Sound and vision blog

A huge step forward has been made for online research in film studies with the launch of the Media History Digital Library project. This is a major conservation and access project for histoical printed materials related to cinema, broadcasting and recorded sound, concentrating on American media industry journals and financed by private funds. The project has been established by film archivist and historian David Pierce, and has ambitious plans to digitise an make freely available online a wide range of American media journals, of which these are the target titles:

Industry Magazines  Billboard, Box Office, Cine-Mundial, Daily Variety, Exhibitor's Herald, Exhibitor's Trade Review, The Film Daily, The Film Index, The Hollywood Reporter, Motion Picture Daily, Motion Picture Herald, Motion Picture News, Motography, The Moving Picture World, Radio Broadcast, Radio Daily, Talking Machine World, Variety

Company Magazines  The Lion's Roar, Publix Opinion, RCA News, Radio Flash, Reel Life, Universal Weekly

Fan Magazines  Motion Picture Classic, Motion Picture Magazine, Motion Picture Digest, Radio Mirror, Screenland, Shadowplay

Technical Journals  American Cinematographer, American Projectionist, The International Photographer, International Projectionist, Motion Picture Projectionist, Projection Engineering, Radio Engineering, Sound Waves, Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers

A pilot project has a target of 300,000 journal pages, and already eight volumes (covering four years, 1925-1930) of the fan magazine Photoplay, and one volume each of the trade journals Motion Picture Classic (1920) and Moving Picture World (April-June 1913), have been made available through the Internet Archive, taken from the collection of the Pacific Film Archive.

There's an enthusiastic review of the project by Leonard Maltin on his Movie Crazy blog, and I review the project in greater detail on my silent cinema blog, The Bioscope.

The British Library hasn't digitised any film journals (though the stage journal The Era, available for the years 1838-1900 on our Newspapers site, has much information on the early film industry). However we do have a list of all the British and Irish cinema and film periodicals that we hold in our newspaper collection, which includes many rare titles and useful information on date ranges and changes of title.

Posted via email from Luke McKernan

President Obama's State of the Union Address, 27 January 2010, from www.c-spanvideo.org

C-SPAN has put its entire video archive online, 23 years of broadcasting amounting to over 160,000 hours of content. C-SPAN stands for Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. It's an American cable TV network owned and operated by the US cable industry as a free service. It was set up in 1987 to record government proceedings, and its archive documents practically every session of the Senate and the House of Representatives, presidential press briefings and many kinds of public affairs events. The New York Times reports:

“This is the archive’s coming of age, in a way, because it’s now so accessible,” said Robert Browning, director of the archives. Historically, the $1 million-a-year operation has paid for itself partly by selling videotapes and DVDs to journalists, campaign strategists and others. Mr. Browning acknowledges that video sales have waned as more people have viewed clips online. “On the other hand, there are a lot of things people now watch that they never would have bought,” he said. The archives’ fans include Ms. Maddow, who called it gold. “It’s raw footage of political actors in their native habitat, without media personalities mediating viewers’ access,” she wrote in an e-mail message ... C-Span executives said they hoped that its search filters would be up to the task. Mr. Lamb said, “You can see if politicians are saying one thing today, and 15 years ago were saying another thing.” He added, “Journalists can feast on it.”

The site gives the schedule for the three C-SPAN channels (C-SPAN, C-SPAN2 and C-SPAN3), the C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle (an index to the C-SPAN video recordings of the House and Senate floor proceedings), a blog, store and extensive search and browse options. There is a simple search option on the front page (which has a drop-down text feature showing summaries with your search term highlighted) and an advanced search option (for which you can add extra fields by clicking) allowing searches to be refined by date, tag, format, title, summary, person, organisation, location etc. You can browse the archive by programme type, series, congressional committee, date, topic, popular programmes and so on. Each record gives title, date, topic, tags, summary, duration (some of them run for hours), sometimes a transcript (generally made from uncorrected closed captioning), programme ID and the number of views. There are handy user features such embedding, sharing, links to biographical details of people featured, and related videos. Videos can be viewed full screen and are of a good quality.

