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by james macgregor | December 7th, 2001 | contact: james@netribution.co.uk

Movies of a Century Ago

Jim Gilchrist gave a thought-provoking account to Scotsman readers this week of his visit to the Scottish Film Archve’s 25th anniversary screening……

It doesn’t necessarily require megabucks’ worth of computer-generated special effects to make you sit up in the cinema. Monday night’s special screening at the Edinburgh Filmhouse, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Scottish Screen Archive, was an engaging affair, with intriguing footage from the Glasgow-based archive and the British Film Institute collections edited into a rough travelogue, Around the World in 1900. There was a genial commentary from silent film buffs Luke McKernan and Frank Grey and a scintillating accompaniment from cinema pianist Neil Brand.

There was also, I suppose, in those resurrected moving images, something of what you might expect - crowds of bowler-hatted and crinolined Victorians or Edwardians flitting about their long-forgotten business or crowding curiously round the new-fangled cinematograph, much horse traffic and some wonderful shots of trains steaming at speed (and at much great efficiency, one can’t help presuming, than their counterparts today) and kilted soldiers marching off to distant Empire wars.

But there was more. All of a sudden, you’re in Paris, regarding a tired-looking man leaving a building and walking through stolid formations of mounted soldiery. It is September 1899: Albert Dreyfus, the persecuted Jewish officer, is leaving the court which will shortly pardon him of charges of spying and espionage trumped up amid a poisonous cloud of corruption, perjury and anti-Semitism. The year before, Emile Zola’s famous J’accuse letter had appeared in the newspaper L’Aurore, accusing Dreyfus’s original court martial of having violated the law and its officers of lying.

So here is Dreyfus himself, the focus of what has become a vast and bitter political issue, caught leaving his re-trial by an early cameraman, filming across the sullen rows of cavalry and making us blink in disbelief in an Edinburgh picture house a century on. Old film reels can be like that. Gazing at their flickering, monochrome lost world, you expect Charlie Chaplin but suddenly find yourself gazing incredulously at some fleeting snippet of history.

I remember once, while visiting the Scottish Screen Archive’s premises in Glasgow, viewing a reel from its vaults which showed the "doon the watter" frolics of Edwardian holidaymakers. There was a momentary glimpse of an elegant steam yacht cutting past. The name glimpsed briefly on the stern was Iolaire - the same vessel which would go down off Stornoway, on Hogmanay 1918, with the deaths of 208 naval ratings returning from the First World War.

Monday night’s experience was much the same; one minute you were viewing belle époque Paris, the next this hunted-looking man emerges from a courthouse amid the regimented disapproval of a military machine conspiring against him. At a time when so much of the world continues to be torn apart by ingrained hatreds and prejudices, there is something monumentally symbolic in that brief, grainy tableau of churlishly arranged troopers, with Dreyfus making his weary way down an avenue of disdainful horses’ arses. He may be about to be granted a pardon by the French government, but it will be another seven years before he is finally exonerated of the iniquitous spying charges.

Meanwhile, the establishment is, quite literally, closing ranks.


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