Colour footage of London in the 1920s allows us to be
tourists in our own past
The full-colour silent era footage that caused so much
excitement online recently is almost like science-fiction
London looks itself and other in this footage. For a
21st-century viewer it is like watching a science-fiction film in which almost
everything is the same until you notice little differences that betray a
completely alien quality. The past is another country, but in Claude
Friese-Greene's film of the capital's streets and sights it is a place
disguised as our own.
This is because this 1926 footage, which is currently a
Twitter talking point, was shot in colour. Friese-Greene and his father William
pioneered their own method of shooting in colour, back during the silent era:
it is a byway of cinema history, an experiment that never caught on. In fact,
it is part of a lost history of rival technologies in which Britain was an
early leader – the Friese-Greenes fought a legal battle in the House of Lords
with the rival Kinemacolor method before both were eclipsed by the American
success story of Technicolor.
So there's this haunting little film, in which Claude
Friese-Greene demonstrates his colour method by revealing the green embankment,
the brown Thames, the dark stones of the Tower, the blue of a policeman's
uniform as he directs traffic.
It's easy to see why this clip from Friese-Greene's
documentary The Open Road has become an online hit. It mirrors our nostalgia
perfectly, in this age of revitalised royalism and Ukip-ish invocations of
England's lost green and pleasant land. Here is an uncanny full-colour glimpse
of a time when even London looked innocent.
The policeman directing traffic is a case in point. There is
plenty of traffic on the roads – carts and drays as well as motor vehicles –
but it all stops timidly when a London Bobby raises his hand. People cross the
road under his protective eye, then he lets the traffic move forward.
On the pavements, people walk by in small quiet groups. Even
crowds filmed at Petticoat Lane market are properly dressed, in brown suits and
hats, and mill with what can only be called gentleness.
Another friendly policeman appears patrolling the Embankment
in a scene that is captioned as a "romantic" view of London. Beyond
him the Houses of Parliament glow in sunlight, in a vision of an orderly,
humble, relaxed Britain.
Of course it is an illusion. The film was made to show in
European cinemas and gives a tourist view of the great city. In reality, there
were tanks on the streets of the capital during the 1926 General Strike.
But we are all tourists in our past, a place that gets
sweeter with distance. Eerily silent as it may be, this placid vision of London
tickles fantasies of a kinder, more secure age. It is a national idyll in
living colour.
The full-colour silent era footage that caused so much
excitement online recently is almost like science-fiction
London looks itself and other in this footage. For a
21st-century viewer it is like watching a science-fiction film in which almost
everything is the same until you notice little differences that betray a
completely alien quality. The past is another country, but in Claude
Friese-Greene's film of the capital's streets and sights it is a place
disguised as our own.
This is because this 1926 footage, which is currently a
Twitter talking point, was shot in colour. Friese-Greene and his father William
pioneered their own method of shooting in colour, back during the silent era:
it is a byway of cinema history, an experiment that never caught on. In fact,
it is part of a lost history of rival technologies in which Britain was an
early leader – the Friese-Greenes fought a legal battle in the House of Lords
with the rival Kinemacolor method before both were eclipsed by the American
success story of Technicolor.
So there's this haunting little film, in which Claude
Friese-Greene demonstrates his colour method by revealing the green embankment,
the brown Thames, the dark stones of the Tower, the blue of a policeman's
uniform as he directs traffic.
It's easy to see why this clip from Friese-Greene's
documentary The Open Road has become an online hit. It mirrors our nostalgia
perfectly, in this age of revitalised royalism and Ukip-ish invocations of
England's lost green and pleasant land. Here is an uncanny full-colour glimpse
of a time when even London looked innocent.
The policeman directing traffic is a case in point. There is
plenty of traffic on the roads – carts and drays as well as motor vehicles –
but it all stops timidly when a London Bobby raises his hand. People cross the
road under his protective eye, then he lets the traffic move forward.
On the pavements, people walk by in small quiet groups. Even
crowds filmed at Petticoat Lane market are properly dressed, in brown suits and
hats, and mill with what can only be called gentleness.