It's a stunning resource, overwhelming in its size, limitless in the opportunities it opens up for American studies, political studies, and just for finding who said what when. What we wouldn't give to have something similar in the UK. Here we've had parliamentary AV recordings since 1978, when the Parliamentary Sound Recording Unit was created. This became the Parliamentary Recording Unit when it added video of the House of Lords in 1986, then the House of Commons in 1989 (the Sound Unit disbanded in 1992). We do have live access through the excellent ParliamentLive, which has coverage of all UK Parliament proceedings taking place in public, but its on-demand archive only stretches back 12 months from the date of broadcast. Thereafter you have to contact the Parliamentary Recording Unit itself for access.

Where the US cable network has led, maybe one day the UK will be able to follow in providing comprehensive online access to this archive much as we now enjoy with Hansard. It's good to be able to read, but how much more compelling it is to be able to see and hear as well. It helps us all the more to judge, to recognise, and to understand.

'Nazi Congress', Pathe Gazette, released 17 September 1936, from www.britishpathe.com

The National Archives recently issued some declassified MI5 files which cast an intriguing light on one corner of British film history. An MI5 dossier says that Sidney Bernstein, owner of the Granada cinema chain, a founder of ITV, and later Lord Bernstein and a fellow of the British Film Institute, was a Soviet informer. As The Times report puts it,

Sidney Bernstein, later Baron Bernstein, helped the Soviet Embassy to vet journalists applying to go to Moscow and provided funds for a Czech-German agitator named Otto Katz, said to have been Marlene Dietrich’s first husband. He was known for persuading Hollywood stars to contribute to the Anti-Nazi League, a Communist front.

What particularly caught my eye though was this line from a 1936 Security Service report on Bernstein:

Sidney Bernstein is now reliably reported to be an active secret Communist ... He always cuts the news films in his cinemas so that Fascist scenes etc which might make a favourable impression are removed. Items about Russia are given prominence.

Now this is fascinating - but was it possible?

British newsreels were notoriously conservative in politics and supine towards authority. Firmly established as a part of the entertainment package that was the cinema programme, they delivered a ten-minute package of news stories that kept audiences informed but favoured royalty, sport, tradition and the upbeat. In the 1930s there were critics on the Left who derided the newsreels' political attitudes, and in particular felt that their treatment of the Spanish civil war at times revealed a Nationalist, or quasi-Fascist, bias.

Whether that is entirely fair or not as regards the newsreels is a moot point. Some might argue that they were more facetious than fascistic, but they undoubtedly aroused passions in those who felt that the Republican cause was being overlooked, and that the newsreel's avowed impartiality was hiding political truth from British audiences.

But did Bernstein edit the newsreels in his cinemas to counter this insidiousness? It is intriguing to think that he could have done so, but hard to believe that he actually did. Granada was a relatively small circuit - Bernstein controlled 30 or so cinemas by 1939 - and the way that newsreel distribution worked was that one print would service several cinemas through a system of what were called 'runs', whereby the older the print (and hence the older the news), the cheaper it was to rent (newsreels were issued twice-weekly). One could estimate that a few as half-a-dozen prints could serve all Granada cinemas, though there were five newsreels series on the market at that time - Pathe Gazette, Gaumont-British News, British Paramount News, British Movietone News and Universal Talking News, which would have added to the complexity. But even if stories might conceivably have been cut, giving extra prominence to other stories was not possible unless a new commentary was added, which simply not technically possible. Moreover I have not come across any evidence which remotely suggests that Bernstein - or any other exhibitor of his prominence - tampered with the newsreels. One feels that the story would have had to have leaked somehow - not least by prints with the missing or altered stories being returned to the newsreel companies who were most particular about how their product was treated.

Though it is appealing to think that Bernstein - who had strong socialist sympathies, though there is no evidence that he was ever a communist - could have got his own back on the newsreels by cutting out stories that he felt were pro-Fascist, the Secret Service report is most likely a product of rumour or fantasy. Bernstein became a film adviser to the Ministry of Information, and went on to enjoy a notable career with Granada television, ending up a revered elder statement for the industry.

