s story to emphasise a message of racial tolerance.
Just a few hours of the 300 on offer, and with lots more to come - you could spend months in the BFI Mediatheque and not exhaust the catalogue. And it’s all free!
For programme listings visit www.bfi.org.uk/mediatheque. The Mediatheque will be open Tuesday – Sunday from 11am – 9pm and Bank Holiday Mondays throughout the year. Every month new specially selected programmes will be added to the collections. Coming soon for May 2007 is ‘Play for Today’: a complete retrospective (300 titles) of the groundbreaking BBC drama strand including ‘Blue Remembered Hills’, ‘Nuts in May’ and ‘Abigail’s Party’. 30 titles will be launched in May followed by new additions every month. Other programme highlights for later in 2007 include: ‘The Way We Ate’ – A social history of food, eating and feasting in Britain – from rationing to Fanny Cradock to the rise and rise of the chicken tikka masala; 100 titles which reveal the hidden history of Black Britons; 100 titles reflecting lesbian and gay experience in British film and television.
The year is 1961, the scene Hessel Street in London’s East End, moments before bulldozers started pulling down the old shops and houses. A shopkeeper stands at the door of his store, knowing that in the space of a few minutes his business, his job and the certainties of his life in London will be torn away. ‘The Vanishing Street’ documents, in 20 minutes, the life of a typical Jewish community in 1960s Britain, showing us its street market, kosher food shops, newspaper and synagogue.
It’s an astonishingly vibrant and moving piece of work, one of the highlights of the Free Cinema documentary film movement, which emerged in Britain in the 1950s. Leading lights included Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti - the movement really beginning with a programme of their short films at the National Film Theatre in London in February 1956.
For decades these, and countless other depictions of London life past, have been out of the reach of most of us. They form part of the enormous archive of the British Film Institute (BFI), which comprises more than a quarter of a million international films and half a million TV programmes. This “filmic equivalent of the collections of the British Museum, containing more material than the Library of Congress”, as it is described by BFI director Amanda Neville, occupies 37 acres on two sites outside London. Previously, you could only view the films at special screenings or by request.
For the last year or two, BFI technicians have been undertaking the marathon task not just of restoring and preserving the movies, but also digitising them. Loaded onto hard disk, a fraction of the film stock is now available for instant access at the Mediatheque, which occupies old Museum of the Moving Image beneath Waterloo Bridge. So far there are just 300 hours of footage, with the same again due by the end of the year. Now visitors to the Mediatheque can slide in front of a plasma TV screen at the sparkling new BFI Southbank complex and, with a mouse click, enjoy the film of their choice.
The initial offerings are under three headings. ‘Exodus’ is a collection of 25 or so documentaries and TV dramas that tell the story of Britain’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade - 2007 marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. ‘Essentially British’ is a collection that explores Britain and British identities with 100 titles dating back as far as 1900. Visitors to the Mediatheque can call up images of Victorian tourists at Stonehenge, see life in Britain during the war as depicted to audiences in the US or take a sweep through the history and traditions of cricket. They will be able to see scenes of communities in the 1950s linked by their connection to the coal mining industry, and a film that follows the fortunes of young punk rockers in Northern Ireland.
Most fascinating for East Enders is ‘London Calling’, more than a century of London through the lens. Here you’ll see some of the very earliest film in the Archive, including ‘Blackfriars Bridge’, a 25-second film from 1896. In a film from 1903 we are taken on a journey round central London taking in familiar sights and some that have long since disappeared. Half a century later, the innocently titled ‘Nice Time’, by Goretta and Tanner, pulls together the disparate sounds and images of a Saturday night out as the crowds gather around Eros. And you’ll see some of the most recent, with Peter Ackroyd’s ‘London’ and Saul Dibb’s ‘Bullet Boy’ from 2004.
The documentaries are perhaps the most enticing place to start. ‘The Elephant Will Never Forget’ is a record of the last week of London’s trams in July 1952. The film is largely shot from the tram driver’s position, giving you the rather strange sensation of actually driving the vehicle. Half a century on, of course, our trams are on the way back. By 2013 they’ll be rattling over Waterloo Bridge, right above the NFT’s current home. Ironically, that will force the BFI Southbank to find a new home. In the meantime though, there are delights from London past to enjoy - Carnaby Street swinging in the sixties, lunch at the top of the Post Office Tower, and a host of documentaries and feature films filmed in and about the East End, from ‘Broken Blossoms’ to ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’. Next week we look at a sample of what’s in store.
BFI Southbank is on the southern end of Waterloo Bridge (nearest tube Waterlool). For programme listings visit www.bfi.org.uk/mediatheque. The Mediatheque will be open Tuesday – Sunday from 11am – 9pm and Bank Holiday Mondays throughout the year; www.bfi.org.uk.