Another friendly policeman appears patrolling the Embankment
in a scene that is captioned as a "romantic" view of London. Beyond
him the Houses of Parliament glow in sunlight, in a vision of an orderly,
humble, relaxed Britain.
Of course it is an illusion. The film was made to show in
European cinemas and gives a tourist view of the great city. In reality, there
were tanks on the streets of the capital during the 1926 General Strike.
But we are all tourists in our past, a place that gets
sweeter with distance. Eerily silent as it may be, this placid vision of London
tickles fantasies of a kinder, more secure age. It is a national idyll in
living colour.
When Britain was a rose-tinted spectacle
A nostalgic voyage round the Twenties is about to grace TV screens following the loving restoration of the first-ever colour documentary. Simon Garfield saunters down memory lane
The Observer, Sunday 9 April 2006 / http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/apr/09/television.features
Frank Malcolm is in his late eighties and his memory is holding up well. He sits in the kitchen of his Edinburgh flat in the shadow of Murrayfield rugby ground, remembering the names of the leopards, elephants and chimps in the nearby zoo. His father was head keeper and Frank lived there as a boy, occasionally sharing his playpen with bear cubs.
It is early November 2005 and Malcolm has company. A BBC crew has brought trunks of gear and presenter Dan Cruickshank to ask him stories about the animals and their keepers. He is obliging and funny, even as the shoot drags on and breaks for inconsistent light and ambulance sirens. Cruickshank shows him some unusual colour film from the mid-1920s on a battery-operated portable monitor and the silent clips contain some old friends.
'That's Topsy,' Malcolm says. 'A European bear. We rescued her and brought her up on the bottle ... she used to plant a sloppy kiss on your cheek. She eventually had a mate, but she wouldn't accept it.'
An elephant appears on the little screen, and the sequence has a green and rosy glow to it, a hand-tinted quality resembling a vintage picture postcard.
'Oh, Sundra,' Malcolm says. 'She used to come and investigate my pockets ... '
'Oh look, the polar bear,' Cruickshank announces a while later. 'That's Starboard,' the head keeper's son remembers. 'He was the best polar bear we had.'
Then the sun bursts through the kitchen window and Emma Hindley, the BBC series producer, decides on a brief interval. 'Frank, your stories are fantastic,' she says. 'I want you to go over a couple of things. I'd like you to go over the leopard story, because he effectively stopped your dad working ... '
'Well he didn't,' Malcolm observes.
'Don't tell me now,' Hindley continues. 'Save it for when you're filming! And the other thing is the reptile house, because it opened in 1925, so it was new. And the other thing, when you were talking about Topsy, did you feel Topsy was like a sister?'
'Yeah. I told Dan about the sloppy kisses.'
'So let's finish Starboard, do Topsy, and then do the leopard story again.'
A pause; the sun disappears; the camera rolls. Dan Cruickshank says: 'Ah, this looks like Starboard ... '
Making films today is a little different from the mid-1920s, when Claude Friese-Greene set off on a 1,500-mile journey to film Edinburgh Zoo and Frank Malcolm's furry friends. Malcolm does not remember Friese-Greene arriving in his soft-top Vauxhall with his large camera; he may have been at school. A man filming moving images would have been a rare enough sight and someone making films in colour unheard of.
Like his father William, Claude Friese-Greene was a pioneer. His camera and film stock established a new way of tricking the eye and his enterprise is now the subject of three entrancing BBC documentaries that illuminate Britain at a time of sudden transformation. We discover Malcolm's animals in Edinburgh, but before then, we travel through St Ives, Plymouth, Weston-super-Mare, Cirencester, Carlisle and Blackpool - the entire Land's End to John O'Groats extravaganza long before it became popular as a charity trek - and we glimpse a place of harmony and beauty, a travelogue from the interwar years of great social value and some mystery.
