British Movietone Archive Now Free Online

A sleepless night, not helped at all by the discovery that the entire British Movietone film archive is available to view free online.

British Movietone were/are a newsreel company, competitors to Pathe News whose archive is already online.

Naturally this means that the amount of historical football clips available on the net has pretty much doubled immediately - the pre-WW1 stuff is particularly good, and there is what amounts to near full coverage of the great 46-48 England team, who were poorly served before.

Start with England v Scotland 1930 - with sound, but no commentary.

Not In Front Of The Children

I drove to Wales and back yesterday for my father’s birthday, and through a general fug of tiredness can remember my sister decrying the cultural atmosphere in which she’s having to bring up her children. Although she’s not having to do it in the inner city, nevertheless she’s right to assert that when we were eight and six respectively we had no sense of such a thing as fashion sense nor felt its absence. But childraising was quite expensive and difficult enough without all that…

For sure, we didn’t have something as upfrontedly evil as gangsta rap to deal with either. But that’s not to say that everything in the garden was lovely. Everything is wrong with this ABBA video, and that’s in a garden. I can’t help but see the influence of another famous kind of Swedish seventies export in this - it’s the way the cameraman backs into the bushes, and as for Benny and Bjorn..

It’s sinister stuff. Would you show this to your children?

(Tongue in cheek, btw. I know it doens’t always come across).

A Complete Event: Pre-War Boxing, Baer and Braddock

One reason why film of football prior to the 1960s is so consistently awful is that the Football League wanted it that way. At the outbreak of World War II, most clubs kept their season ticket receipts despite fans taking them to court (as we’ll see in a forthcoming short film here). After the War, live radio commentary was hindered by clubs’ fears that it would induce fans to stay at home. At the time, the hospitals were still full of the war injured, and the League’s attitude was felt, rightly, to be mean and insulting to the pain and sacrifice endured by so many of their most loyal customers.

Boxing in the United States enjoyed excellent coverage right from the start. Here’s a medley of clips featuring Max Baer from the early 1930s. There is no football film of this quality or interest from the same period.

To the best of my knowledge, not one full pre-War league match survives on film. I’m not even sure that any FA Cup Finals from that era exist in the form of a full ninety minutes.

Again, boxing shows the way. Here is the entire Baer-Braddock fight that was made the subject of Cinderella Man, one of the better sporting films of modern times. (The DVD extras feature analysis of this fight by Norman Mailer, should that float your boat).

Before going to the films, some reflections on the problems facing filming football over boxing. Boxing can be filmed with one or two cameras, in controlled lighting conditions, and the only real sound requirements are a mike for the commentator - everything else can be hashed up easily as special effects (I wonder if the sound of punching in these films is real or added later). Before floodlights - before the sixties, realistically - football often took place in dark, foggy conditions. More cameras are required, in different places, and editing is difficult - you have to cut your film together before interest in the game drops, so you don’t really get time to compose a masterpiece. Good enough is enough. Nor is there any call, in the 1930s, for the film to be of a quality that will survive: the idea of football tradition and history was in its absolute infancy then, and the kind of interest I have, in changes in the culture, style and performance of the sport, simply didn’t exist in the same way. No Simon Inglises or Simon Kupers then. It can’t just have been lack of interest that’s responsible for the paucity of decent football film - it’s that combination of low Football League enthusiasm and the sheer technological demands of filming football that was to blame. Now, Baer v Braddock:

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

Part Five:

Part Six:

Torino v Bologna 1929 and More Camera Angles

Yesterday, we had cameras behind the goals. Today, we have a camera held over the side of a biplane almost exactly 78 years ago. I don’t think it really comes off.

The match finished 2-0 to Torino. As usual, it’s filmed on chip paper.

Many of you who take video at matches will share my own frustration: DV, VHS-C, etc., just aren’t compatible with modern reel film projectors. You are left watching everything you’ve shot through the viewfinder of the camera. Or rather, you were, until now. This site shows you how to use an ordinary inkjet printer to turn your incompatible video into mainstream 8mm or 16mm film that will run in your projector. You can even have sound. Isn’t technology wonderful?

