The shock of the old… BFI Film on Film Festival, 8th – 11th June 2023

I must have been 14, fibbing about my age and sneaking with my mates into the Astra Cinema in Maghull, opened in 1930 as the Albany and where The Beatles had played back in 1962, to watch Jaws not once but twice as we hid in our seats for the second showing. Projected, as everything else at the time, on 35mm, the film was a vividly shocking experience with moments of horror I can still remember experiencing for the first time… I even dreamt about the film that night after.

Is it just age that changes our experience of cinema or is there something in the actual technology? I was taken immediately back to the Astra by the snippet shown at the launch of the BFI Film on Film Festival in the NFT 1 today, the same heat hazed expression of fear on Roy Scheider’s face as he scans the water line after the beach has been re-opened; imperfect, not crystal clear but sun-drenched, his anxiety and obscured vision is perfectly captured by the original materials: this is new light shone through chemicals originally affected by the actual light of the scene, not a perfected copy buried under microns of digital artifice. It’s not just the Gen-X and Boomers that treasure the analogue experiences but a whole new age of youngsters fascinated by the distinctiveness of technology abandoned and almost extinct. It’s like vinyl, an analogue experience with media that shows its age and is all the better for it.

We were shown a new short film made by Mark Jenkin, A Dog Called Discord (2022), which explained his fascination with film and not just the creation of narrative but also the process of development and projection, the entire mechanics. He is often handed old Super 8 and home movie footage and used one of these reels – best before 1960 – as an example of the content that can surprise; it’s a bout capturing moments and, restoring memories and feelings, a proper emotional gem that has to be seen to be understood. On celluloid of course.

Everyone in the room had their own connection to the material of film not least Robin Baker, Head Curator of the BFI National Archive who took us through an overview of the new festival’s aims and content. Whilst accepting digital strengths, there are also weaknesses, or at least differences… “A print can feel more… unpredictable. Like us it will change over time, its ‘imperfections’ helping to convey the life it has lived…” There are even films that play with the mutability of celluloid such as Charlie Shackleton’s The Afterlight (2021) which exists as only a single 35mm print which will be getting it’s 50^th spin around on 10^th June in the festival. Then there’s Morgan Fisher’s Screening Room (1968/73) 16mm’s and shot in NFT2 and, under the director’s instruction, only to be screened there and nowhere else.

The BFI is one of only 50-odd cinemas in the UK which is still set up to screen film and it’s not so much the technology as the expertise of projectionists. Then as BFI’s Head of Technical Services, Dominic Simmons, explained, it’s about the only one built specifically to screen the notoriously flammable nitrate film with a projection booth built in the early fifties with steel walls sandwiching asbestos to prevent the spread of fire. The projectors used for nitrate also have built in fire suppression with gas released to extinguish any fire, we will, almost certainly, be perfectly safe.

That said, who wouldn’t be willing to take some level of risk in order to see Rita Hayworth in 35mm in Rouben Mamoulian’s Blood and Sand (1941), Sidney Poitier in Joseph L. Mankiewicz No Way Out (1950) and Benita Hulme and Lesley Howard in Alexander Korda’s Service for Ladies (1932). These films are going to dazzle and take our breath away on 11^th June. Perhaps the greatest impact will come from Joan Crawford and the 35mm nitrate screening of Mildred Pierce (1945) on 8^th… I already have ticket anxiety having, to my knowledge never seen nitrate projected, I’m not that old! 

Joan Crawford: explosive?

On the silent front there will be the most welcome return of Miles Mander’s The First Born (1928) featuring my Grandad Bill’s favourite, Madeleine Carroll in one of this country’s finest films of the period. There will also be Stephen Horne to accompany with his music being so memorably associated with the film’s restoration screenings ten years ago. There are also two comedies directed by Manning Haynes from WW Jacobs’s wonderful short stories: Sam’s Boy (1922) and The Boatswain’s Mate (1924). Both could only have been made in this country and will have accompaniment from Neil Brand, one of the UK’s leading special effects.

Talking of such things, there’ll also be time to turn off, relax and float downstream with 3D spectacles to revisit the early fifties craze: the great outdoors with John Wayne in Hondo (1953), Grace Kelly almost within touching distance in Dial M for Murder (1954) and the blood-curdling dislocation of House of Wax (1953). See this film as it was meant to be seen along with dozens of Telekinema shorts commissioned as part of the Festival of Britain from when the Southbank complex was born.

There’s a hugely diverse offering over the festival’s four days with every possible screen in the former National Film Theatre being used to cram in every last drop of celluloid. Personally, I’ll be looking to catch Jon Pertwee in Doctor Who: Spearhead from Space, a new print of Dorothy Arsener’s Working Girls (1931) and Sight and Image: The Visual Documentary, dialogue-free films with newly commissioned live musical score. There's also the chance to tune in and turn on to Experimenta Mixtape 16mm Happening with live music by The Begotten... until the early hours on 10th June.

The First Born (1928)

For the real hardcore Gothamite, there’s a 70mm all-night treat at the BFI IMAX, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy… the teen who lied about his age to watch Jaws would have had his mind blown by this one.

Whatever the cut of your cape, you’ll find something to love in this feast of around 200,000 feet of film: 39 features, 69 shorts and 8 television works, screening from 38 16mm prints, 58 35mm prints, four 70mm prints and 16 Super 8 prints.

Checkout the full programme online now and prepare for booking which starts in the first week of May.

Experimenta Mixtape 16mm Happening with live music by The Begotten...

There's more than one way to time travel, Jon...