Metadata
WORK ID: NEFA 21932 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| AS THE SPIRIT MOVES | 1967 | 1967-01-01 |
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Details
Original Format: Standard 8 Colour: Black & White Sound: Sound Duration: 9 mins 1 sec Credits: Organisation: Elvet Youth Club Individual: David Williams Genre: Amateur Subject: Sport |
| Summary An amateur ghost story and morality play based on Charles Dickens' “A Christmas Carol’ made by members of the Elvet Youth Club in Durham with the assistance of David Williams. The story follows a young boy who visits a local youth club where he causes nothing but trouble. He falls asleep and a ghost appears to show him the error of his ways. After ... |
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Description
An amateur ghost story and morality play based on Charles Dickens' “A Christmas Carol’ made by members of the Elvet Youth Club in Durham with the assistance of David Williams. The story follows a young boy who visits a local youth club where he causes nothing but trouble. He falls asleep and a ghost appears to show him the error of his ways. After being terrorised by the ghostly images of those he has wronged, the film ends with the boy returning to the club and making good his bad...
An amateur ghost story and morality play based on Charles Dickens' “A Christmas Carol’ made by members of the Elvet Youth Club in Durham with the assistance of David Williams. The story follows a young boy who visits a local youth club where he causes nothing but trouble. He falls asleep and a ghost appears to show him the error of his ways. After being terrorised by the ghostly images of those he has wronged, the film ends with the boy returning to the club and making good his bad deeds.
Title: Elvet Youth Club Presents
Title: With an apology to Charles Dickens
Title: As the Spirit Moves
The film begins with general views of young people in a hall taking part in various indoor activities including table tennis, heading a ball and playing a game of draughts. A plate of biscuits are laid out at a service hatch in the youth club.
A teenage boy in national health glasses visits the youth club. He walks into the hall and looks up a set of stairs. He opens and walks through a door.
In the hall, he looks around at the other teenagers and sees a friend sitting on a bench. The friend waves at the boy and points him towards the ping-pong table where two of the youths are playing table tennis. The boy takes his place at the table and makes wild moves with his bat trying to hit imaginary balls. The friend serves and the boy misses, the ball falls to the floor. The boy looks frustrated. The friend serves again and the film shows a short rally before the boy misses again. The ball falls to the floor, rolls towards the boy’s foot. He stamps on it in frustration. The boy picks up the now broken ball and shows it to his competitor who shrugs. He places the bat and broken ball onto the table.
A group of boys are practising heading a ball. The boy helps himself to a biscuit on a plate. One of the boys playing with the ball accidently heads it off screen. It lands at the the boys feet. He kicks it against a wall and the ball is punctured. One of the boys comes over and picks up the now flat ball and angrily throws it over to the group.
The boy’s hand creeps towards the plate of biscuits and takes another.
The film cuts to a young girl standing beside a record player. She is dancing to the music. The boy comes over and stands next to her. The record stops and the girl tries to replace the 45 single with another. However the boy tries to put on another record. Not being able to play what he wants, he looks angry and drops the record on the floor on purpose, smashing it.
Two girls sit at a table playing a game of draughts. The boy now arriveds and looks at the board. He points out a move to one of the girls. She takes his advice and her friends jumps with joy realising she has won the game and can take all her friends pieces. The boy looks down and walks away sheepishly.
The boy takes another biscuit from the plate before taking a seat in a chair beside the stage. He looks over at the other young people who are all dancing to music. The boy begins to fall asleep.
The film fades to him asleep in the chair. One of the other boys comes over to check that he is fast asleep. Seeing that he is, he indicates to the others to exit the hall quietly as not to wake him.
With the hall now empty, shots of a closed door are intercut with the sleeping boy. A ghostly shape in a bed sheet is superimposed over a view of the hall. It arrives and taps the boy on his shoulder.
The boy awakes and a superimposed imaged of his spirit gets up and follows the ghost, his body remaining asleep in the chair.
The ghost shows him the youth club and those he had wronged earlier including a couple playing table tennis and the boys playing with a ball.
Once again the boy walks over to the table where the two girls are playing draughts. They look up at him and angrily wave him away.
He walks towards the servery and the plate of biscuits. As he puts out his hand to pick one up they all disappear. He looks shocked.
The spirit of the boy arrives at the group who had been practising heading a ball. Again, the ball falls to the floor. This time the film cuts to the faces of the boys as they stare angrily into the lens of the camera.
Looking scared, the boy rushes across the hall to a door and tries to open it. It is locked. He tries a second door, but this is also locked. All the young people begin to walk menacingly across the hall towards the scared boy. The boy’s spirit rushes across the hall and merges back into his body.
A girls head appears around the door of the hall. She indicates to the others to enter the hall and they walk menacingly across the hall towards the sleeping boy. He awakens as they all crowd around him.
Suddenly the boy jumps up and rushes out of the hall through the open door, petrified after his dream.
Title: Next week
With a smile and carrying a bag, the boy returns to the youth club. He sees his friend on the bench, who looks away unhappily. He walks over to the table tennis table and takes a new ball from his bag, which he hands to another boy.
He walks over to the stage and hands the girl who’s record he smashed a replacement. She is overjoyed.
