Edna Owen or Miss Owen as she was always known by when at ITN. Virtually employee number one Edna Owen was there from the very first night of ITN when ITV started in September 1955. An interesting insight into those very early days. She recounts the day when the training days were over and the group of employees would be split in to two shifts. Potentially to not meet anymore. A formidable manager who made sure all were doing their best.  

Fifty-five years ago Ralph Bond, documentary filmmaker and Vice-President of the ACTT film and television union, sat down in the union’s offices in Soho Square to interview Alf (“A.A.”) Tunwell, doyen of Britain’s cinema newsreel camera operators. The audio interview is now part of the History Project collection, has recently been digitised and uploaded, and is a sheer delight.

It clips along efficiently, runs for less than an hour, and had obviously been meticulously prepped by Ralph Bond. He gently guides Alf through his career, and prompts him to share his favourite anecdotes. And as a result we get a fascinating insight into the lost world of the cinema newsreel, focussing mainly on the period from the 1920s to the 1940s.

But because the interview itself was conducted in 1963, and we are listening to it over half a century later, we get a second layer of historical reflection. In the 1960s, newsreel films were still part of the staple cinema diet, alongside advertisements, trailers for upcoming pictures, the B-movie, and the main feature. So Ralph and Alf look forward from their 1963 vantage-point to speculate on the future prospects of the cinema newsreel, while we look back from 2018 knowing that it finally faded away in the 1970s.

Alf’s career started before the First World War as an office boy with the Warwick Trading Company, founded by ‘actuality’ film pioneer Charles Urban. From there he moved to Barker Motion Photography (early owners of the site which would later become Ealing Studios) and G.B. Samuelson’s operation at Worton Hall in Isleworth (the Samuelson dynasty is still very much with us). By this time he had moved on from office duties to technical work, initially in the dark-room as a developer, then as a camera hand-cranker, and finally as an operator.

Alf stayed with Samuelson through the ‘20s, but in 1929 he joined British Movietone News which was setting up the country’s first sound newsreel. His stories about the rivalries between the newsreel companies – Gaumont, Movietone, Paramount, Pathé, Universal – are a treat. For instance: at each big sporting event such as a Grand National or FA Cup Final, only one company would have a license giving them official access. Crews working for the other companies would therefore try to “pinch pictures” as best they could, through bribery or deviousness or both. And the license-holder, naturally, would try to stop them. As Alf tells it, it was all good clean fun and everybody met in the pub afterwards for a drink and a laugh. But to find out what exactly he got up to in his efforts to “pinch pictures” on behalf of Movietone, log into the interview and listen to the man himself.

During the Second World War Alf helped the Canadian Army to set up its own film unit, training over 200 soldiers in the use of lightweight cameras. Later in the 1940s he worked with MGM, and his final long-term job was as Head of the Camera Department with the UK end of the US newsreel company Hearst Metrotone News. By the time he sat down with Ralph Bond in 1963, he was a grand old man of the cinema newsreel having seen it develop from its silent origins, through the advent of sound, and of colour, and so on to its final eclipse by television.

You’ll find the interview at https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/alf-tunwell .

This month (April 2018) the BFI is running a retrospective on Woodfall Films, the company which in the late 1950s and 1960s pioneered a new sort of cinema in Britain. This was, of course, also the time of Truffaut, Godard and the New Wave in France, but it is a disservice to both movements to yoke them too closely together. Each was struggling with social, economic and aesthetic challenges rooted in its own national circumstances.

For Woodfall, class was always central, not just in its early essays featuring working class protagonists (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in 1960, A Taste of Honey in 1961, and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner in 1962), but also in the later costume dramas (Tom Jones in 1963 and The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1968). It was always committed to the virtues of location- rather than studio-based shooting. And it usually found a way to celebrate joy in life, while acknowledging its brevity.

The name most closely associated with the Woodfall project was the director Tony Richardson. He died in 1991, and the History Project never interviewed him. Nevertheless, for anyone interested in this pivotal moment in British cinema, the History Project collection is a rich resource. There are several interviews which touch upon or refer to individual films or crew members, but perhaps the most relevant are with three of Richardson’s cinematographers, and one of his editors.

Ossie Morris (https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/oswald-ossie-morris), interviewed in 1987, was cinematographer on two Woodfall films, Look Back in Anger (1958) and The Entertainer (1960). He went on to win BAFTAs for The Pumpkin Eaters, The Hill and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, and an Oscar for Fiddler on the Roof.

The interview with Walter Lassally (https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/walter-lassally) was conducted in 1988. Walter was cinematographer on A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness …, and Tom Jones. The year after he made Tom Jones, Walter won an Oscar for his cinematography on Zorba the Greek.

David Watkin (https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/david-watkin) was cinematographer on Mademoiselle and The Charge of the Light Brigade. He is probably best known for photographing Out of Africa, for which he won both a BAFTA and an Oscar.

And finally we have a video interview with Kevin Brownlow (https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/kevin-brownlow) who edited The Charge of the Light Brigade. Kevin has many other claims to fame, including his championing of silent cinema, and his work in film preservation and restoration. His own counter-factual drama It Happened Here (1965), a remorselessly unflattering portrayal of Britain under Nazi occupation, was bank-rolled by Tony Richardson in one of his many acts of generosity to struggling film-makers.

The BEHP’s audio interview with Bill Girdlestone – conducted in 1987, and now digitised and available on the website at https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/bill-girdlestone – offers fascinating insights into the world of the film lab, and in particular Bill’s own craft of grading (For an invaluable historical overview of Britain’s film labs, go to http://www.brianpritchard.com/British%20Labs.htm). His career spanned much of the twentieth century, from the First World War to the 1970s, taking in the advent of sound and the coming of colour. And his changing fortunes also shine a light on the power-play and cut-throat competition which characterised the British film industry in these decades.

As a boy before the First World War Bill was already a film enthusiast, who built his own home projector and was always scrounging random strips of film. One day in Wandsworth he met a cinema manager willing to sell him odd feet for a few bob. In later years he realised he had been buying stolen goods, film which should have been returned to the renters but had been withheld by the manager so as to make a bit of money on the side – a common problem at the time.

Bill’s first job in the industry was as an office boy for Provincial Cinematograph Theatres (PCT), Britain’s first national cinema chain. (For a list of former PCT cinemas which are still open, go to: http://cinematreasures.org/chains/664/previous). But he wasn’t cut out for an office, and quickly moved on to the Worton Hall studio at Isleworth, set up by George Berthold Samuelson, father of Sir Sydney Samuelson (whose own BEHP interview is at https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/sydney-samuelson). Here he had the pleasure of washing out the lab’s chemical tanks.

His next move was to the London Film Company’s lab at Twickenham, to work as a printer. One of his first jobs was to print rushes for D.W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World. This must have been around mid-1917 when Griffiths was filming in England and on the Western Front: Hearts of the World was a propaganda film, backed by the British Government and intended to bolster US public support for the Allied war effort.

After a short period of Army service, Bill went into the dark-room at the Gaumont-British film lab in Shepherd’s Bush. His job was at the ‘front end’, making the negative and producing the first print; bulk printing was done separately in the ‘works laboratory’. This was where his career really got started, because Gaumont-British was a major force in the industry. The company grew steadily through the 1920s and 1930s, affiliating with others – notably Gainsborough – and running film studios at Lime Grove and Islington in addition to the Shepherd’s Bush lab. Its international links meant that Bill was handling negatives from different countries, and he realised that American negs were far better than British ones, with subtler contrasts and textures. He started experimenting with film grading, working by trial and error, adjusting the chemical mix and developing time to try to replicate this higher quality. And as he did so, he started attracting the attention of the camera department: he describes being in awe of the American cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, quite unaware that Musuraca was equally impressed by him, and used his negative as a model for others to aspire to.

It might be thought that Shepherd’s Bush, as the in-house lab, would have enjoyed a guaranteed flow of work from Gaumont and Gainsborough productions, but in fact things were less clear-cut. Michael Balcon, who from 1931 was overall Director of Production, came from the Gainsborough side, and had no particular loyalty to Shepherd’s Bush. In fact, according to Bill, he positively preferred to place work with Humphries lab in Whitfield Street. Although Bill was very much on the technical side, he observed these commercial rivalries and it’s clear from the interview that had his own views – including the view that Humphries owed much of their success to their willingness to pay ‘back-handers’.

Bill worked at Shepherd’s Bush until about 1950, when he was caught up by the ambitions of another big beast in the film industry. From the early 1930s, flour-magnate J. Arthur Rank had, ploddingly but effectively, built up a formidable vertically-integrated film empire. In 1939 Rank snapped up Alexander Korda’s brand-new but heavily-mortgaged studios at Denham; and in 1941 it acquired Gaumont-British and Gainsborough. In the late 1940s Rank decided to concentrate its film processing in a new, state-of-the-art lab at Denham. Shepherd’s Bush was surplus to requirements and Bill was invited to move to Denham or take redundancy. He chose to move.  

It’s clear from the interview that it was a wrench to leave Shepherd’s Bush. By this time Bill was in his fifties, and he’d worked there for the best part of thirty years. His reputation as a master of the art of grading was secure – but it must have hurt to leave the place where that reputation had been won. And initially, he wasn’t too impressed by some of his new colleagues.

And yet, in the end, Denham became a happy place for him. The BEHP interviewers, Roy Fowler and Alan Lawson, asked Bill which had been the most satisfying time in his working life and he replied:-

“At Denham, the last five years. They had sufficient sense to know what I was doing and I was able to produce the best colour pictures that this country ever saw. When I did Oh What a Lovely War, 1968, we showed it at the Plaza, I sat with Dickie Attenborough, it was a Paramount picture. The Paramount executive came to me and he said, ‘Bill, this is the best colour print I’ve ever seen.’”.

Bill retired in 1970, at the age of 71.

I have been volunteering for the BEHP (British Entertainment History Project – www.historyproject.org.uk –  a hugely valuable collection of interviews with people who have worked in the Film, TV, Theatre and Radio industries) since April 2017. I am pursuing a career change from digital marketing to archives management because I am passionate about collecting and cataloguing elements of history that tell fascinating stories about society.

I am working on a project to audit the archive by filing and cataloguing copies of audiocassettes, minidisks, CDs and DVDs for each of the 700+ interviews to help volunteers find them for digitising and adding to the website.

What I like most about the collection is that it celebrates professionals who are perhaps as not as well known to the public but have still made significant contributions to the entertainment industry in many different roles. In a way, it brings the credits at the end of shows to life!

Over the last six months I have enjoyed working with my fellow volunteers to find logical ways to file the material and filling in the metadata gaps for the content management system. I am impressed by the wide range of interviewees we have recorded as well as the skills required to film, edit, archive and publish the interviews.

What I have taken away from the experience so far is that the process of optimising the archive is iterative and that a pragmatic approach is best to maintain momentum while identifying opportunities for future improvement.

I am proud to be involved with the project and look forward to seeing it continue to grow as a valuable resource for anyone interested in how their favourite shows are made.

Recently digitised and now available online (https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/sidney-cole) is the British Entertainment History Project’s 1987 interview with Sidney Cole. Sidney was a constant presence in the film and television industries from the 1930s to the 1980s. He was an editor and a producer, in both drama and documentary, and throughout a busy career he regularly found the time and the means to put his socialist politics into practice. 

Sidney was a South London boy, clever enough to get a place at the LSE, from where he went straight into the film industry in 1930, at the age of 21. He started out as a ‘scenario reader’ at Stoll Studios, and quickly struck up a friendship with Thorold Dickinson who was working as an editor. Thorold was only a few years older than Sidney, but was already a key figure among London’s progressive film intelligentsia, a mainstay of the Film Society and an ally of figures such as Ivor Montagu and John Grierson.

When Thorold moved to Ealing Studios in 1933 to edit Gloria Swanson’s Perfect Understanding, Sidney went with him as second assistant editor. And as Thorold moved from editing to directing, Sidney moved up from assisting to editing in his own right, working on films by Carol Reed and Frank Richardson, as well as Thorold’s own film The High Command in 1936.

They worked together politically as well. Both were early activists within the ACT, the film technicians’ trade union, which had been founded in 1933 and, after a rocky start, found its feet from 1934 once George Elvin came on board as General Secretary. Thorold was elected as one of the union’s Vice Presidents in 1935, and in 1936 Sidney served on an ACT delegation to the Board of Trade to discuss the future of the film industry. In the following year, he too was elected as a Vice President.  

By this time the Spanish Civil War was under way, widely seen as the opening episode of armed confrontation between fascism on one side, and socialism and communism on the other. Sidney and Thorold travelled together to Spain in 1938 and made two short films to rally support for the Spanish republic: Behind the enemy lines, and Spanish ABC. Both were distributed by Ivor Montagu’s Progressive Film Institute.

During the Second World War Sidney worked on several films which are now regarded as British classics. In 1940 he edited the melodrama Gaslight, directed by Thorold: it was a stunning success, so much so that MGM bought the rights and tried to destroy all copies of it so as to give themselves a sure-fire winner with their own re-make. Thorold and Sidney thwarted them by squirrelling away a secret print. Sidney also edited Cavalcanti’s ‘s ‘what-if’ fantasy Went The Day Well? in 1942: a brilliantly audacious film, made at a time when victory was far from assured, which tells its wartime story from the vantage point of a peaceful, post-war future. And, in a sign of things to come, he acted not as editor but as associate producer on the ground-breaking horror compilation Dead of Night in 1945.

From this point on, Sidney worked primarily as a producer, firstly of films (including Alexander Mackendrick’s The Man in The White Suit in 1951, and Thorold’s Secret People in 1952), and then from the mid-50s in television.

From 1955 to 1982 Sidney produced a series of long-running, popular shows for commercial television: children’s tales of derring-do (The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and The Buccaneers for ATV; The Adventures of Black Beauty and Dick Turpin for LWT); and secret-agent tough-guy drama (Danger Man and Man in a Suitcase for ITC). I still remember Robin Hood and Danger Man with enormous affection but let’s face it, none of this was cutting-edge television. And yet, Sidney being Sidney, he still found ways to inject his politics. Robin Hood was produced in the ‘50s when McCarthyism was live in the USA, and Sidney used it as a refuge for blacklisted American writers such as Ring Lardner Jr. and Ian McLellan Hunter who were blocked from working in their own country.

Even in his 70s, Sidney didn’t give up. In 1981, with Thatcher in power and unemployment climbing inexorably, he helped produce People’s March for Jobs, a film about the nationwide trade union march of that year, inspired by the Hunger Marches and Jarrow March of the 1930s. This final project, fittingly, was for ACT Films, the production arm of the union with which he had been associated for almost half a century.

Sidney died in January 1998.

If Dallas Bower is remembered today, it is probably as the driving force behind the 1944 Laurence Olivier film of Henry V. Olivier himself is credited as Producer and Director, but many believe it was Dallas (credited as Associate Producer) who made the whole thing happen.  

His interview with the British Entertainment History Project (https://historyproject.org.uk/content/dallas-bower) reveals that there was more to Dallas Bower than one Shakespearean film. From the late 1920s to the early 1960s he crossed and re-crossed from film to television and back again, and participated both in the birth of the talkies, and the birth of TV. The interview, conducted way back in 1987, has recently been digitised and uploaded to the Project’s website. It covers his whole career, but it is his account of his early years which most intrigues me.

Born in 1907, Dallas was a middle-class London boy, obsessed by the new technology of radio. His first jobs were in wireless, with Marconi and others. Then in 1928 he heard that British International Pictures (BIP) at Elstree were getting fitted out with the latest sound recording kit, to enable them to make talkies. He applied for a job as a Sound Recordist, got it, and arrived just in time to work (uncredited) on Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, ‘Britain’s first talking picture’. (In fact Blackmail was made right on the cusp of the sound revolution. According to legend it went into production as a silent; then Hitchcock was given permission to include some limited sync sound; but he ignored this and made it as a full-blooded talkie. Even so, many cinemas were still not equipped for sound when it appeared in 1929, so a silent version was released alongside the sound version).

Dallas gives a fascinating account of the practical problems of sound recording in these early days – where to place the mike, how to work as a team when the camera was isolated in a sound-proof booth. Equally fascinating is his account of studio working practices: 12 or more hours a day was the norm, and during his 18 months at BIP he only got three weekends off work. When he got the chance, he left BIP for the Stoll Studios at Cricklewood, where attitudes were more civilised.

By this time Dallas was developing a broader interest in filmmaking, and came under the influence of Thorold Dickenson and others in the Film Society. He took an interest in editing and watched editors at work: in his interview he credits “two admirable women”, Doris Dooley and Violet Burdon, “without whom nothing would ever have been in sync”. But he himself only edited one film before moving on again to directing and producing. His first project as Producer and Director was the 1934 quota-quickie comedy The Path of Glory. So far as we know, no copies survive: it’s on the BFI list of ’75 Most Wanted Films’.

So: in six years Dallas had progressed from humble wireless engineer to film producer and director, and by the mid-1930s it seemed that film would be his career. But once again, he took the opportunity to jump sideways into something completely new. While he had been making his way in the film studios, a three-way tussle had been in progress between the BBC, the Post Office, and John Logie Baird, over the feasibility of a public television service. After interminable argument, the BBC had finally, reluctantly, bowed to pressure and agreed to launch a service. In 1935 it acquired Alexandra Palace to serve as its TV broadcasting centre, and started recruiting its embryonic TV team. Dallas joined as a Producer.

The decision to launch the service had been essentially technical: live TV broadcasting started because it was technically feasible. But that still left unanswered the question of content. What should television be? Should it model itself upon some existing art-form or medium? Should it try to be like radio, but with moving pictures? Or like theatre, but on a small screen? Or like cinema, but with all the action performed live and unedited? When Dallas joined the team as one of the BBC’s first television producers, these were the issues he was wrestling with. For instance, he arrived to find that the new TV studios were – quite unlike the film studios with which he was familiar – modelled on theatres, complete with cyclorama. This clashed with his own conviction that television should, as far as possible, take cinema as its model.

