As film archivists, there are probably times when we see ourselves as cunning sleuths, hot on the trail of identifying that unknown reel shrouded in mystery. Maybe we’re squinting through a loupe to find an edge code or perhaps we’re trying to get a better visual on that car model so that we can narrow down which side of the 1910s we’re in, or maybe we’re just chasing down a hot lead by scouring through old trade papers, technical manuals and fan magazines.
Whatever the case, gathering clues from the carrier and content of any unknown title is often the first step towards its preservation and/or restoration. We might not be looking for means, motive and opportunity, but we want to establish the people, period and provenance for what we’re dealing with. Sure, there are frustrating times when we can’t find any of our favourite edge codes and we think we don’t recognise anything in the image, but don’t turn that light pad off yet!
Bryony Dixon and Camille Blot- Wellen during le giornate del cinema muto Collegium Dialogue 2017 (Photo Credit: Valerio Greco)
This year’s le Giornate del Cinema Muto featured a special preview from the BFI National Archive of 13 Victorian films spanning the 1896-1901 period. Curated and introduced by the BFI’s Silent Film Curator, Bryony Dixon, the programme offered a remarkable selection of previously unseen footage selected from 700 titles that are currently undergoing digitisation. These included copies from large formats, such as 60mm and 68mm, as well as some unique nitrate prints. They have been identified as coming from the British Biograph/Mutoscope Company, Gaumont, The Warwick Trading Company – and even one charming piece by RW Paul.
Later, during a special Collegium Dialogue, Bryony Dixon and Film Restorer and Researcher, Camille Blot- Wellens delivered an inspired (and inspiring) presentation exploring the problems of identifying such early films. They also suggested useful tools, methods and resources. I was particularly enticed by Harold Brown’s FIAF publication, “”Physical Characteristics of Early Films as Aids to Identification” and decided to look a little deeper.
Here’s a brief breakdown of what I learnt and some further tips that you might find handy. By no means is this is an exhaustive list of characteristics to look out for, which is of course beyond the scope of a mere blog post. In fact, film identification is an inherently problematic task due to the heterogeneous histories of film materiality, which are complicated (read: made frustratingly fun!) by the added effects of time and decay. Nonetheless, enjoy! And be sure to explore the shiny suggestions for further reading at the end.
For the identification of early films, there are essentially two key categories of evidence: Forensic and Filmographic.
FORENSIC
This includes all information acquired from the physical film itself. Many of us might be comfortable with finding an edge code, but since the BFI’s Victorian films predate standard practices, we need to look for other types of codes and etchings.
For the first twenty years of cinema, it was common practice for filmmakers to process their own camera negatives and to make their own prints. This means that many films from this period can be distinguished by the filmmakers’ unique production methods and characteristics. Here are a couple of features worth looking out for:
Producer Codes
Serving as an early form of anti-piracy and as an attempt at trademarking their products, both producers (and later on, film stock manufacturers) often embossed their company names, letters or symbols into the film’s margins. These might be words or initials, but also serial codes or symbols. These are often rather faint and not easy to spot, but with the right light and lense, and your powers of perception, you should be able to detect traces of these during inspection.
One possible caveat to interpreting this information is that the markings may not refer to the producer, but to the trader who bought and sold the copies. Sure – it’s a kind of red herring, but remember that when combined with other methods of identification, producer codes can still help paint a better picture of what we’re looking at.
UPDATE: The Timeline of Historical Film Colors has added some fantastic illustrations for Producer and Manufacturer edge codes, along with further excerpts from Harold Brown’s publication.
Perforations
From the 1920s onwards, film perforation holes became increasingly standardised. However, early cinema was experimenting with all kinds of nutty shapes and sizes (relatively speaking!). Early perforation holes were generally smaller in size, and only started getting bigger (and closer to the standard) from 1903 onwards. This means that very early film presents us with a wide range of possibilities.
