New site for the Cinema Museum

The Cinema Museum in Lambeth has a new website, which is rich in images of its collections of cinema memorabilia, and the buildings in which these are housed. However, the Museum is having to look for a new home. As this article in The Observer reports, the NHS Trust which owns the building (a former workhouse, which once had Charlie Chaplin’s mother as an inmate) is selling it, and the Museum needs to find a new home by March 2008. Photographs of possible new homes are included on the website.

There’s a marvellous video on the site, and on YouTube, made in 2000, in which Museum founder Ronald Grant shows us round the collections.

Local history treasures

Delving into local history museums can unearth some unexpected troves of moving image artefacts. Gunnersbury Park Museum in Hounslow, West London may not immediately spring to mind when researching film and television but a clue can be found in the London boroughs it serves, Hounslow and Ealing. Over the years the museum has built up a significant collection of material relating to Ealing Studios, primarily of scripts, posters, campaign books and includes oral history interviews with the editor and producer Sid Cole, his daughter and the assistant director, Tom Pevsner. A couple of models are of special interest in this context, a post production model of the Titfield Thunderbolt and one of the set of Passport to Pimlico. Television researchers can even find the head of the Robot of Death from Dr Who alongside headdresses from Elizabeth R. All research access is by appointment between 9 and 5, weekdays only.

What is screen heritage?

16mm projector spool (BUFVC)

What do we mean by screen heritage? The term has become a popular one of late, with its adoption for the UK Screen Heritage strategy document, which focusses on the film and television archive collections of the UK. However, our definition of screen heritage is broader, and encompasses not only the films and programmes, but the equipment used to produce them, the venues where they were shown, the documentation that supports them, and artefacts associated with their production, distribution and consumption.

The Screen Heritage Network has produced a definition of screen heritage (which you can find on the About section of this site). It states:

Screen heritage begins with the magic lantern in the 17th century and continues through to this day with our online culture. It encompasses:

• the history of the moving image as created on film, video and digital media
• the history of those working in the screen industries, whose creativity and skills are responsible for screen heritage
• business and individual records associated with screen history
• allied publications and ephemera
• related artefacts and visual material, such as costumes, sets, photographs, graphics and designs
• audio material, such as interviews and soundtracks
• screen technology
• heritage sites and their histories, such as cinemas, TV and film studios, and locations
• reception of the moving image
• histories and cultures represented by the moving image: who are we are, where we live, our place in the past

It also describes the work of screen heritage organisations:

• archiving: preservation, documentation and access initiatives
• curation: the work of museums, archives and cinemas
• education: teaching, learning, research and resource development
• production and publication: the use of this heritage in film, television, publishing and digital media
• exhibition: cinemas, festivals, television, museum exhibitions and digital media

So our survey of moving image and screen-related objects represents only a part of what we are defining as screen heritage. Eventually the data we uncover through our survey will be incoporated within the BUFVC’s Researcher’s Guide Online database, a directory of film and television collections in the UK. The enhanced resource will therefore provide us all with a guide that looks across a greater range of screen heritage collections - films, programmes, artefacts and documents - from which we will all have that much clearer picture of what it is that we hold in the UK, where the expertise resides, and where the gaps lie.

Film in the lives of others

For most of us, our own moving image artefacts, be it televisions or cameras and all the accompanying paraphernalia, are simply a part of our daily existence, occupying a peripheral area of our lives. It is this almost incidental dimension of screen-related objects that is explored by Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum in its presentation of the social history of the people of the North East of England. Here projectors, cine cameras, stereoscopes and zoetropes are viewed within a much wider social context. One which gives weight to documents such as trade catalogues for example. This collection, which dates from the 1820s, includes early twentieth century items for photographic and optical equipment, ‘Catalogue of Science Lanterns, Magic Lanterns, Dissolving-View Apparatus and Lantern Slides’ (1921) right through to cine film processing leaflets from the 1960s. People’s recollections of working in cinemas, as well as visiting them, are also recorded in some 40 interviews, a significant element of the museum’s oral history collection which was started in 1970.