Over the next three years Dallas produced a range of pioneering TV programmes for those viewers in and around north London who had bought TV sets, and were able to pick up the signal from Alexandra Palace. He drew on his film industry contacts to make a series about current productions in the film studios; and he produced and directed live TV productions of Shakespeare: Julius Caesar in 1938, and The Tempest (with Peggy Ashcroft as Miranda) in 1939.

The BBC stopped its television broadcasts when the War broke out in the autumn of 1939, to re-focus exclusively on radio. Dallas’s career continued, of course – including his role in Henry V – and is fully covered in his interview. It’s all worth listening to – but for me the most precious parts are those which take us back to the birth of talking pictures, and the birth of television.

Martin Spence

On 30^th September 2017 we mark the 50^th anniversary of the transformation of the BBC’s Light Programme into Radios 1 and 2; and of the Home Service into Radio 4. (The transition from the Third Programme to Radio 3 took a little longer).

The Light Programme and Home Service were both, in their different ways, creatures of wartime. The Home Service was created on the outbreak of War in September 1939, as a merger of the former ‘National’ and ‘Regional’ programmes: it was feared that enemy bombers might use differential signals from regional transmitters as navigation guides. The Light Programme on the other hand was launched as the War ended, in July 1945, making use of the old ‘National’ longwave frequency which was now freed up again. When they were laid to rest in 1967, the Home Service was therefore only 28 years old, and the Light Programme a mere 22. Their middle-aged successors, Radios 1, 2 and 4, have lasted much longer.

The History Project has three wonderful interviews with radio producers who lived through this era. Between them, Bernie Andrews (http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/bernie-andrews), Bill Bebb (http://historyproject.org.uk/content/0591), and Jimmy Grant (http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/jimmy-grant) were key players in BBC popular music – pop, rock, jazz, folk, blues, skiffle and the rest – from the 1950s to the 1980s.

The show that brought the three of them together was Saturday Club – or, as it was called for its first two years, Saturday Skiffle Club – which went out on the Light Programme. The brainchild of Jimmy Grant, it launched in 1957 as a Saturday morning showcase for contemporary skiffle. The term ‘skiffle’ first appeared in American music in the ‘20s, but in Britain in the ‘50s it was being used loosely to indicate a wide range of contemporary music including folk, blues, jazz, rock & roll, and pop.  

When the BBC launched Radio 1 ten years later, it signed a raft of deals with record companies which created a positive incentive to focus on ‘needle time’ – playing tracks from commercially-released records. This signalled a major shift away from the music culture which Saturday Club had nurtured since 1957, because although it had always included some needle-time, the programme’s first love was live music. It would get bands or performers in – or it would go out to them – to record unique sessions especially for the show. This was central to its identity; it wasn’t just music radio, it was music-event radio, and the event might be anywhere: in October 1965 Saturday Club went to Copenhagen. In his interview Bill Bebb recalls this culture-shift, and remembers saying to himself: “I’m not here to pick records, I’m here to make music”.  

Saturday Club limped on for a few months after the Radio 1 launch, and the Keith Skues show continued its sessional focus for a while after that, but by 1969 it was over. Pop-chart needle-time ruled the roost. So let’s finish with a couple of Saturday Club line-ups from its glory days.

The Radio Times advertised the 1958 Christmas holiday show, on Saturday 27^th December (http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/90c5aba39c134d49af0d55b5f1d863ef) as “The best of today’s ‘pop’ entertainment”. Heading things up were Cliff Richard and the Drifters – the band’s name-change to ‘Shadows’ was yet to come. Johnny Dankworth was there with his jazz orchestra. And there was “Folk, skiffle, and spasm music from Glasgow played by Joe Gordon and his Folk Four and Fionna Duncan”.

Just over four years later, on 26^th January 1963 (http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/0bb3f5a6a9154dd18a50e49e24fafcd3) the Beatles made their first appearance on Saturday Club, in a show produced by Bernie Andrews. Also on the line-up were ‘chirpy Cockney’ Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, crooner Vince Hill, and jazz trumpeter Alan Elsdon and his band. Two weeks earlier the Beatles had released their second single, Please Please Me, so I reckon listeners back in January 1963 must have been treated to their own special Saturday Club rendering of that number, plus maybe a reprise of the Beatles’ earlier breakthrough hit Love Me Do.

Beatles fans can find more in Bernie Andrews’s interview. He was a close personal friend to them, and to Brian Epstein, and John Lennon referred to Bernie fondly in the last interview he ever gave, the night before he was shot dead.

Martin Spence

Find out why Bruce Forsyth nearly became a newsagent. Listen to Brian Tesler’s interview at 01-34-30 to find out why.

It’s not often that a film or TV programme has a direct, measurable political impact, and perhaps today, with the sheer volume of audio-visual content coming at us from all directions, it can’t happen. But once upon a time it could, and here in Britain we have two celebrated examples from the ‘60s: the Tony Garnett / Ken Loach 1966 TV play Cathy Come Home highlighted the reality of homelessness and helped launch the charity Shelter; and the Basil Dearden / Michael Relph 1961 film Victim helped pave the way for the 1967 Sexual Offences Act and the decriminalisation of homosexuality. 

Given the attitudes prevalent at the time, it wasn’t an easy film to get made. For a dramatic treatment of its gestation, focussing on the complex relations and negotiations between writer, producer, director, lead actor, and the censors –  listen in to Sarah Wooley’s brilliant radio play, available on BBC i-player at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08xcqwp.

When I went to catch Victim at the National Film Theatre a couple of days ago I hadn’t seen it for years, and was probably expecting it to feel a bit hackneyed. Far from it: it’s unsentimental, brave and bitter, narratively tight, beautifully shot, impressive cinema. It manages to work simultaneously as social commentary and police thriller – and also for us, beyond the original intentions of the filmmakers, as London documentary.

Ever since the film was released, Dirk Bogarde’s courage in taking the leading role, at a time when homosexuality was illegal and gay men routinely abused, harassed and arrested, has been celebrated. Quite right too. But it seems to me that the same applies to other members of the cast who contributed to this first mainstream cinematic portrayal of London’s gay sub-culture: Norman Bird, Donald Churchill, Peter Copley, Hilton Edwards, Peter McEnery, Anthony Nicholls, Charles Lloyd Pack, Dennis Price, Nigel Stock … And Derren Nesbitt who plays the blackmailer, in one of his many thug / crook/ bad boy roles, also deserves our respect; as Mark Duguid points out in his BFI Screenonline piece at http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/444107/index.html – the gay-baiting Nesbitt character is “slyly coded” as gay himself.

Finally, there is the film’s incidental documentary value. Much of it was shot on location in and around London, presumably in the autumn/winter of 1960-61. To contemporary cinema audiences the exterior scenes were nothing special: a building site, streets, cars, shops, pubs. And I suspect this was the filmmakers’ intention: to present an unremarkable backdrop of ‘normal’ life as a counterpoint to the hidden presence within it of an embattled gay community, fearfully keeping its head down.

For London obsessives like me, however, these scenes from 56 years ago are a treat. The building site used for the opening sequence was somewhere close to Westminster Cathedral, and I suspect this became the shops along the south side of Victoria Street. Later in the film there’s an encounter on Grosvenor Road looking across the river to Battersea Power Station chugging away on the south bank, its four chimneys stark against the sky, with no hint of the ghastly glass and cladding which hem it in today.

On the other hand, the scenes on Chelsea Embankment, and Charing Cross Road / Cecil’s Court / St. Martin’s Lane, are remarkable for showing how little has changed. You could re-shoot the police stake-out on the steps of the ENO tomorrow and it would look just the same – so long as you get your hands on some retro coppers’ macs and trilbies.

The History Project has conducted two interviews with people directly involved in the making of Victim – producer Michael Relph, and sound recordist Gordon McCallum. Unfortunately neither has yet been digitised so they are not available on the website. However a transcript of the Gordon McCallum interview can be found at http://historyproject.org.uk/content/0058. Also, the film’s cinematographer Otto Heller is mentioned in the interviews with Cedric Dawe, Freddie Francis, and Robert Beatty.

Martin Spence

30^th July 2017   

Michael Bond passed away three weeks ago, but when I visited the statue of Paddington Bear at Paddington Station yesterday, it was still an intimate little shrine, festooned with flowers and jars of marmalade. There is definitely a ‘national treasure’ here somewhere, but I’m not entirely clear whether it’s Paddington Bear or Michael Bond. Or maybe a sort of composite of them both?

Although our memories of Michael today are inseparable from the figure of Paddington, there was a Michael before Paddington. When A Bear Called Paddington was published in 1958, Michael was a Cameraman at the BBC studios in Lime Grove. He had been working for the BBC for over a decade, and he would continue to work for them for almost another decade before finally deciding to become a full-time writer.

The History Project interview with Michael, viewable online at http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/michael-bond, focuses on his time at the BBC, not just as a backdrop to his celebrity as the creator of Paddington, but because of the light it sheds on television broadcasting in its early, formative years.

Michael first joined the BBC as a restless teenager. He was 17, stuck in a dead-end job as a solicitor’s clerk, and the War was on. The BBC were advertising for wireless engineers to help construct a wartime network of local transmitters, and he landed a job. This was followed by a period in the RAF in the hope of becoming a pilot, only to find that he got air-sick; followed by a transfer to the Army. But once his service was over, he returned to the BBC where his job had been kept open for him.  

His next BBC posting was as an engineer at the ‘listening post’ at Caversham outside Reading, where foreign language broadcasts were monitored. It’s clear from the interview that he found this an interesting time, and that he met a number of ‘colourful characters’ among the refugees and emigrés who worked there. But he was also acutely aware that the BBC had resumed its television service, suspended during the War, and he was keen to be part of it. The problem was that by now the BBC had pigeon-holed him: he had been employed as a wireless engineer, and trained as a wireless engineer, and the Corporation intended that he would serve out his time as a wireless engineer.

Opportunity knocked in the mid-50s, when a cut in Caversham’s funding forced it to shed jobs. Michael was offered a choice between redundancy, or a transfer to some other department, and he seized the chance to move to television. He arrived at Lime Grove just as the BBC was facing up to the challenge of competition in the shape of commercial television. The new ITV network was luring away BBC TV staff with tempting salaries and benefits, but from his point of view this was fine, because it created openings for newcomers like him. He had escaped the prospect of a life sentence in wireless engineering, and could embark on a new course as a television cameraman.

Michael’s descriptions of working life on the studio floor in the 1950s are a treat. Two things stand out for me. Firstly, the sheer hard work of shifting enormous TV cameras, attached to heavy electrical cable which had constantly to be moved out of the way, all of which meant that back problems were a constant hazard among the staff. The BBC doctor was a regular visitor. Secondly, television was a live medium: every image which Michael and his colleagues captured, every camera movement, every zoom-in and pull-out, was broadcast to the audience at the moment of capture. No chance here of “fixing it in post”.     

Inevitably there were some hair-raising moments – such as the time when Michael was still a relative rookie, operating Camera No. 4 on a four-camera drama shoot, with the straightforward job of providing a static general view of the set. Then one of the other cameras broke down, followed by a second, and a third, and suddenly Michael was covering the action alone, live, continuously, the sole remaining link between the studio and the audience. He survived.   

In the early 60s he moved from Lime Grove to the newly-built Television Centre at White City. By this time he was a Senior Cameraman with a reputation for working on children’s programmes, and a close working relationship with Biddie Baxter, long-time editor of Blue Peter. He recalled that crews “always wanted to do a good programme for her”.

And also by this point, the Paddington books were enormously popular. In 1967 Michael left the BBC and set out on his second career, as one of the most successful and beloved children’s authors of our time.

The death of Roger Moore last month triggered a wave of nostalgia, with the main focus inevitably on his seven film performances as James Bond. His were the funniest and silliest of the Bond movies. The plots, the villains, the fights, the gadgets, the seductions, were classic kitsch: cheesy and tacky, yet knowing and ironic. And Moore, with his matinee idol looks and oh-so-expressive eyebrow, was just the man to personify the package, a mocking celebration of Britain’s ‘70s and ‘80s delusions about itself. And the fans loved him for it. Maybe it was rubbish, but it was our rubbish.

Those of a certain age will also remember his earlier TV action-adventure incarnations as The Saint, made by Lew Grade’s ITC for ITV from 1962 to 1969; and ITC’s 1971 follow-on series The Persuaders which added Tony Curtis for a bit of transatlantic appeal. If an episode of The Saint was on, my brother and I would suspend our endless feuding to watch it, simply because it was on. Such was the power of telly.

But back to Bond. The History Project collection includes a number of interviews with, or references to, key figures on Moore-era Bond films.

Ken Adam acted as Production Designer on The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, and there is an interview with him at http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/ken-adam. He was succeeded by Peter Lamont who designed Moore’s last three Bond films: For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, and A View to a Kill. Lamont is mentioned by Terry Ackland-Snow in his interview at http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/terry-ackland-snow.

Alan Hume was Cinematographer on those same three films. His interview is at http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/alan-hume

Guy Hamilton, who directed Moore’s first two Bond films, Live and Let Die, and The Man with the Golden Gun is mentioned by Sydney Samuelson (http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/sydney-samuelson) and Peggy Gick (http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/peggy-gick). And there is an interview with Lewis Gilbert (http://historyproject.org.uk/content/0386) who directed The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker.

Gordon McCallum was Dubbing Mixer on The Spy Who Loved Me, and Re-recording Mixer on Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, and Octopussy. The transcript of his History Project interview can be found at http://historyproject.org.uk/content/0058.

Finally, Stunt Performer Doug Robinson did his eye-watering stuff on five of Moore’s seven Bond pictures: Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, and A View to a Kill. His interview is at http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/doug-robinson

ROGER MOORE as JAMES BOND: FILMOGRAPHY

Live and Let Die 1973

The Man with the Golden Gun 1974

The Spy Who Loved Me 1977

Moonraker 1979

For Your Eyes Only 1981

Octopussy 1983

A View to a Kill 1985.

Martin Spence

June 2017

The ‘Girls Like Us: British Women and WWII Cinema’ season continues at the National Film Theatre in May with more great films on offer. As in April, and despite the fact that these 1940s films have been selected for their strong female content, all of them were directed by men. But, also as in April, if we look more closely we will still find women in key roles not just on screen but also behind the camera.

In my previous post I focused on Carmen Dillon, who made her name as an Art Director during the War. But I also highlighted editing as one area where women were making a particular impact in the British film industry of the 1940s. Across the Girls Like Us season as a whole, we have Vera Campbell who was editor of Unpublished Story in 1942; Winifred Cooper on Tomorrow We Live in 1943 and Candlelight in Algeria in 1944; Flora Newton on Thursday’s Child in 1943 and Piccadilly Incident in 1946; and Betty Orgar on Great Day in 1945. 

We all know that in general, across most occupations in most industries, higher-status and better-paid jobs are associated with men, and lower-status and worse-paid jobs with women. But the status attached to a particular job, and the practical or creative value of that job, are two different things, and this is illustrated by the case of women film editors.

Film production took shape in the early twentieth century as a male-dominated domain. It was highly technical, and technical work was generally seen as ‘unsuitable’ for women, in common with other jobs which were defined (by men) as challenging, professional or high-status. But this did not apply to editing or ‘cutting’. Editing in the early days seems to have been regarded primarily as a matter of assembling shots whose running-order and inter-relations had already been decided ‘in camera’. The job was understood to require care and diligence, but no great technical or creative ability. This is certainly the view of veteran editor Anne V. Coates – still going strong at the age of 92, whose History Project interview is at http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/anne-v-coates. She says:

“ … most of the editors (i.e. on early, silent films) were women, and they started by cutting negative. And I think that women were considered more patient and careful and all those sorts of things” (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0167613/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1).

Hence the emergence of the woman editor, which was not restricted to Britain. In Hollywood too, editing provided a way in for women, precisely because it was initially seen as low-status, low-paid work (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/martin-scorsese-jason-reitman-reveal-664559).

In the 1910s and 1920s one of Britain’s leading directors was Maurice Elvey. In later years he recalled that before 1920, one of his crew was:

“that charming lady Alma Reville who was to become Mrs Alfred Hitchcock and at that time used to edit my films for me”.

We don’t know exactly which of Elvey’s films she worked on because credits in those days were few and far between, but she can be seen on screen in his great – unreleased – masterpiece The Life Story of David Lloyd George made in 1918. In 1930 Elvey gave an interview to the Daily Express in which he discussed various film industry roles:

“Another job is the negative editing and cutting and the piecing of the actual film when made. This is usually done by women, and is well paid. Some of them earn from £10 to £15 a week.”

So it seems that by 1930, editing was still seen as women’s work, but its status and financial rewards were improving.

By 1930 of course, sound had arrived, but this was not a key factor. Throughout the 1920s there had been a growing understanding of the creative contribution of the editor, as late-silent projects became increasingly complex and ambitious. If anything, the advent of sound set things back by imposing new limitations on visual story-telling. Eisenstein’s conception of montage is just one, well-known example of the appreciation, in the late-silent era, of editing as a creative moment in the filmmaking process.

The 1930s and 1940s therefore represent an interesting period. On the one hand, there was this new realization of the creative potential of editing, and ambitious young men chose to work as editors to hone their story-telling skills before moving on to direct: Thorold Dickinson, Robert Hamer, David Lean. In his autobiography Nice Work Adrian Brunel described his cutting rooms as “a sort of film university” from which “many brilliant film workers graduated”.

