Vic-Tok… The Story of Victorian Film, BFI talk with Bryony Dixon

 

 

We can only strive to realize, in some dim measure, the fascination which those pictured ribbons of celluloid will exercise upon the eyes and minds of future Londoners – let us say, at some remote epoch, when the throne of Great Britain will be occupied by a monarch of whom we can form no conception, under social conditions which may differ widely from those existing at the present day.

 

Canadian scientist, Joseph Miller Barr, 1897 concerning film of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee*

 

Well Joseph, here we were 127 years later, for a spectacular show and tell from BFI archivist Bryony Dixon who has just published a book on Victorian cinema which starts in 1896 and ends in 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death. It’s a remarkable period and one which in the presence of such expertise, suddenly bristles with modernity and commercial opportunity. The new media of the time was not so unlike out own and Bryony made a convincing case for parallels between Tik-Tok – short films, sometime silent, often with music – with the 60-second high-impact and content rich output of ground-breaking Victorians.

 

Everything was fresh and competition was high with William KL Dickson, making great PR out of filming the 1900 Grand National in Aintree, riding a fast horse-drawn cab to Lime Street, catching the express to London Euston, developing the film on route and screening it at the Palace Theatre at 11.10pm in the evening. How fast do you want your sports news? This must have seemed so exciting and ground-breaking at the time, and it was: projected media in the age of steam speed.

 

Dickson, Scottish by reputation but Liverpudlian by birth had worked with Thomas Edison in America and, frustrated by the great copyright-hoarders focus on the nickelodeon, broke free of his contract to escape to the projecting future as it was opening up in Europe. He had an eye for news and wanted to make his own way even differentiating his film stock from that of his ever litigious former employer.

 

A detail from Launch of the Worthing Lifeboat (1898), it looks stunning on a proper screen

Clearly, the invention and appetite for innovation of the late Victorian age was so intense, we’ve spent the last 120 years just trying to catch up which is exactly why Bryony Dixon’s book, The Story of Victorian Film is so vital especially after her work leading the restoration of hundreds of films from their original materials over recent years. Bryony decided that transfers to video and other early digital media would not be good enough and showed a number of examples, in particular Dickson’s Launch of the Worthing Lifeboat (1898), a staged rescue for the camera of which showed the huge difference in depth of field, clarity and content between the decades old copies and the restoration from the negative: A vista which even in freezeframe simply invited you back to 1897, as silent waves crashes on pebbled shore and the locals watched as lifeboatmen rescued a volunteer even as he had to be dragged back into frame.

 

These restored films had formed the basis of The Great Victorian Picture Show at the BFI IMAX during LFF in 2019 and almost everything is now available to view on the BFI Player: our national heritage from these white-hot early years, a step into immersive Victorian cinema that is still so fresh and so familiar.

 

The book is very much the companion and guide to these films and is designed, as Bryony stressed, not only as an accessible and entertaining read in itself but also as a guide to resources now available and which require further academic study. There were questions even from the samples shown in tonight’s talk and, as with archaeologists who leave at least 10% of each dig for their successors, so the BFI’s whole project has raised more questions than answers.

 

Dixon split the films thematically in lose groups that show the breadth of Victorian film and she covered about half of those featured in the book with examples and explanations tonight:

 

Children Dancing to a Barrel Organ (1898)

Actualities and News including Dickson's Grand National Mar 24th, 1900. Bryony’s scouring of the archives and contemporary catalogues makes for fascinating reading with the majority of films being news-based at this time. Does the public’s base fascination drive visual technology? This was certainly the case with Wilkinson’s films of the Boer War which even though they mostly lacked the action he sought, showed those at home the conditions in which their friends and relatives were fighting and dying.

 

Street Life Bryony screened Children Dancing to a Barrel Organ (1898), a marvellous film shot near Kings Cross – an area I walked through on to the BFI, these locations feel so familiar in style as much as atmosphere. It’s not known if these young performers were professional but as Bryony pointed out, that’s part of the investigation that needs to follow the restoration.

 

There was time for Panoramas and Phantom Rides – again the fascination with place and the window on humanity only distanced by time and fashion – as well as Trick Films, humanity of all ages just as fascinated by seeming impossibility as actuality; the MCU began here with spring-heeled Jacks from across Europe. Looking beyond, we also saw the astonishing film of a solar eclipse from 28 May, 1900 by the magician, Nevil Maskelyne, while on an expedition by The British Astronomical Association to North Carolina. He’d first worked the trick in India in 1898 but the film was stolen on the way home… the battle between science and greed.

 

I'll see you on the dark side of the Moon...

In the book are also sections on: Artistic/Aesthetic, Natural History and Science, Variety acts and novelties, Comic sketches and facials, Erotic films – although the British were somewhat less active than the French in this area, and probably remained so. Travel and industry includes a detailed look at Feeding the Pigeons in St Mark's Square, Venice (1898) all that has changed is the dress, the pigeons still the same insistent grey.

 

Actualities and Topicals include The Launch of HMS Albion (1898), a breach launch into the Thames which created a backwash that led to the drowning of 34 people, filmed by both E. P. Prestwich and Robert W. Paul, the release of their films sparked one of the first debates on the public right to view such a loss of life. You don’t have to try very hard to find much worse on Twitter especially.

 

Drama and Adaptation

 

Bryony showed James Williamson’s five-minute long Fire! (1901) which, in the context of what we had seen before and what we generally understood of the narrative capabilities of the time, is a quite astonishing film, shifting from the scene of a fire, to a fire station and then a magnificent shot of horse-drawn fire engines and firemen on their way to the fire and then not just outside but inside the property rescuing a sleeping man. Now this is obviously well before Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) and more narratively complex than Alice Guy-Blaché’s earlier efforts involving more than one scene but, all one should really do is marvel at technique at this stage as the styles we now take for granted were rapid-prototyped by the engineers, chemists and secretary-visionaries!

 

The firemen on their way...

Ultimately, what’s interesting is how quickly fashions and the technology changed. Local films, with Mitchell and Kenyon being the experts, were largely limited in their appeal to 1900-02 after which the novelty had worn off. In the case of drama, the films became longer with earlier shorts like Scrooge being joined together to form longer narratives. There were experiments with sound and colour and throughout the 1900s technology drove the new medium forward.

 

Bryony quoted Canadian scientist, Joseph Miller Barr writing in 1897* and who seemed to have guessed the future very accurately. He saw the development of sound, colour and 3D as well as the development of longer features; whoever guessed in 1993 that we’d end up with 60-second videos dominating the screen time of the younger generations must have found the same crystal ball… what goes up must come down and diversity and experimentation is the commercial norm.

 

To discover more I can’t recommend this book highly enough: through a glass brightly!

 

You can order The Story of Victorian Film direct from the BFI shop online or in person whilst you can view the 100s of Victorian restorations on the BFI Player: the search for meaning and connection is personal and it continues.