National Film Archive Catalogue, Part II

NATIONAL FILM ARCHIVE CATALO GU E Part II Silent Non-Fiction Films 1895-1934 [HE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE LONDON 1960 ie, part II : silent 5-1934 J NATIONAL FILM ARCHIVE CATALOGUE Part II Silent Non-Fiction Films 1895-1934 Foreword by Sir Arthur Elton THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE LONDON 1960 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from Media History Digital Library http://archive.org/details/nationalfilmarchOOnati TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword by Sir Arthur Elton Introduction by the Curator Arrangement of the Catalogue Credit Abbreviations Non-fiction Films, 1895-1934 Austria 1 Belgium . 1 Canada 1 Cyprus 1 Czechoslovakia 2 Denmark . 2 France 2 Germany . 18 Ghana 22 Great Britain 22 Italy . 125 Japan . 127 Netherlands . 127 New Zealand 128 Norway . 128 South Africa . 128 Sweden 130 Switzerland . 131 U.SA. 131 U.S.S.R. 146 Alphabetical Index to Film Titles Subject Index FOREWORD we can still consult the orations of Cicero, the commentaries of Julius Caesar and a fair number of the books of Livy. We often have the greatest difficulty in consulting film records ofeven the most epoch- making events in the first decades of the twentieth century. This is not only because paper, papyrus and parchment are more durable than cellulose nitrate, which is difficult to store, perishable, inflam- mable, and even spontaneously explosive, but also because the moving picture has positively attracted obliteration. People used to go out of their way to get rid of film the moment it ceased to be profitable. They were contemptuous of anyone who acted otherwise, and even today this attitude still lingers on. What caused it is difficult to decide. It may have come because, in the early days, the established Arts regarded the film as a vulgar interloper. They elbowed it into the back streets and failed to recognise it was the first brand-new art form in a couple of thousand years. The result was that the people who made films and projected them took a kind of defensive pride in the non-Art which was sweeping the public into the new Picture Palaces. They made a virtue of its sup- posed no-goodness, and consigned the living material of history to the film strippers by the million foot. For this reason, collections of early films are often little more than random assemblies of scraps, left behind by accident in vaults, dredged out of dustbins, and retrieved from the most unlikely forgotten corners. Inevitably, such collections lack that unity which comes from systematic selection, and it is against a depressing background of deliberate neglect that the present catalogue must be judged. The heterogeneous, unsystematic nature of the items listed has forced the compilers to arrange the entries alphabetically by country and date instead of under subject categories. Though this gives a certain sense of historical growth, it has the effect at the same time of embedding masterpieces like The Mechanism of the Brain, Turksib, Grass, Nanook of the North, Drifters and the Secrets of Nature series in a mass of ephemeral and unimportant material which in other cir- cumstances could more conveniently have been arranged separately. For example, Moana rubs shoulders with Joe Magee in an Evening at Home—an account of a chimpanzee in evening dress who removes his gloves, strikes a match, lights a cigarette, rides a bicycle, roller skates and then begins to undress—because both films came out in 1926 and "M" follows "J" in the alphabet. That so much has been preserved is due to the National Film Archive of the British Film Institute and its devoted librarians, who have brought a scholarly discipline to the systematic study and des- cription of film, and have turned iconography into a science as exacting as bibliography. Film iconographers do not only have to contend with the inherent disorder of much of their material. The indexing of each single item has complications which the bibliographer is spared. A book can usually be entered in a catalogue under its author, with agreed rules for dealing with anonymous works. Its title page, supported by its contents list, usually provides sufficient material for a subject entry. But films rarely have an author in the accepted sense; their equivalent of a title page is a mass of technical and artists' credits ; they never have an equivalent of a contents page, and their tjtle (when one can be traced) often gives no clue as to what is to follow. So each film must be screened before cataloguing, and each entry may take anything from an hour to a whole morning to complete. There are other pitfalls. Some films purporting to be actual por- trayals of events are, in fact, fakes. Film editors, at a loss, say, for a shot of the Zambesi to lend colour to a sequence, will happily slip in a shot of the Mississippi, confident that no one will notice the difference. Under film no. 461, for instance, recording the building of a locomotive at Crewe, there is a scene of the initials "G.W." being transferred to the tender. How could any cataloguer, save a loco-spotter, know that the initials "G.W." belong to Swindon, and that this shot must have been interpolated in error? This is no isolated example of the problems the film iconographer has to face and overcome, and the 1,054 items here recorded represent a for- midable volume of detailed scholarship of a kind no one save dedi- cated film librarians could have undertaken. When the other volumes of the catalogue come out, listing the Archives' collection of Silent Feature Films, Sound Newsreels, Sound Non-fiction films, and Sound Features, the whole will be a landmark in iconography as important as Lowndes' Bibliographer's Manual, and one which will earn the British Film Institute the gratitude, not only of every film historian, but of every social and cultural historian in the world. ARTHUR ELTON 28th January, I960 INTRODUCTION when A film is acquired by the National Film Archive, such information about it as can be readily obtained, accurate or inaccurate, is immediately entered in a provisional catalogue, maintained in loose- leaf form in our cataloguing department. As soon as possible thereafter the film is viewed, further information is obtained and existing information verified (often at the cost of considerable research) and the details are then entered on the cards which form our permanent catalogue and its several indexes. In order to make the information in the permanent catalogue more widely available we have undertaken the task of publishing it in a modified form in a series of volumes, each of which will thereafter be kept up to date, at first by supplements, and eventually by reprints, as required. The present volume is the second in this projected series. The first {Silent News Films, 1895-1933) was published in 1951;* the third, devoted to silent fiction films, is in course of preparation. Three similar volumes devoted to our sound films will follow. To the best of our knowledge this is a unique pioneer effort in the field of film cataloguing, and we believe these volumes will be recognised as a landmark in the era of visual record and communication into which the world is so rapidly moving. The present volume has been prepared for the press by the Archive's Chief Cataloguer, Mr David Grenfell. We are much in- debted to Sir Arthur Elton for his sympathetic Foreword. As an accomplished documentary film producer who occasionally needs to make use of library material, and as a protagonist for the untapped potentialities of the film as a medium of research and communication, he understands very well, no one better, the problems which confront us in documenting our collections. ERNEST LINDGREN Curator *In 1951 the National Film Archive was known as the National Film Library; its title was changed in July 1955. vii ARRANGEMENT OF THE CATALOGUE the films in this catalogue were produced over a period of almost half a century, and after due consideration it was decided that a chronological arrangement under country was preferable to a classified subject arrangement. Although documentary, scientific, educational and other non-fiction films are often requested and selected by subject, the content of many films is so varied that any classified subject arrangement would have required a confusing number of cross-references and multiple entries. The National Film Archive, by adopting a chronological arrangement under country (an arrangement which will be applied throughout the published catalogues), has tried to meet the needs of film historians wishing to study the development of non-fiction films in each country; and by providing a full alphabetical subject index, has also attempted to satisfy the demands of particular subject interests. Owing to limitations of space, the synopses accompanying the main entries have been compressed, and many subjects and personalities listed in the subject index will not be cited in the main entry; this applies particularly to feature length films. As already stated, the films are arranged chronologically under country of origin, and wherever possible the date used is the date of first release. Where this is not ascertainable, the date of production is used, or the date of the film stock preceded by an asterisk. If none of these dates are known, an approximate date is supplied and preceded by a "circa" notation. The films are entered under the original release title in the language of the country of origin, and if this title is not the same as that on the film copy held by the Archive it is enclosed in square brackets.

Load more