On the other hand, there was a continuing tradition of editing as a female craft. Anne V. Coates remembers the 1940s, when she entered the industry, as a time of many women editors. But few went on to direct, and Anne casts some light on this as well. When asked if she ever wanted to be a director, she answered:

“Yes, when I was younger.  But as soon as I had children, I realized I would have to give up too much of my life to directing, and would not be able to give enough to my children … The director has to be there; if he’s not there at 7:30 in the morning, the show doesn’t go.  If the editor comes in late because a child has a cough, no one really knows as long as you keep up with the day’s cutting.  My husband was a director––and one in the family was enough”. (https://www.editorsguild.com/Magazine.cfm?ArticleID=831)

Even if most women editors did not become directors, they still needed good relations with directors, for the simple reason that directors have a big say in who gets to work on their films. This is especially true of the editor, whose working relationship with the director is inevitably close and intense. The career-defining partnership of Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese is probably the best-known example of this today, but it’s not unique. Long-lasting director-editor relationships litter the history of the industry.

Take one of our British 1940s women editors, Thelma Connell. As Thelma Myers, she worked with Noel Coward and David Lean on In Which We Serve; and with Michael Powell on One of Our Aircraft is Missing and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Then in 1945 she edited Sidney Gilliat’s film The Rake’s Progress, and her own career-defining relationship took off. From 1945 to 1960 she edited film after film either for Gilliat, or for his collaborator and friendly rival Frank Launder. Her Gilliat films include Green for Danger (1947), London Belongs to Me (1948), and State Secret (1950); and among her Launder films are I See a Dark Stranger (1946), Folly to be Wise (1952), and two St Trinians films in 1954 and 1960.

Thelma only tried her hand at directing once: in 1954 she co-directed and co-edited the crime drama Tale of Three Women. Instead, she branched out in a different direction, stepping across from the mid-1950s into the new and challenging world of commercial television. First she worked as editor on Colonel March of Scotland Yard, starring Boris Karloff; and then she worked as editor, and subsequently as associate producer, on the long-running children’s series The Adventures of Robin Hood. In his History Project interview at http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/sidney-cole, the producer Sidney Cole talks about his own work on Robin Hood, and recalls Thelma – “a very nice person and very good editor” – advising him on the most economical way to edit (yet another) dramatic Sherwood Forest ambush. But Thelma never gave up on the film industry or on her relationship with Frank Launder. She edited her last film for him, The Pure Hell of St Trinians, while also holding down her TV associate producer job on Robin Hood.

So, if you manage to get along to the NFT season, remember to look out for the films edited by women, and remember to celebrate their work when you find them.  

Many thanks to Lucie Dutton (who tweets @MissElvey) for information on Maurice Elvey; and to Polly Rose (who tweets @theflyingeditor) for many invaluable comments and for pointing me to sources on Anne V. Coates, Adrian Brunel and others.

Martin Spence

May 2017

The latest batch of History Project interviews uploaded to our website this month include:

Interview number 532  Peter Graham Scott  Peter was an film producer, film director and screenwriter. One of the producers and directors who shaped British television drama in its formative years, He was a key figure in television drama in the seventies and eighties and was responsible for top rating series including The Avengers, Mogul, The Troubleshooters, and, most successfully, The Onedin Line, which ran for 9 years. He was much admired by fellow directors as well as actors and was renowned for his film editing skills, which he had honed in the forties while working for J Arthur Rank on films such as Brighton Rock.

Interview number 575   Doug Robinson The younger brother of fellow actor/stunt man Joe Robinson, Doug was born Douglas Bowbank Robinson in central Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1930. Their father Joseph Robinson Senior and grandfather John were world champion wrestlers, and both brothers trained in wrestling and body-building. Doug’s film career began in the mid-1950s, and his early film work included Ben-Hur (1959). He was also one of the Argonauts in Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and he made numerous British television appearances usually as a tough guy in everything from The Avengers to Steptoe and Son. Together, Doug and Joe became two of the cinema’s most popular stunt arrangers, particularly on the James Bond films. Doug and Joe co-authored, with Honor Blackman, the book “Honor Blackman’s Book of Self-Defence” published by Andre Deutsch in 1965.
 

Interview number 520 Betty Willingale Betty is a British television producer, formerly a script editor, who is best known for her work on BBC TV drama adaptations of classic literature. She  worked on key BBC drama series and serials including North and South (1975) and I Claudius (1976). She went on to form a strong working partnership with producer Jonathan Powell script editing many of Powell’s most successful drama serials including the hit adaptations of A Christmas Carol (1977), Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy (1979) and The Barchester Chronicles  (1982)

Interview number 128  Jack Gold  Jack was a BAFTA award-winning film and TV director of confrontational documentaries and touching dramas, including Aces High,Goodnight Mister Tom     and The Naked Civil Servant.

In April and May 2017 the National Film Theatre is running a season of films under the heading’Girls Like Us: British Women and WWII Cinema’. There are some real treasures here. Some of the April titles – Went the Day Well?, Millions Like Us, In Which We Serve – are relatively well-known. But – to my enduring shame, I’m sure – I have never seen Demi-Paradise, or The Gentle Sex, or Unpublished Story. I can’t wait.

The ‘Girls Like Us’ theme refers, of course, to the actors. These are films of female agency, where women take the lead in terms of storyline and performance. But with regard to the process of production, they reflect the film industry of their time, the industry of the 1940s. Every film in the series was directed by a man, every producer was a man, every cinematographer was a man. But even so, it wasn’t a masculine clean sweep. Female designers, technicians and craft workers were breaking through here and there. Marjorie Whittle was Hair Stylist on The Gentle Sex and Perfect Strangers; and Elizabeth Haffenden took on the Costume Design for Two Thousand Women (on whom see Melanie Williams’s blog post at http://historyproject.org.uk/blogs/girl-you-don%E2%80%99t-see-julie-harris-and-costume-designer-british-cinema, and interviews with Edward Carrick at http://historyproject.org.uk/content/0182 and Anthony Mendelson at http://historyproject.org.uk/content/0280).  

Significantly, the role in which women made the biggest impact – in this collection of films, at least – was that of Editor. Thelma Connell (mentioned in the History Project interview with Sidney Cole at http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/sidney-cole) co-edited In Which We Serve with David Lean in 1942; Vera Campbell edited Unpublished Story in the same year; and Flora Newton edited Piccadilly Incident in 1946.

But the individual I want to discuss here is Carmen Dillon, Art Director on the three films I’ve already highlighted: Demi-Paradise, The Gentle Sex, and Unpublished Story. Carmen, who trained as an architect, had arrived as an Art Director with a bang in 1938, in which year she made four films. But this was not achieved without a struggle: she faced open hostility from some men in the studios, was subjected to comments such as “That bloody Carmen Dillon is keeping a man out of a job”, was not allowed to wear trousers, and was discouraged from mixing with her colleagues.

Maybe the toll taken by this experience partly explains why she dropped off the radar for a while. But in 1942 the director Harold French brought her back to work on Unpublished Story and Secret Mission, after which she was in steady demand. In these years her key relationships seem to have been with French himself, and with Anthony Asquith. After Demi-Paradise she worked with Asquith on several more films including The Way to the Stars, The Woman in Question, The Browning Version, and the sumptuously-designed, gorgeously-Technicolored The Importance of Being Earnest in 1952. By that time she was at the top of her trade, the first woman to win an Oscar for art direction/set decoration for her work on Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet in 1948.

Carmen’s career from the 1950s onwards was a gloriously varied affair, taking in more Shakespearean Olivier, a couple of Carry On’s, and the iconic horror The Omen.

The History Project collection has three sources on Carmen Dillon: her own interview at http://historyproject.org.uk/content/0288, and references to her in the interviews with Kay Mander (http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/kay-mander) and Tom Peacock (http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/tom-peacock). Other online sources include several production case-studies at http://www.screenonline.org.uk/ , and for some wonderful insights into the making of The Reluctant Widow in 1950, go to https://isthereroomformetosew.com/2015/03/18/reflecting-on-the-reluctant-widow/ .

Martin Spence

This month – March 2017 – the National Film Theatre is showcasing Ken Russell’s 1971 production of The Boy Friend, focusing in particular on the production design and costume design that gave it its particular 1920s/1960s crossover look.

The Boy Friend sits right in the middle of Russell’s purple patch, stretching from the mid-60s to the mid-70s, when he produced much of his most enduring work. In the early 1960s he was in television, producing idiosyncratic documentaries, including several on composers – Bartok, Debussy, Prokoviev – for the BBC ‘Monitor’ series. From 1967 he moved into film with Billion Dollar Brain, followed in 1969 by Women In Love which won him an Oscar nomination, and Glenda Jackson an Oscar.

His feet didn’t touch the ground over the next few years. 1970 saw him back with the composers: Dance of the Seven Veils was a highly controversial TV biopic of Richard Strauss, and The Music Lovers was a lurid reimagining of Tchaikovsky’s music and sexuality. These were followed in 1971 by The Devils (blasphemy, erotic fantasy, orgy, torture); in 1972 by Savage Messiah (extremes of artistic angst); in 1974 by Mahler (including Nazi references, although Mahler himself died before the First World War) – and so on. His films were greeted by some as works of genius and by others as offensive exhibitionism.

But like him or loathe him, you couldn’t ignore him, and he is referred to in British Entertainment History Project interviews with Terry Ackland-Snow (http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/terry-ackland-snow), David Puttnam (http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/david-puttnam), and Gordon McCallum (http://historyproject.org.uk/content/0058).

In 1971, right in the middle of this run of sensational and controversial work, Russell made The Boy Friend, a very different sort of film, an unashamedly romantic musical. But many of those who worked on The Boy Friend were regular collaborators from his other, more lurid efforts. These included his wife Shirley Russell, costume designer; George Ball, props master; Michael Bradsell, editor; and Neville C. Thompson, production manager. All of these worked on all or most of Russell’s films from Women in Love through to Savage Messiah and Tommy.

Then there were others, not Russell regulars but experienced technicians who contributed to one or two of his projects. Two of those who worked on The Boy Friend have given interviews to the History Project. The first is the cinematographer David Watkin (http://historyproject.org.uk/content/0320) who by 1971 was a major figure in the industry, having shot The Charge of the Light Brigade and Catch 22, both of which attracted BAFTA nominations for Best Cinematography. He shot The Devils and The Boy Friend with Russell, and later in his career he won an Oscar for Out of Africa. David is also mentioned in interviews with Lindsay Anderson (http://historyproject.org.uk/content/lindsay-anderson) and Oswald ‘Ossie’ Morris (http://historyproject.org.uk/content/oswald-ossie-morris).

Secondly there was the sound recordist Maurice Askew (http://historyproject.org.uk/content/0294) who before doing The Boy Friend had worked on Women in Love and The Music Lovers. He was an industry veteran who by the early 1970s had over 20 years of film and TV productions under his belt, from the children’s TV series Stingray and numerous B-movies, through to big-budget Bond films Thunderball and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Maurice was awarded a CBE in 1981.

The Boy Friend has a very different feel to the Russell films which bracketed it: no nude wrestling, no orgies, no torture, blasphemy or Nazis. But for some, this was still the same old Ken Russell up to the same old tricks. Jan Dawson’s review of The Boy Friend in the Spring 1972 issue of Sight and Sound, for instance, was a masterpiece of sniffy vitriol:

“ … Ken Russell consistently approaches his source material as a tattered poster upon which to scrawl those outsized and eye-catching graffiti that pass for an auteur’s signature among less discerning critics of the Common Market countries … He mistakes his distorting mirror for a window on the world … a comic-strip frieze in which petty-minded puppets roll their bulging eyeballs to cavort in clashing costumes through gaudy decors … his source material is first trivialised, then – in its newly impoverished form – inflated to epic proportions … “

It was Russell’s cavalier treatment of his source material – in this case, Sandy Wilson’s much-loved 1953 stage musical – which clearly infuriated Dawson. She accused him of:

“ … eclipsing the fragile dignity of Sandy Wilson’s characters  … “.

For Dawson the one redeeming element in the whole catastrophe was Twiggy, in her first screen role, for which she won a Golden Globe:

“ … her natural beauty … has no need of the surrounding ugliness to set it off … She has a sweet, clear voice that restores the songs to some of their original innocence, and serves as a wistful reminder just how much nicer – and quieter– the stage version was”.

I suspect that Russell regarded Dawson’s review as a back-handed compliment: “nice and quiet” was never, after all, his top priority.

In February 2017 the National Film Theatre (NFT) has been screening Robert Hamer’s 1947 classic It Always Rains On Sunday – a dark and complex domestic thriller from Ealing Studios, from a time before it became overwhelmingly associated with ‘Ealing Comedies’. (The first ‘Ealing Comedy’, Hue and Cry, was in fact produced in the same year).

It Always Rains On Sunday stars Googie Withers in perhaps her finest role. In a bleak portrayal of post-war East End working class life, she plays Rose, a woman with a past, forced to choose between a decent but unexciting husband and family, and a glamorous but dangerous old flame who turns up out of the blue, on the run from the law. I won’t say more: if you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a morally-compromised treat.

The film has a noirish flavour, and it’s perfectly possible that director Robert Hamer and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe had seen films such as Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice which were coming out of the USA: crime dramas with a cynical line on sex and romance and a starkly expressionist look. But if this is noir, then it is very British noir. American films such as Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice are set on the west coast, in a spatial expanse of suburbs, highways, motels and mobility, where the option of escape, of moving on, is ever-present. It Always Rains On Sunday is very different, set in working class London, a world of narrow streets, and poky over-crowded Victorian terraces, where every move is monitored by family members or nosy neighbours. There is an overwhelmingly claustrophobic feeling to Hamer’s film, a sense of being hemmed in, entrapped.

The cast and crew on It Always Rains is well-represented in the British Entertainment History Project collection. Firstly, there’s an audio interview with Googie Withers, along with her actor husband John McCallum. Its available to listen to directly from the website (http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/googie-withers-john-mccallum).

Secondly, there is an interview with the cinematographer Doug Slocombe. Slocombe was in his mid-30s when he shot It Always Rains, but he was already a veteran of some hair-raising filmmaking adventures. He started out as a stills photographer in the 1930s, but was persuaded to do some clandestine anti-Nazi filming in Germany and Poland in 1939, and found himself in Warsaw when the Germans invaded. He just about managed to slip out and get back to Britain, where he did wartime documentary and propaganda work with the Ministry of Information, before he was persuaded by the Brazilian filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti to move over to Ealing. His best-known projects there include Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Lavender Hill Mob, and post-Ealing triumphs included The Italian Job, The Lion in Winter, and Stephen Spielberg’s insanely successful ‘Indiana Jones’ films in the 1980s. The BEHP interview is audio only, available on the website (http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/douglas-slocombe).

The interviews with Charles Crichton and Sidney Cole are also worth a visit. Neither of them worked on It Always Rains, but Crichton was an Ealing-based editor and director who knew Robert Hamer, and the film’s producers Michael Balcon and Henry Cornelius, and refers to them in his interview. Unfortunately it has not been digitised and uploaded to the website (we’re currently working through a large back-list and haven’t got to him yet), but a transcript is available (http://historyproject.org.uk/content/0072).

Sidney Cole was an editor and producer at Ealing, who went on to have a long career in TV producing series such as Danger Man (which I personally remember with enormous affection). In the 1930s he was one of the founding members of the film technicians’ union the ACT (later ACTT, then BECTU, and now the BECTU Sector of Prospect). Cole refers to Robert Hamer in his interview, which like the Crichton interview is not yet directly available online, but there is a transcript (http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/sidney-cole).

What of Robert Hamer himself, the director of It Always Rains On Sunday? He started out in the 1930s as a documentary editor working at the GPO Film Unit with John Grierson and Cavalcanti. From there Hamer moved to Ealing with Cavalcanti, working initially as an editor, and then as a director. His talent was undeniable: he directed the classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, and his last film was the brilliant comedy of manners School for Scoundrels: if you haven’t seen the tennis scene where Terry-Thomas humiliates Ian Carmichael, you haven’t lived. But Hamer was a tortured soul. He was gay at a time when it was a crime, and he struggled with alcoholism and poor health. He died at the age of 52.

Finally, although Alberto Cavalcanti didn’t work on It Always Rains On Sunday, he too is part of its story in that he personally recruited three of its key creators to Ealing Studios: the director Robert Hamer, the cinematographer Doug Slocombe, and the producer Henry Cornelius. Cavalcanti is probably best known for his film Went The Day Well?, made during the War in 1942, which ‘looks back’ at the War from a fictional-future, post-war vantage point (and I’m delighted to say that the NFT will be screening it in April 2017). But this was only one episode in a career which combined documentary filmmaking, feature films, and political activism. After leaving Ealing, Cavalcanti returned to his native Brazil to carry on making films, but was hounded out by the country’s right-wing government which branded him as a Communist. In his last years he made his home in France.

For more on It Always Rains On Sunday and the people who made it, go to BFI ScreenOnline at http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/486809/

FROM START TO FINISH – FROM A TECHNICAL POINT OF VIEW

Thanks to Ian Noah, Alison and others, there is quite a comprehensive guide to the Workflow needed when undertaking an interview for the History Project. I thought it would be good to set out below my experience of filming interviews for the History Project, through editing to archiving and uploading to the web. The process probably throws up more questions than answers but I thought it would be a good exercise and a starting point for other people to contribute their knowledge . I don’t pretend to know all the technical language. Some of the procedures I have undertaken a certain way I have done because I have been advised it is the best way..

CAMERA FOR FILMING

I use a Sony EX3 camera . It is at the cheaper end of the Sony Broadcast XDCAM series of camcorders which uses Mpeg -2 in the recording section.  I am now using HD setting 1080/25p – 1080 the number of lines scanned determining the resolution of the picture  ( I can record 720 which uses less pixels but is not considered  full HD) . 25 is the number of scans per second. p standing for progressive where there is no interlacing and the camera scans line 1 then line 2 etc.  i–interlaced scanning has been the traditional system that has been used for decades broadcasting with 405 and 625 line transmissions. Yorkshire TV, when filming ‘Heartbeat’ using a video camera, de-interlaced the image which was supposed to give it a ‘filmic look’. When I first used progressive on my broadcast dvcam camcorder back in the 1990s, the picture became jerky when I did a quick pan and only became apparent in the edit suite. Things have changed and improved so progressive mode does seem to be the future. It is, so I am told, more computer and web friendly. So in conclusion I think progressive is best to use for The History Project.