Not that this was the film-maker's sole intention. Friese-Greene had developed his father's novel mechanical colour process with an eye on fame and fortune, but in the early 1920s, he encountered a serious problem. The technique involved not only a particular camera but a special projector and, to encourage cinema owners in Europe and the United States to invest in his vision, he needed a demonstration film.
The result was The Open Road, 26 reels shot between 1924 and 1926 on a car journey through a Britain infused with optimism and sunshine, a place where the First World War has been forgotten and a second one will never happen. Much of it looks like a long bank holiday; even the work scenes are studies in contentment. It is a picture devoid of cynicism and one where poverty is never regarded as hardship. By default, it is the first comprehensive colour tourism film: come to Britain, where everyone smiles as you go by and where many things are unnaturally turquoise and red.
The Open Road was donated to the British Film Institute National Film and Television Archive by Friese-Greene's son in the 1950s and the job of restoration and explanation has taken several decades. Snippets have been shown here and there, but until now it has been a curiosity to ensnare and confound film historians. The literature expands upon 'colour-sensitive panchromatic negative film that was shot through a red filter on every other frame ... alternate frames were exposed to the red component and then all the light from a scene. When this negative film was processed and printed, the alternate frames were tinted orange-red and blue-green so that the orange-red exposed frame was projected in orange-red light and the alternate frame in blue-green light'.
At a particular speed, the alternating frames suggested a naturalistic colour and our own temptation to see it as quaint should not detract from the contemporary view of it as 'Britain's greatest technical film triumph' (Daily Express).
When Cruickshank first saw a brief showreel of The Open Road three years ago, he was 'slightly underwhelmed' by the images and unimpressed by the 'rather disturbing, humourless' captions that Friese-Greene had used to accompany them - the Welsh miners, for instance, who were in good need of a bar of soap.
'Even when I saw the whole film, which lasts three hours, it seemed rather clunky and I wasn't that excited. I couldn't fully see the potential for making something really interesting with it.'
But he came on board once a good idea emerged: he would recreate Friese-Greene's journey in a few months, travelling in a similar car ('beastly hard work - horrible') and talk to people who recognised the locations and people in the films; twice he would meet people who recognised themselves.
Cruickshank had recently finished presenting The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon, the hugely successful series based on the 800 rolls of nitrate film discovered a few years ago in two sealed barrels in the basement of a shop in Blackburn. The films were 20 years older than those of Friese-Greene and featured crowds at factory gates, football matches and social celebrations. They stunned the viewer with their detail and joie de vivre. That was also a BFI/BBC collaboration and its international acclaim created delays on the Friese-Greene project; a victim of its own success, the BBC now had to outbid several rivals for the second archive.
'Fortunately, we managed to get almost exactly the same team together,' Emma Hindley says a few weeks after her meeting with Frank Malcolm in Edinburgh. It is mid-December and Hindley is now in an editing suite in Oxford Street, examining her footage of a notable discovery: 90-year-old Grace, who was one of several unnamed children filmed by Friese-Greene in an unidentified village on his way to Blackpool. A local historian recognised her and her siblings and she was traced to Devon.
'How many were you?' Dan Cruickshank asks her. 'Seven children ... Dad died just before I was born. And that's my brother Dick, he was my favourite of the lot, he was a good lad to Mother.' She tells of clogs, jam butties and pets. It's a compelling story, a true demonstration of the power of film and memory. 'Ain't I a little beauty?' Grace asks at the end, examining herself 80 years before.
When I talked to her last week, Hindley was justly proud of her films, pleased with the atmosphere they create and their lack of cloyingness. She was in Tibet to interview the Dalai Lama for a programme tentatively called The Lost World of Tibet - a veritable franchise. 'We've put Claude back on the map,' she said. Perhaps
his relatives will get royalties, for Friese-Greene's original films never made his fortune. The United States had other schemes for colour and their inventors had studio backing and marketing clout.
But 80 years later, the Americans are finally interested. Last week, Jan Faull, archival footage sales manager at the BFI, was at the TV festival in Cannes with her Friese-Greene DVDs. 'It's all very exciting,' she said on her mobile from France. 'People just seem to fall in love with it.'
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