Wonderful London

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antnield
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Wonderful London

#1 Post by antnield » Wed Apr 25, 2012 5:26 pm

Confirmed on the BFI's website. More info here from when the films played the London Film Festival:
From Hackney to Chelsea in the company of the great 1920s British travelogue.

In two series and over 20 films the directors of Wonderful London captured some of the most evocative images of the capital in the mid-1920s. These simple travelogues contrasted different aspects of city life – East End and West End, poor and rich, natives and immigrants – often looking beyond the stereotypes to show surprising views of the city. Cheaply produced, but told with wit and flair, the films offer a potent time capsule of a lost London. Of particular interest is Cosmopolitan London. Despite its inherent racism, the film provides an invaluable record of communities too often ignored by films of the 1920s. Here, among the over-populated districts of Limehouse and Tower Bridge, we see London's original Chinatown as well as the South Asian and African seamen and dockers working in the Port of London. These six new restorations by the BFI National Archive reintroduce the films' original tinting and toning. Bryony Dixon, BFI's curator of silent film, will introduce the screening.

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antnield
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Re: Wonderful London

#2 Post by antnield » Fri Apr 27, 2012 2:39 pm


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antnield
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Re: Wonderful London

#3 Post by antnield » Fri May 04, 2012 6:51 am

Image
Last edited by antnield on Tue Jun 26, 2012 8:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

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MichaelB
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Re: Wonderful London

#4 Post by MichaelB » Tue Jun 26, 2012 8:15 am

Full specs announced:
Wonderful London
A film series by Harry B Parkinson and Frank Miller
Release date: 23 July 2012


Painstakingly restored by the BFI National Archive to reinstate their original tinting and toning, and with new piano accompaniments, the six films on Wonderful London offer a fascinating glimpse of London life during the silent era of the mid-1920s. Featuring some of the most evocative sights of the capital, they also reveal lost images that our generation will never have seen before. After a sold out screening at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival, they now come to DVD, along with six additional films and an illustrated booklet of new essays by contemporary London commentators.

In two series and over 20 films, Harry B Parkinson and Frank Miller, the directors of Wonderful London, created travelogues of different aspects of city life for cinema screenings. Aimed at exploiting the popularity of the print magazine of the same name, they were produced on a budget, but told with wit and flair. They particularly liked to highlight the contrasts in the capital, East End and West End, rich and poor, natives and immigrants – often looking beyond the stereotypes to show surprising views of the city.

This mesmerising collection features 12 films (each runs between 8 to 12 minutes long), six of which have been digitally restored by a team of experts from the BFI National Archive and six more from the series that are presented in the black and white prints made some years ago by the BFI using usual traditional film printing methods.

The newly-restored films are:
• Barging Through London
• London’s Sundays
• London’s Free Shows
• Cosmopolitan London
• Flowers of London
• London Off the Track


Travelling from Chelsea to Hackney and taking in the familiar landmarks of London town – Buckingham Palace, the River Thames, Big Ben, Tower Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral, Wonderful London also reveals the unknown nooks and crannies and parts of London rarely filmed; the poorer, over-populated districts of Clerkenwell and Whitechapel and the original Chinatown of Pennyfields in Limehouse.

There are glimpses of buildings we can no longer see on the ground; the long-gone Crystal Palace and the recently vanished gates of White City, where London’s first Olympic stadium now lies under the Westfield Shopping Centre; on a boat trip up the Thames we can see Fred Karno’s legendary ‘Karsino’. We can also take a trip through working-class London on a barge from Limehouse to Paddington Basin, via Camden and King’s Cross. By bus or tram or foot, we can observe the thronging Sunday street markets and wander down the little alleyways, past the pubs and law courts – buildings that Dickens knew. And most poignantly, we can see a past generation of Londoners going about their business, complaining about the roadworks or looking with curiosity at us through the camera lens – all gone now – but strangely like the Londoners of today.

The world-renowned silent film pianist John Sweeney has recorded the new piano accompaniments featured on the DVD.

Special features
Dickens’ London; London’s Outer Ring; London Old and New; London’s Contrasts; Known London; Along Father Thames to Shepperton
• Illustrated booklet with an introduction by BFI curator Bryony Dixon and new essays by Sukhdev Sandhu, Jude Rogers, Iain Sinclair and Michael Rosen.

