Pen-Ultima Thule – The Edge of the World (1937 cut), Birkbeck College

“Edge of the World was entirely saved for me by the editor (Derek Twist) … I mean, Flaherty with no story – at least I had the semblance of a story – took about six months to cut Man of Aran, and then it wasn’t any good…”

Michael Powell, Powell, Pressburger and Others (1978) BFI

The last few decades have seen a bonanza of different mixes, demos and alternate cuts of the output of the most familiar musicians from The Beatles and The Stones to even JS Bach, Erik Satie and Taylor Swift (not together…). Each new variation fascinates and paints a picture of the artists on route to their eventual well-known statements, the elements of Strawberry Fields Forever are interesting because they sound so different to the magical mix created by George Martin and his “Boys” and they show how decisions were reached in search of the perfected final version.

So it is with film, with a boom in “Limited Editions” featuring different cuts of even the most esoteric of films. Getting to see a different version of a classic film some of us have seen dozens of times is pretty rare though and to see Michael Powell’s first major “personal” cinematic statement in a form not seen since its original release in 1937 is not only rare it’s almost certainly unique and it happened again on screen right here on 8^th July 2025 in Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image Cinema a lifetime after it was last seen in this form.

How there came to be a copy of this Mark I release of the film is a story of its own and owes everything to conversations between passionate cineastes one of whom, Bob Geoghegan, Director of the Archive Film Agency and a man of many parts, knew he had a copy of the film safely stored on 35mm nitrate but not the exact age. SO it was that investigation revealed it to be a print from the year of release and one that was different from that we know in significant ways. He duly created a digital transfer from these materials for projection at this event.

Inspired by the evacuation of the Island of St Kilda a few years before, The Edge of the World has been recently restored by the BFI and I’d last seen this at Bologna in 2023 but this was something else entirely as Christopher Bird explained in his introduction to a room full of the very people you’d usually find in Il Cinema Ritrovato, some who’d come a long way for this rarity. Chris had scrupulously prepared a shot-by-shot comparison video for four key moments from the films, showing us three before revealing the fourth a very important moment from the ending shot which I won’t spoil.

Technically, Michael Powell is a much better filmmaker than Robert J Flaherty...

The video ran the two versions side by side and it was easy to see the gaps in the restored version against the fuller shots on this 1937 version. For whatever reason – and this is where the historians come in and dig deeper than the primary evidence – Powell re-edited the film in the 1940s no doubt when he had more success and clout behind him so that the version we have been watching all of lives is what he wanted us to watch some eight (?) years after it was first released. As he said in the quote at the top, Derek Twist brought this production home with Powell struggling with a limited budget and, after St Kilda’s owner refused, a last-minute change of location to the island of Foula across the North Sea to Shetland.

In general, the newly-revealed film showed more of the reaction shots to discussions between the main characters filling out the narrative and engaging us with more of the wonderful locals who we would see again when Master of Ceremonies, Professor Ian Christie, screened Return to the Edge of the World a BBC-funded documentary returning Powell, John Laurie and Grant Sutherland back to the remains of the society they filmed amongst. It’s a wonderful film and Laurie is full of mischief with a mystical twinkle greeting every islander who’s name he feigns to have remembered. A special time for both.

I’ve written about this film a number of times before on here but every viewing only makes it more impressive – not least because of the three or so “new” minutes but also the achievement of Powell’s team in making of the film was an epic adventure in itself. "200,000 feet on Foula" was Powell's original title for his book on the making of the film and references the immense amount of footage shot… thanks be to Mr Twist again!

Powell and drama-documentarist Robert Flaherty did not get on and their methods were so different with the Englishman choosing to use actual actors for his depiction of disappearing cultures. In the end the skill of the story making as well as the players and crew win the day for Foula. EOTW is about as political as Powell gets as he highlights the failure of government to support the islanders as they drown their dogs and cut their losses in the saddest of circumstances. I wonder what happened to the folk of St Kilda, Rachel Johnson, the last of the native St Kildans, died in April 2016 at the age of 93, having been evacuated at the age of eight… what stories did she and other tell of their traumatic changes? Powell caught the dramatic truth better than his rival over on the Irish Aran.

Christie and co also presented us with some fabulous extras including Smith (1939) a public information film promoting a charity helping ex-servicemen, The Embankment Fellowship Centre, which was once lost not just to film archives but also film history. This was introduced by the remarkable Mark Fuller who’d actually found the only remaining copy by tracking down the charity - now called The Ex-Service Fellowship Centres - who revealed that they not only have materials about the project but also a copy of the film! They are now called Veterans Aid and the film is available to view on their website.