Camera Angles

You might remember the beginning of the Australia-Italy match during the 2006 World Cup. Because of “technical difficulties”, the only working camera was high behind one goal, and for ten glorious minutes, we could watch the game develop across the entire pitch. Much football broadcasting follows the ball around like a playground centre forward, which means you see little of off-the-ball movement (that movement that was what so impressed observers of the teenaged Wayne Rooney).

Sadly, all good things, and the serendipitous technical hitch was sadly resolved.

Here’s Match of the Day’s coverage of Huddersfield Town v Coventry City in May 1966. England would be World Champions within eight weeks, not that you could tell from this. But the winners would achieve promotion to the old First Division, so it was an important game.

And it’s filmed throughout from behind the goals. Owing to the poor film stock used - especially for the time: this is not Mitchell and Kenyon - it’s often hard to really see what’s going on. But nevertheless far more of the pitch visible, and so they’ve captured English football off-the-ball before the wholesale abandonment of wingers in the wake of the World Cup. That has to be of some value:

Jesse Owens in Colour at the 1936 Olympics

From a great distance, and in Spanish, but it’s the great man nonetheless:

This film by the Nazi Germany tourist board is unwittingly highly sinister, but gives a hint of just what Owens found himself up against:

From sinister, to profoundly upsetting. Vienna, 1938:

Indy 500 1939 and 1941

I think it was Patrick Crozier who coined the phrase “safety is dangerous.” This isn’t what he meant, but this film reminds me of it in an ironic sort of way nonetheless:

It puts Murray Walker into some kind of perspective, doesn’t it?

By Request: Dundee v AC Milan

Dundee 2 AC Milan 0:

Strangely, there seems to be no Youtube footage of the return leg, which Milan won 3-0..

Rangers 1 Dundee 5

Purely for the joy of it, here is Rangers v Dundee and a four-goal spree in season 1961-2 by Alan Gilzean against Jim Baxter’s Ibrox men.

Rangers are playing in the light-coloured shirts. I can’t help feeling that this is one of those games that actually looks worse on film than it would watched live from the stands.

Internet TV and Ancient Soccer Footage

Can I first apologise to readers who have emailed me asking about GoogleTV and what I said were hours of old Match of the Days and original Pathe News rushes?

GoogleTV itself was a particularly wonderful hoax perpetrated by the evil minds behind Youtube’s “Infinite Solutions.” The days following the launch of the hoax were difficult ones for me: I found the whole thing far more amusing than it was probably worth, and couldn’t keep it off my mind. Motiveless giggling fits in Post Office queues and on Underground trains followed.

My references to it here did have a serious side to them, as did the original hoax. We want internet TV, don’t we? and prompting Google - or someone else:
Joost sounds promising - into action some way some how strikes me as a fine thing to do. Likewise, the Beeb is indeed sitting on a lot of Match of the Day, and not using it sufficiently in my view, in some cases hamstrung by copyright agreements, true, but yet..

I don’t know if Pathe still have their original rushes. There are certainly some Pathe films that are known to have existed that I’d love to see, but can’t find archived at their otherwise excellent site. For example, there’s a match played in 1920 by Dick Kerr’s Ladies that Pathe filmed: the game was floodlit by war surplus anti-aircraft searchlights.

The BBC definitely do. In “My Father and Other Working Class Heroes”, Gary Imlach’s persistence led to the rediscovery of the original rushes for the 1959 FA Cup Final. That’s in addition to Match of the Day.

I see no reason, quite honestly, why this material isn’t properly professionally archived and made available. A search on the National Sound Archive database reveals what a shamefully small amount of the millions of hours of sports broadcasting done down the years is being made properly available. With all due respect to the BBC’s rights over its own archive, it has “history” when it comes to wanton destruction of valuable material.

In that respect, the BBC’s making available certain of its archive to film makers on the web is very welcome, and so is the new deal with Youtube. These ventures need encouraging and making much of, so that we see more in the future.

Somewhere out there, I am sure, is a lot of colour film of pre-1969 football that is currently just tucked away in its tin. Friese-Greene aside, someone must have taken a colour camera to a preWar match, surely? Or done so in the 1940s and 1950s?

I’d be interested in any finds, needless to say. Anyway, apologies again: that’s why I did it, and I hope, in the reasonably close future, to see something real that amounts to what I was writing about.

This image dates from 1941. If this is what could be done if required, there must be something similar out there showing sport, surely?