This is an extract from Wiki ‘Broadcasting Standards”

For live broadcast applications, a high-definition progressive scan format operating at 1080p at 50 or 60 frames per second is currently being evaluated as a future standard for moving picture acquisition.[2][3][needs update] EBU has been endorsing 1080p50 as a future-proof production format because it improves resolution and requires no deinterlacing, allows broadcasting of standard 1080i25 and 720p50 signal alongside 1080p50 even in the current infrastructure and is compatible with DCI distribution formats.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080p – cite_note-EBU_No1_1080p50-4

Much of my camera set ups have been determined by the requirements of working for the BBC. Some years ago the BBC published a list of cameras that met their broadcast standards. This was written by Alan Roberts who tested all the cameras and checked their specification. The list is no longer a ‘gospel’ as new cameras and technical requirements do change. One requirement for broadcast is a minimum bit rate of 50MB per sec. This is the amount of digital information which is recorded within the camera per second.  My present camera records at a maximum of 35MB per sec and the BBC do use other cameras which have this spec. I would suspect not even an experienced broadcast engineer could see on a monitor the difference between a sequence recorded at 35 or 50MB per sec.

And now we have 4K (Ultra High definition), the new standard being introduced with quite a lot of reasonably priced camcorders having this ability.  4K has twice the definition of what we know as ‘full HD’ which could be called 2K. Now the Japanese have come up with Ultra High Definition 8K – where does the story end? The History Project has to decide the best recording standard.  Perhaps the best answer, at the moment, is the best each individual can obtain. When the Project updates its own equipment I think originating on 4K will ‘future proof ‘ the recording for sometime, if not decades.

While recording at the best possible standard may be important, the higher the standard, the larger the amount of digital information that has to be processed during the editing and archiving process.  I record onto SD cards. (1080/25p at 35MB per sec).  Recording at this standard, a 32GB SD card will hold up to a 2hr interview. (The card has to be a quality -10 – capable of 60MB per second).
That is a writing speed of  60mbs which is slower than the reading speed which is often written on the card

OTHER EQUIPMENT NEEDED FOR FILMING.

I use two personal mikes (close miking) . One on the interviewee (ch 1 on the camcorder) and one on the interviewer (ch 2).  While many sound recordist will use a boom for the interviewee for a number of reasons, I feel ‘close miking’ is a good compromise as there isn’t a separate person looking after the sound.

I usually use two lights (both soft and dimmable). It was the case that lights where essential to film indoors when film stock and video cameras were not so sensitive. Now the use of lights is not essential but it does mean you don’t have to rely on daylight coming through the window or the lighting already in the room which might be of dubious colour quality. I use lights to give a consistent look to the interview and hopefully a certain ‘shine’.

FILMING THE INTERVIEW

Although the interviews are recorded now on video, I think the prime consideration has to be to choose a place for the interview that is acoustically good. No obtrusive background noise (might be traffic noise) and no bare walls that create an echo and sounds like interviewee is in a bathroom. I find it an advantage if it is a fairly large room for a number of reasons. Firstly I think keeping a good separation between the interviewer and interviewer (6-8ft maybe) is a good idea. It means the interviewee will speak up and thus the other noises will not be so evident. Also the large separation between the two mikes, means the interviewee’s voice will be picked up by the interviewers mike at a very low level. This avoids having to take down of the interviewer’s mike level while the interviewee is speaking, at the editing stage.

The camera lens needs to be on the same level and close to interviewer.  Comfy chairs of the same height for interviewer and interviewee are a good idea. I prefer chairs that do not backs that engulf the interviewee.  I have found swivel chairs need to be avoided, as the interviewee will tend to swivel during the interview.  I prefer to find a pleasing framing for the interviewee, usually a mid shot (waist up) and stick with it. After all, the interview is not going to be edited and I find going ‘in and out’ distracting. Keeping the camera and the interviewer a fair distance from the interviewee does sometimes allow the background to be slightly out of focus. Which can be a pleasing effect.

Using the daylight as a fill light (Or could be called a base light). However it is worth checking, if possible, if the light will be consistent as the I/V will probably last over an hour and you don’t want to keep stopping because the daylight has changed. The same goes for having a window in shot.

I set up the record the level for each mike on the camera just before the recording and then leave it – occasionally checking the level in the viewfinder indicator. I do not use the auto level facility.

EDITING

Again by choice for editing software has been dictated by my work  for BBC English Regions.  Some years ago BBC Regions decided to use Final Cut 7 for their ‘outpost’ editing stations. A Quantel system is used in the Regional Centres.  I have got used to using FCP7. I find it is not ideal, mainly because of the time it takes to encode the output from the timeline edit which I have put together. (It can take overnight or more for a long I/V.) I will be changing to FCP X but changing means a learning curve again. I suppose most non-linear systems work in a similar way with a timeline for video and audio tracks. For the History Project only a few adjustments usually need to be made.  I ingest the material from the SD card using the sequence preset on FCP7 which has XDCAM EX 1080/25p(1920 x 1080  25fps Mpeg 2 – at 35MB per sec with audio at 48khz) or (1920 x 1080  25fps Mpeg 2 – at 35MB per sec with audio at 48khz).

Whatever the settings on the camera, it is probably best to keep them at least through the editing process. Once the clips have been ingested into FCP 7 ( there may be two or three long clips making up the I/V which may be 2 hours long) I put them onto the timeline in order. I then trim them of any unnecessary bits at the start and end and join them together. I use a fade to black effect to join the clips.  Sometimes I have used a quick dissolve or maybe just a jump-cut. I set the level of track 1 and 2 (Ch 1 and Ch 2 from the camcorder). Normally the level does not need adjusting throughout the I/V recording as the separation of the two mikes means the mikes can be left open when one or the other person speaks. The I/V is then ready for exporting and decisions have to made.

EXPORTING, ARCHIVING AND UPLOADING

This is an area I find quite tricky with so many options and decisions to make.
The outcome that is desired as I see it is as follows.

A DVD as a record of the interview that can be kept by The History Project.

A suitable copy for uploading to the British Entertainment History Project website and archiving  on google drive

A High Definition copy to be kept by the  BEHP and the bfi on  a hard drive.

SD CARDS

I think it is also desirable for the History Project to keep the original SD card/cards

DVD
For the DVD, I can just highlight the sequence to be put onto DVD on my timeline and use the ‘Share ‘ option in the FCP7 and choose the DVD option. The sequence will be compressed to produce the DVD.  A standard DVD (Capacity 4.7 GBs) can take about I hour of good quality Mpeg 2 video. A standard  DVD is single layer. A dual layer DVD can hold  up to 2 hours. All DVDs are standard definition.

It is no use just burning a video file to DVD, as this might play on a computer, but it will be just a data file and not formatted to play on a DVD player. A DVD software needs to be used. Most edit software comes with a DVD burner.

EXPORTING FOR UPLOADING TO THE WEBSITE AND ARCHIVING ON GOOGLE DRIVE

Ian and Alison have published a guide about uploading to the Website under the Production Hub heading

I am learning about this process. I have opened a google drive account and can upload the video files to my drive and I imagine I will be able to upload to the BEHP Google Drive. I have not had any success yet using the upload form on the BEHP website. But I am still working on this problem which must be on my computer.

Here are some of my musings about preparing a file to upload.

Here starts the language of  ‘wrappers’, codecs, frame rates and bit rates.
I am still learning but I think there is one general rule and that is try to keep the settings the same as you had when the recording was made. That is the same frame rate (for me 25fps), the same resolution ( HD 1080 x 1920). The bit rate will determine the size of the file along with whether you choose –single pass – or multi –pass and of course will determine the quality of the picture.

Google Drive will accept most types of video files – perhaps MP4 (‘wrapper’)  which contains the H264 codec and audio file could be the one to choose.

I have put below  the Google Drive  list of accepted  video files then some general advice from You Tube and Vimeo about how to export sequences from various edit software  to upload to the web at the best quality. There are also some usefull  video tips on how to export from various edit software on this vimeo page.
https://vimeo.com/help/compression

Video files in Google Drive
Google Drive gives you control over all of your file types in a single place, including video files. With Google Drive, you can:
* Sync or upload video files up to 5 TB in size (limited by available storage space)
* Sync or upload video files in the following formats:
o .WebM files (Vp8 video codec; Vorbis Audio codec)
o .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files – (h264 and mpeg4 video codecs; AAC audio codec)
o .AVI (MJPEG video codec; PCM audio)
o .MPEGPS (MPEG2 video codec; MP2 audio)
o .WMV
o .FLV (Adobe – FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)
o .MTS
* View all of your videos at a glance
* Share videos with other people without ever having to use an email attachment
* Add caption tracks to your video files.
Tips and notes
* Sync or upload your video in the original format and in the highest quality possible. The maximum resolution for playback is 1920×1080.
* Audio and video lengths should be the same, audio and video should start and end at the same time.
Preview and play a video
All of your uploaded videos can be found when you search Google Drive for Videos using the drop-down arrow in the search box. Click a file name to open and play the video using the Google Drive video player.
When you open a video, you’ll also see additional information about the file:
* Owner
* Sharing settings
* When the file was synced or uploaded
* Download previous versions of the file (you can’t view these versions in the video player).
Error messages
Below are some error messages you might see while trying to watch a video in Google Drive, and some possible solutions.
“The video is not yet processed.” or “This video is currently unavailable.”
Please try opening the file again later.
“Unable to process this video.”
The video file might be corrupted, or the video has been uploaded in a format that doesn’t work with the player. Please either choose a different format or try uploading the video again.
 

YOU TUBE

Recommended upload encoding settings
Container: MP4
* No Edit Lists (or the video might not get processed correctly)
* moov atom at the front of the file (Fast Start)
Audio codec: AAC-LC
* Channels: Stereo or Stereo + 5.1
* Sample rate 96khz or 48khz
Video codec: H.264
* Progressive scan (no interlacing)
* High Profile
* 2 consecutive B frames
* Closed GOP. GOP of half the frame rate.
* CABAC
* Variable bitrate. No bitrate limit required, though we offer recommended bit rates below for reference
* Chroma subsampling: 4:2:0
Frame rate
Content should be encoded and uploaded in the same frame rate it was recorded.
Common frame rates include: 24, 25, 30, 48, 50, 60 frames per second (other frame rates are also acceptable).
Interlaced content should be deinterlaced before uploading. For example, 1080i60 content should be deinterlaced to 1080p30, going from 60 interlaced fields per second to 30 progressive frames per second.
Bitrate
The bitrates below are recommendations for uploads. Audio playback bitrate is not related to video resolution.
Recommended video bitrates for uploads
Type
Video Bitrate, Standard Frame Rate
(24, 25, 30)
Video Bitrate, High Frame Rate
(48, 50, 60)
2160p (4k)
35-45 Mbps
53-68 Mbps
1440p (2k)
16 Mbps
24 Mbps
1080p
8 Mbps
12 Mbps
720p
5 Mbps
7.5 Mbps
480p
2.5 Mbps
4 Mbps
360p
1 Mbps
1.5 Mbps
Recommended audio bitrates for uploads
Type
Audio Bitrate
Mono
128 kbps
Stereo
384 kbps
5.1
512 kbps
Resolution and aspect ratio
YouTube uses 16:9 aspect ratio players. If you’re uploading a non-16:9 file, it will be processed and displayed correctly as well, with pillar boxes (black bars on the left and right) or letter boxes (black bars at the top and bottom) provided by the player.

VIMEO

Codec: H.264
A codec is the format in which your video will be encoded. Vimeo accepts most major video codecs, but for best results we recommend using H.264. If you’re uploading High Definition (HD) video, choose the High Profile H.264 setting instead of Main Profile.
Frame rate
When preparing your video for upload, it’s best to maintain the video’s native frame rate when compressing your video. If your footage exceeds 60 FPS, we will automatically reduce the frame rate. If there is an option for keyframes, choose the same value you used for frame rate. Important: Always choose “constant” frame rate instead of “variable” frame rate.
Bit rate
Bit rate (also known as data rate) controls the visual quality of the video and its file size. If your video editing software gives you the option, choose a “variable” bit rate and select a value from the ranges below. You can experiment with different rates if your file is too large or you’re not happy with the quality of your source file.
Quality
Bit rate (kbit/s)
SD
2,000 – 5,000
720p
5,000 – 10,000
1080p
10,000 – 20,000
2K
20,000 – 30,000
4K
30,000 – 60,000
Resolution
Videos come in all shapes and sizes but these are some of the most common formats.
Format
Resolution (px)
Standard Definition (SD)
4:3 aspect ratio
640 ? 480
Standard Definition (SD)
16:9 aspect ratio
640 ? 360
720p HD
16:9 aspect ratio
1280 ? 720
1080p HD
16:9 aspect ratio
1920 ? 1080
2K
16:9 aspect ratio
2560 ? 1440
4K
16:9 aspect ratio
3840 ? 2160
Audio
Codec: AAC-LC (Advanced Audio Codec)
For best results, we recommend using AAC-LC (low complexity) for the audio codec.
Data rate: 320 kbit/s
For best results, encode your audio at constant rate of 320 kbit/s.
Sample rate: 48 kHz
For best results, set your audio sample rate to 48 kHz. If your working setting is already less than or equal to 48 kHz, leave it as is.

ARCHIVING FOR bfi HARD DRIVE AND POSSIBLY BEHP HARD DRIVE

I think we need to know from the bfi  how  the valuable interviews should be stored on a hard drive. I  have found that exporting a 90 minute interview from my imac FCP 7 at high quality as a Quicktime movie created a file of 101 gigabites.

As you will have gathered this is very much a draft document to open up discussion about the best practice will follow.

Nick Gilbey

1st August 2016

8

The recent re-release of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, in a new print from the BFI, has been a triumph.

When Barry Lyndon first came out in 1975 it went off like a damp squib. Kubrick’s previous films – Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange – covered a range of themes and a variety of moods, but each in its own way kept the story moving along at a brisk canter. When it was known that Kubrick was working on a screenplay of Thackeray’s novel set in the eighteenth century, one obvious point of reference was Tom Jones, Tony Richardson’s bawdy celebration of life and lust starring young Albert Finney. Of course, Kubrick was a very different filmmaker – but even so, the eighteenth century was all about frock-coats, oaths and wenches, wasn’t it?

Hmm. If 1975’s audience expected another lusty romp, it was disappointed. What it got was an early exercise in what we now know as ‘slow film’. And it didn’t like it.  

I’ll come clean, I was part of that audience and I didn’t like it. I went along eagerly to see the new Kubrick film, having had my teenage mind blown by 2001 a few years earlier. But – like many others – I found it slow and long and couldn’t understand why Ryan O’Neal only had one expression. But seeing it again in 2016, with an extra 40 years of film-going under my belt, I loved it: beautifully designed, framed, and photographed; its pace just right; the performances – including O’Neal’s performance – exquisite; its baroque sound-track perfectly matched to its cool and ironic mood; its emotions locked down, smothered by style and poise.

Reviewing the details of the creative and technical team on Barry Lyndon has also reinforced my deep hostility to auteur theory. Some may think this absurd, seeing in Kubrick a classic case of a film Director driven by a powerful and sustained personal creative vision. But like any other Director, he could only hope to realise that vision by drawing on the creative input and technical expertise of many others; and the very process of drawing them in meant that those others were contributing to the vision and transforming it. And when those working relationships carry on from one project to the next, who is to say where creativity begins? Of course the Director is the person with whom the buck stops on a particular project, but the creative process itself is a broad stream with many tributaries.

So: on the Barry Lyndon crew we find Sound Recordist Michael (‘Mickey’) Hickey, who also worked with Kubrick on Lolita in 1962 and on 2001 in 1968. Michael was interviewed by the History Project in 1995 (no. 371) and a transcript is on the website.

In the Barry Lyndon Art Department we find Production Designer Ken Adam, who previously worked with Kubrick on Dr Strangelove in 1964. Ken – who died earlier this year – gave the History Project an interview (no. 416) which is on the website. The interview with his Art Department colleague Terry Ackland-Snow (no. 682) refers both to Terry’s role on Barry Lyndon, and to his working relationship with Ken. And we shouldn’t forget Roy Walker who served as Art Director on Barry Lyndon, and then stepped up to Production Designer for Kubrick’s The Shining in 1980, and Eyes Wide Shut in 1999.

In the Camera Department Cinematographer John Alcott, Operator Mike Molloy and Focus Puller Douglas (Doug) Milsome had all worked with Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange, but on Barry Lyndon they were at the sharp end of the technical challenge for which the film is most famous – shooting by candlelight. Kubrick was determined to recreate the visual feel of eighteenth century candle-lit interiors, and for this purpose he ordered a uniquely light-sensitive lens from NASA. To make this work required an extremely shallow depth of field, and Doug as Focus Puller had the job of working out how to deliver it. He had to invent an entirely new focus technique, which is still in use today. Doug went on to carve out a highly successful career as an Operator and Cinematographer.

Kubrick was an extraordinarily creative Director. But he could only achieve what he did through the contributions of others who were extraordinarily creative and skilled in their own domains. These relationships, sustained over many projects and many years, represent networks or matrices of shared imagination and invention, and this is what defines film as an art-form: its collective nature, its collective creativity. Barry Lyndon is a superb example of what it can achieve.

Thanks to Lucie Dutton and Tim Potter for their insights which I have shamelessly plagiarised and probably misrepresented.