For instance, the BFI’s Victorian films feature a lot of 60mm and 68mm Mutoscope titles, which are some of the most distinctive films of early cinema production – and thus easier to spot. Skilfully side-stepping Edison’s patent, the makers of Biograph’s Mutoscope exposed unperforated film through their large gauge Mutograph cameras, punching one set of curved rectangular perforations for each frame. Other examples include the Lumiere Brothers using one pair of circular perforations per frame, or Bioscope’s Skladanowsky Brothers, who went for four pairs of very small perforations per frame.
At first glance, the differences can often seem subtle. We should of course be mindful of shrinkage and tears, but a closer look at the frequency, shape and size of early perforations can be a pretty reliable indicator of the film’s producers and sometime even period.
Frames and Margins
The type, thickness and position of frame lines depend on the size of the camera aperture and the printer used for duping the elements. While the sizes of camera apertures are now standardised, this was not always the case, especially during the first 20 years of cinema. Different types of non-standard frame lines can be observed on early films:
- If the height of the aperture was less than one film frame, there would be a line of unexposed film between the two frames. In a positive, this would show as a noticeably thicker dark horizontal line.
- If the aperture size was greater than the film frame (which Harold Brown warns us is a rare occurrence), the image would spill unto the next frame, creating a superimposition of images at the top and the bottom of each frame.
- If the width of the aperture was smaller than that of the film frame, there would be unexposed film on either sides of the frame.
- Finally, if the width of the aperture was greater than the film frame, the image would be spread across the perforation margins.
Much like the differences in perforations holes, these aperture and printer frame lines can also give us clues as to who the producer of the film was. For more details on the specific printing patterns of particular filmmakers, refer to Harold Brown.
Bryony Dixon discussing the publication Animated Photograph Films as a tool for Victorian film identification ( Photo credit: The Peeping Archivist)
Camille Blot- Wellen introducing the career of Harold Brown (Photo Credit: The Peeping Archivist)
FILMOGRAPHIC
The filmographic evidence refers to all the details that you can obtain from inspecting the photographic image or content of the film. This is the part of the investigation where you can be as creative and crazy as you like in finding resources to help you. The idea here is to carefully examine elements within the filmographic image itself, which might reveal clues to its identity.
In-film text (producer information)
During the early cinema period, illicit copying and pirating of prints was already a grave concern for many producers and filmmakers. If copying films in itself was not technically illegal, copying trademarks was. In an effort to discourage the pirates, several producers included their logos, names or initials in the actual images.
For instance, early Pathé would have the letters P.F (for Pathé Frères) written on a board somewhere in the film’s background. Harold Brown also reports that for a short period of time Pathé actually included a white cockerel in their films! (If you find one, we really want to hear about it. Please email us!)
In-film text (within narrative)
This is pretty straightforward and we’re sure that whenever you find such examples, you immediately do a little happy dance. We’re talking about letters, postcards, telegrams, calendars, newspapers, gravestones and basically anything with a date that is included within the film’s diegetic space. These are often reliable indicators, unless of course the film looks like it’s a period piece.
Bonus: a lot of early films frequently used letters and telegrams as narrative devices, so there’s a strong possibility of spotting one.
People
Bryony Dixon talked about how she recognised a random man in one of the Victorian films from the BFI’s collections; she had simply seen enough early films to know his face! This is obviously jaw-droppingly impressive, but this type of total recall can only really be developed with time, experience and prolific viewing. Making use of online archival collections and just enjoying as many early titles as possible can help, as well as speaking to more experienced archivists, collectors and film historians. Crowd-sourcing metadata efforts have been quite successful and there are even events designed partly for this purpose. Who knows, sometime in the future, archives might be equipped with state of the art facial recognition biometrics, but for now let’s just watch a lot of films, pay attention and ask around.