A cinema in storage

Many cinemas faced closure and demolition in the 1960s and 1970s, among them the Broadway cinema in Bristol, which closed its doors in 1972. As we’ve already seen in Cinemas in Museums, some cinemas have been painstakingly re-located within museums but generally buildings are not the easiest objects to move. The artefacts within them present less of a problem and together can give a real sense of its individuality. The Bristol Museums Galleries & Archives have done just this with the elements of the Broadway, which dates back to 1933. Although currently in reserve storage, the projectors, sound equipment and cinema fittings, including ticket machines, screens, signage and uniform, can be viewed by appointment, along with the architectural drawings which also form part of the collection.

The magical world of the magic lantern

Hand-coloured photographic song slide, c.1905, Stephen Herbert Collection

Screen heritage, for us, means more than just the cinema or television. As the definition of screen heritage on this site puts it:

Screen heritage begins with the magic lantern in the 17th century and continues through to this day with our online culture.

So we are interested in collecting information on all kinds of the popular and projected image, and in doing so hope to demonstrate how cinema and television are part of a larger historical continuum.

Particularly important in this quest is the magic lantern. Image projection by means of the magic lantern or optical lantern (known in the USA as the stereopticon) has its roots in the seventeenth century, and in the Victorian era the art rose to great heights, with its practitioners using single, double (biunial) or even triple-lens (triunial) lanterns to achieve extraordinarily elaborate effects, while the slide themselves were often beautifully coloured. Magic lantern shows covered travel, drama, comedy, popular song, Bible stories, scientific displays and many other themes, and the slides as well as the lanterns themselves can be found in many museums in the UK. No one knows the extent of such collections, and we hope as part of our survey to begin to map this rich part of our screen heritage, whose modes of presentation had such a great influence upon the early cinema.

Lantern shows continued into the twentieth-century, and have been succeeded by other modes of slide presentation, from the slide viewers which used to show family snaps to (arguably) PowerPoint and the modern data projector.

If your institution has magic lantern slides or equipment, or even later kinds of slide presentation, we’d love you to fill out the survey. If you want to find out more about the magic lantern, the Magic Lantern Society has an informative web site, including a blog with news of upcoming lantern shows and other events in the UK.

The material issue?

What do toys, cameras, board games, projectors and televisions have in common? Well, apart from our Survey, they are all made of plastic and comprise an important element of the collection held at the Museum of Design in Plastics (MoDIP) within the Arts Institute at Bournemouth. Amateur cine cameras, television receivers and projectors are some of the items drawn from over 8,500 examples of contemporary design from this century and the last. Perhaps the most intriguing artefacts held are the toys associated with film and television. These include a number of Star Wars models and figurines, together with TV show board games and toys relating to children’s television. Are there any collections out there that specialise in these types of toys?

Hove Museum and Art Gallery

Hove Museum and Art Gallery has an extensive collection of artefacts relating to early film. These include a Magic Lantern collection of around 7,000 magic lantern slides, magic lanterns and toy magic lanterns, an Optical Toy collection and the Barnes collection of moving-image apparatus and ephemera pertaining to the Brighton School of pioneering film-makers. This encompasses early cine cameras made by Alfred Darling, George Albert Smith and James Williamson, including Darling’s ‘Special Effects’ 35mm cine camera of 1899 and Smith’s Kinemacolor cine camera of 1910. The Museum’s interactive Film Gallery explores the role of Hove in the birth of cinema and visitors can follow the invention of film through displays of working optical toys, magic lanterns and cameras.

BBC schools broadcast pamphlets

Related documentation, such as scripts, personal papers, technical manuals and catalogues, are also included in the survey because of the invaluable context they can supply. The Institute of Education at the University of London has a collection of pamphlets (1926-1979) produced by the BBC, originally to accompany schools radio broadcasts from September 1926. When television series for schools started in the summer of 1958, booklets were also produced. The collection was deposited by the BBC on permanent loan with the Institute in 1990.

Projected Picture Trust

The Projected Picture Trust cares for cinema projectors and other motion picture equipment. It aims to locate, rennovate, preserve and where possible exhibit motion picture equipment. It is located at the National Museum of Cinema Technology, Bletchley Park. The PPT was founded in 1978 at a time when many cinemas were closing down or being split into multi-screens, and a whole heritage of technology was in danger of being lost. It was registered as a charity in 1983. It now holds over 3,000 pieces of equipment, a number of which are loaned out on a semi-permanent basis to various organisations to enable the general public to see them and to save on storage space.