From first viewing, it’s nothing very much to look at, a rather grainy piece of silent colour film lasting just under two minutes. Simply recorded as (Lifeboat Launch) the film was dated rather vaguely as ‘1950s’ with an ‘unknown location’. Time to send in the cataloguers.
Tag: movies
Sausages, steam trains and biplanes : Showcasing 100 years of Scotland on film
Most people when they think of films probably think of the latest blockbusters showing at the cinema; fantastic stories far removed from everyday life, and rarely showing anything of Scotland. What many people don’t realise is that for four decades the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive has been collecting and preserving all kinds […]
Sunset Song on screen
Film adaptations of Scottish literature have been very much in my mind recently. In November we celebrated Stevenson on screen for RLS Day, and last week I was in Inverness talking about the Hitchcock film version of John Buchan’s The thirty-nine steps – now many of us are catching up with the long-awaited film of Sunset song
The James Bond archives
(photo credit: TASCHEN: © 2013 TASCHEN GmbH, Hohenzollernring 53, D-50672 Köln, www.taschen.com) (Image above shows the cover of the book which is the title ‘The James Bond archives’ and 007 closely followed by an image of a gun) “Bond, James Bond” With those three words, spoken by Sean Connery in 1962, the world was introduced […]
Cinemas in Britain: a history of cinema architecture
(Photo credit: Ashgate, Gower & Lund Humphries Publishing) (Image above shows an empty cinema auditorium) This fascinating book by Richard Gray is an exploration of the history of the cinema building in Britain, from its 19th century origins right up to the present day. The earliest cinemas were little more than shop conversions or basic […]
Joss Whedon : the complete companion
(Photo credit: Titan) (Image above shows a picture of the film director Joss Whedon) Joss Whedon’s contribution to contemporary pop culture can hardly be overstated but there has never been a book providing a comprehensive survey of his career as a whole – until now. PopMatters, the acclaimed international magazine of cultural criticism, have brought […]
Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-first century Batman
Published to coincide with Christopher Nolan’s third and final Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, released in July 2012, Will Brooker’s book explores Batman’s twenty-first century incarnations. There have been many Batmans: TV’s Adam West, Frank Miller’s graphic novels, the videogame Batman of Arkham Asylum, the very different Batmen drawn by Frank Quitely, Dave McKean or Jim […]