This early record of a sporting event falls into the genre of the ‘local topical,’ sometimes referred to as an ‘actuality’ or ‘actualité.’ A local topical acted as a newsreel, was filmed and shown locally, and was generally considered to be a ‘local film for local people.’ These short films, which reached their peak throughout the 1910s and 1920s, showed carnivals, marches, gala days, village fêtes, general street scenes, visiting dignitaries and, as shown in this film, local sporting events....

This early record of a sporting event falls into the genre of the ‘local topical,’ sometimes referred to as an ‘actuality’ or ‘actualité.’ A local topical acted as a newsreel, was filmed and shown locally, and was generally considered to be a ‘local film for local people.’ These short films, which reached their peak throughout the 1910s and 1920s, showed carnivals, marches, gala days, village fêtes, general street scenes, visiting dignitaries and, as shown in this film, local sporting events. These films follow on from, and are very much in the spirit of, the early ‘exotic’ topicals which were prevalent since the first days of cinema, depicting stories of interest from internationally-travelled news reporters.

Local topicals were typically commissioned by cinemas and often filmed by the cinema projectionist as a marketing tool to attract larger audiences. The films were promoted with gimmicks to “come and see yourselves as others see you” (Abel), offering people the chance to see themselves on the silver screen, a very exciting prospect at the start of the twentieth century. As such, the defining feature of a local topical is a focus on the crowd to maximise audience potential (McBain). This film is typical of the local topicals of the interwar period, featuring long panning shots of the race crowd, out en masse to cheer on the competitors.

This film begins with the race competitors emerging from the Olympia Hall, surrounded by onlookers. The Olympia probably served as both a variety theatre and picture house. It opened on 6 October 1913 on Derwent Street, Blackhill, Consett, a steelworkers village. It is also possible that the Olympia commissioned this topical to promote the venue, which would explain why the competitors emerge from the building.

David Williams has undertaken extensive research of the history of Durham cinemas for his book Cinema in a Cathedral City (2004). He found that cinemas were not confined to Durham city centre, but were prevalent in many of the neighbouring villages. Langley Moor, Meadowfield, Wheatley Hill, Bowburn, Langley Park, Esh Winning, Sacriston and Coxhoe all had at least one cinema each, with some villages housing multiple cinemas.

Village cinemas typically had different licensing arrangements to their larger counterparts in the city. For many years, Sunday screenings were banned in Durham city, but not in the surrounding villages, therefore a trip to the cinema on the Sabbath would have been a popular leisure activity for local villagers during the interwar years. Local picture houses of note in Durham included the Crescent Cinema in Sunderland Road and the Majestic in Sherburn Road (Williams). These local cinemas also often doubled as dance halls. In the case of the Olympia, an advertisement posted on the building asks: “Have you heard our grand orchestral organ”.

Notable in the film are the hugely fashionable bell-shaped ‘cloche’ hats worn by several girls and young women in the crowd. These close-fitting hats, usually made from felt, were worn by women from across the working classes to Hollywood stars. The hats complimented the popular bobbed hairstyle during the 1920s, spotted several times throughout the film. They also contributed to the creation of the Eton crop, famously worn by American-born French entertainer and dancer Josephine Baker, icon of the jazz age. The cloche hat fell out of fashion during the early 1930s but saw a resurgence during the art deco revival of the early 1970s.

Due to the expanding employment opportunities available to young working class women in the interwar years, lower working hours, and increased wages, particularly in the retail and clerical sectors, young women experienced more disposable income and leisure time than ever before, and were able to attend the growing number of cinemas and dancehalls. These young women were able to draw inspiration from the selection of newly available magazines and engage with popular fashions through both home dress making and the expansion of low-cost synthetic fabrics and the ready-to-wear clothing market, particularly Marks and Spencer. M&S, which dominated the high street throughout the 1920s and 1930s, set their prices at a maximum of 5s per garment in 1928, which was one third of the price of a dress from C&A costing on average 15s (Worth). Whether or not the particular young women in the film had access to high street shops such as M&S or the larger city centres of Newcastle and Durham some 15 miles away is uncertain, however it is significant that they are wearing such fashionable attire despite their working class background.

Another hat to fall victim to the whims of fashion is the cloth flat cap. Usually made from wool or tweed, the cloth cap traces its roots back to northern England in the 14th Century and has become synonymous with the typical working class man. Almost every male head captured in this film is adorned with this most modest of headwear, seen here worn by all generations of Durham lads and blokes. By the mid-century, the hat had fallen out of favour and was lamented in 1960 by Durham-born and bred writer Sid Chaplin, who reported in a Guardian article that he spotted just 5 cloth caps on a Saturday afternoon on Grainger Street, noting they were clearly “doomed” (Chaplin). Chaplin is the subject of an edition of the Tyne Tees TV A World of My Own series from 1969 where he revisits his hometown of Newfield in County Durham.