Finally, he takes from the bag a packet of biscuits which he places on a plate on the stage. The film ends with him turning and offering them to the others, which they happily crowd round to take.
End title: The end.
Context
As the Spirit Moves is an amateur ghost story and morality film produced by members of the Elvet Youth Club with the assistance of David Williams. With inspiration drawn from Charles Dickens’ famous novella ‘A Christmas Carol’, the film’s narrative follows a cruel boy who terrorises other members of the local youth club. When he falls asleep after his misdeeds, a ghost appears to show him the error of his ways. At the end of the amateur production, he returns to the youth club as a reformed...
As the Spirit Moves is an amateur ghost story and morality film produced by members of the Elvet Youth Club with the assistance of David Williams. With inspiration drawn from Charles Dickens’ famous novella ‘A Christmas Carol’, the film’s narrative follows a cruel boy who terrorises other members of the local youth club. When he falls asleep after his misdeeds, a ghost appears to show him the error of his ways. At the end of the amateur production, he returns to the youth club as a reformed person.
An amateur film is a hobbyist form of film-making which is practised for passion and/ or enjoyment. However, some gifted amateurs often possessed superior camera skills and moved into semi-professional roles as documentary filmmakers, or were commissioned to film local events, work for charitable organisations, local councils or commercially. One example at the archive of a skilled amateur is Yorkshire-based filmmaker Charles Chislett who documented the process of steel production at the Parkgate Iron and Steel Works in Rotherham in the 1940s in his film Men of Steel. The introduction of 16mm film in 1923 opened up the world of filmmaking for the first time to non-professionals and was also popular for non-theatrical productions (for instance, industrial and educational films). Eastman Kodak first developed this film format and pioneered accessible and affordable film technology during the early 20th century. Kodak had vastly improved the safety of its products too, with new-fire resistant acetate rolls of film meaning that amateur filmmakers could enjoy a cigarette whilst projecting their home movies without fear of causing an inferno. By the mid-1930s, a German observer estimated that the British amateur cine scene had around 250,000 hobby filmmakers and about 3000 to 4000 of those people was a member of an amateur cine club; the home movie craze had taken hold of Britain. This fiction film was made on standard 8 mm motion-picture film, first introduced by Kodak in 1932 along with 8mm cameras and projectors. By 1965, amateur film equipment had become much smaller, lighter, cheaper and easier to use, leading to increased popularity of home movie making and screening. Kodak launched the super 8 movie format with new cartridge-loading Kodachrome II Film, which exploded into the home movie market and was frequently used in avant-garde, experimental artist work. Leicester-born David Williams was a senior lecturer in film and television at Bede Collage, Durham University from 1964. When asked what he enjoyed most about his job, he commented: “enabling students to fulfil their potential. Assisting them over difficult periods of study and organisation.” It should be noted that Williams also assisted with film instructional work for the Durham University Educational department and is credited in several of their films held at North East Film Archive. He was extremely passionate about the silver screen, which is why he became a film historian and an expert on early cinema and silent films. Williams was the instigator of the first Young People’s Video festival, an operation he chaired for twenty years, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Television Society (RTS) in 2000. He His love of film led to him completing a doctorate in 2009 which was based on his life-long research on the history behind early cinema exhibition. Two years later, in the 2011 New Year’s Honours, Williams was awarded with an MBE for his services to media studies in the North East of England. In addition to his love of films, William had a keen interest in collecting postcards. After his passing in 2013 at the age of 80, his collection was donated to the Durham County Record Office. As previously stated, As the Spirit Moves was an adaptation of ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens, regarded by many as one of the greatest authors of the Victorian era. The idea for the novella came to Dickens during a period of time when the British were exploring and re-evaluating the traditions of Christmas, such as carolling, and inventing new traditions, such as Christmas trees. Dickens had worked on shorter Christmas tales which inspired him to try his hand at writing a lengthier piece which would be broken up in five chapters, referred to as Staves - a Western musical notion which is a set of five horizontal lines and the four spaces between represent a different musical pitch, or in this case the different parts of the story. Other inspirations for ‘A Christmas Carol’ were drawn not only from his own childhood, but also from the Christmas stories of authors including Douglas Jerrold and Washington Irving. The novella’s first publication was carried out by Chapman & Hall on 19th December 1843, with the illustration of Jon Leech. By Christmas Eve, the first edition had completely sold out. Due to the extreme success of the novella, it was translated into several different languages, and it is yet to be out of print. There have been many adaptations of the story for film, stage, opera and other forms of media, for instance, the British drama Scrooge (1951) starring the well-known actor Alastair Sim as the miserly Ebenezer himself, which was a box office hit in Britain but flopped in the States. At the time, Variety magazine called the film "a grim thing that will give tender-aged kiddies viewing it the screaming-meemies, and adults will find it long, dull and greatly overdone." However, many of these countless adaptations have become more notable than the source material and it is unknown to most that the novella was originally published as ‘A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas’. References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_film https://lukemckernan.com/wp-content/uploads/digital_lives.pdf http://www.bbc.co.uk/wear/100lives/100lives_david_williams_feature.shtml https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Television_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol |
