The London Project
Over 2004-2005 I worked (with Simon Brown) as Senior Research Fellow at the AHRC Centre for British Film and Television Studies, based at Birkbeck, University of London, on a project investigating the nature of the film business in London 1894-1914. Simon studied the producers, distributors and ancillary businesses, while I took on exhibition and audiences. The main outcome so far of our 'London Project' research has been an online database to the film businesses and venues of the period, available at http://londonfilm.bbk.ac.uk. There is also a small touring exhibition, which is visiting a number of museums and libraries across London. Various written outputs have been produced, including contributions to a special issue of the journal Film Studies on the subject of cities and cinema.
You can download two articles derived from my London research: 'Diverting Time: London's Cinemas and their Audiences', in the London Journal, vol. 32 no. 2 (July 2007), available here by kind permission of Maney Publishing; and '"Only the Screen Was Silent": Memories of children’s cinema-going in London before the First World War', Film Studies issue 10, Spring 2007, now freely available from Manchester University Press:
Download Diverting Time (PDF, 334KB)
Download Only the Screen Was Silent (PDF, 266KB)
Charles Urban
My doctoral thesis was 'Something More Than a Mere Picture Show': Charles Urban and the Early Non-Fiction Film in Great Britain and America, 1897-1925 (University of London, 2003). Charles Urban was an American entrepreneur who came to Britain in 1897 and made his name as a producer of non-fiction films with the Warwick Trading Company, the Charles Urban Trading Company and Kineto Limited. Urban brought his salesmanship and showmanship gifts to bear on films of education, science, travel and documentary. He enjoyed his greatest triumphs with Kinemacolor, the world's first 'natural' motion picture colour system. During the First World War he had a combative relationship with British propagandists, taking British official films for exhibition in America. After the war he made an ambitious but ultimately doomed attempt to break into the burgeoning educational film market. Much more information on Urban can be found on my website http://www.charlesurban.com.
Chapter three of the thesis is available to download, covering Urban's time promoting Kinemacolor. To keep the file size down, I have removed all illustrations (anyone citing the text should please note that this means the page numbering has changed).
Download Kinemacolor (PDF, 688KB)
Cinemagazines and the Projection of Britain
I managed this three-year project (2004-2007) project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), investigating the history and uses of the cinemagazine. Cinemagazines are the lost film genre, magazine films having been a common feature of cinema programmes for decades, before evolving into television programming, but they have suffered from critical contempt if not total neglect. The form, however, was ideal as a carrier of ideas and as a gentle persuader, and cinemagazines were used by industrial concerns through series such as Mining Review and Oil Review, and especially by the Central Office of Information. The British government body carried out the policy of the 'projection of Britain' by producing series such as This Week in Britain, London Line and Transatlantic Teleview, shown across the world in cinemas and particularly on television as broadcasting spread across the globe in the 1950s and 1960s.
The two major outcomes of the work are a database of almost every British cinemagazine story, included as part of the British Universities Film & Video Council's British Universities Newsreel Database, available at http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/cinemagazines, and a book edited by Emily Crosby and Linda Kaye, Projecting Britain: The Guide to British Cinemagazines (London: BUFVC, 2008).
Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio
I was until recently managing a three-year (2005-2008) AHRC-funded project to create an international database of Shakespeare on film, television and radio. As I have now changed jobs, the management of this project has changed hands, but I am retaining a steering role. The project aims to create a comprehensive database for Shakespearean production across these media, include video recordings of stage performances and some audio recordings. It aims to give up-to-date distribution information for all titles, and to make the data available to researchers through a sophisticated online database. The project has a particular interest in the neglected field of radio Shakespeare. The completed database will be published by Spring, but a sneak preview version is available from the British Universities Film & Video Council at http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/shakespeare.
The book of the project is Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio (London: BUFVC, 2009), co-edited by Eve-Marie Oesterlen, Olwen Terris and myself.
Independently of this project, I have established a blog, BardBox, which collects notable examples of original Shakespeare videos on YouTube.
