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 what they called “better-class halls”. In other words, they were more likely to be seen in ‘respectable’, ‘middle-class’ cinemas, something which reflects the series’ promotion by a section of interwar British society which sought to transform the cinema into an agent of social ‘improvement’.

But by the 1930s, the Secrets also found an audience in a more niche type of cinema that became fairly prevalent in the 1930s. Some cinema patrons worked out that audiences sometimes enjoyed going to the cinema not to watch dramas, romances or action movies, but to view newsreels and non-fiction films which were rapidly beginning to be associated with the word ‘documentary’.

Continue 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 definition over the years.

Continue 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. In their book See How They Grow (1952), J.V. Durden, Mary Field and Percy Smith mentioned Mubridge, but they viewed an unnamed woman as their earliest predecessor:

“The wife of an official of Kew Gardens set up her cumbersome plate camera, and made successive exposures of the growth of the flowers of the crocus. But it was left to a future generation to think of projecting such photographs as a motion picture. Nevertheless, we consider that to this lady should go the honour of being the first Ciné-biologist.“

Continue 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 on the question of “intermediality”, an idea originally developed in media studies but which has increasingly earned the attention of historians of science. The workshop will take place over two afternoons, on November 2nd and 3rd, 2021.

Continue 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 made its first talkie. This shyest of birds had to be followed into the depths of a Hertfordshire wood; weeks were spent on discovering a favourite tree and further weeks on overcoming its occupant’s suspicion of microphone and camera. At last its liquid notes were recorded, and ‘as though a window gave upon a sylvan scene’ audiences all over the world will be able to hear an English Nightingale in an English wood. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 4 February 1932.

This quote, from a contemporary film critic, is characteristic of the association between the Secrets and a pastoral, idyllic sense of rural Englishness which was repeatedly evoked by commentators. The nightingale, afterall, was emblematic of this vision of rural England, inextricable in the eyes of many from romanticism and poetry – in this case, the critic chose to quote from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Continue 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 deeper cultural penetration of imperial ideals. Post-war propaganda for the British Empire was bolstered by new institutions (like the Empire Marketing Board) and new media (radio, film) and it is in the 1920s that the apogee of mass phenomena of empire shopping weeks, empire advertising, empire exhibitions, and Empire Day celebrations is to be found.

Andrew Thompson, Imperial Britain, p. 184.

In this blog post, I want to highlight some of the ways in which the Secrets films both reflected, and helped to create, the imperial moment of the interwar years. It would be impossible to cover all aspects of the Secrets and their relationship to the British empire in one post, so the points I will make here are very much a summary, and I hope to expand on them later. The aim of this post is to show how the Secrets are inextricable from the history of interwar imperialism. The first part examines natural history’s entanglement with empire. The second looks at British Instructional Films, the Secrets producers, and their attitudes towards empire. The third selects a few Secrets films which were overtly imperial in their content, and the fourth discusses how the Secrets were distributed across British colonies and dominions.

Continue 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 at the BFI National Archives last year as part of my research.

Continue reading “London Visitors (1936)”

The Flight Machine (1930) was one of the first Secrets of Nature films to be filmed using sound. One of the more unusual films from the series, it demonstrates how the natural history genre could serve for a wide range of purposes, in this case as an exemplar of ‘applied science’. The film compares the flight of a airplane to that of several birds, including golden eagles and seaguls: “perhaps there is only one flight machine better suited for general purposes, and that machine is nature’s. Birds have the advantage over aeroplanes all the time”.

Continue reading “The Flight Machine (1930)”

Recently I have been updating some of the biographical sections on this site, and have been expanding the information on J. V. Durden, one of the key figures on the Secrets team in the 1930s, who directed many of the G.B.I. instructional films in biology. You can read the updated biographical page here, although please bear in mind that I’m constantly updating much of this information at the moment as I continue to build the site.

Continue reading “J. V. Durden and the Developmental Biology Film Series”