Author Archives: mel58cam

I’m delighted to finally be able to share with you the final film produced by our students as part of my and Dr. Amy Cutler‘s project, The Cinema As Time Capsule: using films to capture vanishing worlds.

The Strangler (1930) is by far one of the more memorable Secrets films. It showcases perfectly the time-lapse technique and its ability to ‘capture the vitality of a living plant’, and it is one of the only films of its kind to include a clock in the picture to help viewers understand that the imageContinue reading “The Strangler (1930)”

It’s been a while since I posted here – I am coming towards the end of my PhD, and have been busy writing up my dissertation on natural history films and BBC broadcasts. But it’s good to be back again and I have plenty of things to share on here over the next couple ofContinue reading “The Cinema as Time Capsule”

Secrets of Nature films, like many other interwar shorts classed as ‘topical’ or ‘instructional’, were often played before the main feature film in cinema halls around the country. Whilst we know that their distribution was fairly widespread (see the interactive map), Mary Field and Percy Smith admitted that their films were often favoured in whatContinue reading “Non-Theatrical Cinemas”

Natural history has long carried an association with the word “amateur”. As a kind of ‘all-rounder’ science, natural history gained a ‘mass’ following in the nineteenth century, precisely when science began to attain a “professional” status. But distinguishing between amateur and professional is often a tricky business, and both categories have shifted significantly in definitionContinue reading “Amateur Natural History Films”

Histories of film, and especially nature and wildlife film, often begin by repeating a common origin story. They start, usually, with Edweard Muybridge’s chronophotography experiments from the 1870s, which recorded sequential images of a horse’s gallop. The Secrets producers, however, drew a different genealogy when speaking of the historical origins of their filmmaking practice. InContinue reading “A ‘Secrets’ Pioneer? Rina Scott’s early films”

Along with Anin Luo and Miles Kempton, I’ve spent the past couple of months organising an online workshop which will hopefully bring together a broad church of scholars interested in the history of science and media. Although we initially thought of proposing something very open and broad, we decided in the end to focus onContinue reading “Online Workshop: Intermediality”

I am glad to hear that six new ‘Secrets of Nature’ are nearly complete and will be released before long. They are the best films of their kind ever made, and no other short British films have been so widely successful… But the greatest triumph of this new series is that the nightingale has madeContinue reading “The Nightingale (1932)”

The Secrets of Nature films were produced at moment in British history – the interwar period – that can be interpreted as both the height, and the beginning of the ‘end’ of the British empire. As Andrew Thompson argues in Imperial Britain: The empire in British politics, c. 1880-1932, the inter-war years witnessed a deeperContinue reading “Secrets of Empire”

Recently I came across this wonderful image from the 1936 Secrets of Life film London Visitors (1936). With films like this one, which have not yet been digitized, we will have to make do for the moment with published photographs like the one above. Luckily, however, I was able to watch a viewing copy atContinue reading “London Visitors (1936)”