You might also like to see:

Mark Kermode on Barry Lyndon at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/markkermode/entries/5baa2015-63fb-44aa-b3d8-fc1764f32709

BFI videos on YouTube, about Barry Lyndon and Art:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EykTXlhVmTg

literature:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQolFktJI8s

and technology:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXtZjiE-jQc

And this BFI photographic tribute to Ken Adam:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/obituaries/ken-adam-1921-2016-tribute-pictures

In August 2016  the following interviews have been digitised and uploaded to the website. Peggy Gick ( Interview number 403) ; Tony Garnett ( Interview number 560) ; Kitty Wood ( Morrison) ( Interview number 6) ; Peter Morley ( Interview  number 166) ; Rodney Giesler ( Interview number 312) 

In August 2016  the following interviews have been digitised and uploaded to the website. Peggy Gick ( Interview number 403) ; Tony Garnett ( Interview number 560) ; Kitty Wood ( Morrison) ( Interview number 6) ; Peter Morley ( Interview  number 166) ; Rodney Giesler ( Interview number 312) 

Author: Melanie Williams, (School of Art, Media & America Studies, University of East Anglia)

Screen costume has now been firmly established as a worthy object of academic study, following the publication of numerous scholarly monographs and edited collections devoted to the topic; a development connected in part to the broader expansion of Fashion Studies over the last few decades.^[1] However, the emphasis in these studies has tended to fall more on the on-screen semiotics of costume and its function within the mise-en-scène than on the finer details of its creation and provenance. But given women’s long-standing and continuing prominence within the field of costume design, and its common designation as a feminine specialism ‘considered “women’s work” whether practised by women or by men’, it is clear that this area offers especially productive territory for feminist film history and production studies to explore, with their shared priorities in recording and examining female film labour.^[2]

The work that has already been undertaken in this area has suggested that the gendering of costume design as feminine has entailed lower status and prestige for its exponents. Costume designer (and historian/activist/advocate for the profession) Deborah Nadoolman Landis cites the example of the omission of costume designers from the film listings in the Directors Guild of America’s magazine, despite the analogous posts of cinematographer, production designer and editor all being included in its credits, as proof of the industry’s ‘nefarious gender bias’, and argues that this kind of creative invisibility has a direct correspondence with the lower pay costume designers can expect to earn, with ‘the base salary for the costume designer nearly one third less than an entering production designer’ in Hollywood today while internationally ‘the weekly wage of the costume designer does not approach the minimums of the cinematographer, production designer and editor.’^[3] As production studies scholar Miranda J. Banks suggests, evidence like this suggests how costume ‘is devalued in relation to professions of, arguably, comparable import that are majority male’. ^[4] It is important that feminist film scholarship works to overturn the marginalisation, devaluation and invisibility of women’s work, including in the realm of costume, and this research is animated by that imperative.

This article focusses on a case study of multi-award-winning British costume designer Julie Harris (1921-2015), plotting and analysing traces of her creative labour through a variety of primary sources, most notably Harris’s annotated costume sketches (held in the Special Collections of the BFI National Archive) and the films to which she contributed, promotional and publicity material, as well as interviews with her and press coverage of her work, in which she frequently reflected on its satisfactions and its frustrations, both major and minor. Harris was memorably described in a 1956 newspaper article as ‘the girl you don’t see … the girl whose job it is to make other women look their best’^[5]; it is the aim of this article to render the woman and her work more fully visible, not only in terms of its own inherent interest (which is considerable) but also as a way of providing more broadly applicable insights into costume design as a professional endeavour in post-war British cinema, and shedding light on a whole cohort of ‘girls you don’t see’ doing vital work creating screen costumes both spectacular and surreptitious in their effects. It is particularly interesting to note that while there have been survey books on other key professions in British cinema, including volumes on editors, cinematographers and production designers, to date an equivalent volume on British costume designers has yet to appear.^[6] Thinking back to Nadoolman Landis’s comparisons of the prestige attached to different areas of film work, and Banks’ observation that costume design is devalued in comparison with majority-male professions, it seems that the marginal place accorded to costume design in the writing of British film history is just another symptom of the gendered invisibility affecting costume design labour that seems to manifest across both industrial and critical contexts.

Despite Harris’s long and diverse career spanning six decades, this article will focus particularly on her work in the 1960s, concluding with a detailed account of her Oscar-winning work for Darling (1965). The reason for this focus on the 1960s is twofold. Firstly, Harris’s reputation remains inextricably bound up with that decade, as in Brian McFarlane’s paradigmatic summary of her career that ‘she not only got an Oscar for Darling but also dressed the Beatles twice’^[7], details also emphasised in the obituaries for Harris in 2015 prioritising her work during this period and its entanglement with contemporary fashion and the ‘swinging London’ phenomenon. Her work is of pivotal importance to that moment in which British fashion and British film, and sometimes the two intertwined, enjoyed unprecedented international visibility, as exemplified by films such as Darling, Help! (1965) and Casino Royale (1967), all costumed by Harris and each, in their differing ways, prioritising style as an essential component of their diegesis. Secondly, the 1960s was also the decade by which, according to Sue Harper, ‘women’s dominance of costume design was complete’ in the UK film industry, with Harris doing distinguished work alongside peers such as Yvonne Blake, Phyllis Dalton, Beatrice Dawson, Margaret Furse, and Jocelyn Rickards.^[8] The growing prestige of British costume designers during this period is signalled by their Oscar success, with the more senior figure Elizabeth Haffenden winning twice in the 1960s (in 1960 for Ben Hur and 1967 for A Man for All Seasons), Margaret Furse winning for Anne of a Thousand Days in 1970, and in between the annus mirabilis of 1966’s ceremony in which Harris won the award for best black and white costume design for Darling while Phyllis Dalton won for her work in colour on Doctor Zhivago (1965). Because women not only gained critical mass in the profession at this time but were able to gain major international acclaim for their work, this decade therefore provides especially fertile ground for an exploration of costume design in the British context, and women’s essential input therein.

Contextualising The Career Of Julie Harris: How She Did Her Work, And How She Felt About It

Despite Nadoolman Landis’s persuasive case for screen costuming being seen as a feminine preserve, not to mention the presence of several important female costume designers such as Edith Head, Irene, and Helen Rose in the Hollywood studio era, it is nonetheless the case that men initially dominated the profession, and the notion of the ‘costume designer as style svengali’ tended to hinge upon a male artist incarnating a female star’s image (Jane Gaines cites the examples of Travis Banton and Marlene Dietrich, Orry-Kelly and Bette Davis, Gilbert Adrian and Joan Crawford).^[9] In Britain, the only female costume designers working in film during the 1930s appear to have been Doris Zinkeisen and the somewhat misleadingly named Gordon Conway, and it was only in the 1940s that women like Elizabeth Haffenden began to make headway.^[10] Julie Harris’s own entry into the profession occurred in the mid-1940s. After training as a commercial artist at the Chelsea College of Art in the 1930s and then working for a court dressmakers just before the war (making white dresses for debutantes), Harris had been keen to work in films and sent some speculative sketches to Gainsborough Studios while she was still doing her wartime service in the ATS. In her own words, ‘even before [she] got demobbed’, she was taken on as one of several assistants to Haffenden, who was by then the studio’s chief costume designer, alongside fellow future costume designers Joan Ellacott and Phyllis Dalton.^[11] Harris worked on the Paganini biopic The Magic Bow (1945), later graduating to solo designer on Gainsborough’s contemporary drama Holiday Camp (1947), and doing striking work creating glamorous evening wear for the heroine of Good Time Girl (1948) [see figure 1].

[figure 1 here]

During the 1950s, Harris rose to become the Rank Organisation’s lead designer, responsible for not only making costumes for the studio’s films but also for its stars’ personal appearances. This most famously included the concoction of Diana Dors’ faux-mink bikini which garnered huge amounts of publicity at the 1955 Venice film festival, despite Harris’s disapproval of such an inelegant outfit: ‘horrid little furry job’ is how she described it years later.^[12] As befitting someone who remembered being ‘brought up in the film fan era of Carole Lombard and Joan Crawford, and Irene Dunne coming down the stairs singing “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”, swathed in white fox’^[13], Harris was especially drawn to creating opulent female costume, clearly stating in one interview: ‘I like really glamorous clothes’.^[14] She also admitted that she had never quite mastered drawing male figures and in any case designing women’s clothes, in her view, afforded her far greater opportunities for creativity than costuming men, a task which tended to be ‘all administration really’ and shopping to order rather than what she saw as the more satisfying work of bespoke design.^[15] This is reflected in the BFI’s Julie Harris sketch collection in which female costume vastly outnumbers male.

Given her love of glamour, it is little wonder that her delicately drawn and painted costume sketches are things of beauty, arguably even works of art in their own right – not merely working templates for future costume design, but often subtle little moments of drama and characterisation – and with each one given the authorial imprimatur of Harris’s signature. Their materiality is also crucial, particularly the originals with fabric swatches attached; a feature which cannot be replicated in quite the same way in their digital form. The sketches present some interesting interpretive challenges, partly because of the tendency identified by Sue Harper and Vincent Porter for film and television historians to feel more comfortable ‘scour[ing] through archives for empirical data’ while ‘tend[ing] to ignore each medium’s visual qualities’, a problem deriving ‘in part with the difficulty of finding an appropriate verbal language with which to discuss it.’ ^[16] In the specific case of Harris’s sketches, it may also have something to the seductive visual pleasure they offer; it feels more fitting to swoon and covet than to try to analyse.

A very elegant and attractive woman herself- it was often noted that she possessed ‘a film-star face’^[17] – Harris also became an occasional style commentator and arbiter of sartorial good taste in the 1950s, dispensing advice from her ‘brain full of fashion wisdom’^[18] to the likes of Girl annual’s teenage readers [figure 2].^[19] Once her contract with Rank elapsed as the company’s operations contracted in the 1960s, Harris shifted to freelance work very successfully. The loss of regular employment and automatic use of Pinewood’s excellent wardrobe facility, with stock costumes and equipment to hand, was compensated by greater freedom to schedule assignments according to her own wishes: ‘I prefer to work inconsistently’, she said in 1967. ‘I like a good break between films.’^[20] Nonetheless, she remained very busy throughout the 1960s, working on over 25 film productions as well as doing small amounts of stage and television work. Her BAFTA nominations (for Psyche 59 (1963), Help! and Casino Royale) and her win for her Victorian period work on The Wrong Box (1967), and her aforementioned 1966 Academy award, regularly punctuate the decade, providing palpable evidence of her pre-eminence within the field at this time, both domestically and internationally.

[figure 2 here]

In some ways, costume design, whose end product is very visible on screen, does not immediately appear to fit in with Sally Potter’s observation that women’s work in film usually comes within the category of ‘invisible labour’.^[21] It is much easier to see how Potter’s argument applies to a majority-female area of film labour like continuity or script supervision, which very obviously ‘hinges on invisibility, noticed only if it is not done properly via continuity errors which render visible the processes of film-making that should ordinarily be invisible.’^[22] Practitioners of this kind of work are often torn between relishing their invisibility, the subtlety of art-concealing-art, and conversely wanting proper recognition for the extensive effort that goes into the appearance of seamlessness, and acknowledgment of their essential contribution to the film. This is where some parallels with costume design become apparent. In industry discourses, exemplary design for the screen is seen to be self-effacing, aiming to obliterate signs of its labour, as Miranda J. Banks suggests: ‘If a costume is not right, and a viewer notices this, this extra-textual recognition pulls viewers out of the narrative, reminding them of the industrial production of the image’. ^[23] Likewise, Nadoolman Landis outlines the role’s creative imperatives thus: ‘A successful costume must be … woven seamlessly into the narrative and visual tapestry of the movie… Costumes, like the characters they embody, must evolve within the context of the story and the arc of the character within it.’^[24] Or in the words of Julie Harris’s contemporary, the costume designer Anthony Mendleson: ‘It was design for a character, always.’^[25] But this therefore creates a recurrent tension between the principle of costumes working solely as ‘functionaries of the narrative’ and their potential to move beyond mere characterisation and become ‘spectacular interventions that interfere with the scenes in which they appear’; the crucial question of ‘whether to look at or through the clothes’, as Stella Bruzzi puts it.^[26] Harris’s feelings about professional demands for narrative and characterisation to be prioritised, over and above costume’s spectacular potential, shift over time, as can be traced through her changing position in interviews.

There is certainly ample evidence of Harris’s adherence to the orthodoxy of costume being ‘handmaiden to the story’, espousing it ethos in several interviews while showing a clear-eyed awareness of where this placed the designer in production hierarchy:

In designing for films, there are fundamental priorities. In Miss Harris’s order of importance, these are the script, the character, the director’s requirements, the actor’s likes and dislikes, the art director’s opinions, the action. “Last of all” says Miss Harris ruefully “comes what the designer would like.”^[27]

Script and character figure in paramount position, but in working towards the objective of creating believable on-screen people, the costume designer’s input, and her collaboration and consultation with other key creative personnel, are clearly also vital. This creative back-and-forth is reflected in the running order Harris describes for her workflow:

The first thing you do is read the script… I do a breakdown of the number of costume changes, and what kinds of clothes are needed. Then it’s discussed with the director and producer. And probably the artistic director too… Then probably you make sketches.^[28]

Given the importance of harmonious collaboration, it is clear from her statements in later interviews how much Harris valued mutual trust among the creative team, often built up through successive projects: ‘it’s nice working with the same people because you learn how their thinking goes, and they have confidence in you.’^[29]

As Harris suggests, a central part of the costume designer’s creative process is the drawing up of sketches to provide an idea of how a character might be dressed in a particular scene, sometimes offering alternative versions to be selected according to the preferences of director, art director and star. Harris frequently stated that she was happy to adapt costumes in line with a star’s preferences, and to design to flatter: she happily disregarded strict Regency period authenticity so that Melina Mercouri’s figure could be shown off to best advantage in The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958), and did likewise for Lauren Bacall in the Edwardian-set North West Frontier (1959). There are similar considerations observable in some of Harris’s later sketch annotations, as with the note on a sketch for Samantha Eggar in Psyche 59 – ‘Hat style to be agreed with Miss Eggar’ – and the alternative swatches of polka dot fabric for a blouse for Shirley Anne Field in The War Lover (1962) to be tried against her complexion during fittings, suggesting the kinds of experiments, negotiations, and further decisions to be undertaken between the drawing board and having the finished articles ready for filming.

As well as the influence of casting, technical considerations also played an important part in Harris’s creative process, as we can see from her comment on a sketch for a girl’s dress for The Swiss Family Robinson (1961) demonstrating her knowledge of how different kinds of lighting and colour processes would affect the costume’s final look on screen: ‘I like the possibility of yellow as an alternative to pink. But it is such a tricky colour for Eastman that I must choose it very carefully. With warm yellow light from the lamps it could be quite pretty.’ Black and white photography of colour costumes on Harris’s other films presented their own complications for the designer, as seen with Darling, and how different cuts and fabrics would work on a moving body is another vital consideration often commented upon in Harris’s annotations. And her remit was not restricted to the visual; the implications of costuming for sound recording had to be taken into account, such as the necessity to use ‘rustling taffeta’ very sparingly.^[30]

At the pre-production stage, further costume amendments might be required at the behest of a director, often reflecting changes in narrative emphasis. We can see this demonstrated in Harris’s work on Prudence and the Pill (1968), and a newspaper article on it which went through four of her sketches and followed the changes made to a single costume required for Deborah Kerr’s character. A housecoat for a breakfast scene had to be amended to an evening gown when the timing of the scene was switched to night and the scene given more dramatic emphasis, and ‘as this was a climactic scene, he [the director] wanted more glitter’. The off-the-shoulder dress Harris proposed [figure 3] then wouldn’t work with the preponderance of close-up framing intended for the scene – which would make Kerr appear naked – so ‘Miss Harris went back to the collar of sketch 2. And the dress at last reaches the cameras.’^[31]

[figure 3 here]

The preparatory labour undertaken by the designer here is considerable, especially given the time and care required for sketches: ‘Each of her drawings takes about an hour to do, and is an exquisite vignette of the person she is designing for.’^[32] Indeed, traces of that time pressure are sometimes evident in Harris’s annotations on sketches, as with her comments on sketches for The Swiss Family Robinson:

Getting rather pressed for time so this is just roughly to suggest that by now, Kuala has cut the sleeves from grandpa’s jacket, to make him more comfortable for fighting… Sorry I haven’t time for more detail, but you will never get the sketches at all if I go on at this rate.

