Midsummer Madness - An Idiotic Idyll

1933
Silent
1m

Four bright young things enact a midsummer's love tryst among the daisies in this short, well-crafted amateur fiction film.

Swim-suited and sprightly, four bright young things prance and dance their way through a mythical midsummer's love tryst in this bizarre and beguiling work of amateur fiction. The actors - who play a tree-nymph, a wood-sprite, an archer and a club-wielding aggressor - are clearly having a whale of a time and were probably friends of the filmmaker, Harold Street, an accountant from Birmingham.

An amateur film involving three men and one woman dancing and cavorting in swimming costumes in a field.

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.