We also saw the poignant, An Airman's Letter to His Mother (1941) which is so revealing of the times in which Powell made films and the nature of lived experience during wartime.

My thanks to the following:

• Christopher Bird
• Ian Christie
• Mark Fuller
• Bob Geoghegan

And also the audience of some of the most cinematically curious people in the country and, indeed, in the town!

The next event at the BIMI is Voices from the Chorus presented by Ian and Robert Denning. Full details are available on the Birkbeck website.

The Time Machine... The Toll of the Sea (1922) and Early Colour Live!, Birkbeck University with John Sweeney and Christopher Bird

 

First some maths: film historian and cinematic technologist, Christopher Bird revealed that he would be cranking his 1919 Ernemann projector some 2,100 times during the course of this event – this live cinema is the interface between man and machine we keep on hearing about especially as from 1895 to 1922, the period spanning the films we were to watch, were similarly powered by elbow grease. Added to this were the almost chromesthesiatic improvisations of John Sweeney’s ten digits on piano and the combined perceptions of an audience that could hear the projector whirring, always aware of both men’s efforts as we experienced the past in vibrant colour.

Watching these daring adventures in film technique was fascinating but also strangely humbling especially when, to quote another of Chris’s figures, we watched a hand-coloured film that would have required sixteen images hand colouring for every foot of film equating to one second. So, for Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon (1902) which is 853 ft long, some 13,600 frames would have had to be hand worked for every copy of the film, this was clearly incredibly labour intensive but worth it for the popularity and spectacular response from the viewing public.

In the first section we saw the results of such labour with four films shot in black and white and then painted directly onto each frame of film. The first was from the very beginning with a black and white extract of Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) which was, like most films here, a modern 35mm copied from original materials

The Kingdom of The Fairies

This was followed by part of Louis Lumière’s Roundabout in Paris (1896) then Georges Hatot’s The Death of Jean-Paul Marat (1897) both of which were hand coloured in this style. A lengthy extract from George Méliès's The Kingdom of The Fairies (1903) followed, the full film is some 1,050 feet long, so around 16,800 hand-coloured frames and, at two cranks per second, Chris would have moved the projector’s handle… quite a lot!

The story was picked up by Ian Christie who reminded us of the Lumiere’s first screening in London in February 1896 at what is now the Regent Street Cinema I believe. British pioneer Robert Paul also projected on the same day in the evening with the Electrical Journal sure that the technical hitches bedevilling both screenings would soon be ironed out. Méliès bought his first camera from Robert Paul who was working in colour right from the start as advertised in his first catalogues. There are sadly so few colour examples extant as the first archivists copied colour films, some of which only projected as colour via tinted lenses, in black and white.

Ian screened Paul’s Come Along, Do (1898) the world’s first two-shot film and tinted it to look as it might have done at the time. The Dancer’s Dream (1905) was also shown and is the only known Paul film in its original colour, found by BFI and available on the iPlayer. It’s a very Méliès type film with stop motion and camera trickery of a fairly advanced nature – it’s easy to forget how on trend the British were at this time.

Modern Sculptors

Back to celluloid and Pathé pioneering new system called stencil colour which gave much sharper results than hand colouring with a separate stencil for every colour ensuring that there was no colour bleeding over the edge of images. Even though cutting the stencils was laborious, the result automated the colouring process and continued until late twenties in spectacular films such as Casanova (1927) and Michael Strogoff (1926) both staring that most colourful of performers, Ivan Mozzhukhin! Segundo de Chomon was a master of both trick films and stencil colour and his Modern Sculptors (1908) was screened next – a fine example of both from George’s more darkly-comic Spanish “cousin”.

The next step was for filmmakers to attempt to add the colour at point of source and this is where Edward Turner and Marshall Lee come in with a system that enabled the capture of red, green and blue images on adjacent frames in different tones.  This required a projector running at triple speed - 48 frames a second vs 16 – and on the 1902 fragment we saw, this still gives the impression of three colours albeit with slight fringing as subjects moved too quickly to be captured by all three filters. We did, however, see a spectacular yellow sunflower.

