Crossing the Great Sagrada

1924
Silent
10m

A silent satire with hints of Monty Python.

Travel films were all the rage in the 1920s, and this short comedy pokes fun at the self-importance of the intrepid explorers who led the expeditions to exotic climes. The film is a slice of silent silliness, composed of a mish-mash of out-takes, home movie footage and jokey titles.

Holmes, Sweet and Holmes, the intrepid explorers, set forth on their expedition to Sagrada, sailing via the Bay of Biscay. After trekking through tropical rain forests, paddling in a canoe up the 'langurous Salamander river', riding on camels across the vast desert, they eventually reach the goal of their journey. As they wearily make their way homewards one by one they drop down dead in the desert, leaving their bones to whiten amid the illimitable sands... Comic names in the lists of credits and a mixture of real and fake shots with humourous sub-titles are used to obtain comic effects.

Pioneers of Personal Film

At the dawn of the cinema age, these trailblazing early adopters brought filmmaking technology into the home.

Home moviemaking is older than the first cinemas: we've been filming ourselves for well over a hundred years. The birth of the cinematograph in 1895 inspired a plethora of inventions pitched at the domestic market: Kinoras, Kammatographs, Pictorialographs, Birtacs and Biokams - all cameras designed for amateurs and enthusiasts to film and project in the home. This collection celebrates the earliest home movies preserved in Britain, and bears witness to the dawn of the amateur's long-standing fascination with family, travel and community. "The object in introducing this apparatus is to endeavour to popularize this extremely fascinating branch of photography.... [I have] always looked forward to the time when animated photography would be within the reach of every one" - filmmaker/inventor Birt Acres, on his Birtac camera, 1898.