That last blog post on the battle of Flodden has reminded of a list we used to maintain at the BFI’s National Film and Television Archive’s cataloguing department of memorable footage requests. Having a film collection that covered just about every subject on earth, you were bound to get some wide-ranging requests from footage researchers,Read More
I have been in dispute with a copy editor. I am a great admirer of the keen-eyed and patient people who find amendments to be made in a text the author could have sworn was perfect. But in the case of Dont Look Back (1967) I had to defend my corner. The said copy editorRead More
Here’s a major thing. Film Atlas is an online encyclopedia of film formats. Launched to the public last month, it is a collaboration between the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and the George Eastman Museum, with funding from the Louis B. Mayer Foundation, the George Eastman Museum Publishing Trust Endowment, and FIAF (Eileen BowserRead More
One of my favourite lines in all film literature is in a booklet note for the National Film Theatre, possibly in the early 1990s. The NFT was showing what I think was Rookery Nook, a British title from 1930. It was an early sound film and one of a series made around that time ofRead More
I discovered the poet Stevie Smith, as I suspect many others did, on 19 February 1980, when the film Stevie was first shown on British television – on BBC Two, at 21:00 to be precise. In my memory I hurried out to Whitstable’s Pirie & Cavender bookshop the following day and acquired a copy ofRead More
I have written two more profiles for the Women Film Pioneers Project which were published this week. The WFPP is a long-running project at Columbia University to produce short online biographies of women who contributed to silent cinema, with the idea of rebalancing, or making you think again, about film history – or history inRead More
One of the great fascinations of early cinema is the archaeology involved. While for later periods of film issues of identification are relatively clear (title, authorship, duration, variations, ownership etc), for early films when the business was young and its nature indeterminate, things are not always straightforward. If you combine this with all the changesRead More
I have a third past paper that I am publishing on this site. Back in 2011 I was invited to speak at the 8th Seminar on the origins and history of cinema, a series hosted by the Museu del Cinema in Girona, Spain. The title of the seminar (a conference really) was ‘The Construction ofRead More
I’m continuing to look through the files at papers I wrote which were published but are no longer available, or which were never made available in the first place, with the aim of publishing them on this site, in the hope that this is useful to someone. One paper that falls into the never madeRead More
One of the goals I have for this website is to make as many of the texts I have written as I can available for free download. You can find what is available as hyperlinks on the Publications and Talks sections of the site. One text I have just added is a 12,000 word essayRead More