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Reel lives captured on film
Sue Howard pauses halfway through a sentence, as though suddenly remembering something, and says: "I must show you Fenella the tiger." A few seconds of computer keyboard wizardry, and here she is on screen – Fenella, a fully grown tiger, Queen of the Jungle, eyeballing the camera. Just one thing: she's strolling through Holmfirth.
Fenella is one of the stars of the Yorkshire Film Archive, the York-based library of regional films – 15,000 cans of them – that celebrates its 21st anniversary this year. She was adopted as a cub by the Overends, a Holmfirth circus family who toured South Africa in the 1930s with a trapeze act. When they came back to Britain at the outbreak of war, they brought Fenella with them. She was, in the words of a fascinating YFA film, "an exotic reminder of their lives on the road".
The film shows Fenella as a cat-sized cub, a labrador-sized adolescent and a sideboard-sized adult. She's walking the streets on a lead, and there's not a raised eyebrow or a batted eyelid from passers-by. Children would stroke her, she shared the Overends' house, liked to curl up on the settee – and here are the family, rolling playfully around on the hearthrug with her. The way you do with a fully-grown tiger.
In recent years, Fenella has become a bit of a cult and a Holmfirth Tiger Project has been launched to commemorate her. She is long dead, but she lives on in people's memories – and that's part of the point of the Yorkshire Film Archive.
Touring the vaults at its smart, purpose-built offices is like exploring a Tutankhamun's tomb of Yorkshire history and creativity. There are films of almost every imaginable aspect of life, and more than 50 hours of them are going on-line over the next six months, starting in early November with 21 hours to celebrate the anniversary.
They date back beyond footage of Queen Victoria opening Sheffield Town Hall in 1897. She never stirs from her open carriage outside the main entrance, hardly waves to the crowds; might almost be one of the thousands of statues erected to her all over the Empire.
But it doesn't have to be very old to be very interesting. Sue Howard, the archive's director, leads the way through the vaults, past racks of films and videos. Here are BBC Look North programmes from the Seventies and Eighties, intriguingly labelled "Menwith Hill" and "Pit TV" and "Hairdressing pix". Proof that there was life even before Harry Gration.
Some of the cans arrived rusty, some badly damaged. Sue points to a hole in one of them: "What damage is that doing to the film inside? If it's mouldy it will have to be cleaned. We have to make difficult decisions about what's important to preserve. Though, as with any archivist, we might say: 'Who are we to decide what's important?' We use the criteria: is it unique content? Is it something people are going to relate to?"
Some of the films donated to the YFA, one of Britain's nine regional film archives, are, after all, home movies with an appeal hardly stretching beyond the homes where they were filmed. But for all the hundreds of "babies on the lawn" films, Sue stoutly maintains: "Family films are hugely important. People filmed absolutely what they wanted to film, for how long they wanted to film it for, and that's always the material that other people relate to because they recognise their own lives in it."
We tour the shelves: Huddersfield Trolley Buses; Vespa rally in Leeds 1959; Ingleton Fell Rescue Team ("That's really good"); Bingley Gala 1977; Denby Dale Pie; Cliff Michelmore interviewing Lord Kagan, the industrialist whose Elland factory made the Gannex macs that were central to what modern political spinners would call the Harold Wilson "brand". Hebden Bridge Carnival, 1924. A 1930s Rowntrees factory sports day.
"Sometimes people will have opened a cabinet and discovered films that they didn't know were there," says Sue, who still seems as thrilled with her job as she was on the day she started at the archive 18 years ago.
As well as public screenings, films can be seen at the YFA... and here, in one of the viewing rooms, the archive's head of learning, Alex Southern, is showing films of York to Lizzy Linklater, a creative writing tutor. She is planning to use
some of them to stimulate students on her Re-imagining York courses, about the city's history and architecture.
"Looking at films of 1920s York, you see just how much slower the pace of life was," she says. The way we were, the way we walked: slower. And the way we watched. "It really does feel we've moved on centuries over the past five or 10 years to where we are now," says Sue. "Then, we were still using analogue technology as opposed to today's digital technology. Now we can stream things on websites and interact with people and contextualise. Unless we contextualise what we're putting up on-line, we're not doing our job."
She instances a 1916 film called Scenes from the Ripon Highland Sports, on the face of it a cosy portrait of a Sports Day at Ripon racecourse. In context, though, it features Scottish soldiers on their way to the Somme: "a very poignant film".
No danger there of luring viewers down a Memory Lane that can all too easily lead to Nostalgia Cul-de-Sac. Nor with Curry City, a film from 2000 about the personal stories behind two Bradford restaurants. Or Tame the Tigers, from a year earlier, which looks at the players and supporters of Castleford Tigers rugby team (more tigers).
Sue shows me some highlights – from Humber Highway, for instance, one of 50 films made by Cyril and Betty Ramsden, members of Leeds Cine Cub. "Betty took a two-week holiday at Hull Docks to film it," she says. Why? "Because she loved it. Beautiful film-makers." The 1956 film shows ships being built, great rearing cranes, big men and big rivets.
Or a wry 1962 film by another Leeds club member, Alan Sidi, of a bowler-hatted businessman's commute from Leeds to Bradford (heartbreaking glimpses of the days when Bradford still had a proper station). Or John Turner's film of Hull fair in the Fifties: teddy boys with goldfish in plastic bags. Or a 1953 workers' outing to Blackpool from Salts Mill in Saltaire, with passengers getting silver-service treatment from the train stewards and everyone so smart. No tracksuits and trainers then.
And there's a 1970 film celebrating the first 10 years of Myers Grove school in Sheffield, one of the first purpose-built comprehensives. Here are language laboratories, woodwork classes, and a fashion show with bashful girls flouncing around in mini-skirts. The school had four "houses" – Australia, Canada, India and Ghana.
Not everything is documentary or factual. Sue shows me T'Batley Faust, a staggeringly inventive animated take on the Faust legend, with the central character re-imagined by film-maker Tony Hall as a mill owner. And another animated film, created on a tabletop by Eric Balderson, of the 1950s Christmas song Winter Wonderland, with the snow made of icing sugar.
I join in with the choruses: "In the meadow, we will build a snowman..."
Oh, I could sit here all afternoon. I could sit here for the rest of my life. Can we just have a quick look at the 1936 Marbles Championship in Castleford Co-op Hall? And are there any more Yorkshire tigers?
Yorkshire Film Archive: 01904 876550; www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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