British Empire in Colour

Adrian Woods, Lucy Carter, Stewart Binns, Prof. Lola Young and Prof. Judith Brown talk about how they tracked down rare footage for TWI/Carlton's series The British Empire in Colour. In addition to rare and often very early footage, all in original colour and much of it previously unseen, readings from letters and diaries bring to life the experiences of the rulers and the ruled - from Canada to India, Australia to Nigeria, the Caribbean to South Africa. Highlights include the celebrations marking George V's visit to India and the only remaining footage of the Oehli durbar.

• Kinemacolor
• Historical Voices

Interview © BFI 2002

Kinemacolor

Chair: Art Malik (AM)

Panel: Adrian Woods (AW); Lucy Carter (LC); Stewart Binns (SB); Prof. Lola Young (LY); Prof. Judith Brown (JB).

Art Malik: Stewart Binns started his career at the BBC, working in their political research department, before moving on to work in documentaries and current affairs. In 1987 he moved to Trans World International, where he was executive producer of Trans World Sport for ten years. He went on to launch the features and entertainment division of Trans World by producing TWI's Century - a thirteen-hour history of the twentieth century. He has won a BAFTA for The Second World War in Colour and Britain at War in Colour.

Next, Professor Judith Brown, who was born in India. She was educated in the UK, doing her undergraduate and doctoral research at Cambridge. She is now Professor of Commonwealth history at Oxford.

Professor Lola Young used to be an actress - we both worked together many moons ago. She is Head of Culture at the Greater London Authority, and prior to that she was Professor of Cultural Studies at Middlesex University. She also worked as Project Director at the Archives and Museum of Black Heritage.

Adrian Woods is our archive producer. Lucy Carter is the series producer who employed me.

Any questions?

Q: It's very hard to show the history of the British Empire in eighty minutes. How much other footage is available?

Lucy Carter: We researched all over the world. We think we saw over 1000 hours of film. In-house we ordered over 100 hours of film, of which 20-30 hours went into the edit for each one-hour programme. That's the sort of percentage we worked with. With regard to how much material is out there that we didn't find, well that's over to him...

Adrian Woods: It's almost impossible to guess how much was filmed in colour or black and white in this period. I remember after the first series, World War 2, we were astonished at how much we had found. We continue to find more material. At some point you have to call a halt to the search, but I suspect there could be another couple of hundred hours out there, we just didn't have the time available. We creating a television series and not an archive, so it's a very different agenda.

Q: Congratulations to the team. How are you able to find colour copies of the very same images we may have seen in black and white? The same shots?

AW: Quite often it was because of the commercial nature of cinema distribution. Cinemas relied on a large number of prints being circulated across the country and making colour copies was probably five times more expensive than black and white copies. So while a lot of imagery, particularly in World War II, was shot using 16mm Kodachrome, when it came to cinema release it was often duped into black and white.

While myself and my colleagues can take some credit for finding the colour originals, it's sitting there waiting for us. The first person I know who did was a German film-maker, Lutz Becker, in the 1970s who banged on the door of the National Archives in Washington and insisted that Eva Brown's home movies were shot in colour. After many, many months of argument it was proved that colour was the original format. So we're just continuing a tradition that other people started.

Q: Some of the early footage looks like adjusted black and white and not colour. Is that the case?

AW: One of the problems we have in convincing people that the film is colour... The system you saw in the early part of the film, the Kinemacolor process, was a British invention exploited in the early part of the Twentieth century by a man called Charles Urban. The system relied on the use of black and white film and people say how can it be a colour system? But it was as much of a colour system as Technicolour in the 1920s and 1930s.

I can show you an example. The image was recorded on black and white film, but what you can see is a stripe on the soldier's leg which appears and then disappears. This is because the film was shot through an alternating red and green filter. As different colours in the spectrum were captured on alternating frames, you can see how if you bring together the frames and re-apply the filters you have a colour image.

We haven't colourised it, this is how the system originally worked. One of the reasons why this material has been overlooked is because it has survived in black and white rather than colour. Luke McKernan is one of the experts in this process, he's sitting back there, and he told me about the whole system.

This film had been lost since about 1918, and the BFI had classified it as missing presumed lost, and it was part of an epic produced by Urban, shown in his theatre in Charlotte Street. I found it in Moscow in an archive that had previously been cut off to the West by the Soviet system.

Q: The first episode is due to be broadcast at ten-o-clock at night. This seems outside of peak-viewing time.

Stewart Binns: We'd love to have it shown at an earlier time, but the schedulers have their reasons and the ratings are the ratings. Sadly many documentaries are shown outside of primetime these days.

Q: Did you get most of the material from libraries?

