Cine Snapshots - 1938

Hong Kong
1937
Silent
9m

Beautiful and engaging amateur footage of a lively 1930s Hong Kong.

Amateur photographer Edwin G. Phillips produces a rich, intimate portrait documenting ordinary people and life in 1930s Hong Kong. Among his many varied snapshots, we see labourers tending to paddy fields, Wan Chai Temple, domestic footage of interactions with a servant, buzzy streets, junks and the British merchant cruiser, HMS Rawalpindi, which would be sunk by German warships in 1939.

Scenes in Hong Kong, including: rice fields; junks and temple at Wanchai (Wan Chai).

The amateur photographer Edwin Phillips produces a rich, intimate story through many and varied snapshots, wonderfully recording ordinary people and life Hong Kong. Documenting labourers tending to paddy fields, Wan Chai Temple, domestic footage of interactions with a servant, buzzy streets, junks and the British merchant cruiser, HMS Rawalpindi, later sunk by German warships

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.