gor[b] Paul Gorbould: Words and Pictures

This was England

I spend most of my work week trolling through archival audiovisual material with an eye to putting it online. So I'm always interested when new archival resources turn up online.

Here's one that came my way courtesy of CBC photo editor Robin Rowland and his blog The Garret Tree.

Newsfilm Online launched a few weeks ago, a British venture that says it has over 3,000 hours of archival news stories. Unfortunately most of it is available only to students and educators in the UK.

(This makes me double proud of the CBC Digital Archives, which has about half the total hours of content, but is completely free to everyone, everywhere. The Newsfilm, however, is downloadable.)

The stuff that is freely accessible, however, is really interesting and the quality is very good.

Check out a British Paramount newsreel about the Suez Crisis or race riots in London's Notting Hill (interesting, especially for 1958 - black reporters interview white people, and vice versa.)

Dig a little deeper and you'll find mice drinking sherry (1986), more riots (absolutely wild Reuters footage of the 1936 fascist riots, again in London), the Hindenburg Disaster (British Paramount News, 1937) and so on.

There's also an interesting collection of the early work of David Lean, who would go on to direct films such as Lawrence of Arabia. You can see some of Lean's early film editing work on political gatherings, 1930 auto racing and a Noël Coward premiere.