Here's a Health to the Barley Mow

[Duncan Hopper]

Yes, I'm sure a few retailers have some copies left, but the BFI have zero left, the cupboard is bare. I bet those remaining copies at Amazon will soon be gone.

[MichaelB]

The great thing about tapping previously untapped audiences is that they can sometimes turn out to be surprisingly huge.

For instance, one of the most reliable moneyspinners in the entire history of BFI DVD Publishing was the British Transport Films series, which passed entirely under the radar of most film buffs and were generally ignored by the mainstream media. But the trainspotter market is clearly much bigger than the arthouse film market!

[zedz]

Well done, BFI!

This kind of phenomenon is why I'm so amused when people shriek that Criterion has lost its mind and is committing commercial suicide by issuing discs like Martha Graham, Antonio Gaudi or The Mikado, when there's every chance that the niche audiences for those titles are exponentially larger than those for most of the auteurist classics they put out.

(And I must confess that I've finally broken down and picked up the Transport Films set, not because I'm much of a train buff, but because all of the BFI documentary sets seem to contain their fair share of gold dust.)

[MichaelB]

This kind of phenomenon is why I'm so amused when people shriek that Criterion has lost its mind and is committing commercial suicide by issuing discs like Martha Graham, Antonio Gaudi or The Mikado, when there's every chance that the niche audiences for those titles are exponentially larger than those for most of the auteurist classics they put out.

It's certainly not going to be any less - and a title like Antonio Gaudí neatly straddles both camps anyway, since the package includes films by Hiroshi Teshigahara and Ken Russell.

And while I'm not privy to the actual figures, I understand that the BFI's Tales from the Shipyard was something of a smash hit in central Scotland (i.e. Clydeside) - and I myself have very fond memories of going up to Durham to introduce 90 minutes of mining documentaries and finding out that the event was such a sellout success that they booked another one in time to announce it at the start of the programme.

It was also very very obvious simply from scanning the audience that the vast majority were retired miners and their families, something that came out very strongly indeed during the Q&A afterwards. In fact, at a very early stage I decided to take a back seat and just let them reminisce (let's face it, nothing I said could possibly compete with a miner telling us about his first days on the job in 1947, just before the National Coal Board took over, having to crawl two miles in and two miles out every day with minimal equipment), and even after we were thrown out of the auditorium for the main evening show, we carried on in the bar afterwards. (As an aside, the first National Coal Board DVD compilation has sold well enough to greenlight a volume 2, which should be out before too long).

What's particularly gratifying about these sessions (and I hosted numerous similar examples, including fashion films to an overwhelmingly female and middle-class audience in Chichester, early WWII propaganda to an audience in Dorset that was clearly old enough to remember 1939, and so on) is that not only were they fun to do, but they also demonstrate the BFI's seriousness about reaching audiences well beyond the stereotypical arthouse film fan - something that they're required to do as a condition of funding. It's also very clear from the comments on its YouTube channel that it's attracting all kinds of people: many of the responses to Alice in Wonderland (1903) had never seen a silent film before.

Which in any case is a sensible strategy, since a comparatively tiny percentage of the archive's holdings consists of auteur-helmed films aimed at the arthouse market - a far greater amount consists of newsreels and actualities along the lines of those included in Here's a Health to the Barley Mow. And indeed British films that have slipped through the critical/historical cracks, hence the Flipside series.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Well done, BFI!

(And I must confess that I've finally broken down and picked up the Transport Films set, not because I'm much of a train buff, but because all of the BFI documentary sets seem to contain their fair share of gold dust.)

Gold dust indeed. My grandmother can be seen in one of them sailing 'doon the watter' in Bernard Braden's film of the Clyde steamers.

[zedz]

Gold dust indeed. My grandmother can be seen in one of them sailing 'doon the watter' in Bernard Braden's film of the Clyde steamers.

I'll wave when I see her!

[Roger Ryan]

Perhaps this is a very common name in the U.K., but when recently re-watching BARRY LYNDON, I smiled when I noticed "A Health To The Barley Mow" is the name of the tavern shown early in the film.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Gold dust indeed. My grandmother can be seen in one of them sailing 'doon the watter' in Bernard Braden's film of the Clyde steamers.

I'll wave when I see her!

Just so as you don't miss her she's sitting up on deck wearing a black hat and glasses eating a doughnut.

[zedz]

I'll be dressed in a purple suit with a red bowtie wearing a white carnation in my buttonhole. The password is "It's a fine clear day in Ferniegair."

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

The answer will be..'it's a sublime day,right enough '

[antnield]

The Digital Fix.

[MichaelB]

That was well worth the wait - and I don't envy you trying to encapsulate this collection: I've still only scratched the surface.

[zedz]

I've made my way through it and really enjoyed it - even all that morris dancing. To my great surprise, I think my favourite film was the very recent video of those guys doing their sword dance in the bar.

And the booklet is as invaluable as ever. Great work all round.

[MichaelB]

Caught by the River:

This sumptuous six-hour DVD set, subtitled A Century of Folk Customs and Ancient Rural Games and accompanied by a richly detailed booklet of notes and essays by folk historians and film archivists, should be of great interest to the Caught by the River audience. Watching these 40-odd films is like taking a holiday in a strange and wondrous land, or maybe an afternoon spent leafing through CBTR-revered Country Bizarre.

[MichaelB]

Here's a Health to the Barley Mow comes in at number three on Time Out's Top 50 DVDs of 2011 poll.