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Topic: 'O Dreamland'

Stephen Furley
Film God

Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002

posted 10-01-2007 05:11 PM

For anybody who happens to be a BFI member this month's free download from the members section of their website is Lindsay Anderson's 'O Dreamland' Made in 1953 at the Dreamland Amusement Park in Margate, a sort of British Coney Island I suppose, it's a very strange film.

You've never seen such miserable-looking holidaymakers in your life; but when you see he 'attractions' on offer you can probably understand why. It must have been quite a relief to finish the holiday, and get back to work.

At times like this I'm glad I wasn't around in 1953; it's quite interesting to see though.

Last month's download is also still available; it's a brief extract from 'The Open Road' made in the 1920's by Claude Frieze Green it featured, in an early colour process, a journey from one end of Britain to the other, by car.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 10-02-2007 03:06 AM

Amazon had the BFI's Free Cinema DVD at a knock-down price last year, and I have to agree that Anderson, Reisz, Richardson and Mazzetti seem to have been hell-bent on portraying Britain as a run-down s***ehole. Maybe it was a reaction against the escapism of the Ealing comedies or Gainsborough melodramas, which tried to deal with the post-war 'Age of Austerity' by making fun of it, but I find it surprising that most of these depressing documentaries appeared just at that moment in the late '50s/early '60s when living standards were improving, incomes were going up and Macmillan was telling us that we'd never had it so good. I did like the scene in We Are the Lambeth Boys in which two teenagers in a youth club discuss the death penalty, though. Their enthusiastic discussion of who they'd like to string up makes a hilarious counterpoint to the serious social commentary that has grown up around the Ellis and Bentley cases, the abolition debate etc.

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Stephen Furley
Film God

Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002

posted 10-11-2007 02:44 PM

Last Saturday on BBC Radio 4 'The Archive Hour' was about the British documentary movement; there were some interesting recordings by those involved; obviously recorded many years ago now. There's a 'listen again' available of it here . There are also extracts from the soundtracks of some of the films, including one that I'm sure you will remember from your days at MOMI Leo. I think it's from 'Spare Time', and it's the bit with the marching band of kazoo players, from somewhere in the Manchester area I think. Now, the kazoo is not the most tuneful of instruments at the best of times, but when you take whole marching band of them, and a band who don't seem to be very good at playing them at that, the sound has has got to be one of the worst I've ever heard that is actually supposed to be music.

Right at the end of the programme was an extract from Jennings' 'Words for Battle'. It's the part with the words from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and the music of Handel, I think the Music for the Royal Fireworks, but It might possibly be the Water music. This reminded me of a screening of wartime films that I attended, probably about twenty years ago now. This section of 'Words for Battle' was the last item in that screening was the last item to be screened, and was followed by a discussion session. The print of 'Words for Battle' was a rather poor 16mm one, and the end, including the last few bars of the music was missing. By luck, the cinema had an organ, and somebody on the staff who could play it. At the end of the film they faded out the film sound, and played the last few bars on the organ as the house lights were brought up. The live organ of course sounded very different, the technical quality of the sound on most of these films is not very good, even for their day, but it actually worked rather well as a transition between the getting on for fifty year old material we had been watching on screen, and the present day discussion, which was about to take place.

The thing which for me always seems to mark the beginning of the 'new' was the Festival of Britain, though it was really ahead of its time, and the rest of the Country seemed to take rather longer to catch up. Those were times of great hope for the future, but sadly, much of it unrealised. The old slums were cleared to make way for the fine new tower blocks of flats, which soon turned into the slums of the new era. The slow, dirty steam railways were replaced by the fine new roads and motorways, and the fine new cars to drive on them, which were in turn to become slow, congested and polluted. Are we better off than we were? I don't know; in some ways we certainly are, but it's a different world now, with very different expectations.

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