Vivat Birt Acres
Series of programmes about the pioneers of moving pictures, with footage from some of the earliest known films.
This episode of the Granada TV series Moving Pictures looks at the very earliest British pioneers starting with Birt Acres who made the first British films with Robert Paul. It goes on to cover the main types of filmmaking and the filmmakers; George Albert Smith, James Williamson, Cecil Hepworth, Mitchell and Kenyon, Goodwin Norton, Frank Mottershaw, and James Bamforth.
There are one or two inaccuracies in the titling but it's a good survey of early British film for the time, despite postulating, somewhat strangely, that British filmmakers 'threw away' the opportunity to get in at the birth of the new medium because they thought 'film was too unpredictable'.
The programme is narrated by Gus Macdonald and with music by the great film composer George Fenton.
Behind the Screen
Get inside the movies with these illuminating insights from the people who make them.
The movies can make us believe in magic, but what they really serve up is illusion: pull back the curtain and what's revealed is a vast enterprise of imagination, skill and invention. When it comes to feature films, a director may preside over a legion of hundreds of actors, artists and technicians.
To outsiders - that's most of us - this complex world can seem mystifying and impenetrable. So an insider's perspective is worth its weight in gold, as these rare interviews and talks by filmmakers and performers show.
20 videos in this collection
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The Set of Far from the Madding Crowd
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Robin Williams (Kelly)
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Clapperboard [24/11/80]
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The Guardian Interview: Ralph Fiennes
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MOMI Indian Cinema Interviews
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Ismail Merchant and James Ivory
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Ben Kingsley and Buzz Goodbody
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Georges Melies
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Clive Donner
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Mike Leigh and Les Blair
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Jill Craigie / Rosamond Lehmann
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Clapperboard North West [16/11/79]
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David Lean A Life in Film
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MOMI Presentation by Terry Gilliam
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The Electric Paradise
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War, Peace and Pictures: The Films of Kay Mander
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Anthony Daniels (Kelly)
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Gerry Meets... Maureen O'Hara
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