Reprieve for Cinema Museum

The Cinema Museum has won a temporary reprieve according to an article in Time Out this week.  It was due to close at the end of this month after the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, the owners of the building, had decided to sell out.  However, the Trust has agreed to allow the museum to remain for another two months before selling it at the end of May.  The news isn’t up on the Cinema Museum website yet but well worth visiting to experience the guided tour.

The Movieum

On 22nd February a new museum, the Movieum, opened at County Hall in London. It claims to take visitors behind the scenes of the British film industry through its use of moving image artefacts to chart the production process. The Movieum of London website describes itself in these terms

‘The Movieum is a movie museum that goes behind-the-scenes of the British film industry, showcasing the great UK talent that has produced some of the world’s most famous movies, whilst at the same time displaying the wonderful creative process that they are part of. From the history of Pinewood and Elstree Studios, through to the individual departments that come together to create a film, including Special Effects, Animatronics, Make Up, Wardrobe and much more, there is something for everyone in this entertaining and educational experience. Featuring real sets, props and movie equipment, unseen behind-the-scenes footage, and a walk through the film making process.’

It has already been reviewed favourably The Times whilst The Telegraph emphasises the passion behind the collection, claiming that those looking for a comprehensive, well curated exhibition will be disappointed. I haven’t managed to get down there yet, is it all it claims to be??

Moving Image Archiving and the Academy

Following on from MeCCSA’s Future of Screen Heritage symposium held in September 2007 at Roehampton, this one day conference (supported by the BUFVC) on Saturday 15 March 2008, University of Leeds seeks to ‘reassesses aspects of the institutional and intellectual links which exist between our film archives and our universities, and explores how they might develop and strengthen.’ The following speakers and presentations will not only raise issues ranging from digitised to content to copyright, and challenges they bring, but also provoke discussion and debate.

Confirmed keynote speakers are:
Charles Barr (Washington University in St. Louis)
Nicholas Pronay (University of Leeds)

Confirmed presentations from:
Claude Mussou (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, Paris)
Johan Oomen (Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, Hilversum)
Patrick Russell (BFI, London)
Justin Smith (University of Portsmouth)
Richard Taylor (East Anglian Film Archive, Norwich)
Peter Todd (BFI, London)

Delegate fees are £30 concessionary rate; £40 standard rate; £50 for
registrations after March 7th. Fees include lunch and refreshments. To register your interest in attending, and for other information phone or send an email to:

Sarah Ventress
Research Officer
Institute of Communications Studies

Email: S.A.Ventress@leeds.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (113) 343 5805

Full registration forms and payment details to be made available shortly, via the Institute of Communications Studies and Louis Le Prince websites.

Organised by the Louis Le Prince Centre for Cinema, Photography and
Television, Institute of Communication Studies, University of Leeds.

Supported by the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association, Practice Section (MeCCSA Practice); and by the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC).

Magic Lantern Slides At Anti-Slavery International

The survey has uncovered small collections that often dip below the radar because they are held by organisations other than museums and archives and Anti-Slavery International is a good example of one of these. Founded in 1839, it is one of the world’s oldest international human rights organisations and has a significant collection of magic lantern slides dating from the early twentieth century. These were used by the Congo Reform Association in their campaign to raise awareness about the abuses taking place in the Belgian Congo, revealing valuable context as to how this aspect of our screen heritage was utilised to inform and persuade as well as entertain.

“Two youths from the Equator District. the hands of Mola, seated, have been destroyed by gangrene after being tied too tightly by soldiers. The right hand of Yoka standing was cut off by soldiers wanting to claim him as killed.” Circa 1904 Alice Harris / Anti-Slavery International.

Muybridge Collection at Kingston Museum

Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), the pioneering photographer who changed the history of the moving image, was born and grew up in Kingston upon Thames. He moved to the United States in 1852 where he developed his interest in analytical motion photography, eventually producing in the 1880s an exhaustive series of photographs, Animal Locomotion. The most famous of these were his galloping horse pictures and later experimented in synthesising motion from photography to prove the authenticity of them.

