Ut Proficias

1953
Silent
16m

A day in the life of a school - filmed by a pupil who later became one of Britain's best documentary makers.

This day in the life of Abingdon School, Oxfordshire, is doubly fascinating: a glimpse into the daily rituals of a 1950s public school and the juvenilia of a great filmmaker. Pupil Michael Grigsby (1936-2013) headed the school photographic society and was the driving force behind this film and its companion piece No Tumbled House (also on BFI Player). He went on to become one of our greatest film and television documentary makers.

Grigsby appears on-screen in the shot which starts at 15:12. The director's many masterpieces as a mature filmmaker include Enginemen (1959), A Life Apart (1973) and Living on the Edge (1987). There are few obvious similarities between these poetic, socially conscious documentaries and his school home movies - except a palpable enthusiasm for diving in and exploring the film medium. Other Abingdon alumni include actor Tom Hollander, politician Francis Maude and all five members of Radiohead. In 2004, partly inspired by the rediscovery of the 1950s films and with the blessing and initial mentoring of Grigsby himself, the school set up a new Abingdon Film Unit. It has produced over 100 films, mostly documentary and animation, several of which have been shown at film festivals in the UK and abroad.

Home Movies & Amateur Film

Celluloid scrapbooks: the most intimate and personal of films invite us into Britain's birthday parties, back gardens and beach holidays.

Home movies are intimate catalogues of everyday life: birthdays and holidays, childhoods and neighbourhoods. Each reel is a private scrapbook - memories of cherished people, places and times committed to film. Rarely shared outside the family, home movies are the most intensely personal kind of filmmaking. They are by us, of us, for us. Victorian inventors put filmmaking gear in the hands of wealthy amateurs, but decade by decade, home moviemaking technology has become ever cheaper, simpler and more ubiquitous. Our home movies look much as they always have: in and out of focus, thumbs over the lens, wobbly framing, over-enthusiastic pans. But these flaws can't diminish their warm authenticity. Collectively, the nation's home movies make up a patchwork archive of British social life, of whims and ways, loves loved and lives lived.