This introduction is in two parts. The first part is written by Bryony Dixon with assistance from Laraine Porter and Neil Brand. The second part is written by Lawrence Napper.
Part One: A pianist, a cinema programmer and a film archivist walk into a bar…
Bryony Dixon, Laraine Porter, Neil Brand
In 1997 at the Pordenone silent film festival, three mildly irritated English people sat in the bar opposite the cinema, plotting. The occasion for the irritation was the sound of tip-up seats banging as an American film historian of note, and his entourage, walked out of the cinema loudly pronouncing they would leave, as the film about to start was British - the implication being that there was nothing of interest in it. Of course this was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, we had been hearing about how bad British silent film was for years. Even within the British Film Institute, the body charged with preservation and promotion of Britain‘s film heritage, the reputation of British silent film (beyond a few early pioneers), was poor. The indignant conversation in the bar - with Bryony Dixon (the archivist), Laraine Porter (the cinema programmer) and Neil Brand (the silent film pianist) was really focused on the fact that the confident pronouncements of these film historians on the rubbishness of British silent cinema was based on the sketchiest possible knowledge. I knew this because for years I ran the BFI’s viewing service and film booking office. Anyone who viewed material or booked it for screening in the BFI’s archive came through this office so I had a pretty good idea no one had booked out any of our silent British films. There are copies of British silent films with other collectors but not many. The undeniable fact was that no one of this generation of film historians and academics, with a few exceptions, had seen more than a bare handful of British silent films. Apart from perhaps Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1926), no British film was considered part of the silent film canon. Neil Brand sums up the situation
There was an unofficial hierarchy that existed at Pordenone in those days, within which certain big names set the agenda for what was, and what wasn’t, worth researching and celebrating in silent film. Academics, archivists, collectors and amateur experts formed a consensus, based, obviously, on what had been seen on one or other side of the Pond, and during the British season the critical reaction from these voices had grown louder. Hitchcock was great, Asquith was OK but after 1905 British cinema was mostly crap. Four or five films into the 1997 Pordenone British season, in reaction to Maurice Elvey’s The Life Story of David Lloyd George (a brilliant, groundbreaking long-form biopic from 1918 which had been suppressed for political reasons by its own subject) the dam broke. “Why do you like this stuff?” I was asked by colleagues I respected, and I’ll never forget my friend Jonathan Dennis slowly shaking his head as he clapped me out of the pit at the end of the film…
Turning our outrage into positive action, we realised that we had the means to do something about it - we had an archive full of films waiting to be seen, thanks to the BFI’s nitrate copying programme which made 35mm viewing prints as part of its process, we had a cinema to show them in and a popular accompanist with experience in bringing films to life for an audience. We would get together the few people interested in the project and set ourselves the task of watching all extant British silent cinema and then decide if it was any good in comparison with the silent film canon as it existed then. And so the British Silent Film Festival (BSFF) was born.
Writing this in September 2019, just after the end of the 20th edition of that festival, having achieved the task of screening most surviving British films of the silent era, it seems a good moment to reflect on how we went about it, what we found, how the landscape of silent film changed in the meantime and how British silent film is seen now.
The unusual – possibly unique - festival structure developed over the first few editions. We started by simply programming films and persuading everyone we knew who had an interest or curiosity to come along. Soon we realised that people not only wanted to watch the films but wanted to talk about them too. Some of these were academics who could share existing knowledge among themselves and their students who we encouraged to come along to do their first public presentations. Others were inspired to do research of their own; some came to British silent film because they were interested in family history and relatives who had worked in the industry; some came to silent film from a related interest like early aviation and transport, a particular author like Dickens and Shakespeare, or 19th century theatre. The enthusiasm was broad but also deep. After screenings, conversations became epic sessions, far into the early hours of the morning. The annual event became a kind of hybrid conference/festival with space for anyone to propose a talk on the one condition that they illustrated it with film (so that we all saw as much film as possible) to go with the ‘festival’ style of feature film screenings and programmes of short films. Emphasis was placed on showing as well as telling. Musical accompaniment was always of high quality and we soon began to acquire more accompanists and multi instrumentalists like Stephen Horne, John Sweeney, Phillip Carli, Guenther Buchwald, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry and Lillian Henley and special performers and performances for a wide variety of films.
