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The story of 9.5 and its early role in archaeology - Part 2

28/7/2016

 
By Ken Walton
​
Continued from Part 1. 

Small 9.5mm ‘Pathe Baby’ movie cameras had been available since 1923. At first they were hand cranked but from 1926 the possibility of an attached clockwork motor ‘Motrix’ was introduced. Then in 1931 (tying in quite well with the Lankester Harding films) came the 'Pathe Motocamera' and then the ‘World B’ model, which both had built-in motors. We don’t know exactly what camera Lankester Harding was using for filming but we can be pretty certain that it was one of the new motorised cameras because there is a classic 'giveaway' shot: we see the view point of the camera on a tripod filming a wall and in a couple of seconds Lankester Harding walks into shot and poses on the wall for the camera. He then exits but the camera remains rolling, whilst he would have made his way back to turn it off. This is exactly the kind of thing people with a motorised camera do when the want to be in a film but are by themselves at the time.

As far as exposure was concerned, Lankester Harding might well have used the Pathe ‘Posograph’,  a chart/calculator made of card that gave some guidance on the correct exposure for certain conditions. However, a relatively new invention was the ‘Extinction meter’, like the ‘Drem Justophot’. The extinction meter relied on a series of numbers or letters seen through a viewer like a small telescope. The letter or number just in view was the correct exposure.  On the barrel of the device a table of settings for the camera could be used to adjust shutter speed and aperture, rather like a modern 'spot meter’.

Having been invented in 1924 the ‘Drem Cinophot’, designed specifically for movie making, linked more to a fixed shutter speed.  It was improved in 1928 to make it more sensitive; just a few years before Lankester Harding was to make his films. It is very likely that Lankester Harding used an extinction meter because that was the latest most practical technology. There was a photoelectric meter in 1931 called the ‘Electrophot’ sold by J. Thomas Rhamstine, of Detroit, Michigan - but it weighed 1.5 lbs. and was not very portable like the modern light meters.

Around Europe the market for 9.5mm cameras and projectors grew with the Swiss producing the ‘Pailliard Bolex’ brand and the Austrians the ‘Eumig’. In the UK makes such as: ‘Campro’, ‘Midas’, ‘Coronet’, ‘Binoscope’, ‘Dekko’ (which might well have come from the British army bringing back the word ‘Dekho’ (‘Look’ in Hindi) from India, hence the old British phrase ‘Have a dekko’ (‘Have a look’). The best British make of projector was the ‘Specto’ made by Specto Ltd of Windsor. The Specto Company was founded by a Czech, J. Danek.
Picture
A Specto 9.5mm projector, invented by J. Danek in1935/6. Image: K. Walton, 2016.
Gerald Lankester Harding was something of a pioneer of 9.5mm film in archaeology but he was certainly not the only person to use it. A film exists of the reconstruction of Avebury stone circle in Wiltshire, shot between 1937 and 1939 by Percy Lawes. The film shows the stones being raised in a project organised by Alexander Keiller.  The film was shown for the first time soon after it was made in the Red Lion pub in Avebury, after which the film disappeared into a biscuit tin for 50 years until it was re-discovered and shown again (on video) in the Red Lion in the year 2000. This 9.5mm Avebury film is now in the Wiltshire Records Office's Local Studies Library in Trowbridge, where it can be viewed.

From 1936, with the introduction of Kodak’s 8mm film gauge, 9.5mm began to decline, even though the new 8mm format could only hold ¼ of the information and image quality of a 9.5mm frame, very near, in fact, to 16mm film! The ‘commercial’ end for the format came around the mid 1960s. It is now only kept alive by enthusiasts, who meet to have 9.5mm film shows. The gauge has even been manufactured again by re-perforating 16mm film for the use of 9.5mm enthusiasts.

The story of 9.5mm film is just one piece in the jigsaw that goes to make up the history of amateur filmmaking. Pathe, for example, had also got into the 17.5mm film gauge that had been around since the 1890s but that too eventually failed.

We are so fortunate that Gerald Lankester Harding was a movie film enthusiast and has left us with such a good record of life on excavations so long ago. Film and video is a great way to communicate to the public. The person in the street who is interested in archaeology but is not a professional or specialist in the subject has the power through public opinion to support the work of archaeologists both in spirit and financially. I am sure that Gerald Lankester Harding knew the importance of sharing archaeological work with the public in an accessible way such a through movie making: we would do well to follow his lead today.

For this piece on 9.5mm film I am especially grateful for the writings and research of the late Mr Paul van Someren, Mr Patrick Moules and Mr Grahame Newham.

References/Further Reading
Edwards, B. 2000. Avebury Film Discovery. Regional Historian 6. 
​
Moules, P. (ed). A Brief history of 9.5 [Online].
​

Newnham, G. Pathefilm.uk [Online].

Introducing Gerald Lankester Harding

17/7/2016

 
By Amara Thornton

I’ve spent hours going through Lankester Harding’s footage since we received the digitised version earlier this year.  The digital file we received was all the individual films sequentially rolled into one, making up about an hour and a half of ‘raw’ footage.  There were short breaks where the ‘leaders’ attached to each canister’s roll indicated the reference number we had assigned it – LH1 and so on.  So one of my first tasks was to separate the digitised files into each canister’s film using the leader breaks as a guide.  I was able to do this relatively easily in iMovie, and since then I’ve been experimenting with creating bespoke films using the footage and related digitised archive material in order to draw out different facets of the film and the archive.  Each time I watch it I see something new, which is pretty exciting!
 
I made this short film for the Institute’s recent World Archaeology Festival event on 11 June this year.  Having the Harding footage in a digital format makes it pretty flexible in the creation of new narratives.   Being able to manipulate the total film in iMovie allows me to view the footage almost frame by frame, bringing a new focus to my own viewing experience.  And, it’s leading to the creation of new ‘archive’ of films – thematic ones.  
 
