Jim Gilchrist gave a thought-provoking account
to Scotsman readers this week of his visit to
the Scottish Film Archves 25th
anniversary screening
It doesnt necessarily require megabucks
worth of computer-generated special effects
to make you sit up in the cinema. Monday nights
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 cant help presuming,
than their counterparts today) and kilted soldiers
marching off to distant Empire wars.
But there was more. All of a sudden, youre
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 Zolas famous Jaccuse
letter had appeared in the newspaper LAurore,
accusing Dreyfuss 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 Archives 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 nights 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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