This film was made by a keen amateur filmmaker from Leeds, John (Jack) S. Eley. The YFA has a large collection of Jack’s films spanning nearly fifty years, from 1932 up until 1980. As this film demonstrates, Jack was a highly accomplished filmmaker, making different types of films, though principally of a documentary type. He covered geographical and historical topics such as A Temple For Athena (1954), a trip of historical sites around the Mediterranean finishing up at Athens, and Invaders...

This film was made by a keen amateur filmmaker from Leeds, John (Jack) S. Eley. The YFA has a large collection of Jack’s films spanning nearly fifty years, from 1932 up until 1980. As this film demonstrates, Jack was a highly accomplished filmmaker, making different types of films, though principally of a documentary type. He covered geographical and historical topics such as A Temple For Athena (1954), a trip of historical sites around the Mediterranean finishing up at Athens, and Invaders From The Sea (1964) about the places that the early Viking and Saxon invaders of Britain came from in Northern Europe. Also among Jack’s documentaries is one on the restoration work on York Minster from 1965-1967.  Jack also clearly had a literary bent, making films on Emily Bronte, Emily Jane (1980), a film of a poem by Rupert Brooke, The Great Lover (1955), and one of where John Ruskin lived in the Lake District, Ruskin Country (1966).

 

Amateur filmmakers would often submit their films to competitions, and Jack in 1953 won an award for an animated film, Little Cinders, with the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers (IAC).  Jack was a member of the Leeds Cine Club as well as its off-shoot Mercury Movie Makers who specialised in making 16mm film. The YFA also has a large collection of films made by the Mercury Movie Makers, some of which can be found on YFA Online. These were often collaborative efforts with those participating often unaccredited, so Jack may well have been involved in some of these as well – for more on Mercury Movie Makers see the Context for A Vision Fulfilled (1982).

 

Kelly's Eye presents a story that reflects something of Jack’s own development, making 9.5mm black and white silent films in the 1930s, up to 16mm sound film in Kodachrome from the early 1950s: 1952 seems to be the changeover date. Judging by the collection of his films donated to the YFA however, it appears that, unlike the protagonist in the film, Jack skipped an 8mm stage, which most amateur filmmakers used at one time, and moved directly from 9.5mm to 16mm. And although the film is done in a humorous way, it still provides some insights into the amateur cine world. For an excellent, and highly readable, overview of cine filmmaking from its earliest days see the Chapter ‘What’s It All About?’, in David Cleveland’s, Films Were Made (References).

 

Amateur cine clubs started up in Britain in the 1920s, with the first at Cambridge University in 1923.   Soon there were some 200 clubs, although these mainly catered for the relatively wealthy because of the cost. Later, magazines started up such as Home Movies and Home Talkies, starting in 1932, and Amateur Ciné World, established in 1934 and becoming part of Amateur Ciné Enthusiast in 1940. The latter had a competition that ran for fifty years from 1936.  This interest led to an explosion of British cameras and projectors on the market in the 1930s, such as Ensign, Dekko, Specto, Pathe, Kodak and British Thompson Houston. Although the better off would use 16mm film, the favoured gauge was 9.5mm because it was much cheaper.  This had been around since 1921, developed by Pathe Freres, around the same time as 16mm.  These formats were safety film, unlike 35mm which was made with highly inflammable nitrate.  9.5mm gauge continued in use until after the Second World War and still has its enthusiasts today.

 

However, in August 1932 Kodak introduced an 8mm format, though it was on a 16mm film and needed to be run through the camera twice, slit down the middle and re-joined – a similar idea was introduced in 1898 when Birt Acres split 35mm in two to produce 17.5mm strips. Colour film also became more popular in the 1930s. Already Kodacolor had come out in July 1928, to be followed by the German Agfacolor in 1932, Dufaycolor in 1934 and the popular Kodachrome for 16mm in 1935, and for 8mm the next year. By the late 1950s colour film accounted for 90% of all films sold. After the war 8mm became increasingly popular, with 16mm being used by professionals and those who could afford it. In 1965 Kodak introduced Super 8 film in easy loading cartridges, which had smaller perforations allowing for greater film area. This not only provided much better speech sound, but also made filming easy for everyone.  It was followed by Fuji who brought out their 8mm cassette loading system, Single 8, in 1967 – although this was polyester based, which subsequently became more widespread than triacetate.

