Tales from the Shipyard
One of the BFI National Archive's most ambitious current projects, This Working Life is a three-part celebration of Britain's industrial heritage as seen through the eyes of filmmakers from the Victorian era to the present day. Concentrating on coal mining, shipbuilding and the steel industry, This Working Life made its debut in September 2009 with King Coal.
February sees the launch of the second strand, Tales from the Shipyard, which includes several programmes that will play at BFI Southbank, Newcastle's Tyneside Cinema, Glasgow Film Theatre and Belfast's Queen's Film Theatre. They include features such as Michael Powell's Red Ensign (1935) and John Baxter's The Shipbuilders (1943), a wealth of documentary material dating back to the ill-fated launch of HMS Albion at Blackwall, London, in 1898, and a rare chance to see the television version of Bill Bryden's astonishing stage production The Ship (1990) on the big screen. A companion two-disc DVD set compiles five hours of documentary, and there will also be new Mediatheque and Screenonline collections. Many of the films have been recently restored both by the BFI and partner archives.
Non-Fiction Curator Ros Cranston has overseen This Working Life from the start, but Tales from the Shipyard offered new challenges. "With King Coal, we had the advantage that the BFI National Archive preserves the whole of the National Coal Board Film Unit's output, almost 1,000 films, so we had a massive base of material to draw on, and we'd already done extensive research. By contrast, Tales from the Shipyard felt much more like starting from scratch. We knew early on that while the BFI held a great deal of excellent material, we'd want to collaborate with other archives such as the Scottish Screen Archive and the Northern Region Film and Television Archive. On the other hand, shipbuilding has a major advantage over coal mining in that it's a wonderfully visual subject - the climactic scene in Amber Films' Launch (pictured above) always draws gasps from audiences."
The most surprising discovery was a little-known but stylish and witty documentary called The Bowler and the Bunnet, which was shown on Scottish Television in 1967, and is of unusual interest because it's the only film that Sean Connery ever directed. Sir Sean Connery has told us: "I am very pleased that The Bowler and The Bunnet will be screened as part of the Tales From The Shipyard season. I spent a month making the film and was inspired by the common sense attempts being made to revolutionise working practices - all ultimately with the goal of making a great industry succeed in Scotland. Although it was made in the Sixties, there are lasting themes to be found in it."
And that last comment also perfectly encapsulates the work of the BFI National Archive as a whole.
Links
Tales from the Shipyard website.