This particular assignment also demanded special attention to what would be the visible effects of the wear and tear undergone by the characters’ clothes while they were marooned on a tropical island, a challenge which Harris approached with great care and skill, as demonstrated by her copious rough sketches and accompanying notes.^[33]

As draft sketches are approved or revised, a firmer idea of the ‘dress plot’ for the film thus begins to be consolidated – the overall costuming plan Harris described as ‘a sort of Bible as to what each character wears in each scene’^[34] that will be crucial for continuity. Then before filming starts (and frequently during), the costumes that have been designed now have to be made up  – often by costumier firms such as Berman’s or Angel’s – under the designer’s supervision, with the fabrics she has selected, while other costumes have to be bought or hired, and on a film with a large cast, this represents an enormous workload. For instance, creating several hundred identical school uniforms for the opening shots of Goodbye, Mr Chips (1969) meant not only acquiring the correct number of stock costumes in the right size but also having to make emergency amendments, as Harris recalls:

when the clothes were unpacked none of the ties and hatbands had any stripes on them… But we had a wonderful wardrobe supervisor called Betty Adamson, who found art students in Sherbourne and lots of pots of white paint and brushes. And they all sat down and painted the stripes. It went on almost all night.^[35]

Anecdotes such as this map onto the kinds of production stories delineated by John Caldwell as typical of craftspeople and technicians: ‘war stories’ and ‘against all odds’ narratives that emphasise the quiet heroism of ‘physical perseverance and tenacity’ in completing a difficult task successfully.^[36]

For Harris, like many of her peers, the work of the costume designer extended far beyond her initial concepts and sketches, and she regarded ‘being on the studio floor right through shooting’ as ‘essential’ because ‘every day brings unforeseen problems.’^[37] For instance, you might ‘forget that the action calls for a cup of tea to be spilt over a coat, and you find you have only one and a duplicate is needed for re-takes. I make a schedule but it changes constantly. Something supposedly not wanted for two weeks is wanted yesterday.’ ^[38] In her emphasis on omniscient levels of vigilance and dogged arduous work in the service of the picture, Harris adheres to customary ‘trade stories’ from costume designers as well as broader industry discourses about film costume’s function hinging on characterisation and authenticity.^[39]

In similar vein, she often talks about the importance of getting period costumes right, a meticulous approach which can be seen in her extensive sketch portfolio for Petula Clark’s costumes for Goodbye, Mr Chips which include sketches of original Vogue fashion plates from 1938 and 1940 (with notes to self ‘Shoulders square but not too exaggerated – this was some years later’). It is no accident that in the ‘film fashion ABC’ she drew up for a newspaper article in 1956, V was for ‘veracity’.^[40] The aspiration towards veracity extended beyond period pieces into contemporary settings, with Harris exhibiting particular professional pride in her work on The Whisperers (1966), transforming Dame Edith Evans into an impoverished downtrodden elderly lady with the aid of a customised battered old coat picked up for £1 at Camden Town market: ‘we rubbed the lapels with candle wax to make it look greasy, and rubbed candle wax all down the front. Eventually we put it through a washing machine. It looked quite different by the time we had finished!’^[41]

However in a later interview, Harris’s position towards the privileging of characterisation over spectacle in film costume appears more ambivalent:

Character is harder than dressing someone up in the full fig of glamour, but it’s not always more rewarding. It’s an achievement if you make someone look right in character, like Edith Evans in the Whisperers, which was really quite difficult, and therefore very satisfying. However, no-one is going to say you are a great designer for having done that.^[42]

Here, Harris queries the long-standing received wisdom that realising character represents the apex of a costume designer’s achievement and suggests some of the concomitant problems of status and respect that comes with this kind of invisible labour. Furthermore, when she is then asked in the same interview which film stands out as ‘wholly satisfactory’ in her career, Harris plumps first for Casino Royale, an infamously chaotic production which had five different directors working on it, resulting in an equally chaotic end product. However, with an almost limitless Hollywood-fuelled budget (‘they always wanted something “yesterday” so it was a case of “Pay anything, just get it”’^[43]), and the absence of the usual imperatives to dress for narrative and character, given the complete lack of those things in Casino Royale’s spectacular cinema of attractions, and no single authorial directorial presence to determine how costumes should look, it seems that the assignment was a liberating experience for Harris in terms of her creative agency, however incoherent it might have been as a film. As she put it, ‘Some of it is very bad but there was lots for me’.^[44] Other films selected by Harris as particularly satisfactory in her career also tend towards the spectacular; one suspects it is the pretty gowns [see figure 4] and lavishly costumed musical numbers that made Goodbye, Mr Chips another personal favourite among her films as much as its period veracity.

[figure 4 here]

The relish with which Harris worked on costumes in exotic/erotic vein suggests her attraction to creating clothes that are spectacular above all other considerations. Her sketches offer a richly realised range of arresting female costumes, from her Balinese-influenced nightclub dancers in the Charlie Drake vehicle The Cracksman (1963), to the witty but still sexy pastiches of Irene Sharaff’s designs from Cleopatra (1963) for Amanda Barrie in Carry On Cleo (1964) [figure 5], to the stunning spangled burlesque outfits for We Joined the Navy (1962) which demand equal meticulous attentiveness to matters of costume continuity as The Swiss Family Robinson but this time in terms of the different stages of striptease rather than wear and tear. The comic book orientalism required for Vesper’s bright pink silk ‘elephant boy’ tunic and turban in Casino Royale, or Ahme’s Courrèges-meets-salwar-kameez outfits in Help! [figure 6] seem to have especially whetted Harris’s creative appetite. ^[45]

[figures 5 and 6 here]

This is also true of Harris’s enthusiasm for designing fancy dress costumes when the narrative demanded it: Harris’s sketches for the spare elegant women’s daywear for the thriller Deadfall (1967) contrast completely with a range of much vividly drawn outfits for a costume ball scene, among them a Scheherazade, a Medusa, a Restoration wench, and a red silk crinoline with what she described as ‘a touch of the Lola Montez’. Harris was also responsible for all of Genevieve Page’s costumes as Margot Beste-Chetwynde for Decline and Fall…of a Birdwatcher (1968) and although all her designs are dazzling throughout, with lots of ostrich feathers (responding to the title’s avian brief) and lashings of her favoured shade of pink (known in the trade as ‘Harris Pink’^[46]), she seems to show the greatest pleasure in creating a fancy dress costume, sadly not used in the film, for the incalculably wealthy Margot to dress up as what Harris notes is her ‘idea of “the poor”’ in ‘very “couture” rags. Twigs by Constance Spry [royal florist]. Fabulous long wig. Becoming smudges of “dirt” on face.’ These costumes do serve a narrative purpose – the latter would have underlined Margot’s essential callousness in a very witty and concise fashion had it reached the screen – but they seem to go far beyond the immediate demands of narrative expediency and stretch into the realms of spectacular excess; clothes that demand to be looked at rather than looked through.

Harris sometimes exhibited frustration at the inability of filmmakers to showcase the beauty of her costumes to best effect, such as a beautiful feathered gown with gradations of colour from brown to orange for Petula Clark on Goodbye, Mr Chips that was eventually shot only in head-and-shoulder close-up so ‘you just saw the top bit, the ugly bit’.^[47] Other carefully created costumes might be shown only for a second or excised altogether and Harris admitted that it was ‘frustrating when a scene in the film has to be cut and perhaps one of my favourite dresses doesn’t get used.’^[48] Her intriguing plan to subtly change the colour of Ursula Andress’s chiffon gown in one scene in Casino Royale so that it would begin pale pink and end up deep pink [figure 7], achieved by making four identical copies of costume dyed gradually darker shades, was mangled in the editing so it ‘lost the whole point’, which was to suggest the accelerating romanticism of the scene.^[49]

[figure 7 here]

For Harris, it seems, narrative was important but so too was spectacle and proper respect being accorded to a beautiful costume. As she reiterated in another interview, again in relation to her creations for Ursula Andress on Casino Royale, if someone has gone to the bother of making a beautiful dress then she felt that the director should ‘show it!’^[50] For all these frustrations, it seems that the exhibitionist tendencies and higher (Hollywood- backed) budgets of British cinema of the 1960s probably provided one of the most sympathetic contexts for her costumes to be accorded a prominent position in the mise-en-scène.

The obverse of the designer’s professional pride in creating unique on-screen costumes (and the wish to have them displayed to full effect) comes with her/his sense of unease around the use of off-the-peg clothes rather than bespoke designs. In the context of contemporary Hollywood costume culture, Helen Warner has detailed the professional concerns expressed over ‘costume designers “proper” being replaced by “creative shoppers”’, with the rise of the ‘stylist’ seeming to represent a de-skilling of the art of screen costuming for many, but not all, of its practitioners.^[51] Similar concerns may lie behind Harris’s frequently stated preference for period drama despite being better known for modern dress films; not only does period drama carry the prestige of historical research but it also increases the likelihood of costumes being specially designed rather than ‘shopped’, increasing the creative control of the designer. As Harris argued, ‘with modern things it’s different because the director can look at them and might say, “Oh, my wife doesn’t like that.” They all know about modern clothes. But with period clothes, people know less so they accept the pretty drawing that I give them.’^[52]

In addition, contemporary settings have always presented specific problems around the fashionability of their costumes, due to the time-lag inherent in film production. Harris remarked upon how ‘tricky’ it was ‘having to second-guess what would be fashionable in a year’s time, because a film from start to finish took about nine months; you might do your sketches ten months in advance and, by the time the film came out, fashion had changed’^[53]; this was the reason why Samuel Goldwyn briefly hired Coco Chanel to design costumes for his films in the early 1930s, to avoid being caught out by a sudden change in hemlines which rendered a film’s fashions suddenly out-of-date.^[54] The ‘costume versus fashion’ rhetoric common to industry discourses around the profession – fashion generally being seen as antithetical to character, in the same manner as spectacle is – has also meant, as Jane Gaines observes, that designers ‘have dissociated themselves from trend-setting’ for fear of being contaminated by consumerism rather than associated with the more prestigious realm of dramatic craft.^[55]

In Harris’s career, these concerns about shopping for a film versus bespoke design, about how to harness or anticipate contemporary fashion, and about the tension between character and fashion, spectacle and narrative, all converge upon and define her work on the film that was to win her an Oscar, Darling. The remainder of this article will concern itself with a close consideration of Harris’s costume design work for Darling, with a special focus on the costumes worn by the film’s lead character Diana Scott, played by Julie Christie (who also won an Oscar for her work on the film). Darling’s narrative centres on a young woman’s progress from aspiring model and actress to joining high society and finally marrying into the Italian aristocracy, with the narrative framing provided by Diana being interviewed by ‘Ideal Woman’ magazine about her rise to fame. Diana’s voiceover, answering the interviewer’s questions, is used in ironic counterpoint to the extended flashback which purports to show us the ‘real’ story of her past, including numerous affairs and betrayals, and a ‘happy ending’ which is anything but happy, with Diana trapped in a outwardly glamorous but hollow loveless marriage.

Dressing Up Darling: Fashion, Femininity, Mobility, Cosmopolitanism

Harris came to Darling’s production at a very late stage, replacing the previous designer ten days before shooting was due to begin, as she recalled in an interview in 2010:

no-one had a costume to wear! So Victor Linden who I had worked with before, rang me and asked if I could help out and get some stuff for location. So there was a bit of a quick shop with Julie Christie in the High Street. That was just to get a few things so we could get by really, but you never have all the clothes for a whole film ready when you start filming on day one and luckily by the time we got to all the “better stuff” I had had time to do my designs and get things made. Some of it was made in Rome, and then when we were on location in Capri the fitters came out to Capri for fittings and I was able to catch up a bit.^[56]

Time constraints necessitated hasty shopping for some of the film’s costumes but these appear to have been the clothes required for the earlier parts of the film narrative in which Diana is a gauche girl-about-town. The scene that introduces Diana recalls the similar moment in Billy Liar (1963) in which Christie’s character Liz first appeared, both young women striding confidently through an urban landscape, insouciantly swinging a handbag. Some of Liz’s likeability, bound up with Christie’s emergent star persona as modern young woman, therefore informs the first encounter with Diana in Darling. The pinstripe trouser suit she wears in this scene was an early design from Biba, the company central to the youth-centered fast fashion revolution of the 1960s, recognized with delight by Biba’s designer Barbara Hulanicki when she saw it on screen.^[57] [figure 8]

[figure 8 here]

Hulanicki’s 1960s clothes have been acclaimed for their ‘instinctive grasp of the emerging identity of young women – financially independent, sexually confident and sartorially expressive’^[58], all of which maps effectively onto the character of Diana. Her trouser suit, still quite an outré choice in the mid-1960s, is referred to in Diana’s voice-over as naïvely unstylish – ‘I don’t know what I was wearing. Terribly Chelsea I thought I was’ – but she is also shown defending it as bold and new in the vox-pop television interview she gives to Dirk Bogarde’s BBC reporter Robert: ‘would you say the way I dress is conventional?’, she says while posing to show off her outfit This moment seems indicative of a larger epistemological uncertainty around the significance of Diana’s clothes and whether their style is to be repudiated or admired. Julie Harris certainly was not very keen on them, hence her reference to the ‘better stuff’, the more mature, couture-esque outfits which Diana wears when she begins her inexorable social climb. Harris later elaborated on this in an interview:

it wasn’t exactly Cinderella but she went from an ordinary model girl to the Italian princess so she ends up able to have the clothes that I felt I understood and loved more than the early ones which were King’s Road sixties, swinging sixties.^[59]

And yet the more casual clothes worn for the scenes at the very beginning of Diana’s trajectory – the trouser suit, a tight white ribbed polo-neck sweater, short tartan skirt and flat suede knee-high boots for her secret assignation with her lover, and then back at home wearing a sporty mini-dress trimmed with white piping and ribbed white knee-socks [figure 9], all worn with hair loose – represent a new way of dressing which to young female audiences would prove just as aspirational as Diana’s more elegant formalwear.

[figure 9 here]

In fact, the mixture of the two types of clothes in her wardrobe is crucial, as Christine Geraghty notes in her account of the film. Whether Diana is wearing ‘the mod (tartan skirt, knee-length socks, hairbands)’ or ‘the traditional (her evening dress at the charity function)’ [figure 10], both styles ‘are worn with an individual flourish, and the emphasis in her dress is not so much on following a 60s style but creating it, controlling fashion rather than conforming to it’, communicating a sense of ‘self-confidence based on but not limited to a new approach to fashion and style.’^[60] The Darling look was powerfully influential on contemporary fashion, particularly in the US, with Harris noting how US trade paper Women’s Wear Daily ‘thought the look said something’ and picked up on the film as a source of new styles, something confirmed by British fashion writer Felicity Green who observed its influence stateside (along with another film of 1965, The Knack) and Julie Christie’s enshrinement as fashion icon: ‘Two British hit films have given New York its latest “in” words. Now everything is either “Darling” or “Knacky” … The whole “Darling” hit started with Julie Christie’s movie of that name and she is the no. 1 exponent of the look, from her wild blonde mane to her little girl shoes.’ ^[61]

[figure 10 here]

In the face of apparent authorial intention to criticise the worst aspects of the affluent society through what seemed to them to be its most obvious representative, a shallow young woman^[62], the discourse of costuming in Darling works to undermine any straightforward critique of Diana and instead, as Geraghty argues, represents an alternative discourse of creative self-expression for young women, whether that is through the off-the-peg clothes bought for the film or Harris’s mod-inflected bespoke designs [see figures 11 and 12]. As Pam Cook noted of Gainsborough’s costume melodramas, following Sue Harper’s work, in a formation that applies equally well to Darling twenty years after: ‘design works against the rather moralistic trajectory of the scripts, in which sexually aggressive women tend to come to a sticky end, by celebrating a feminine pleasure principle… We are back with the disruptive power of costume – always, it seems, a troublemaker.’^[63]

[figures 11 and 12 here]

While Julie Harris as costume designer was undoubtedly the central organising force of ‘the Darling look’, the input of Julie Christie to its creation was also crucial. The hasty pre-production shopping trips to acquire suitable off-the-peg clothes were undertaken by Harris and Christie together, and Harris credits Christie with keeping the skirt lengths short for her character’s clothes, echoing her own personal style of ‘simple little skirts’^[64], despite Harris’s qualms that such a distinctive hemline might have passed into obloquy by the time of the film’s release: ‘I was doubtful but it was Julie Christie who said keep it short and she was so right’.^[65] This collaborative dimension to the costuming for Darling may well have been instrumental to its ability to simultaneously harness and influence fashion. Harris had proved herself adept in costuming fashionable young women in previous films, including her Bardot-esque wardrobe of tight gingham, broderie anglaise and denim for Christie in the comedy The Fast Lady (1962), as well as the mod-style schoolgirl uniforms in A Hard Day’s Night (1964), but as we have seen her deeper preference was for a more traditional kind of feminine elegance: she cited Deborah Kerr as her favourite star to dress because she ‘liked her kind of clothes – and the way she wore them.’^[66] Although Christie does have some outfits to wear in Darling that echo that kind of mature glamour, they actually tend to be used at the points of the narrative when her character is feeling most hemmed in and claustrophobic, particularly her stint as lonely neglected principessa towards the end of the film. In that spirit, Harris created a rich full-length evening coat, a model of ‘Galitzine-Fabiani elegance’^[67], to go over a chiffon under-dress, to go over a slip, layers deliberately designed to be torn off by their wearer as she wanders the corridors of the palace, alone and unhappy. ‘Jewellery to break away’ reads one of her annotations to the costume sketch [see figure 13].

