Joce and Gill at Home

From the collection of

Screen Archive South East at the University of Brighton collects, preserves, catalogues and provides public access to its collection of films and magic lantern slides. The collection charts the rise of screen culture in the region and the nation and captures many aspects of life, work and creativity in the South East from the late 19th century to the present day. It is available for research, screenings, creative re-use and commercial access.

Joce and Gill at Home

Screen Archive South East at the University of Brighton
1936-01-01
Silent
28m

Joseph Emberton's marvellous film captures the early years of daughters Jocelyn and Gill - with birthdays, Christmas and a trip to Blackpool

Joseph Emberton's film starts by introducing his two daughters - Jocelyn and Gill. We see them celebrate several birthdays with family and friends, including other children. We see them learning to swim at an outdoor pool, with Nanny in attendance, followed by Christmas celebrations, where the children struggle with a giant cracker. The family are then seen admiring the newly built Blackpool Casino, designed by their father. The film ends with a wartime birthday party.

Joseph Emberton was a noted British architect, designing some of the defining modernist buildings of the 1930s. His designs included parts of London's Olympia, Simpsons of Piccadilly and the rebuilding of Blackpool's Pleasure Beach - including the Grand National roller coaster, the Fun House and the Casino buildings which are seen in this film. The events captured in this compilation were edited together at a later date, with accomplished inter-titles added, and the footage spans the end of the 1930s to the first year of the war. Wartime restrictions and the consequent shortage of cine stock curtailed Joseph Emberton's movie-making for the duration and he only resumed filming again in 1948.

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.