 

Recording sound as well was very difficult, usually having to be done separately.  If it was just background music or a general voiceover to be added later there wasn’t too much difficulty, but adding sound to be precisely synchronised was. However, the film’s portrayal of the DIY nature of amateur cine making is very close to how it was. Many film makers, some of them trained engineers, were very skilled at developing their own pieces of kit. One such was that of fellow Leeds filmmaker Alan Sidi, who developed a synchronous sound device for 16mm which he marketed – see the Context for Alan’s film 8 O'clock Special (1962). It wasn’t until the year after this film was made, in 1973, that a sound camera was made for Super 8, with a magnetic strip on the cassette making sound recording easy.

 

Of course, putting copyright music onto a soundtrack is an infringement of the Copyright Act, but this did not seem to be a complete deterrent. The classical lps on show in the film were typical of the type of music that Jack Eley would use: he uses, appropriately enough, Debussy piano music on The Great Lover and Edvard Grieg on Invaders From The Sea. Coincidently, the edition of Movie Maker that Lancelot Kelly looks through (with the woman in the red top on the front cover, which is August 1970) has an item on the IAC negotiating reduced rates for licences for copyright music from the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society. 

 

The equipment shown in the film gives an idea of just how technical filming had become at that time, before the introduction of video cassette cameras in the late 1970s – by which time it has been estimated that 1 in 10 people in Britain owned a cine camera. The Bolex 155 Macrozoom that Kelly has was introduced in 1968.  This introduced a lens that could focus as close as one inch: the phrase "One Inch to Infinity" was often used in advertising.   It also had a viewing system with a coincident image rangefinder and a new thumb-operated pushbutton allowing for "instant slow motion".  A Multitrix could be attached to the front of the camera as an optical bench for filming titles, pictures and transparencies for special effects.

 

But not all the equipment shown is so up-to-date. The camera our protagonist buys looks as if it might be a Bolex C-8SL, 8mm camera from 1959, and the projector a Bolex M - 8R 8mm from 1950; the camera he uses to film the models also looks like a Bolex, possibly a H-16 Standard 16mm which came out as early as 1949 (as for the typewriter, well that looks like vintage 1920s!).  Doubtless enthusiasts will be able to identify more of the equipment on display.  As well as Bolex, a French company, other foreign companies came to dominate the market, like Bell and Howell from the US, and many from Japan in the 1960s, like Canon.

 

This great interest in making film as a hobby, and its technical complexity, is evidenced by the number of magazines that were on the market on amateur film making. The main one seen in the film is Movie Maker, a monthly published in the UK between 1967 and 1985 for home movie makers, amateur and semi professional film makers using 16mm, 9.5mm and 8mm film – not to be confused with MovieMaker a US professional journal founded in 1993.  This was published by Fountain Press, mentioned in the film, who, still, specialise in photography and cine publications – and, again, not to be confused with the Christian publishing house based in India.   Other journals were Amateur Film Maker (journal of the IAC), Film Making and Making Better Movies, both offering expert advice on techniques and equipment. It ought to be remembered too that before the advent of video recorders (VCRs) in the mid 1970s, 8mm projectors were also the most common form of showing film at home, and the magazines carried advertisements for commercially produced film, including football matches – and some other films of a rather racy nature: in a different way to the Triumph Spitfire racing off at the end of the film!

 

The film also shows the ambitions that many film makers had; devoting all their spare time to making high quality films – as YFA Online demonstrates. There were many competitions put on by the IAC and local cine clubs, and those such as the Ten Best Films of the year ran by Movie Maker. The reference that the narrator makes to the classic, and highly innovative, Russian film directors Eisenstein and Pudovkin, and the French director René Clair, is not entirely frivolous as the more adventurous amateur filmmakers were indeed inspired by some of the great directors.

 

Perhaps one of the unfortunate side-effects of video, and now digital film – not to mention computer software – is that the world of film making portrayed in this film is now nearly, though not quite, a thing of the past. However, many of the numerous cine clubs that grew from the 1930s onwards, especially in the West Riding of Yorkshire, still exist, albeit mainly now using newer technology.  Although fortunately the use of old film formats is not quite dead, even among the young, some of whom have, as with vinyl records, rediscovered these – see ‘exploding cinema’ in References. Fortunately also, regional archives like the YFA exist to preserve these old films, and hopefully to collect the very many that must still exist out there.

 

References

 

David Cleveland, Films Were Made, published by David Cleveland, 2009.

Brain Coe, The History of Movie Photography, As and Garton, London, 1981.

Leo Enticknap, Moving Image Technology: from zoetrope to digital, Wallflower Press, London, 2005.

Glenn Matthews and Raife Tarkington, ‘Early history of Amateur Motion-Picture Film’, Journal of the SMPTE, Volume 64, March 1955.

John Wade, Cine Cameras, Shire Books, 2004

Bolex Collector

exploding cinema

CINERDISTAN

Stephanie Marriott: A Brief History of Amateur Cinema