[figure 13 here]

The heroine’s stripping off of all her clothes and jewels in this scene marks an important dramatic climax in the film’s dense and complex ‘dress plot’, one that is riven with trans-European peregrinations, as one commentator described, from ‘typical Chelsea bird (Vinyl raincoat, knee socks, zany dresses) … pseudo-sophisticate in Paris (Courrèges boots and shift), and finally her grandeur as the wife of an Italian prince (Galitzine-type Palazzo pyjamas, superbly cut Fabiani-type coat and Givenchy fur-lined hat).’^[68] Diana has not only tried many things, she has also tried on many things – party clothes, model clothes, costumes, daywear, evening wear, menswear – but none has really proved a satisfactory fit, and in the end the naked sobbing woman, soon to be rejected by her ex-lover when she attempts a reconciliation, is all that remains. However, while this is true in strictly narrative terms, the film’s ‘covert, codified discourse that centres on the clothes themselves’^[69] suggests otherwise. The sheer plenitude of Diana’s wardrobe – there’s a telling shot of her early in the film, in little black dress, deciding which pair of shoes to slip into from an extensive collection [figure 14] – and its diversity, with clothes for every occasion, from smart suits for work, casual clothes for leisure to chic little cocktail dresses, presents a powerful sumptuary counter-narrative. Once again, these are clothes (and accessories) to be looked at rather than looked through, costumes which elicit the ‘critical “shopper’s eye”’ identified by Charlotte Herzog in her work on fashion shows in film, in which viewers are encouraged to ‘size up the cut and line of the dress into which they project their (imaginary) bodies.’^[70]

[figure 14 here]

Ultimately, the keynote of Julie Harris’s wardrobe for Diana in Darling is mobility: physical, social and geographical. In what she wears, Diana can walk the streets, dance at a discotheque, hop on the back of a scooter, or bicycle her legs in the air. She flies off to exciting destinations like Paris and Capri for pleasure, or travels to Italy for a job on a commercial. The apparent ease and spontaneity of Diana’s European travel is particularly interesting and suggests the same kind of destabilising of national identity that Pam Cook identified in Gainsborough’s costume melodramas, with ‘their emphasis on hybrid identities and concern with crossing national borders’.^[71] In both the 1940s and 1960s, costume is key in constructing a transgressive, transnational border-crossing, manifesting in the flamboyant femininity of Elizabeth Haffenden’s gypsy-influenced aesthetic for the Gainsborough melodramas, and in the perfect holiday wardrobe that Diana has for her break in Capri in Darling. Neat little sundresses with floral and cherry prints, simple sandals, big black sunglasses Capri pants, Breton top [figure 15]; these are clothes that embody cosmopolitanism, that move across national borders, in their origins (British, French, Italian) but also literally in Diana’s suitcase, speaking to that sense of mobility that Moya Luckett identifies as typical of media representations of desirable femininity in the 1960s.^[72] Even though such mobility ultimately results in enforced exile and stasis in Darling, this pessimistic narrative closure is not quite enough to close the wandering ‘shopper’s eye’, taking in a wealth of desirable fashion possibilities that speak to what Julie Christie would later sum up as ‘an element of possibility for women … a new way of living’.^[73]

[figure 15 here]

But in the final analysis, any consideration of the complex significations of on-screen costume should acknowledge and examine the off-screen labour that went into its creation. Harris’s primary recollection of working on Darling was to do with the labour involved: ‘The work that went into those clothes was amazing … There were a tremendous amount of clothes in that film!’^[74] Her work on the film, begun at late notice, not only entailed the creation of a subtle and highly communicative costume scheme for its female lead featuring over 30 distinct costumes (which happened to influence 1960s fashion) but also encompassed the considerable task of sorting out the clothes for the entire cast and making sure that all the people populating the diverse worlds inhabited by Diana look right.^[75] The irony is that the more right those people look, the more it seems that they naturally look that way, that no work has gone into their appearance. This effortless final result on screen belies the ‘sheer physical slog’ and often punishing schedules endured by those who mastermind film costuming, as Harris suggested: ‘Just getting from A to B in the West End for fittings and shopping is ulcerating when I’m on a tight schedule darting between the studio and London’, or further afield in the case of a production like Goodbye, Mr Chips where she had to fly to Paris and Geneva to do Petula Clark’s fittings.^[76] It also belies the complex demands of designing for character, of ‘keeping a sharp and beady eye on fashion [and] develop[ing] a flair for fashion futures’^[77], and in the right circumstances giving full creative expression to costume as a powerful source of visual pleasure. Julie Harris managed all these demands with aplomb.

Her distinguished work in the 1960s continued into the following decade on varied assignments including Roger Moore’s first Bond film Live and Let Die (1973), making beautiful period costumes for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) and the fairy-tale musical The Slipper and the Rose (1976) – ‘I’ve never enjoyed my work more’, she writes to its director Bryan Forbes on her sketch for Cinderella’s wedding dress [figure 16] – and designing simultaneously futuristic and ultra-contemporary costumes for the dystopian Rollerball (1975) [figure 17]. Working more for television in the 1980s, her final assignment was the mini-series A Perfect Hero (1991) which offered Harris a final opportunity to demonstrate her skill in creating period costumes, as well as marking a return to the decade in which her long career in screen costume design had originally begun.

[figures 16 and 17 here]

Conclusion

In line with the broader aims of feminist production studies and historical enquiry, this article has attempted to elucidate how one particular costume designer did her work, what she felt about it (at the time and subsequently), and more broadly to reverse the tendency for media production labour which is gendered feminine, like costume design, to be rendered invisible. Julie Harris did gain a minor degree of media visibility, although ironically this often emphasised her self-effacing invisibility, as ‘the girl you don’t see’ whose role was making others look good.^[78] Sometimes Harris herself was happy to collude with this, stating in her foreword to Elizabeth Leese’s book that costume had to be ‘the art that conceals art. It is all part of the alchemy we call the cinema.’^[79] But just one paragraph later, she voices that equally pressing but somewhat contradictory desire for visibility: ‘even within the film business, the costume designer has been a long time winning proper recognition … The wardrobe department and all it encompasses was taken for granted far too long.’^[80] It is the job of feminist film history to recognise these profoundly gendered ambivalences and tensions around the visibility of ‘women’s work’ (such as costume design) and to attempt to render fully visible that which, for a variety of reasons, has been hitherto obscured.

Author: Rebecca Harrison, (School of Art, Media & America Studies, University of East Anglia)

Author: Joy Cuff ( née Seddon)

On my first visit to the Stanley Kubrick archives, I began looking through an inventory that detailed information on over 700 boxes that related to 2001: A Space Odyssey. My aim was to find some of the artwork that I had produced for this monumental film forty years ago.  At random, I selected two boxes noted as ‘Miscellaneous Polaroid’s and 35mm transparencies’. To my wonder and surprise, both contained photographic shots of the moons’ surface; I had indeed created a number of tabletop models of the moon and its’ complex surface.

Working incredibly closely with Stanley Kubricks ideas, I observed that his research within many areas – visual and dramatic concepts, set design and character situations were always meticulous. These were then translated into film by the technicians whom experimented many times, throughout the filming, working alongside Stanley.

My contract at MGM Studios commenced in February 1966. The live-action shooting was completed at Shepperton Studios, and 2001: A Space Odyssey was shot in 65mm film. When I had joined the ‘picture’, the filming of the astronauts descending into the ‘pit’ to examine the monolith was ‘in the can’ but had not been developed.

At MGM a tabletop model of the moonset was to be created and produced as what is known as a ‘matte shot’. Sculpted in plaster, ‘the pit ‘centre frame was to be the live action, filmed at Shepperton, which was then fused together through the process of working with the camera. This technique was perfected in the early years of filmmaking, however as duped film became of better quality, the process of inserting live action into a still image became less utilised. With attention to minute detail, Stanley Kubrick adopted to use this method predominantly because of the high quality of reproduction it created. John Mackay, Cameraman and Bob Cuff, Matte Artist, were two of the significant technicians that were engaged with the development of both the creation and filming of the moonsets.

Working as a mixed-media artist and sculptor, I felt comfortable working with the medium of plaster when working on the moon sets, but I had not any experience in the Special Effects (SFX) area of film making and in particular the making of Matte Shots – i.e. the fusing of individual shots to make one complete shot. I worked alongside Bob Cuff, an expert in this field and learned the craft of being a matte-artist. I was privileged to be learning this art form, whilst creating one of the most iconic shots in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This shot and subsequent shots throughout the film of the moon bus travelling over the moons’ surface and the views from the spacecraft windows, are actually tabletop models that were 3ft x 6ft in size, within one 10ft square area and an interacting long set for a tracking shot of approximately 25ft. I would work from thumbnail sketches, which can also be found amongst the archive. Some created by me, with some simple drawings drawn by Stanley – mere diagrams to show surface plains and crater edges but all to be very carefully composed on set. After Bob Cuff and John Mackey left to form a company Abacus which serviced films (I later was to join them to work with Bob) I worked alone on the moonsets and in the later stages was joined by Roger Dicken, a model maker.

The content from the Stanley Kubrick archive, now bequeathed to the University of the Arts, London is an amazing and valuable collection of material collated from the many years of Stanley’s filmmaking career. This rich source of subject matter demonstrates an endless insight into the thought processes, pragmatic approaches, observations and creative methods that Stanley Kubrick applied to his filmmaking. The archive illustrates great aspirational content to both the student or would be filmmaker. To view this wealth of material, demonstrates how remarkable a Director Stanley Kubrick was.

Source: Graham Smith, Institute of Historical Research, London University (www.history.ac.uk)

This article provides an excellent introduction to Oral History, from Developments in Oral History Theory, Ethics and Legal Understanding to Technical Changes, Archives and the Future of Oral History.

Since the 1970s oral history in Britain has grown from being a method in folklore studies to become a key component in community histories. Oral history continues to be an important means by which non-academics can actively participate in ‘making history’. However practitioners across a range of academic disciplines have also developed the method into a way of recording, understanding and archiving narrated memories.

Oral history has also emerged as an international movement. Within this movement oral historians have approached the collection, analysis and dissemination of oral history in different ways. In broad terms while oral historians in Western Europe and North America have often focused on issues of identity and cultural difference, oral historians in Latin America and Eastern Europe have tended to pursue more overtly political projects.

In Britain the Oral History Society played a key role in facilitating and developing the use of oral history. Internationally oral historians are represented by the International Oral History Association (IOHA) However, there are many ways of doing oral history even within single national contexts.

Click any of the article sub-headings below to continue reading the original article in full:-

This is a copy of a magazine article from 2012 in which “Janice Turner (Editor) reviews a study by Andrew Dawson and Sean P Holmes of the development of the BECTU History Project – from a reminiscence during an ACTT conference to an internationally important  archive”.

Read the original article in full here:- History Project Article SSR April-May 2012 (1113Kb PDF)

Source: Stage, Screen & Radio, 2012

There are many reasons why knowing our history is important, and this is particularly so for trade unionists and trade unions.

In this era of YouTube, the iPhone, 3 D movies, Facebook, ultra high definition television , the BECTU History Project links us to a time when we worked in a different way. It tells the stories of the workers in our industry over the last 100 years – it tells about the challenges they had to overcome, the skills they developed, the enduring human relationships they forged as Britain developed into one of the world’s major centres of the film and television industry.

The BECTU History Project began in 1986 when a group of workers in the British film and television industry under the guidance of Roy Fowler, set about collecting and archiving the oral testimonies of retired co-workers. Supported by the Union which gave them the resources and the autonomy to get on with the work in hand, it is now an archive of international importance of more than 670 interviews made with the men and women who have made their working lives in the film, television, radio and theatre industries. Among the famous voices in the collection are Lindsay Anderson, Richard Attenborough, Sheila Hancock, Karel Reisz and David Puttnam.  But there are also interviews with hundreds of other men and women from all walks of life who have worked in our industry over the last 90 years.  There are DoPs, film editors, hair and makeup artists, actors, projectionists, matte artists, writers, neg. cutters, electricians, dubbing mixers, costume designers – every craft is there.  It is a vast store of knowledge and experience.

The project is run by a group of volunteers with a variety of skills and from a variety of backgrounds who undertake the filming, the interviewing, the logging and management of the collection. We are constantly looking for new contributors to film; help with the shooting of the interviews in different parts of the country and transcribing of the completed interviews.  We receive invaluable administrative support from BECTU and storage support from the British Film Institute. We believe that by carrying on the work of the Project’s pioneers we are capturing valuable testimony for future generations. The Project works with academic institutions, the industry guilds and others who have been able to access funding and resources to continue transcribing the interviews in the archive.

The Project has had a strong year. With the ongoing support of BECTU in supplying us with resources we continue our programme of recordings. Our industry grows and changes every year producing new areas of activity for us to capture. We recently completed interview number 666 with our former   President Tony Lennon who gave us a vivid interview covering, not only a comprehensive history of the union over the last 30 years, but also his own personal history working for the BBC and BECTU. The interview had the added poignancy for us all as it was filmed during the final days of the BBC’s tenure at Television Centre. Tony took us on a remarkable tour of TVC as the bulldozers moved in, providing us with his own commentary about the building as a unique work place and the people who produced such memorable programmes there.   It was a clear reminder of why the work of the History Project is so important.

We continue to collaborate on behalf of BECTU with academics and fellow trade unionists. We are currently working with the Britain@ Work group and SERTUC to   contact different trade unions with a view to extending the involvement of trade unionists in the creation and documentation of workers’ own history. Discussions are being held with the aim of encouraging more trade unions to include a history dimension in trade union organization and education and to organize their own oral history and archive building activities. We plan to give them every support.

The BECTU History Project has a website (http://www.historyproject.org.uk) where you can go to get a flavour of oral history as told through the voices of the hundreds of contributors we have interviewed over the last thirty years.  

Our recordings can be accessed by anyone with an interest in them: students, researchers, trade unionists, teachers, writers and film and television enthusiasts. A list of interviewees can be obtained via the website. If you want to view or listen to any of the interviews they can be accessed from the British Film Institute.

Our thanks go to Teresa Debrou, Sharon Elliott and Tracey Hunt in particular from Head Office for their support of the committee. Our thanks also to the union as a whole for its encouragement and support.

Our main priority in the coming months is to develop easier and wider public access to our interviews. We believe we have an extremely important archive which is of worldwide interest .We are currently developing the potential of our website by creating a BECTU History Project Channel on YouTube similar to the BECTU Channel with clips of our interviews.  We are constantly exploring the exciting possibilities raised by the use of new technology and new applications to help us increase the effectiveness, relevance and longevity of the History Project and its archive.

The Project remains entirely voluntary with a small organising committee and a wider participating membership. We meet monthly at BECTU Headquarters.  We are an open organisation and have members from a wide range of ages, backgrounds and crafts. Our interviewing is ongoing and we are open to your suggestions for potential interviewees and new topics which we might cover We welcome all offers of practical assistance either in undertaking the interviews, transcribing, or in providing the camera and sound skills needed for the recordings.

If you want the opportunity to help capture the lives and work of the men and women of our industry who want to pass on their skills, their ideas, their craft, their passion, to future generations then the BECTU History Project is the place to come to.

For more details and offers of support please contact Mike Dick who is the Chair of the BECTU History Project at mikedick@blueyonder.co.uk

50 Years of British TV Documentaries: A Diary of Decline, by a film editor – Simon Rose 2014

With his unique perspective of 50 years working in documentaries, Simon Rose describes the profound cultural and political changes that have transformed the genre.

In 1964, when I left school and got my first job in the TV industry, documentaries seemed to hold endless opportunities. Many directors hoped their films would change the world for the better and I think to some extent they did. A large proportion of the children I went to school with were ignorant, racist, homophobic and xenophobic. But in the sixties audiences were viewing life in many different parts of the world for the first time. They were being invited to empathise with people whose lives were different from their own; hunter-gatherers, prostitutes, factory workers, gentry…. In my opinion this led to a better educated and more tolerant society. Documentary directors didn’t just hold up a mirror. Many tried to open the audience’s minds to ideas that differed from the established view. It is easy to romanticise the past as a ‘golden age’ and I recognise that there were a great number of extremely bad documentaries made in every decade (I edited a few of them!) But there used to be some freedom to make original, thought provoking films. That freedom has all but gone and I was in the thick of it, as it disappeared around us.

My first job was as a projectionist in a 16mm dubbing theatre. Almost all documentaries were shot on 16mm in those days and I got to see a lot of them. Every day the cans for a different production would turn up. Quality varied enormously but I learned that if certain directors or editors were booked in we could expect something special. I remember “The Opium Trail” (1964) directed by Adrian Cowell and shot by Chris Menges, ‘Seven Up’ (1964) directed by Paul Almond for World In Action and “Up the Junction”(1965) directed by Ken Loach.

Two films in particular seared into my brain as I peered through the glass at the back of the theatre. They were ‘Culloden’ (1964) and ‘The War Game’ (1965). Both were directed by Peter Watkins and they influenced me for the rest of my life. It wasn’t so much their content that was revolutionary, as their style.  They looked like news film grabbed on a battlefield (the black and white stock was forced in processing to give extra grain and the camera juddered occasionally because Watkins kicked the tripod). But they patently weren’t news; the first was about the battle of Culloden in 1746 and the second was set in the future when nuclear deterrence had failed and Britain was being bombarded with hydrogen bombs.

The faces of the clansmen that peered at the camera on Culloden Moor with rain running down their hair didn’t look like actors, and they weren’t. They were amateurs, many descendants of the original clansmen, who for years onward would meet up to remember the powerful experience of making that documentary. And the fire fighters who helped in the making of ‘The War Game’ did so because they had serious doubts about the government’s plans for dealing with a nuclear war. Peter had a way of getting everyone committed to his projects. I’m sure we worked above and beyond what we were being payed for in the dubbing theatre, because we thought ‘Culloden’ and ‘The War Game’ were worth it.

Both films are subtly subversive in two ways;    1. They show ordinary people being killed in wars that they were never consulted on and had little chance of escaping.   2. Events from centuries past and the possible future are presented as viscerally convincing ‘current affairs’ style documentaries, so the audience may be led to wonder, ‘How true is any documentary’? On the face of it the commentary is factual but the voice of the narrator is full of suppressed emotion. The emotion clearly came from Watkins and that made me think, how objective can a filmmaker be? And if they can, should they? Surely they should be honest about their feelings. Looking at the faces of the men and women who occasionally glanced at me through the lens with an almost accusatory expression, I didn’t just feel like a passive observer, I felt involved; as though this was something maybe I could do something about. It seemed as though this involvement of participants and audience might be a positive way forward for documentaries.

I remember Lou Hanks, who was mixing the sound, asked Peter if he thought the BBC would allow The War Game to be shown. At the time Peter was optimistic. In fact the BBC banned it from television anywhere in the world. Peter Watkins left the BBC and two years later left the UK for a life in exile. But paradoxically, the fact that Watkins, who was still in his twenties and had only been in the corporation for three years, was allowed to make a film that was so revolutionary in both content and style shows the freedom that was given to television directors in those days. Kenneth Tynan, in The Observer, said it was one film that might have changed the world. A year later, Ken Loach made drama/doc ‘Cathy Come Home’ (1966) which did bring about a change in legislation.

Now very few TV directors expect their programs to change anything. The ambition is for a large audience and a step up the ladder that might lead to a job as an executive producer or even a commissioning editor.