Laraine Porter describes the very first event:
The first festival took place at Phoenix Arts in Leicester in 1998, where the then Director, Nigel Hinds, had for the past decade established a culture of commissioning new music for silent films, largely funded by the Arts Council, at a time when new musical approaches to silent film was seen as a desirable and emerging experimental art form. These commissions attracted some talented composers and diverse scores from saxophone quartets to ensembles of Indian musicians, and reached out to audiences excited by new combinations of image and sound. In most cases, the music took priority and the films were sometimes there to provide background to the musical performance, but these events indicated an appetite among composers and audiences for ‘live cinema’ and established Leicester’s Phoenix Cinema with the necessary technical expertise to stage such events and the experience to market them to audiences.
After this first festival, a two-day event modestly called ‘The Forgotten Cinema’, we decided that subsequent festivals would have a theme. This was to give contributors a place to start thinking about relevant subjects and a programming framework for the screenings but mainly it was to challenge some deeply entrenched myths about British film. For example, a high proportion of every national cinema is based on literary or theatrical sources, but in regard to British historical film this was seen entirely as a negative. Not so much in France or United States. How did this come about? So to begin to investigate this negative association we programmed a festival focused on adaptation in British silent cinema. Other research questions tackled comedy, the relationship of British film to American and European film, location and place, music and sound, the Great War and the transition to sound film. We also published a series of books of essays to provide a record of findings and research and to fill a gap in the market for scholarly writing on British silent film. Many substantial pieces of writing came from the festival community such as Christine Gledhill’s extraordinary survey of the British cinema of the 1920s published by BFI Publishing in 2003: Reframing British Cinema, 1918-1928: Between Restraint and Passion.
The hybrid structure was both a blessing and a curse. Though popular with delegates and attendees, it didn’t fit neatly into either the academic conference format or the cultural cinema festival. It was managed within slender means and what scraps of funding were available through a confusing and ever-changing array of schemes and funding criteria. The BFI contributed in kind and everyone worked for free except the pianists and projectionists. But there were often pressures to change as Laraine Porter remembers:
Festival funders understandably wanted the event to expand exponentially by increasing audiences – attendances being one of the few quantifiable outputs - with large ‘marquee’ events, such as well publicised successes like the Pet Shop Boys and Dresdner Sinfoniker playing to Battleship Potemkin in Trafalgar Square in 2004. Even if the Festival had gone down the populist route, with showstopper events using pop and rock musicians, production costs would be astronomical and unsustainable. It’s not what the festival was for. Also, to become a more conventional public festival there were demands for restored materials that we (the archives) could not deliver; the number of restored British silent films was negligible – you could count them on two hands. BFI Archive viewing materials were often fine for research screenings but not necessarily suitable for public audiences due to missing sections or the variable quality of unrestored prints.
The demand to deliver British silent cinema to mass audiences are often unrealistic. Although the Festival has moved around – first to Nottingham then back to the Phoenix Leicester, with stints at the Barbican in London, Cambridge (and with satellite events ranging from Aldeburgh to Orkney), all of which delivered good audience numbers – its appeal remains consistently niche. The BSFF, like most film festivals and cultural cinema, does not recoup its costs and requires subsidy.
Equally, if the BSFF were to become an annual conference, academic funders were looking for different outputs, which a weekend event with no permanent staff and infrastructure couldn’t deliver. But steering a course through the Scylla and Charybdis of incompatible funding schemes and conventional expectations, and after nearly foundering on the rock of losing our cinema base in Nottingham, we kept going and, we are happy to say, we stuck to our guns. We succeeded in showing nearly the whole of the surviving corpus of British silent film available as viewing copies from the BFI National Archive and films from other collections such as the Imperial War Museum, private collectors and FIAF colleagues.
Along the way, a community developed. A generation of students have become academics in their own right and teach British film or have gone on to other related careers. A significant number of books and articles have been written. DVDs and television programmes have been produced. BSFF programmes have travelled to festivals in other parts of the world. The knowledge generated by this community has fed back into the BFI and informed a long series of silent feature film restorations including all nine silent Hitchcock films (the thing about which I am personally most proud), and the rediscovery of the silent films of Anthony Asquith including A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), Shooting Stars (1928) and Underground (1928). Films of exploration and discovery like The Great White Silence (1922) and Epic of Everest (1924). Walter Summers’ WW1 battle film The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927), Miles Mander’s The First Born (1928) whose assistant director was Alma Reville, the Indian, German, British co-production Shiraz (Franz Osten, 1928) and the dazzling large format Victorian films to name but a few.
It is hard to imagine a time when Hitchcock’s silent films were not well known, but Neil Brand remembers the impact of their re-discovery:
I remember playing Hitchcock’s The Ring (1927) for the first time and loving it so much I scored it for video release and toured with the band a year or two later.