Zoopraxiscope courtesy of Kingston Museum (click on thumbnail to obtain a larger image)

He did this using the Zoopraxiscope, a device which projected a series of images from glass discs, basically a projecting version of the old Phenakisticsope or ’spinning picture disk’. In the 1890s he returned to Kingston and on his death in 1904 left his equipment and prints to Kingston Museum. The museum displays the original Zoopraxiscope moving image projector, Muybridge’s biunial lantern with which he delivered his famous lecture tours on the ‘Attitudes of Animals in Motion’, a rare panorama of San Francisco (187 and assorted packing crates and ephemera. The reserve collection (viewable by appointment) includes Muybridge’s lantern slides, zoopraxiscope discs, prints and a newspaper cutting book which Muybridge kept of his career and achievements.

Winner of Apple iTouch

Steve Chibnall, Professor of British Cinema at De Montfort University, is the winner of the Apple iTouch. In an informal ceremony Murray Weston, Chief Executive of the British Universities Film & Video Council, pulled the lucky slip of paper out of a large paper clip container earlier today.

The Chibnall British Cinema Collection is a private archive of around 10,000 artefacts, primarily consisting of posters, lobby cards, stills, scripts and especially press books (c. 2000), forms the principal resource of the communal archive of the British Cinema and Television Research Goup which functions within De Montfort University’s Faculty of Humanities. Particular elements of interest within it are a few 1930s set designs by Alfred Junge for BIP (original photographs for set construction) and material owned by the late historians Denis Gifford and John Huntley. Research access to the collection is by appointment only.

Odeon Cinemas 1935-39

Odeon Cinema, Parsons Hill, Woolwich, London, October 1937. Reference no: BB87/03661. Copyright English Heritage. NMR.

The National Monuments Record, the public archive of English Heritage, holds a wide range of collections covering the built and archaeological landscape from the prehistoric period to the cold war. Photographs form the largest part of our holdings and a number of these feature cinemas. The most important group is a collection of 1200 photographs taken by John Maltby of Odeon cinemas in England between 1935 and 1939. Together they form a remarkable visual record of the interior and exterior design of this chain of cinemas, which formed such a part of the everyday experience of people from that time. All of these images can be viewed via the Viewfinder database.

Peter Handford

One of the most innovative exponents of sound location shooting, Peter Handford, died last month at the age of 88. His work on British New Wave films such as Room at the Top and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning established him as a master of his craft which was eventually recognised in semi-retirement with an Academy Award in 1985 for his work on Out of Africa. Tony Sloman has written far more fully about his life and career in today’s Independent which also mentions his numerous sound recordings of steam trains. This collection now resides in the National Railway Museum in York.

Artefacts and Art

An area that is often pushed to the periphery in discussions of moving image artefacts is that of art works and installations. The irony here is that this material is usually at the cutting edge in the production and presentation of screen related media and perhaps should be more at the forefront of our minds. The National Portrait Gallery possesses a number of examples of which this portrait of Susan Greenfield is one.

NPG 6526 Susan Adele Greenfield, Baroness Greenfield
by Tom Phillips courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London

This portrait is composed of computer-processed drawings and video and uses moving image to re-interpret portraiture for the twenty-first century. Other ‘time-based’ portraits in the collection include Sam Taylor-Wood’s digital film of David Beckham. Other ‘objects’ relating to these works, such as documentation are also retained by the Gallery as part of the collection.

Screen Heritage survey extended - win an Apple iTouch

The deadline for the Screen Heritage Network’s survey of moving image and screen-related artefacts in UK collections has been extended by one week to Friday 7 December 2007. The survey is open to any UK collection with artefacts relating to the moving image and screen-related media which may be accessible to the public or researchers. All organisations who submit a completed survey will be entered into a draw to win a 16GB Apple iTouch, the revolutionary touch-screen iPod with web browser - the screen heritage of tomorrow.

Organisations that have already submitted a complete survey will be included in the draw. Only one entry per organisation will be accepted. Organisations must be from the UK. Current member organisations of the Screen Heritage Network are not eligible.