Directors also show little interest in bringing people closer together. They have been taught that what attracts a large audience is conflict. Differences are exaggerated, and not only between people. I recently met a wildlife cameraman who shot many beautiful scenes for David Attenborough’s BBC series. He was becoming disillusioned, because producers now want wildlife to appear dangerous. They want ‘jeopardy’ (One of TV’s favourite buzzwords). The cameraman thought it was wrong to make people afraid of the natural world when, in fact, most animals are harmless, unless they are afraid themselves. To me that typifies what is happening across the field of TV documentaries.

At first I thought I wanted to be a cameraman; it was glamorous and exciting, but then I realised that they were never around at the decisive time of making a film. Editors seemed to have a real influence on the final result. I was impressed by the sheer skill, intelligence and patient good humour of editors like Dai Vaughan and Ted Roberts and decided I wanted to be an editor.             I got a job as an assistant and then editor on ‘Man Alive’ which was a weekly 50 minute documentary slot on BBC2. With only three channels there were not many documentaries. When I commuted to work in the morning after transmission there was a good chance someone would be talking about the film I had just cut. Newspapers took the series seriously and usually reviewed it. Maybe, with hindsight, we had too much influence.

‘Man Alive’ was edited by Desmond Wilcox, an ex Fleet Street journalist and Bill Morton who claimed to have cut for Orson Welles. There was a healthy rivalry between the reporters, who tended to be more interested in words, and the directors (known as producers in the BBC) who tried to be visual and filmic. It felt democratic and open; anybody could throw in an idea at a viewing, including assistants. Desmond made a point of being ‘anti-establishment’.        It was his way of getting us to feel we were all on the same side; ‘making ground-breaking TV despite the boring old farts at the top’.

One incident I recall exemplifies the culture of the time; A few complaints had been received about swear-words on the latest Man Alive. The head of BBC 2 asked to see the programme. In those days films were transmitted directly from telecine so there was no video recording. A film viewing theatre was booked and in the meantime Desmond said, ‘We better get rid of the swearing’. So we took the film to a dubbing theatre and re-mixed it with extra traffic noise over the offending words. It was sent to the channel controller’s viewing with a note from Desmond saying ‘he couldn’t detect the problem’!

That would never happen now, partly because there are no series editors around with those kinds of balls and partly because it depended on the loyalty of all the people who were in on the secret. Mainly, because it is more important to be seen as ‘on board’ with management than any consideration of what might make better TV.

Back in the 60s and 70s the forms documentaries took were widening in scope. Lightweight cameras and sound recorders and sensitive film stocks had allowed crews to become smaller and less intrusive, and different editing styles were being tried; many directors were making TV documentaries without narration. On 9^th November 1970 Charles de Gaulle died. Panorama marked the occasion in the following way: They hired freelance cameraman Erik Durschmied and his sound recordist to capture the mood of the French people. A few days later they transmitted the edited film at peak viewing time on BBC1. There was no narration or music or interviews. As I recall it lasted about half-an-hour. There were scenes of people on a train reading newspapers, of an old man sweeping leaves in a cemetery. It made poetic use of images and natural sounds. It is impossible to imagine any television company transmitting a programme like that now, even at midnight!                                            Nowadays, if a world leader dies, all programmes follow a predictable format dependant on the time-slot available. A half-hour programme would be narrator-led. It would contain facts to be found in Wikipedia. It would be illustrated with stills and library footage. It would use sound-bites from ‘experts’ and ex-colleagues. If the leader was deemed to be on ‘our side’ it would take the form of a tribute. Otherwise there would be some critical comment. It would be practically identical on every channel.  To me the change that has occurred in forty years seems a great loss.

In these days of directives from above, it’s hard to believe there could once have been the idea that we should attempt to democratically arrive at films that were fair and honest. That’s what Dai Vaughan describes in his book ‘For Documentary’. During editing “The Space Between Words” in 1972, the crew were regularly invited to the cutting room and asked if they thought the various participants were being portrayed fairly. Today, the idea that a producer would pay a film crew to spend time in an edit suite is unthinkable. The only concern producers have regarding ‘contributors’ is whether there is a risk of them suing the TV Company.

There has been an inexorable shift of power to the top. This has affected Documentary directors in particular. They have lost control of the films they are nominally responsible for.

During the 1960s directors as diverse as John Schlesinger, Jack Gold, Charlie Squires, Jenny Barraclough, Ken Loach, Ken Russell and Peter Watkins made documentaries and drama-documentaries for the BBC, each in their own distinctive style. Most of their films (with one notable exception!) got transmitted and the directors got due credit (even editors got credits in the Radio Times in those days!) Today most people would be hard pressed to name a single documentary director working for the BBC, and would certainly find it very difficult to detect any difference in their styles.

Admittedly most BBC directors made unremarkable use of the freedom and resources they were given. I had come from a background of amateur film making and often thought that the amateurs would give their eye teeth to have access to the budgets and creative technicians available to BBC directors. The corporation was structured like a branch of the armed forces. There were the officers (director/ producers) who were almost exclusively graduates of Oxford and Cambridge universities and were expected to come up with ideas. Then there were the ‘other ranks’ who sorted out the technicalities. Many of the directors I worked with were proud of the fact that they didn’t know one lens from another or what effect a different focal length would have on a shot. (That was the cameraman’s job).                                                                                  It is probably no coincidence that some of the most creative documentaries made by the BBC came from directors like Peter Watkins, Ken Russell and John Schlesinger who, as ex-amateur film makers, had handled cameras and editing equipment themselves, and knew how to achieve the style they wanted. I came from an amateur film background myself and, although I admired the expertise and commitment in the professional world, I sometimes found it too rigid. To make good documentaries one has to experiment and I hate it if someone says, “We just don’t do it that way”.

In the late seventies I worked on the Horizon science series and the bar at BBC Kensington House seemed to be full of recent Oxbridge graduates, turning their theses into under-visualised documentaries. But there were still some older producers who had experienced far more varied lives before they joined the BBC. In 1976 I worked for Peter Adam who had grown up the son of a Jewish father and Christian mother in Berlin during the war. He had travelled extensively in Europe doing various jobs before joining the BBC in the sixties. He certainly made full use of the freedom he was given.

 We were working on an ‘Omnibus’ called ‘Spirit of Place’, about novelist Lawrence Durrell returning to his roots. Peter Adam researched the program thoroughly himself and arranged to meet Durrell in Greece. He drove down through France, picking up one of his favourite cameraman on the way. They sailed around the islands shooting on locations described in Durrell’s books. We edited for seven weeks in London. Humphrey Burton, who ran Omnibus, saw it once and made no changes before it was transmitted on BBC1 after the evening news. It was nominated for a BAFTA award.

Today any TV documentary, however innocuous, is checked at every stage, not only by people who assess the audience it is likely to achieve but by ‘the editorial policy department’ who judge it for ‘compliance’. This department has well intentioned aims; to check programmes for impartiality, accuracy, fairness and editorial integrity. But some of these qualities are difficult to measure and the results sometimes seem counter-productive.                         For instance a film I cut about care homes was narrated by a young man who had spent his childhood in care homes and felt that it would be better if more children were adopted. This was judged to be ‘unbalanced’, even though it was clearly his view, and the program had to be altered to include more positive comments about care homes. Sometimes the result of ‘compliance’ is simply comic. For instance a man who was suspected of being a thief by the police but never charged had his face ‘fuzzed out’ and the little dog running by his side was transformed into a fuzzy ball!

The ultimate reason for loss of freedom in British TV was political. In 1986 Margaret Thatcher appointed Marmaduke Hussey as chairman of the BBCs board of governors. He was regarded as by Thatcher as ‘One of us’ and was a friend of Rupert Murdoch, whose newspapers continuously attacked the BBC. In 1987 he sacked Alistair Milne, the Director General, and replaced him with Jon Birt.

Birt introduced a ‘market economy’ to the BBC which was regarded by the government as the next best thing to privatisation. This involved every department buying and selling things from other departments, which required an army of managers and salesmen. In practice this meant that, as a freelance editor, I could no longer ring the lady in the gramophone library who knew thousands of music recordings by heart and would recommend one. Instead I had to fill in a form that went, via managers who had no idea what they were dealing with, to the correct department who then had to charge the programme I was working on for the music. It became cheaper for producers to buy discs from a record shop than use the corporation’s own facilities.

While management at the BBC blossomed, the actual people who made programmes; camerapersons, sound recordists, editors were asked to take voluntary redundancy. Those that remained were soon priced out by the market economy. As a freelance editor my only costs were the hire of a cutting room and an assistant. Staff editors were loaded with inflated costs to cover BBC infrastructure and management. It was soon decided that they were uneconomic and now the craft side of the BBC (which used to set the technical standards for the British TV industry) is almost totally casualised. The BBC is still top-heavy with management and the idea of programmes as a commodity prevails.

The government also decided that the market must rule more firmly at ITV, which was described by Thatcher as, “The last bastion of restrictive practices”. She was particularly enraged by Thames TV’s ‘Death on the Rock’ (1998). It presented evidence that British Special Forces had assassinated IRA members on Gibraltar. Previously ITV franchises had been awarded on the basis of quality, but in 1990 they were re-distributed to the highest bidder. Since then the quality of documentaries on ITV has dramatically declined; long running and highly regarded series like ‘World in Action’ (Granada) ‘Survival’ (Anglia) ‘This Week’ (Thames) ‘First Tuesday’ (Yorkshire TV) have disappeared.

In 1982 Channel four was launched to provide an alternative to BBC and ITV. Jeremy Isaacs, the chief executive, interpreted this in a liberal way. The independent producers and production companies who provided the programs to C4 were given a lot of freedom. Commissioning editors would regard their work as almost done once the programme was commissioned and would thank us for letting them come to the cutting room to see the result.  Some remarkable documentaries were produced in the early years, but C4 changed dramatically.                                                                                                                     In 1993 they started to sell their own advertising instead of being funded from ITV and the pressure to achieve high viewing figures grew. Gradually the freedom C4 had given producers and directors was eroded and commissioners started behaving more like executive producers. It seemed that at every viewing the commissioner (usually an ex-public school boy with an Essex accent) was expounding the latest theory on ‘what people like’. A mood of fear and bullying descended from above. What started as a remit to broadcast alternative programming has become, in their words, “Born to Shock”.

The small production companies and partnerships that serviced C4 were mostly set up by people who had left the BBC and ITV in the hope of making better programmes and more money.

Previously nobody had expected to become rich in documentaries; that was not the motivation, but it now became a possibility. Over the years the more business orientated individuals within companies moved to the top, and the more profitable companies bought out smaller ones. The move to multiple channels accelerated that trend. Accountants started taking over. Now, a small number of conglomerates dominate the independent sector.

The move to multiple broadcasters which started with Channel 5 and Sky in the late eighties was modelled on American TV and was claimed to give viewers more choice. Milton Shulman had said that British TV was the “least worst in the world” but suddenly we were being told we should emulate the USA.     The UK had a strong tradition of documentaries dating back to the thirties, which had grown and diversified on TV. The US had also produced some notable documentaries but they were mainly aimed at the large screen and festivals. TV documentaries in The States are journalist led. Interviews come first and the visual material is called “B roll”. Many are produced by PBS which takes its educational role boringly seriously. They taught us, “Tell the audience what they are going to see. Then show it to them. Then tell them what they have just seen”. Producers told me “If we are making something for PBS, remember it is “an irony free zone”.

As the audience and advertising revenue were stretched thinner between different channels, executives became ever more obsessed with viewing figure. To me it would be better if one million people were engrossed by a documentary I had cut, than if six million half-watched it while doing something else. But advertisers don’t see it that way. Even the BBC is constantly worried about viewing figures, because they have to justify the licence fee to the government of the day.

In the 1990s another advance in equipment design took place; Small lightweight video cameras, which met ‘broadcast standards’, became available. (‘Broadcast Standards’ keep changing; at that time Hi8 tape passed the test). They re-opened the door to observational documentaries which were becoming increasingly rare because of the cost of 16mm film. One of the last such series shot on film was ‘The Police’, directed and filmed by Charles Stewart in 1982. One episode, showing how police treated a rape victim, can claim to have changed the law in Britain. It led to the formation of specialist units, trained to be more sympathetic. But one thousand ten-minute rolls of film were used on the series at a cost of about £100,000 in stock and processing alone.

Cheap Hi 8 tape, and the digital cameras that followed, could have led to a revolution in TV documentaries, but they didn’t. On the whole they were used to make programs cheaper, not better. But In 1998 C4 television placed an unusually open ended commission with a producer at a small production company who had gained unprecedented access to Social Services. The remit was for three camerawomen with Hi 8 cameras to follow different cases involving children for a year. At the end of that time it would be decided how many films would be edited from the material. There was no stipulation on running lengths. The series called “The Decision” won an RTS award.               One of ‘The Decision’ films, edited by me, about a pair of twins being taken into care, was not transmitted because the boys did not give permission.      Ten years later, when they were 21 and no longer under the control of Social Services, they gave the go ahead. Channel 4 was persuaded to fund an updated version of the film and transmit it. The RTS jury who awarded it the 2008 prize for ‘best observational documentary’ said “Extraordinary and absolutely outstanding, a prime example of what documentary could – and should – do. Immensely compelling and very moving, the film gave viewers a profound insight into a process rarely, if ever, observed at such close quarters.”             The commissioner said “We wouldn’t make that now”.

Formats imposed by executives rather than programmes made by people trying to be original rule the airwaves. We used to try and make documentaries that we would enjoy watching ourselves; I assumed that the audience had much the same level of intelligence and curiosity as me. Back in 1960, as part of their evidence to a government enquiry on the future of television, Granada TV had said “Never overestimate the audience’s knowledge, but never underestimate their intelligence”. These days TV executives seem to view their audience as a different breed. Sometimes this attitude becomes clear. An editor friend of mine was at a viewing with an executive who later became channel controller. After watching the film she said, “Of course, I enjoyed it. But would someone who goes to a supermarket and buys Australian Chardonnay enjoy it?”

 It is assumed that people are more at ease with the familiar than with new ideas. To me, the fascination of documentaries is that when one explores true stories they often turn out to be more surprising and dramatic than any drama writer could have imagined. But executives now demand that documentaries are structured like drama or light entertainment. Anything counter-intuitive is ignored and documentaries have become less honest. Hyperbole and phoney exaggerated cliff-hangers are obligatory.

No documentary nowadays is complete without a presenter saying, “I’m longing to find out”. Either the presenter is an ‘expert’, in which case she already knows what she is “longing to find out”, or he is a ‘celebrity’ who has been scripted to sound enthusiastic about the subject. With the common parlance of documentary now based on transparent untruths the word itself starts to be meaningless.

The uniformity of today’s TV documentaries stems from a top-down structure. Directors usually have a series producer, an executive producer and a commissioning editor telling them what to do (usually three different things!). They are often expected to handle the camera and sometimes the microphones as well as everything else! They tend to overshoot (100 hours of rushes for a 1 hour programme is common) because they are trying to second-guess what their bosses might want and want to cover all eventualities. They are liable to be sacked at any time and cannot complain if they want to work again. (Another by-product of the Thatcher years is a complete loss of union power).                                                                                                                        Directors, afraid of slipping behind the ridiculous target they have been set, urge editors to ‘Just start cutting’. This precludes any proper judgement of the material or any chance of discovering the more interesting truths that may lie buried in it. Often a different director will take over at the editing stage who has never met the people who were filmed, and a new job has been invented; ‘The edit producer’. Meanwhile, commissioning editors try to micro-manage every film from above.

Admittedly editors, as a clan, tend to moan. I sometimes chat to old friends about the ‘good old days’ of editing on film, and the way our work has been revolutionised by technical changes (first with the move from film to tape and then digital formats). But what gets me, and many others, angry has nothing to do with technicalities. It has to do with dumbing down, with lowering respect for the audience and the change of culture from one where making TV documentaries was seen as a worthwhile pursuit to one where the only aim is to make money.

A few years ago broadcasters would hire a high profile director such as Molly Deneen, Nick Broomfield or Kim Longinotto to make one film a year so they had something to enter for festivals. Even that token respect for the craft of directing documentaries seems to have now been dropped. Any up and coming directors are kept firmly in their place.

I remember working with a young director who won an award. When she was invited to the commissioning editor’s office she was hoping for congratulations and the offer of more work. He coolly told her to get in touch if she had any interesting ideas. He also mentioned another up and coming director who he described as “getting too big for their boots”. She decided to leave the TV industry.

I think that the uniformity of TV, together with the pretence of objectivity in documentaries, contribute to a feeling of helplessness in the audience. If every story, from the horrific to the frivolous, is treated in the same way; if every argument is balanced by an equally weighted counter-argument, aren’t we bound to become cynical and disillusioned?

Peter Watkins has written about what he calls, ‘The Monoform’; the almost universal filmic grammar which television and cinema use to impart information and entertainment. After he left Britain Watkins continued to make documentaries. Among them were ‘Punishment Park’ (1971, USA), ‘Edvard Munch’ (1974, Norway), ‘The Journey’ (1983 Sweden, Canada) and ‘La Commune’ (2001, France). In these films he strove to be less didactic and more democratic than is usual. Watkins points out that in the ‘Monoform’ the average length of time given to individual shots has reduced over the years and now stands at about three seconds. He suggests that this constant barrage of images and sounds, which give the audience no time to reflect or question, is equivalent to brainwashing.              

If a young person with the revolutionary ideas and commitment of Peter Watkins applied for a job at a British TV studio today, it is unlikely they would get inside. If they did, they would surely stay for even less time than Watkins spent at the BBC in the sixties. Maybe one day documentaries with the qualities of ‘Culloden’ and ‘The War Game’ will be made for TV, but at the moment that day seems a long way off.

© Simon Rose 2014