And for the festival programme itself and its community of devotees, there have been great discoveries, some by intrepid researchers in the basement of the BFI – the extraordinary Tony Fletcher who could not remain unnamed in this article
What did we find? While we discovered no great movements in British film we did find a number of interesting traits – there is the ground-breaking development of the exploration and natural history film and the moving films that came out of WW1 like The Somme (1916) or A Couple of Down and Outs (Walter Summers, 1923). For Neil Brand the 2004 Festival which focused on World War One was a defining year with profound effects,
…my head was reshaped by the season on World War One. The Roll of Honour films, the actualities, the fictional features, the research that had been done into them all actually redefined the war for me and its place in British popular culture, challenging a lifetime of preconceptions.
We also examined Britain’s pastoral tradition focused on the British landscape and epitomised by director Cecil Hepworth’s films like Owd Bob (1923) and Comin’ Thro’ the Rye (1923) and the Florence Turner/Henry Edwards production East is East (1917). As film developed its artistic side so the Film Society began its mission to study and show film as an art. The BFI still has its precious cache of important international films, into which, crept the odd British title - The Lodger and Blackmail (1920) from Hitchcock and the absurdist humour of the 1920s Bohemians (a starry list including Adrian Brunel, Ivor Montagu, Elsa Lanchester, P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and A. A. Milne). These very British comedies picked up on earlier traditions as Neil Brand remembers:
The double whammy of Pimple’s Battle of Waterloo (1913) and Blood and Bosh (1913) opened up a seam of comedy I didn’t know existed, and year upon year we were able to see more glories.
We discovered a penchant for the ‘little film’ like the fabulous adaptations of the stories of W. W. Jacobs (a Jerome-like humourist) by screenwriter Lydia Hayward, and the beautifully observed works of H.G. Wells directed by Howard Shaw. P.G. Wodehouse adaptations, produced close to the release of the author’s original stories, were also revelatory and showed how a modest British silent cinema was able to interpret the wry and self-effacing humour of the original.
We have learned about the stars, Ivor Novello and Betty Balfour, Alma Taylor and Henry Edwards, and became familiar (necessarily) with ubiquitous and talented character actors like Moore Marriott and Marie Ault. We discovered genius directors and very competent unknown directors like Guy Newall, Arthur Rooke, W.P. Kellino, Walter Forde and Sinclair Hill. There were great one-off films like Miles Mander’s The First Born and Elvey’s Hindle Wakes (1927) that stood out from the crowd. We have seen what great writers like Eliot Stannard could do with a 600-page novel to adapt and we have considered the truly world-beating innovations of our earliest pioneers, Robert Paul, Birt Acres, G.A. Smith, W.K.L. Dickson and James Williamson to name a few. Certainly we can confirm the British didn’t invest heavily in film like other nations, but in the face of very active discrimination by the French and then the Americans, its film industry produced much that was good; usually at its best in the domestic sphere rather than over ambitious forays into the international market.
We have also discovered the importance of Britain’s relationship to Europe in the silent period in terms of shared ideas and creative personnel. Hitchcock and Asquith famously worked in Germany, but German-speaking directors like Hans Steinhoff, A.E. Dupont and Geza von Bolvary imported a certain bravura to British cinema and helped to elevate its status as art form. This bond was strong enough that there was even a short-lived attempt to continue producing multi-lingual films as sound came in.
The festival has for over 20 years produced not only informative but magical performances of these films. In 2013 we split off the conference aspect of the festival to its own separate event at Kings College so we can continue to attract academics, archivists and enthusiasts alike to present their researches on an annual basis. Meanwhile the festival itself runs every other year focusing on screenings of the best of world silent cinema as it relates to British film. The Festival was given a boost in 2015 and 2017 when it received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to help us rediscover those fantastic films trapped in the five years of transition to sound from 1927 to 1932. Enthusiasm for British silent film, in its small but perfectly formed way, continues unabated.
