Why everyday life is the stuff of magical movie moments

When I first heard the Yorkshire Film Archive was launching its very own festival, my mind drifted to my Uncle Charlie, and what his reaction would have been.

Charlie worked down Houghton Main pit and his big passion was photography. I remember as a child in the 1960s spending lots of time with him in the darkroom he’d converted from a cubby-hole by his back door in North Street. His pit-ravaged chest would wheeze loudly as he developed picture after picture.

The subject matter was surprising, though. He never took landscapes, or what he called “views and scenes” because, as he said, “You can see them out of the window”, and he didn’t take people because, “You can see them any day of the week”. What he took were “famous people off the telly” as he put it: he’d set up his camera on a tripod to catch Richard Dimbleby or Harold MacMillan and the result would be an odd grainy shot of somebody on the screen of a TV rented from the Co-op with long thin legs and a bowl of fruit on top. Uncle Charlie’s reasoning was that “people like that will never come to Barnsley!”

Towards the end of his life Charlie talked fondly about getting a cine-camera then he could film the people from the TV; an early version of YouTube, I guess. I suggested, with the enthusiasm of pre-teen exuberance, that instead of filming the TV he could look outside and get some tracking shots of my Auntie pegging the washing out and then pan across to their son Little Charlie lovingly washing his car. Uncle Charlie dismissed the idea with a flick of his cap and some potentially wonderful archive film was lost forever, mainly because it was never made.

And that’s the point of the Contrast/brilliance festival: it shows us to ourselves. Sometimes we forget how short the history of moving film is, and what a large part Yorkshire has played in its development. It’s only just over 120 years since the first flickering images of traffic over Leeds Bridge were captured by Louis Le Prince, and James Bamforth’s early development of comic films in Holmfirth in the first decade of the 20th-century meant the West Yorkshire town was, almost, Hollywood. The festival builds on this legacy by celebrating the great archive of mainly amateur film-making across the region, and it’s part of Screen Heritage UK which is a nationwide project to encourage people to gain access to their history and culture through film.

The festival will include some amazing pieces of film-making that, I’m sure, would have changed Uncle Charlie’s mind. There’s John Nunn’s wonderfully atmospheric 1950 film of the Nalgo holiday camp at Cayton Bay with its chaps in shirts and jackets playing beach cricket and girls with ribbons in their hair racing towards a finishing tape.

There’s the astonishingly moving A Sentimental Journey, made by Frank Dean, a film-maker and lifelong worker on the railways; it brings tears to my eyes from the opening scene with a shot of a newspaper headline showing the then transport minister Lord Beeching’s cuts to the Whitby Line in the 1960s. Milk is loaded on to the train at the lost and forgotten Robin Hood’s Bay station and some washing, that could have been my auntie’s, flaps in the wind.

Later in the film Frank gets access to the last train going down the line, long after the passenger service has closed; it’s a train full of demolition men and at one point we see a station clock, forever stopped at 3.15.

I think that one of my favourites is John Turner’s 1957 slice of cinema verite Hull Street Scenes. It does what it says on the film tin, showing men in caps and women in scarves and lads with quiffs and lasses in cardigans just going about their business (although at one point an incongruous fox hunt appears) buying fish and chips, playing football, walking down a street, walking back up a street.

Hull Street Scenes is the essence of what the festival is about; it proves that film has always been a medium for us all to record our lives, to make art out of the comings and goings of “ordinary” people and to give unregarded places a kind of majesty. And these days, when everybody is a director with the cameras on their mobile phones, it makes us pause to give homage to the unsung pioneers of the art.

Beat that, Uncle Charlie!

The Contrast/brilliance festival runs from September 23 to October 5. Ian McMillan will launch the event at Hambleton Forum in Northallerton on September 13. A limited number of tickets are available for the launch by emailing [email protected].