If you are interest in British newsreels, the first place to look is the BUFVC's News on Screen database, which is a near-comprehensive record of all British newsreel issues 1910-1979, including thousands of digitised commentary scripts. Newsreels themselves are easy to view. The whole of the British Pathe archive 1896-1970 is freely available online, as is the British Movietone library (1929-1979), though the latter requires registration. Those in the UK university sector should check when their institution is signed up to the JISC's NewsFilm Online, which includes a large proportion of the Gaumont newsreel library from the 1920s-50s, while much of this content anyone can find for free (as low resolution copies) on the ITN Source website, under its New Classics series.

The best study of British newsreels in the 1930s (there aren't many) is Anthony Aldgate's Cinema and History (1979), which is particularly strong on the newsreels and the Spanish Civil War. For a more general account with some key original texts on the production and reception of the newsreels in the 1930s, see Yesterday's News: The British Cinema Newsreel Reader (2002) - edited by yours truly.

A Glimpse Of India from Cambridge University on Vimeo.

The Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge University has released online a collection of almost 300 films showing life in India and other parts of South Asia during the final days of the British Empire.

The remarkable archive comprises around fifty different private collections made by people who lived and worked in India between 1911 and 1956 and which were originally gathered together in the 1960s. The Centre has been able to digitise the collection and publish only for free access - not only to view, but to download and reuse in education (the films are in QuickTime and you will therefore have to have QuickTime Pro software loaded to be able to download them - it costs £20.00). Each video comes with the message "These images may not be used without licence", but what that licence might be is not stated. But elsewhere it says that you are "free to use this material in the classroom".

The films were all shot silent, by amateurs, so they are the home movies of the British in India. When home movies started to become common in the 1920s and 1930s, with the appearance of non-flammable small gauge 16mm (i.e. smaller than the 35mm film used in cinemas), the cameras and filmstock were still expensive, and it tended to be that such films were taken by the wealthier classes - including those who made up the British Raj. So such films tend to privilege the privileged, though the collection overall is very varied in what it shows and includes scenes shot during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, images of labourers working on railways, dams and farms, tribal dances and days at the races, children at school and playing, and pictures of the funeral of Lord Brabourne, a former Governor of Bombay and Bengal, in 1939. Colour came to home movies in the 1930s (here on 8mm film), and many of these films reveal a picture of life in India that the monochrome commercials newsreels and travelogues of the period cannot match.

Dr Kevin Greenbank, archivist at the Centre of South Asian Studies, describes the films thus:

It's one thing to get an understanding of a place by reading about it or visiting 60 years later; to be able to see people at the time and watch events such as partition actually taking place before your own eyes is quite another. The films are the equivalent of modern-day home videos. This makes the collection particularly valuable because it shows some of the things which aren't recorded in documents or books - like the interactions between people, or the way that the British behaved towards their servants. It's a fascinating resource for analysing how these two societies, British and Indian, worked - or perhaps didn't work - together.

What you see is India through British eyes - it appears that no films made by Indians exist in the collection, as the names of the families who donated the films indicate: Christie, Hunter, Mackrell, Stokes, Williams, and so on. No information is given on the filmmakers and their personal backgrounds, which is a shame, because such information contextualises what we see and increases the films' value for the social historian. When viewing personal films, it is important know the person just as much as what the person filmed, because there is no such thing as the objective film record. The scholar needs always to ask why one is able to see what one is seeing, to understand the process of mediation. (More background information is promised for later this year)

The films each come with a brief synopsis, plus technical information and indication of location. To view individual films you click on the thumbnails provided. They are utterly engrossing, and the collection will undoubtedly open up South East Asian studies into areas that textual sources just don't cover.

• The collection is available from: www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/films.html
• The background to the collection is described here
• The video above that describes the collection can also be see on YouTube here

The Centre of South Asian Studies is now seeking funding to link the film collection with its oral history archive, which contains more than 300 recorded interviews and was released online last year.