Object of the week: The oldest film in our archive

It’s 30 years since the BFI National Archive was contacted, in 1995, about a cache of 17 films from the 1890s bought by a collector of vintage radios. I remember the excitement it caused – hundred-year-old films don’t turn up every day. Among the fragile film strips was a film of the Epsom Derby showing the riders coming up to the finish line with crowds of spectators looking on before invading the course, as they used to every year. It became the earliest surviving film in the BFI’s collection (depending on what you mean by ‘film’ of course – but let’s not go there).

The owner of the film, a Mr Ray Henville, allowed the BFI archive to examine and duplicate the films but later took back the originals and sold them on to unknown buyers. The impressive feat of identification of the Derby film was done by cataloguer Luke McKernan, who did it by carefully studying pictures of jockeys’ strips, horse positions and camera angles in relation to the very poor quality film image. The poorness of the image was a clue in itself. All Birt Acres films from this early period have this blurriness (you can see some of them on BFI Player).

Remarkably, a contemporary newspaper report contains a photograph of Birt Acres and his film camera in the stand at Epsom, so we know precisely where he was filming from on 29 May 1895. A still image of Acres’ film was also used in an issue of The Field from 21 September 1895, allegedly without Acres’ permission, to make a representation of the race. You will be gathering by now that the identification of ‘first’ films is a matter of researching minute details, very difficult to do before the availability of digitised newspapers. And in those pre-internet days if you wanted to see a film you would have to wait for a cinema to programme it; now you can watch it on your phone. What a golden age we live in now, 130 years on.

You can find out more about Birt Acres in a new book being published next year by University of Exeter Press, which was intensely researched by Barry Anthony, Peter Domankiewicz and Deac Rossell.

Transcription: The “living” photographs – or, more properly, photographs of objects in motion – now exhibiting by the Kineoptikon at Piccadilly Mansions, opposite the Shaftesbury Fountain, are noticeable for many of them being representations of actual scenes attempted out of doors by Mr. Birt Acres. The Derby-day is the most successful, and shows the clearing of the course, the race, with Lord Rosebery’s Sir Visto forcing his way to the front, and, finally, the crowd surging in after the last horse. The waves rolling past the Admiralty Pier at Dover are very realistic. The illumination of the pictures might be improved and more steadiness given to it, and this will probably be accomplished at the public entertainments.

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.