Places
Locations, landmarks and set designs can be powerful tools for identifying an unknown title. For non-fiction, you can look beyond the obvious clues like street and city signs to see if there are signs for a shop, hotel or a house for instance. If there are, you might be able to find more about when this building or business was active by searching online or in databases of historical businesses, local and regional histories, town records or family histories. Similarly, even with just watching a handful of films from the same producer, you will probably start spotting the same door designs, paintings on the wall, etc. The sets were indeed often rearranged, redecorated and recycled.
Objects
The best examples of these are probably motor vehicles and transports of any kind. As a period of rapid progression and growth, the turn of the century saw an array of innovations and technologies taking centre stage on film. Other items to look out for are clothing and fashion or other branded products that could at least help work out what year it is NOT (which can be just as useful as a starting point). Unless you have a particular interest in cars or corsets (or both), you’ll probably need to dig a bit deeper into illustrated histories of particular products to help your research and narrow things down.
Just one more thing! (or actually a few)
- Pay close attention to the type of element you’re examining. Depending on the element, the data determined from the forensic evidence can be misleading! See below for some great resources on ‘reading’ different elements.
- Consider the possibility that the print might be an international release containing foreign language titles and intertitles. For instance, German intertitles don’t necessarily indicate that the film is German!
- Be careful when working with the archive’s documentation and records, because they too can be misleading. For instance, one of the Victorian nitrate films presented at the festival, “Fun on a Clothes line” (UK, 1896-1900) was listed with the given name “Gypsy Camp Drama,” presumably because the archivist was only able to inspect it on a bench and saw some kind of ‘campsite’ and a ‘gypsy- like’ character. Upon closer inspection (and projection), it has become evident that it was actually a comedy starring a famous slack wire walker that happens to be set outdoors.
- Find as many examples to support your theory as possible, especially when exploring very early titles. Using just one circumstantial piece of evidence isn’t really enough to confirm a film’s identity. Unfortunately, sometimes that might be the most you can say!
- During inspection, make a point to note down everything, however inconsequential it may seem. Besides the fact that something might ring a bell to somebody else, it could also come in handy when you’re inspecting another title in the future.
- Search engines such as Google Image and TinyEye allow you to perform reverse image searches. The results can be quite uneven and you’re unlikely to get a perfect match, but they can help with identifying historic figures or landmarks you might not be familiar with.
I hope that this has inspired you to (gently) crack open that unidentified can gathering dust on your shelf! Remember, these are just a few of the types of things that are worth looking out for, but as Harold Brown reminds us, none of these characteristics alone will reveal the film’s hidden histories. Much like a case for the great TV detective Columbo, it’s about observing the smallest of details and gathering enough circumstantial evidence to solve the mystery of your unidentified film.
FURTHER READING
We’ve been talking a lot about the Harold Brown publication, so you’ll probably want to check it out. After all, it’s great to inspect your film’s physical properties, but what do we use to interpret our findings? That’s where Harold Brown’s meticulous research and records come very handy. Unfortunately, there is currently no complete copy available online but there are some key excerpts published on the Timeline of Historical Film Colors, which in itself is a remarkable resource for early film history. It is also available to purchase via the FIAF website at:
http://www.fiafnet.org/pages/Publications/Other-Books.html
The following are some great online archival collections that we at The Peeping Archivist love to browse (caution: you may lose entire weekends!)
https://player.bfi.org.uk/free
http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu/about_efg/collections
https://www.youtube.com/user/eyefilmNL
https://archive.org/details/prelinger
And finally here’s a nice mix of articles and sites that can help with better understanding the film’s material properties, as well as some general databases to help solve your case!
https://erikpiil.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/piil_characteristics_archiving.pdf
http://www.victorian-cinema.net/
http://www.brianpritchard.com/Anorak’s%20Corner.htm
http://www.costumegallery.com/
Main Photo: Lt Columbo inspecting a film containing subliminal messages, spliced in by the killer. Screenshot taken from “Double Exposure” ( 1973: Season 3, Episode 4) Credit: Universal.
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