The film embedded below features sequences from eighteen of Lankester Harding’s films.  You will see the film canister reference numbers on the top left hand corner of the footage sequences.  Harding’s photograph albums were also very useful in illustrating Harding’s initial experiences as an archaeologist in Mandate Palestine and his relationship with some of the workers on site.  The photograph of Hilda Petrie was in one of his albums, as were the group photographs of local families.  These might be particularly useful in future in helping to identify some of the workers featured on film. Thanks are also due to Alice Stevenson (Petrie Museum) and Robert Winckworth (UCL Records) for permission to include digitised images from each source.
 
I hope you enjoy this first ‘narrative’ film – there will be more to come!

The story of 9.5 and its early role in archaeology: Part 1

8/7/2016

 
By Ken Walton
​Gerald Lankester Harding made an important record of life and excavation techniques on Near Eastern archaeological sites in the early 1930s. His record was especially unique in that he used movie film, enabling us to see the life people led and the working techniques they employed in motion rather than in still photographs. Apart from the interesting archaeological work we see, we also get an idea of the workers’ hard physical labour, the way they lived and something of their characters. We also see the archaeologists in charge, their characters and some of the fun they had. They become human for us rather than us just knowing them from their serious academic work. Lankester Harding was able to record all this because he had access to 9.5mm cine cameras. 9.5mm was the first amateur cine gauge but it was invented and started life for a very different reason. 
Picture
A group of canisters in Lankester Harding's archive containing 9.5 mm film. Image: I. Carroll, 2014.
35mm film had been established for many years as the gauge for the distribution of cinema films. 35mm was very good for this but some saw that there might well be a market for home cinema viewing, much as we today buy DVDs of cinema releases. Selling copies of 35mm film for home viewing was impractical; not only would the film rolls be cumbersome but also a 35mm projector would be needed - a piece of equipment that was far too large for most domestic living spaces. 

In 1912, Thomas Edison had come up with a 22mm wide film with three sets of pictures, used in his ‘Home Kinetoscope’.  This system proved impractical and was restricted to what the Edison Company decided to release. The Edison system proved not to be popular enough and was dropped. Meanwhile, the French (Pathé Freres) launched, in the same year the ‘KOK’, or ‘COQ’ projector that used a 28mm film gauge. This format proved very successful and became widely distributed. Pathéscope Ltd opened an office in London at 64 Regent Street for the distribution of the films. Many of the 28mm releases were documentaries with titles such as: Ice Breaking in Finland and Prayer Time at the Great Mosque, Delhi. There were also moralizing films, including the title In the Grip of Alcohol. Lighter, comedy films of European performers such as Charles Prince and “Little Moritz” proved popular. 

In 1914 Pathé  tried to make inroads into the US film market and there was some success but the war intervened and things slowed down. Then an American inventor, Willard Beach Cook, came out with his own design of equipment in competition with the Pathé machine. After the war, Cook expanded his business in the US with films of more popular appeal. There were Hollywood releases such as Chaplin farces, Douglas Fairbanks action films and westerns, starring William S. Hart. The Pathéscope offerings were, by comparison, rather less exciting - Mr Smith’s Small Feet andThe Pork Butchers Nightmare among them.​
Picture
A piece of 35mm film divided into three parts to make 9.5 mm sections. Image: K. Walton, 2016.
Pathé decided it needed a new approach and set a team to work under engineer Louis Didée. The plan was to come up with a completely new format. Didée and his team hit on the idea of using existing 35mm film and splitting it into three. The way it was done was to load the unexposed film, in darkness, into a machine that used the 35mm sprocket holes to drive the film. As it progressed through the process, it was cut into three strips of 9.5mm film. New sprocket holes were punched in the middle of each of the new strips, producing three rolls of 9.5mm film. At the end of the production line, the 35mm sprocket holes, no longer needed, were cut off. 
Thus was born 9.5mm, that was to become the first real amateur film gauge. The film was launched by Christmas 1922. ​​Nine metres (30ft) of the new film was loaded in cassettes. The Pathé trademark was a chick emerging from a shell and the slogan was "Le Cinema Chez-soi" ("Home Cinema"). The films could be shown on the ‘Pathe Baby’ projector, equipped to take the cassettes. The new format took off in popularity and film cassette sizes increased to 15m (50ft) and 30m (100ft), the larger cassettes became known as "G" for "Grand". Over 300,000 projectors were sold in France and the UK. The Pathéscope office in London became 5 Lisle Street, off Leicester Square.
Picture
9.5mm film stock from the Harding archive. Image: K. Walton, 2014. Courtesy of UCL Institute of Archaeology.
The purpose of the film cassettes was still to show movies to the public at home. Projection was still by hand cranking and a film such as Gance’s Napoleon would require 47 reels to be hand cranked. In 1926 came the first motorised projectors and then the Pathe "Kid" projector (1930), a cheaper option to appeal more widely but with the drawback of no access to the projection film "gate" for cleaning. 1931 saw the introduction of the Pathé "Lux" motorised projector that corrected the defects of the "Kid" projector and gave a choice of lighting power and flicker free performance. British film releases included many documentaries:The Germination of the Broad Bean, The Earthen Pot and the Iron Pot, later, comedy films such as Laurel and Hardy and later feature films including Errol Flynn’s Captain Blood (1935) were released.  The 9.5mm format was increasingly used in Europe but in America, Kodak’s new 16mm film stock proved more popular. 

To be continued...


References/Further Reading

Moules, P. (ed). A Brief history of 9.5 [Online].
​

Newnham, G. Pathefilm.uk [Online].

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