Former Curator of the Scottish Screen Archive, Janet McBain has noted that when the ‘talkies’ of the late 1920s emerged, the local topical continued, but remained a silent film. Due to the shortage of film stock during the Second World War, the local topicals all but disappeared, but re-emerged in the post-war era, though still usually silent. By the end of the 1950s, the local topicals again disappeared due to the closure of many independent local cinemas and the rise of television sets in the home, (McBain) however they continued to be shown in small town cinemas into the 1960s (“Early Cinema in Scotland”).

One of the most noteworthy film companies to produce these local topical films was Mitchell and Kenyon based in Blackburn, Lancashire during the early twentieth century. The Mitchell and Kenyon collection features films reflecting working class life in English Northern towns from 1900-1910. The NEFA collection includes a number of local topical films including West End Aged Poor’s Outing to Benton August 15th 1923

Cellulose nitrate was first used for photographic roll film by George Eastman in 1889 and was used for 35mm motion picture film until the 1950s. Cellulose nitrate is highly flammable, prone to spontaneous combustion and also decomposes with age, becoming toxic (“Introduction to Nitrate Film”). Collections at NEFA include a number of films which originated on nitrate, a number of which are local topicals. The decomposition of the nitrate produces a swirling psychedelic effect, not unlike an oil light projection, as a result of the chemical emulsion drying up and peeling away from the nitrate strip. This decay is best evidenced in the 1929 film in NEFA collections Pilgrimage to Holy Island

In our digital age, the imperfections of decaying nitrate film have enriched the work of contemporary artists, notably Chicago-born filmmaker and director, Bill Morrison who has used decaying nitrate film as a key medium in his practice. His 2002 film Decasia (a play on Walt Disney's symphonic animation Fantasia), is a collage of old silent film, featuring the striking image of a boxer sparring with a turbid section of cracked emulsion. Morrison’s latest project is the 2016 documentary film Dawson City: Frozen Time, a collage made up from the 1978 recovery of 1,500 reels of nitrate film from a sealed-up swimming pool in Yukon, Canada. This general interest in the aesthetic of film decay is also present in the filters offered by photography apps such as Instagram and Hipstamatic, which allows users to make the photographs they snap look as though they were both taken with a vintage film camera and have aged naturally over time.

The closing shots of the film are also very typical of the local topical genre. The slow moving crowd scene is known as a ‘phantom ride,’ which captures the movement of vehicle from a driver’s perspective, usually shot by a cameraman strapped to the front of the vehicle. The name ‘phantom ride’ derived from the position of the camera obscuring any tracking equipment, meaning the emerging footage seems to appear from an invisible force. The phantom ride shot was popular in local topicals as it allowed the film to capture as many local faces as possible, thus maximising the audience potential of people who would later attend the cinema to see themselves on the big screen. Another example of a phantom ride can be found in the local topical Snapshots in Berwick 1928 in which the camera travels down the narrow cobbled streets of Marygate and Walkergate Lane in the working class area of Berwick, to the delight of locals down the street.

References:

Abel, Richard. Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. Routledge, 2012.

“Early Cinema in Scotland Research Project”. University of Glasgow. https://earlycinema.gla.ac.uk/topic/local-topicals/

“Introduction to Nitrate Film.” Science and Media Museum. 2011. https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/introduction-nitrate-film/

Jones, J.R. “How Bill Morrison makes magic with found footage.” Chicago Reader, 2017. https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/bill-morrison-dawson-city-frozen-time-documentary/Content?oid=31401913

McBain, Janet. “The world of local topicals: observations on life after Mitchell and Kenyon through local films made for the Regent Cinema, Glasgow in the 1920’s.” TheBioscope.net, 2009. https://thebioscope.net/2009/12/10/the-world-of-local-topicals/

Newland, Christina. “Frozen in time: the miraculous gold rush movies buried under the Yukon ice.” The Guardian, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/28/dawson-city-frozen-time-yukon-gold-rush-capital-documentary

Chaplin, Sid. “From the archive, 9 September 1960: Traditional cloth cap in decline.” The Guardian, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2011/sep/09/demise-of-cloth-cap-1960

Williams, David R. Cinema in a Cathedral City: Cinema Exhibition in Durham City and its Environs 1896-2003. Mercia Cinema Society, 2004.

Worth, Rachel. Fashion for the People. Oxford, Berg, 2007