NEWSLETTER
Winter 03/04
Supported
by an AHRB Research Exchange award, this project aimed to produce a
comprehensive overview of moving image and associated materials held
in the National Film and Television Archive that relate to music hall
and popular theatre in Britain before 1930. Outcomes will event-ually
include an academic article, a cata-logue of titles to foster further
research, a DVD, and public screenings with com-mentary, which began
at the National Film Theatre in May 2003. Bryony Dixon is Archival Bookings
Officer in the Access Department of bfi Collections. The parallels
between music hall and early cinema are obvious. Both 'music hall' and
'cinema' describe places as well as forms of entertainment. Both are
specifically 'popular' entertainment. Both became organised as mass
entertainment industries with their own peculiar codes of practice and
traditions. Both were driven by the demand for novelty. Both developed
'star' systems and encouraged an increasingly homogenous, family oriented
pro-duct as the industries became more integrated. Music
hall and early cinema shared content, an aesthetic, personalities and
programme structure. For many years, film and variety were seen in the
same programme, by the same audience at the same theatres, shar-ing
the stage and the orchestra. Structurally the film programme reflected
in microcosm the music hall programme with its mixture of topi-cals,
interest items, novelties, humorous and dramatic songs and recitations.
The newer industry inherited much from music hall then, gradually superseded
it, and one could argue that for several years it kept it alive as mixed
film and variety bills were briefly popular. In business terms the cinema
developed along similar lines to the music hall, as a series of interconnected
private businesses run for profit, unlike radio (and later television),
which were spawned by technological innovations like film, but in Britain
were co-opted by government for public service use, despite being ultimately
conveyors of mass popular entertainment. There
were other similarities too. Music hall appealed to the same audiences
that subsequently became interested in cinema; broadly speaking the
urban working classes, although that appeal cut across the classes at
times. The glamour of the cinema, as with the music hall before it,
provided a welcome escape or diversion from the confines of crowded
city dwellings. Both industries were in general politically conservative,
in their structure and in the content which they encouraged. They shared
a sense of humour, which encompassed the specific and the individual
within the 'type'. They shared desires for popular music, dance, novelty,
spectacle and colour, for fantasy, storytelling. In terms of text and
the treatment of that text the similarities between music hall and early
cinema are striking. If celluloid
had been only a fraction more expensive to produce, or just a little
more fragile, it would have been impossible for travelling showmen
and entertainers to adopt the new moving pictures. The film camera
would have remained a scientific instrument, and there would have
been no impulse to develop dramatic narrative or to appeal to a mass
audience. There would have been film, but not film history as we understand
it [which is] the story of how that medium was adapted to the needs
of a paying audience.[1] However,
the two industries began to diverge in the years just before the WW1,
that great watershed in this as in all other areas of life. Yet it was
not the rise of narrative filmmaking which split the music hall from
the cinema - music hall already had plenty of narrative forms easily
adapted to the screen - but rather the rise of the feature film, which
would become the dominant form in the cinema industry. In addition
to identifying these specific film materials, the project contributes
to a number of broader areas of current film and media research, such
as: The context
for this programme of work is provided by a recent convergence of interest
on the subject of early cinema. As well as the growth of international
interest in silent cinema, of which the present increase of work on
British silent cinema is a part, scholars in theatre and performance
studies are undertaking significant work on the inter-textual relation
between film and their fields.[2] Notes 1.
Nicholas Hiley '"At the Picture Palace": The British cinema
Audience, 1895-1920', John Fullerton, ed., Celebrating 1895: The
Centenary of Cinema (John Libbey, 1998), p. 96. 2.
The interest in this field is evidenced by regular conferences and
festivals on British Silent and Early Cinema such as the annual British
Silent Cinema Festival (organised by the BFI and Nottingham Broadway
Cinema) and Visual Delights, a biannual conference organised by a
consortium of Northern Universities. Many UK independent cinemas have
regular programmes of silent film (including the NFT, the Barbican,
the City Screen circuit, Nottingham Broadway, The Festival Hall, and
the Hyde Park Leeds). New studies are published every year by the
academic press and there is a lively internet scene.
MUSIC
HALL AND BRITISH CINEMA BEFORE 1930
Bryony
Dixon
It was not inevitable that cinema should have developed from the music
hall and fairground businesses. As Nicholas Hiley has observed:
This project was designed to make accessible the resources of the National
Film and Television Archive at the British Film Institute to shed light
on the complex relationship between music hall and cinema. Current research
into the important contribution made by the music hall to the development
of British cinema is hampered by a lack of awareness of key archival
resources. As the major national collection of moving images, and as
the most important site holding relevant material, bfi Collections was
the necessary point of departure for this programme of work. The project's
ultimate objective is to contribute to interdisciplinary debate about
this significant area of British popular and film culture while also
stimulating future research. The starting point was to catalogue four
types of material:
Betty
Balfour in Life, Love and Laughter, 1926
International interest continues to increase, with specialist film
festivals and conferences (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Sacile; Il
Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna; the annual University of Udine conference,
and biannual Domitor Congress). Research on American comedy is also
often concerned with British music hall, in Frank Sheide's work on
Fred Karno.