Now to Bristol and William Friese Greene’s Biocolour which, as its name suggested, filmed in two colours with alternate green and red frames shot through a filter for each colour and double speed at 32 frames a second producing a jumpy shot of an omnibus not quite caught in both tinted cells. It looked like one of the least successful efforts but would impact the story in a major way…

George Albert Smith in  between hypnotising and inventing

So, now for Kinemacolor! Developed in 1908 it was commercially very successful at a time when there were hardly any cinemas and with films, much like magic lanterns, mostly being an attraction on the travelling fairgrounds. Hypnotist, psychic and magic lantern projectionist George Albert Smith…  invented the system, which was a two-colour additive process that photographed film behind red and green filters rotating at the front of the lens.

John Adderley, historian and cinematographer explained how the machine worked the difference between the Kinemacolor had a Butterfly Gate compared with a Williamson Gate – in the front there was a wheel with different filters. John demonstrated the process and we saw the alternating red and green … it’s a fascinating machine and if you want to find out more there is an exhibition of this and similar machines at The Race to Cinema Collection at the Bournemouth Film School

The film in the camera is black and white and being projected too but there are red and green filters picking up the colours from the original capture. Chris explained that there are only five surviving Kinemacolor projectors left and this 1919 Ernemann projector has been adapted by projectionist and engineer Nigel Lister to support the continued projection of these materials.

Lake Garda, looking slightly greener on YouTube...

There was a lovely short, Pageant of New Romney, Hythe and Sandwich (1910) directed by George Albert Smith and showing the people of these Kent towns re-enacting their past, an event itself now in the past but colourfully so. This was followed by a longer film, Lake Garda (1910) a print courtesy of collector Dave Cleveland and “… the single best surviving example of Kinemacolor…” according to Chris and it fully supported that assertion. During the travelogue, there is an optical illusion as the water looks blue which is technically impossible given that the source is red and green tints… but the camera never lies and we saw it with our own eyes proving that there’s an element of suggestion in the way we perceive true colour. This is a magical film and really captures the Italian lake in dreamy colours, reds, greens, those “blues” and more beyond. 

Sadly, Kinemacolor was to lose out in a legal challenge from William Friese Greene in 1915 who argued it was a duplicate of his Biocolour process and, as Luke McKernan pointed out, the inability to show “blue” was one of the sticking points. We saw with our own eyes the superiority of the Kinemacolor process in terms of stability and effect but so it goes, F-G was unable to capitalise on his concept all the same and things moved on swiftly elsewhere with the invention of Technicolor “Process 1” in 1916 and by 1922 the company had developed “Process 2” with a camera which used a two-strip colour process – similar in concept to Kinemacolor but with two filtered images used to create a subtracted coloured print with red and green stock cemented together in a print that could be presented using a normal projector.

 

As Ian Christie said, the proof of concept was to make a feature film and that was The Toll of the Sea (1922) restored in the 1990s by the UCL archive and available on the US National Film Preservation website in high quality. The film is also notable for staring Anna May Wong in her first leading role as Lotus Flower, the object of the affection of the American man, Allen Carver (Kenneth Harlen) she rescues from the sea. Written by Frances Marion it’s a loose re-telling of Madame Butterfly and Carver must choose between Lotus Flower and a woman from his own background… “Elsie”.

Anna May Wong

Whilst Allen, fully recuperated returns to the United States, Lotus Flower gives birth to a son she names Allen and waits for her love’s return. But when he comes back it is with Elsie as his new wife and Lotus Flower has to make the best choice for her son… or at least that so often presented as such. It’s quite the thing that she has a child with Carver as that’s rather specific for Hollywood at the time. Oh, Mister Hays…

The last reel of the film is lost and so the restorers shot new film of the Pacific Ocean in October 1985 using an authentic two-colour Technicolor camera with intertitles recreated from Frances Marion’s original scenario. It works very well especially as we all know how it’s got to end.

Anna May Wong is a star to us now, and her abilities far outstripped her success for reasons that we all understand. Here she shows even at 17-18 how skilled she was and how much of a gift to the cinematographer, J.A. Ball and director Chester M. Franklin who makes the most of his remarkable lead.

John Sweeney illuminated the story with his melodious inventiveness, his experience and tonal flexibility being first rate as it had all evening. He’s very good with any flowing water, but seas especially, and his emotional narrative was equally fluid and accomplished!

Kenneth Harlen and Anna in the garden

A last word on Kinemacolor… we also saw Stephen Herbert’s 1995 test film, shot by Dave Locke – also on duty tonight - which used the process to capture a colourful group on the Southbank. This is something akin to experimental archaeology and enables the historians and cine-technologists to understand more about the making of the media as well as its meaning and message.

Let’s hope for more of this kind of thing! Blessed are the archivists and the projectionists!

 

Christopher Bird making the magic work (photo courtesy of Stefanie Benz)