Album 1996
BBC2 Picture This series. 26min doc. Writer/Director
Album illustrates a particular way, which is perhaps my favourite way, of approaching a film. I am curious about people and several of my films use the medium to bring out a number of qualities about their subjects through their work.
They are not direct biographies or historical records. They are fragments and impressions.
Sometime in the mid 1960’s I found a photo album on a second-hand bookstall in Farringdon Road. The photos dated from1898 – 1910. Places were named but people only bore initials beneath them. The album stayed with me throughout the house moves of my life. Revisiting it whilst clearing out cupboards in 1995I noticed the place names were in Yorkshire where I was then living. One day, when we were camping in a beautiful Derbyshire valley in the pissing summer rain, I decided I’d had enough and drove off to visit a place that I recognised the name of from the album. I was idly wondering about it’s history. It had obviously belonged to someone well-to-do judging by the houses lived in and visited in the photos. I proposed to Peter Symes at the BBC that I make a programme searching for the history of the album. Who was its owner? Why had it ended up on a second-hand bookstall?
This research was done before Google and the internet were so widely used for such purposes and in a way it was much more fun. It meant visiting people and places, little museums and archives, ferreting stuff out for yourself.
The albums owner was a wealthy industrialist, a steel mill owner in the north of England. Having established who the album had belonged to, I became intrigued by the little girl who appeared in many of the pictures. I started to find out more about her. She was clearly the daughter of the albums owner and must have inherited the book when he died. I particularly wondered why she had disposed of the Album. I found people still living who had memories of her and even their own photos of her in adult life. Some were relatives and others lived nearby or had worked for her. The portrait that emerged was rather a sad one, not least because she was still alive when I bought the album. She never had any kids. Her possessions must have been disposed of when she was put into a nursing home suffering from some kind of dementia.
The film shows my journey around the country meeting people who help me knit. I intensely dislike the style of documentary where a person with memories is walked round a building or site that has been significant and says ‘I remember when’ ‘this is where such and such happened’. It conjures up little for the viewer who was not there and does not have the memory in their head.
I used some of the photos from the album and as closely as possible took shots of the same places now. I then faded the one into the other (this is easy now but digital technology was in its infancy when I made the film). This evoked places then and now without the need of verbal explanation. Apart from that I used landscape and buildings to show an atmosphere rather than being tied to specifics.
In the course of the journey I met many more interesting people than could be contained in my 26 minute programme slot. I kept a diary of the journey and of course have footage which I now treasure although it never made it on screen.
There were two secondary stories I stumbled on, stories of people who’s live and personalities fascinated me.
The first was ‘Pom’ Elmhurst whose relative features in the album proudly holding a huge salmon he has caught.. Pom was the younger brother of Leonard Elmhurst who founded Dartington College and was a friend of poet and social reformer Rabindranath Tagore. The Elmhurst’s were a family of upper class socialists. Pom told me he had been ‘converted’ when he visited the poor mining families around Sheffield during his duties in WW2.
The second was Lady Mabel, a friend of the album owners who came from the grandest house I’ve set eyes on. She endowed a women’s college at what was to be known as Bretton Hall, adjacent to Yorkshire Sculpture Park. She was a local eccentric and philanthropist. She had no children. People I interviewed remembered her well. At her death she had asked that all her papers be destroyed and her relatives complied although wanting to make more of her life and work.
The portrait of Rosemary, the daughter in Album, is really an absence.