To lose one database is a misfortune; to lose four feels like a conspiracy. Recently three online databases and one audiovisual digital archive with underlying database, on each of which I worked for several years, have been removed from public access, either through policy or misfortune. Two disappeared from view a couple of years ago,Read 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 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
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
In two years’ time, it will be the four hundredth anniversary of the newspaper in this country. The first known newspaper in English, Corrant out of Italy, Germany, &c. was published on 2 December 1620, in Amsterdam. A year later, on 24 September 1621, the first newspaper was published in this country, the Corante, or,Read More
This is the text of a talk I gave to a research event on newsreels at CIAC research centre, University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal, on 9 February 2017. I’ve also published it as a PDF, with footnotes instead of hyperlinks. In the original talk I ended with eight reasons for using newsreels to study history,Read 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
One of my favourite items popping up on my feed reader (thank you NetVibes) is the weekly News of the Week feature from the splendidly named The Pneumatic Rolling-Sphere Carrier Delusion blog. The blog is produced by Joe Thompson, a San Franciscan enthusiast for silent film and cable cars. The blog is mostly about passingRead More
‘The Concept of News’ was the title of a symposium organised by The Newsreel Network and held over 20-21 May at the Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen. The Newsreel Network is a collection of scholars interested in newsreel research, convened by the University of Lund in Sweden, newsreels being a common feature of cinema programmesRead More