All we ever do is tell stories to one another. Back in 1999 Sight and Sound magazine published a plot summary for the Blair Witch Project, as it does for all films released theatrically in the UK. Such plot summaries give the plain details of the plot of the film, as a matter of record,Read More
The opening sequence of Shooting Stars is a hesitant but nevertheless ambitious crane shot swooping over an active film studio. The location is the Stoll Film Company studios, Cricklewood, and through this opening vista the self-reflexive theme is introduced. This is a film about the process of making a film. It is constructed as aRead More
As previously noted, I am republishing a number of old posts from blogs that I have previously managed that are now defunct and/or difficult to find. I’m republishing them with the date adjusted to the date on which they were originally posted, so that gradually this site will build up to be a single sourceRead More
And now for a list of the worst films I’ve ever sat through. Not films that I particularly dislike but which others whose opinions I should respect admire (e.g. Singin’ in the Rain), but films that demean the art of film in the most absolute way. Of course, there are so many films widely recognisedRead More
‘A million minutes of filmed history’ – someone in the communications team of the AP Archive must have been mightily pleased when they came up with that tag line for promoting their release online of the entire British Movietone newsreel archive onto YouTube. For that is what the have done. Apparently every story from everyRead More
I spent three days last week at Il Cinema Ritrovato, the renowned festival of restored and classic films held each year in Bologna, Italy. To my great shame it has been twenty-two years since I last attended the festival (though I was in the vicinity for a talk I gave three years ago). The reasonRead More
The art of Biography Is different from Geography. Geography is about maps, But Biography is about chaps. I thought of E.C. Bentley’s pithy poem while I was attending the What is Cinema History? conference in Glasgow. The conference was organised by the Early Cinema in Scotland project (on whose advisory board I sit), and addressedRead More
Back in 2009 I was set an interesting challenge. I was invited on behalf of a group investigating the lives of British women who had worked in silent film to take on the research into one of those about whom nothing much was known. I picked the name Mary Murillo. I knew nothing of her,Read More
The birth of the popular science film – Francis Martin Duncan appears as the scientist in Cheese Mites, the notorious film he made for Charles Urban in 1903. The full film was only recently discovered by Oliver Gaycken (lurking on YouTube under a made-up title) Two books are to be published shortly which cover theRead More
I paid a rare visit to the BFI Southbank the other day to see a programme of films entitled ‘The Birth of British Sci-Fi’, part of its Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder season. The six films on show ranged from 1897, with G.A. Smith’s The X-Rays to A Message from Mars (1913), the firstRead More