Part two: The British Silent Film Festival Symposium at King’s College London
Lawrence Napper
I was just starting out on my PhD when I attended the second British Silent Film Festival in 1998, so I guess you could say I am one of the generation of students who became academics under its influence, and whose developing understanding and interest in British cinema before 1930 was formed by the pace of the festival. Like Neil I was profoundly affected by the 2004 festival themed around the first world war – a ‘head reshaping’ experience which inspired me to write my second academic book, The Great War in British Popular Cinema of the 1920s. And there is no question that over the years the festival has had a profound effect not only on the reputation, but also on the availability of British cinema. The major restorations and DVD releases by the BFI, but also the development of digital access platforms such as the BFI Player have transformed the possibilities for teaching British cinema of this period at undergraduate and postgraduate level. The landscape has been completely transformed since those dark days of the late 1990s when ‘experts’ were happy to slag off a cinema they had never seen. So I was delighted in 2013 when Bryony, Laraine and Neil invited me to host the conference aspect of the festival as a one day symposium at King’s College, London (KCL). The symposium has run annually since then in the spring, complementing the festival itself every other autumn. It has expanded from a single day event to a two day event with screenings of particularly rare and unseen films, often using the 35mm projection capacity at KCL, but also working in partnership with other venues such as the Cinema Museum and the Phoenix cinema in East Finchley. In the spirit of the festival, I have been keen to keep the symposium as a welcoming and open space and in particular we welcome and rely on research papers offered by independent researchers, amateurs and hobbyists, as well as papers by PhD students, early career researchers and established academics. Early British cinema is a niche topic and much of what we know is due to the impressive research work of enthusiasts. After a hiatus due to the Covid pandemic, the symposium resumes in 2024 and we look forward to many more fruitful days of discovery.
The articles in this special edition of Early Popular Visual Culture are the result of a 2019 invitation to those who had presented at the BSFF symposium over the previous few years to work their papers up for publication. They represent a first tranche of material which roughly deals with the later part of the pre-1930 period – a second special edition is in preparation containing articles more focussed on the earlier part of the period. These articles offer a good sampler of the range of topics and approaches one might encounter at the event, rather than responses to a planned theme or argument, but in so doing they give a good sense of the liveliness and variety of work in the field, and of the interconnectedness between the study of a neglected cinema, the work of the archives in rediscovering that cinema and making it available, and the importance of work in the archives to provide a context for the understanding of that cinema. Each of the articles offers a variation of this balance, but each emphasises – as Bryony’s account of the festival itself above does – the importance of a return to the archive, to the evidence, in order to get a picture that reliance on standard received assumptions about the period and the material doesn’t achieve.
In his article about Jerry the Troublesome Tyke, Christopher Holliday considers this series of comic cartoons created by Sid Griffiths and Bert Bilby in Cardiff in 1925. Jerry was distributed by Pathé and seen in cinemas throughout the UK in the 1920s, gaining great popularity. These cartoons about Jerry – a mischievous dog – were unavailable for many years, only returning to view in 2002 partly as a result of the work of the National Screen and Sound archive of Wales. They were shown at the British Silent Film Festival in 2010 and examples can now be seen on the BFI Player. Holliday’s article places the films in the context of the history of animation in the 1920s, with a particular focus on the way in which Jerry is ‘reflexive’ – referring the numerous occasions where Jerry battles with his own animator who appears onscreen as part of the action. Holliday considers the way in which this feature of Jerry’s persona places him in a tradition of animation both British and American, offering a detailed textual analysis of the films and the ontological implications they contain. Llewella Chapman’s article about the series Haunted Houses and Castles of Great Britain (1926) also takes as its subject films which have been forgotten over the years. Here no late revival of interest has been forthcoming, although some examples of the series are available on the BFI Player. Chapman offers the story of Berg’s Cosmopolitan Pictures as one typical of many small producers working in Britain during the 1920s, buffeted by the turbulent weather of British film finance moods, and the competition of US product. The series followed many of the period in attempting to exploit Britain’s historical landmarks and locations as part of an attractive ‘heritage’ package of visual pleasures, and Chapman offers an entertaining account of how these very 1920s versions of British history were understood and received at the time.
Amy Sargeant’s article on boarding houses in 1920s films adopts a rather different methodology, tracing the figure of the boarding house as a theme and a setting across a number of popular films, novels and plays (many titles being adapted across several or all of these media) of the period. Why was the boarding house such a fruitful location for storytelling? Apart from its real-life prevalence in 1920s Britain, such a space offers film-makers and novelists a highly flexible and elegant way of gathering together characters of different classes and fortunes, and of staging nuanced narratives of the tension between private experience and social interaction. Sargeant’s deft analysis shows the many and nuanced ways in which boarding house life responded to the economic, aesthetic and class based concerns of the period. Neil Parson’s account of Harold Shaw’s film-making exploits in South Africa brings a much more international and cosmopolitan perspective to British cinema concerns. British cinema in this period was, of course, also in many respects an imperial cinema – an aspect that is often neglected or downplayed even in modern accounts. The United States of America also loomed large for British producers and film-makers, as a competitor for domestic audiences, but also as a potentially lucrative but hitherto largely unattainable market. Harold Shaw is a figure who crosses all of these boundaries. He was an American film-maker who often worked in England (for instance on Two Columbines in 1914 and then later on Stoll’s adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The Wheels of Chance in 1922). Parson tells the story of another two film-making adventures undertaken by Shaw – first in South Africa, and then in Lithuania, where at the behest of the British secret service he produced an anti-Bolshevik propaganda piece called The Land of Mystery in 1920. Like many historians working on this period, Parson must write about a film which no longer survives. However extensive research within the archives and through the trade papers enable him to trace the fascinating international web of political, economic and artistic forces which came together in the production of this film.