AW: A whole team did the work. I've been looking for film for twenty years and when I first thought about material for Empire I was astonished how much more was discovered by the team, whose work should be appreciated. It came from national and regional archives who have suddenly become to realise the value of private film as a record of social history. We go along as a team and ask them what they have in colour, which is not a way that film is usually categorised.

We appeal for material on radio and in newspapers and in TV interviews. But the principal source is regional archives and collections.

Q: It's been interesting to watch the Second World War, and how you balanced the material with the argument you wanted to make. I wonder how you felt about that balance between the footage and the story of the end of Empire?

LC: We never aimed to tell the whole story of the British Empire. Obviously we are limited by the footage we can find, and that gives us our starting point. From then on we look into the stories to work out which stories we can tell using those images, but also using the other elements which are the letters and diaries, which are just as important to show the emotional experience of Empire.

In terms of how we decide what to use - it's a long process. We have a great team of advisors - Lola and Judith here - and advisors from all over the world. We try to do our best to create a balanced view.

The footage comes first. Obviously we have an idea of the chronology and the stories that we would like to tell, but unfortunately we can't tell them all, so the footage has to guide us.

Historical Voices

Q: I was interested in what reactions you've received to this movie?

LC: This is the first viewing. Perhaps Lola and Judith could say what they feel?

LY: A number of people have signalled how complicated all of these issues are, and how sensitive. Whatever the world events context is, there's something really pertinent to what's going on here, because Empire affected so much. I anticipate that there will be criticism from all sides, but that's not necessarily a bad thing because it will extend the debates about what the legacy is and how we can move on.

Also there is the issue of history itself and the extent to which voices are heard. My colleagues at The Archives & Museum of Black Heritage were asked to make a contribution to the series because in the past it was felt that there were African and Indian and other voices that had not been heard. The series should be very stimulating with regard to a public debate around Empire and its ramifications.

JB: I think what it shows, amongst other things, is that many people had many different experiences. The fascination is that this new media of colour allowed people to record things that weren't necessarily 'official'. The lens through which you see Empire is partly determined by the cost of the medium - the cost of the camera, film and projector - but it does mean that you get a completely different picture of what it was like to be part of Empire, in Britain or abroad, compared to the set-piece photographs in Imperial family albums or official publications.

So there is an immediacy and power to this medium. There's a wonderful sequence on migration to Australia which shows the experience in a whole new way.

AW: Apparently, the average wage in 1935 was about £5,500 for a manual worker. Someone working in a bank or an office might earn £9,000 a year. A projector cost around £680. So if you think about the cost of a video camera a few years ago, those prices are sort of similar. A roll of black and white films that would run for about two minutes would cost you, including development, £24. If you wanted to film in colour you would have to pay £36.

We came across a chap whose father was a prolific film-maker in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and Bob told me that his father, Sam, had made a decision to start shooting in colour, but he couldn't really afford it so he gave up smoking. I think only the middle and upper classes really used colour in a prolific way. We always try and take account of the subjectivity of the film, but film itself is a very subjective record of history.

Q: How do these series fall between history and nostalgia?

SB: You've probably hit the nail on the head. That's how we do see it, we feel it's our responsibility to make a serious documentary about a very important subject that's not dealt with very much in history books in schools or documentaries. We should tackle that subject with balance. But we are also required to generate an audience, to bring to a topic like this a mass audience. We try and make them accessible and, to an extent, populist. They have an emotive element in order to achieve that.

JB: This is one block of historical evidence that is extremely important to bring to the public view. This isn't an attempt to write a history of the Empire, it's to say here is a source, among many other sources, for understanding the pasts of many of us. This opens a window into that through one particular media.

I don't think that nostalgia is perhaps the right word. I think of nostalgia as being when people look back on things they've experienced. I think that we are so far removed from the material in the early programmes that nostalgia is not the right word. It's not cosying up and luxuriating in a fake, rosy history.

LY: I think they're all leaky categories history, nostalgia, memory, heritage. They're not hermetically sealed categories and when they stray into each other you get some quite interesting things happening.

Q: To what extent did your subjectivity come into the narrative?

LC: When you make a documentary like this, you don't start off with a didactic form of documentary making. We are governed by the spur of wanting to present the emotive feel and trying to show both sides of the story. The way that we marry the witness with the footage does guide the audience along a certain path, but I hope that we present enough of a balanced view to pose questions and open it up for debate.

In a way, finding the footage is almost easier, because finding the personal stories is very difficult as they haven't been collated. We work with some subjectivity that we hope will prompt questions.

JB: I think when you've seen all three in their entirety, one of the things that comes out is to help people who are to young to have any connection with Empire to know that's actually it's part of their own heritage. In the final programme there is some discussion about how contemporary problems in Kashmir and Palestine go back to Empire. The message is that the Empire isn't out there in the past, this material can help us now.

AM: Thank you very much.