The Open Road

                 
Director: George Marshall
Year: 1926
Rating: 7.0
I am not sure why but this sort of filming fascinates me and I could watch hours of it. It is just shooting ordinary people and scenes from decades past. Landscapes and cityscapes. How the world looked then, how people dressed, the technology or lack of it, how people just went about their ordinary days. Preserved forever. This is what this is as Claude Friese-Greene went about filming England from 1924 - 1926. Around London to the English Rivera, Torquay (the home of Fawlty Towers), little villages, Cardiff up to Scotland. People harvesting the hay, going on rides, the beautiful cars, eating sweets and so on. Life. What would be wonderful is if this was interactive. That when he films a small girl on the beach and you could click on it and it would tell you what happened to this child. Got married, had four children. Went off to war and was killed in Africa. Worked in the coal mines and became a union leader. There are so many children filmed that I just had to wonder how their lives turned out. That would be quite the project.




But what makes this especially interesting is that it was shot in color and the color is spectacular. Deep deep colors. The father of Claude Friese-Greene had developed something called Biocolor. "This process produced the illusion of true colour by exposing each alternate frame of ordinary black-and-white film stock through two different coloured filters." His son was to improve on this but still never got it quite right. It appears to have been shown in shorts before the regular film but it "suffered from noticeable colour flicker which would induce headaches after a time". But BFI came along and fixed the flicker, cleaned up the films and stitched together this one hour program. Again, I find it fascinating - England may not be the most exciting of places to film - but now when I read my English mysteries from that period I can visualize just how it looked. In color.