Thirty years or so ago, the Museum of the Moving Image opened on London’s South Bank. Funded privately then operated by the British Film Institute, the museum traced the history of motion pictures from ‘pre-cinema’ days to the blockbusters of 1988. It was notable for the many rare and unique objects on show, for theRead More
I have been having an online discussion with a couple of journalists about newsreels of the Empire Windrush and the arrival of West Indians at Tilbury Docks on 21 June 1948. A Pathé newsreel has been repeatedly used in news programmes and documentaries, and has been widely shared on social media. The conversation brought upRead More
Reggae is island music. It is music that came out of the island of Jamaica, and in its true form could only derive from that place, but its island nature lies deeper. Islands are worlds unto themselves that nevertheless can only be defined by their relation to the worlds that lie beyond. They are proudlyRead More
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, newly released theatrically and on Netflix, opens with a film by Georges Méliès. Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin (1896), known in English as The Vanishing Lady, features Méliès in his familiar role as a magician, placing a woman (Jehanne d’Alcy) under a cloth and, throughRead More
To the Garden Museum, in Lambeth, a museum I’d not visited nor indeed knew existed before now. Of all the small, quaint museums devoted to minor subjects that can be found in London, few can be more quaint yet more rich in interest than the Garden Museum. It is constructed out of a medieval church,Read More
The 2019 cricket World Cup got underway with something extraordinary. Occasionally one is able to look beyond the noisy crowds, the pop music blaring out at every pause, the multi-coloured kits, the banalities of the TV commentary and the formulaic highlights programmes, to moments when the sport shines through. So it was that in theRead More
Here is a family photograph. I know who the one on the left is, but not the one on the right, and I long to know more. If only she could tell me something about herself. If only she could talk. Well, one day maybe not so far away, she will. I’ve been writing aboutRead More
I was spending two weeks in the Lake District, and I wanted to seek out one of the lakes I had not seen before, despite having visited the area many times. Ennerdale Water is one of the least known and least visited of the lakes, owing to its remote location to the west of theRead More
The past did not take place in black-and-white, but many of the technologies for documenting that past when it was present operated in that way. But in our age of never-ending marvels we can right the egregious errors of such out-moded systems. So it is that the colourisation of black-and-white actuality films and photographs hasRead More
On steps leading down to the pebble beach at Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey, the words of an uncredited poem are painted. The white lettering has worn away to invisibility in some places, nor is it possible to see the text in its entirety in one view, as half has to be read fromRead More