Product details
RRP: £19.99 / cat. no. BFIVD946 / Cert E
UK / 1924 / tinted & toned, black & white / silent with English intertitles / Original aspect ratio 1.33:1
There's also a launch event on Wednesday 18 July:
Smoke: A London Peculiar and the BFI present a special screening event to launch the Wonderful London DVD, with live soundtrack by Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley and Smoke: A London Peculiar editors Jude Rogers and Matt Haynes. A selection of the films will be introduced by Bryony Dixon, Silent Film Curator at the BFI and writers who have contributed to the DVD.
Venue: Rough Trade East, 91 Brick Lane, London, E1 6QL
Time: 7.00pm
Admission: Free
More details here.

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htshell
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Re: Wonderful London

#5 Post by htshell » Tue Jun 26, 2012 4:28 pm

Looks excellent. If anyone goes, please report what Bob Stanley's scores are like!

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antnield
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Re: Wonderful London

#6 Post by antnield » Thu Jul 12, 2012 6:15 am


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MichaelB
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Re: Wonderful London

#7 Post by MichaelB » Tue Jul 17, 2012 6:26 am

Caught by the River (by Jude Rogers, co-founder of Smoke: A London Peculiar and author of one of the booklet essays).
As films, the Wonderful London travelogues are quaint little creatures, not particularly experimental in their design, or blessed with hugely elegant inter-titles – although some words that grace the screen do have a peculiar poetry (Barging Through London includes a line about the boat passing “heaven amid the gaunt wharves”, which I’ve used as the title of the piece that I wrote for the DVD liner notes). But an air of furtive fascination, even exoticism, lurks in every frame – the idea that here in is something, gentle viewer, that your eye wouldn’t usually see, that his new beast, the movie camera, somehow magically can.

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antnield
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Re: Wonderful London

#8 Post by antnield » Thu Jul 19, 2012 12:33 pm


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MichaelB
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Re: Wonderful London

#9 Post by MichaelB » Tue Jul 24, 2012 12:41 pm

The Arts Desk:
These London snapshots, each around 10 minutes long, offer sights so fascinating to behold that my finger kept pressing the pause button. For there’s so much here to take in: the frontage, say, of King’s Cross Station, no tidier in 1923 than it is now; the lost glass wonder of Crystal Palace, destroyed by fire in 1936; a 31 bus advertising "Iron Jelloids for Weakness"; and Erskine’s, a horribly notorious Whitcomb Street café-bar, "famous for its negro clientele" (the films’ intertitles aren’t remotely PC). 

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MichaelB
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Re: Wonderful London

#10 Post by MichaelB » Fri Jul 27, 2012 8:29 am

The BFI has published a short extract from London's Outer Ring - though note that this is one of the unrestored films.

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antnield
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Re: Wonderful London

#11 Post by antnield » Mon Jan 28, 2013 7:07 am


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Tommaso
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Re: Wonderful London

#12 Post by Tommaso » Sat Sep 21, 2013 5:31 am

MichaelB wrote:The Arts Desk:
These London snapshots, each around 10 minutes long, offer sights so fascinating to behold that my finger kept pressing the pause button.
Watched the disc last night. The above quote is to the point, but unfortunately you HAVE to keep pressing the pause button all the time, because only seconds after one of these fascinating sights comes onto the screen, it is immediately cut short by just another annoying intertitle, and there are many, far too many of them. Regardless of their content (often condescing, sometimes trying to be funny, rarely informative, and usually with far too much text), these intertitles simply always create a 'barrier' between the images and the viewer, and that's a real pity because the actual images are indeed often very beautiful and enchanting. In retrospect the approach of these filmmakers even makes it clearer how great Mitchell & Kenyon were twenty years earlier. In the basically intertitle-free M&K films (which also usually have far longer shot lengths) you can really have the experience of entering a lost world and getting hypnotised by the images, whereas "Wonderful London" feels only like a photo book.

Still, a very fine release, especially as the BFI made just the right choices in their selection of those six films that they fully restored (the others looks good, too, however).

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zedz
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Re: Wonderful London

#13 Post by zedz » Sun Sep 22, 2013 7:45 pm

I agree with your comparison, though Mitchell & Kenyon weren't generally making finished film for conventional commercial distribution. We're very fortunate that their modus operandi just happened to result in a huge range of unmediated actualities with immense historical resonance. If they'd been marketing finished films for a general audience, they might have looked a lot more like those in Wonderful London, and a lot of value would no doubt have been left on the cutting room floor.

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