Nyasha Sibanda’s article on the arrival of sound at the Tudor cinema in Leicester also deploys an impressive amount of archival and practical research. Sibanda brings a range of statistical and computational analysis techniques to bear on the surviving ledgers of the Tudor – a mid-sized cinema in a suburb of the county town of Leicester in the English midlands – to analyse the impact that the arrival of sound technology had on the economics and practical day-to-day running of cinemas in the UK during this period. These detailed records and Sibanda’s skill in analysing the statistics help create an extraordinarily rich and detailed account of the fortunes of this particular cinema. Sound, he suggests, may not have been the most important shift of the period in terms of its effect on the cinema’s finances – other burdens, like those of the government-imposed Entertainments Tax are likely to have had just as great effect on the finances of cinemas in the period. Henry K. Miller’s article continues the shift in emphasis away from individual films and towards the culture of film exhibition and reception. His account of Iris Barry’s film criticism for the Daily Mail between 1925-1930 is part of his call for a wider reappraisal of the culture of ‘serious’ film criticism in the period. Accounts up to now, he suggests have been too focussed on the role of elite institutions such as The Film Society as the key tastemakers within British film culture. Barry is of course a well-known figure – the author of Let’s Go to the Pictures (1926) and later the founder and long-time curator of the film section of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Nevertheless, the extent of her film journalism in the popular newspapers, particularly of her regular Daily Mail column, has been both literally underestimated (she wrote many more articles than previously thought), and the extent of its influence on serious film culture underappreciated. Miller offers a fascinating and inspiring account of Barry’s column and of her time as a London film journalist.
Finally, Tony Fletcher provides the ‘archive report’ in this issue. Tony has already been mentioned by Bryony above. He is kind of a symbol of the British Silent Film Festival and represents everything that is good about it. Tirelessly enthusiastic and generous with his time and his knowledge, completely curious and focussed on details and pleasures of British cinema in this period, Tony has probably seen more pre-1930 British films than anybody else. Here he offers a detailed assessment and contents list for the Norden Collection which is currently held at the Cinema Museum in London. Norden was the brand name for Mitchell and Kenyon films. Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon are primarily famous today for the extraordinary number of their actuality films which survive in the collection of the BFI Archive, and which have been extensively researched and discussed by Vanessa Toulmin. The Norden Collection consists of a variety of film types, although the sorts of actualities that Mitchel and Kenyon are now known for are less prevalent in this material, which consists primarily of dramas and comedies made within the first ten years of the Twentieth Century. Tony provides a detailed list, offering a short summary of each film.
This edition of Early Popular Visual Culture has had a protracted gestation. The call for papers was in 2019. By early 2020 the first drafts of all of the articles had been received and were in the process of being edited by me. When the pandemic hit, I put aside this work intending to take it up again when the pressures of converting to online teaching and living under lockdown had eased both for me and for the various contributors and peer reviewers. Just as that seemed possible, my living companion of 15 years was diagnosed with a terminal illness and I found myself in a new role as his carer. Mark died in November 2022 and it has taken me a long time to feel able to take up this work again. I am immensely grateful to all of the contributors for their patience and their kind words throughout this period, but I also owe them an apology for the length of time it has taken for them to see their brilliant words in print. My thanks too go to Becca Harrison for her support as journal editor throughout this period, as well as for her considerable editorial work on many of the essays. Thanks also to Andrew Shail who received the original proposal sympathetically, and to Nadi Tofighian who has guided this delinquent issue through its final stages with gentle and kind encouragement. During the period of preparation of this issue from 2019, several of our inspirational regular contributors to the festival and symposium have sadly died, and I’d like to dedicate the present volume to these absent friends: Richard Brown, David Mayer and Stephen Herbert.