RARE footage of Boer War soldiers repairing a bridge and firing guns will be screened in Bradford as part of the Great Victorian Moving Picture Show.

Surviving fragments of some of the earliest moving pictures, shown for the first time outside London, will be presented at the National Science and Media Museum in a new digital format, to a piano accompaniment.

The films were produced towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, when competing showmen were projecting moving picture shows to large audiences in West End theatres. Following early experiments in moving images such as the kinetoscope and mutoscope, these shows were the first examples of communal film watching.

This presentation is chiefly made up of large-format film (68mm) - the IMAX of its day. The format was developed by William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, a British engineer who worked with Thomas Edison to develop moving picture technology. Dickson used his Biograph camera to film things normal people wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to see: the Royal family taking tea, Pope Leo XIII in the Vatican and the battlefields of the Boer War.

Each around a minute long, the films, dating 1897-1901, capture a range of subjects: sporting events, military parades, panoramic vistas, dizzying ‘phantom rides’, music hall turns, the Oxford/Cambridge boat race and bustling Victorian streets.

Since they were first shown the large-format films have been mostly lost - but now the BFI has found and restored them. “These films offer us a new understanding of the Victorian period,” said BFI National Archive curator Bryony Dixon, who will give a talk on the films. “The exceptional clarity of the large-format images makes us feel a connection to the past. These fragmentary moments show our ancestors’ more human side, as many small demonstrations of humour, tenderness and spontaneity help to dispel preconceptions of the sober, austere Victorian.”

Most of the the films were made by the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, which had a residency at London’s Palace Theatre of Varieties, where it projected films to music from the house orchestra

Joining the company, Dickson filmed the spectacle of the decade - Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, in June 1897.. In 1899 he went to South Africa to film the Boer War. “Capturing the action on the large, heavy Biograph camera, with batteries and tripod weighing in, would have been extremely challenging. But the precious fragments that have survived are remarkable,” said Bryony Dixon.

* The Great Victorian Moving Picture Show is at Pictureville on Thursday, September 5.

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