They Are Forsaken A Tale of an Island of the Hebrides

Harris/Na Hearadh
1938
Silent
20m

A starkly beautiful portrait of crofting life in Flodabay on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides.

A starkly beautiful portrait of life in Flodabay on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. The film follows a family of crofters in their daily tasks - milking the cow, peat collecting, lobster pot making - and the fascinating processes of tweed making: washing the wool, collecting flowers and lichens for dyes, spinning warp and weft. A slow and studied yet compelling look at Hebridean life.

This strikingly accomplished amateur film is the work of William Henry George, a Derbyshire-based geography teacher. Intended as an instructional tool or teaching aid, it demonstrates the hardships of croft living, with a poetic and slightly whimsical tone ("the hard living of the crofts is eked out by the making of tweed and the harvest of the sea"). George clearly admired the "toil and skill" of the crofting way of life, yet recognised it as unsustainable: the crofter's son leaves Flodabay for a job in Stornoway at the end of the film.

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.