Lockdown has sent me backwards in time. I’m experiencing a vicarious nostalgia, a longing to see just how much the past was a foreign country, and how differently things were done. I’ve been cruising the many free titles on BFI Player. These include the public information films A-tish-oo (1941), a short wartime guide to preventing germs from “direct, projective infection” and How to Use the Telephone (1948), a lengthy film made up of dramatic reconstructions, wonderfully wringing all it can out of its subject matter.
As I live in London, documentary pioneer Marion Grierson’s So This Is London (1933), was bittersweet. We see London bustling with people and promise. And as day turns to night, the commentator tells us: “London the city of pleasure takes over from London the city of commerce.” Oh, how I long to go out!
It was joyous to discover the TV musical The Rise and Fall of Nellie Brown (1964). In a twist on The Wizard of Oz, an unhappy 13-year-old girl from Liverpool, Selina (Millie Small, who sang My Boy Lollipop) goes on a road trip in search of her relative (the great Elisabeth Welch), who poignantly sings: “A million years ago, or was it yesterday, the world belonged to us …”
Over on Talking Pictures TV, which can always be depended upon for hidden, older gems, I fell in love with a film I’d never seen before, Jack Lee’s Turn the Key Softly (1953). Starring Yvonne Mitchell, Kathleen Harrison and Joan Collins, it tells a moving story of three women from very different backgrounds who leave prison and vow to meet up later to discuss their first day of freedom.
In reaction to becoming locked in and much more isolated, I started an online film club, #FridayFilmClub. It’s every Friday at 8pm, open to all, and there is an option for discussion on Twitter afterwards. Screenings so far include two films in the public domain: Ida Lupino’s impressive film noir The Bigamist (1953), where marriage is the crime, and Nina Paley’s gloriously trippy, uplifting animation Sita Sings the Blues (2008), which features historical parallels of marriage alongside fantastic 1930s musical interludes by Annette Hanshaw. Knowing that we were watching these films simultaneously, as a connected audience, certainly helped my mind from drifting too far to the dark side.
