Category: Diaries

R.D.B.’s Diary

Source: R.D. Blumenfeld, R.D.B.’s Diary: 1887-1914 (London: W. Heinemann, 1930), p. 69

Text: 1 October 1900
I looked in at the Empire last night and saw some Boer War pictures on the bioscope. They were very lifelike, and almost free from flicker, which usually makes these moving pictures so objectionable.

Comment: Ralph David Blumenfeld (1864-1948) was the American-born editor of the British newspaper Daily Express 1902-1932. The Empire is probably the Empire Theatre of Varieties in London’s Leicester Square. The Anglo-Boer War ran from October 1899 to May 1902.

Links:
Copy at Hathi Trust Digital Library (under the title In the Days of Bicycles and Bustles)

The Journals of Sydney Race

Source: Ann Featherstone (ed.), The Journals of Sydney Race 1892-1900: A Provincial View of Popular Entertainment (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 2007), p. 50

Text: February 1895
During this month Edison’s last greatest invention – the Kinetoscope showing living figures – has been on exhibition in a shop on the Long Row. The figures were contained in a big box and one looked down through a glass and saw them within.

I saw at different times a dancer and a barbers [sic] shop the latter with several figures and everything was true to life. The figures appear a brilliant white in outline on a black background but in the barber shop it was possible to distinguish a negro from the white man. The figures have been photographed continuously and two or three thousand of them are whirled before your eyes by Electricity in less than a minute.

Comment: Sydney Race (1875-1960) was the working-class son of a cotton mill engineer and worked as an insurance clerk in Nottingham. His private journal documents the different kinds of entertainment he witnessed in Nottingham. The Edison film he describes, Barber Shop (1893) (or its 1895 remake New Barber Shop), does not feature a black character.

Links:
Entry on Sydney Race at Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema

The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh

Source: Michael Davie (ed.), The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976)

Text: Saturday 31 January 1931
Went to Indian cinema with commercial traveller. Old Charlie in transition stage Keystone – Goldrush. Polishes his nails before meals. Food stolen. Eats grass with salt and pepper and delicacy, rinses fingers. In the end handsome lover turns up and Charlie goes off. Followed Indian film; fairy story; very ornamental. Beautiful girl greeted with shouts (no women in building) and is led from her bed to a precipice and thrown over. ‘That is her dream.’ Supposedly beautiful youth gazes at her. ‘He wants to take her into the bushes.’ Later elephant with drunken attendant. ‘That is an elephant.’ Elephant escapes, wicked robber attempts entrap heroine. Her father dies saying he has never kept promise to irrigate desert, etc.

Comment: The writer Evelyn Waugh was a regular cinemagoer (as noted in his diaries), particularly in the 1920s when he also experimented with producing amateur dramatic films. This screening took place in Tabora, then in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) during Waugh’s expedition to Abyssinia to cover the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie. There was a small Indian population in Tanganyika. The quoted comments in the diary entry are made by Waugh’s Indian companion. The Chaplin film shown is The Gold Rush (USA 1925), but I have not been able to identify the Indian film.

Journal of Queen Victoria

Source: Journal of Queen Victoria, 23 November 1896

Text: After tea went to the Red drawing-room, where so-called “animated pictures” were shown off, including the groups taken in September [sic] at Balmoral. It is a very wonderful process, representing people, their movements and actions as if they were alive.

Comment: Queen Victoria (1819-1901) was filmed at Balmoral Castle, Scotland, by the photographic firm W. & D. Downey on 3 October 1896, in the company of her guests Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra of Russia. This account from her journal records the screening of the film by Downey, among a selection of other films, at Windsor Castle the following month. The film was billed by Downey as Her Majesty the Queen and TIMs the Emperor and Empress of Russia, TRHs the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, HRH Princess of Battenberg and Royal Children at Balmoral.

Diaries of Alexander Goodall

goodall

Source: Diaries of Alexander Goodall, State Library of Victoria, Australia

Text: 1 July 1895, Monday
Geelong. At Exhibition Theatre today. Edison’s marvellous invention. Five scenes on view. “The Indian War dance”, “The Boxing Cats”, “The Skirt dancer”, “Buffalo Bill”, and “Sandow the Strong Man”.

Comment: Alexander Goodall (1874-1901) was a Post and Telegraph Office clerk living in Victoria who died young of tuberculosis. His vividly-illustrated diaries, covering 1892-1897, have been made available online in facsimile form by the State Library of Victoria. This extract records his seeing the Edison Kinetoscope peepshow at Geelong. Other extracts record Goodall’s impressions of the Edison Kinetophone (combing the Kinetoscope and the Phonograph) in July 1896 and the Cinematograph in May 1897. The films referred to are Sioux Ghost Dance (or possibly Buffalo Dance) (1894), The Boxing Cats (1894), Buffalo Bill (1894), Annabelle (1894) and Sandow (1894).

Links:
Diaries of a Working Man

The Private Diaries of Sir Henry Rider Haggard

Source: D.S. Higgins (ed.), The Private Diaries of Sir Henry Rider Haggard 1914-1925 (London: Cassell, 1980), p. 84

Text: 27th September 1916
Today I went to see the Somme War film with Louie, Angie and Mrs Jebb who dined with me afterwards at an Italian restaurant in Panton Street where we got a very good and well-cooked meal at a most reasonable price. The film is not a cheerful sight, but it does give a wonderful idea of the fighting and the front, especially of the shelling and its effects. Also it shows the marvellous courage and cheerfulness of our soldiers in every emergency, and causes one to wonder if one would find as much in a like case. At their age I have no doubt the answer would be yes, but now at sixty I am not so sure. It is a young man’s job! As usual all the pictures move too fast, even the wounded seem to fly along. The most impressive of them to my mind is that of a regiment scrambling out of a trench to charge and of the one man who slides back shot dead. There is something appalling about the instantaneous change from fierce activity to supine death. Indeed the whole horrible business is appalling. War has always been dreadful, but never, I suppose, more dreadful than today.

Comment: Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) was a British novelist, who had a strong interest in cinema following the film adaptations of his popular novels such as She and The Lost World. The Battle of the Somme (1916) was a British feature-length documentary, filmed by Geoffrey Malins and J.B. McDowell for the War Office Cinematograph Committee. It gave cinema audiences some idea of what the fighting was like on the Western front and had a huge impact. The over-the-top sequence described by Haggard is now known to have been faked by Malins.

The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan

Source: Count Harry Kessler (translated and edited by Charles Kessler), The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan 1918-1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson). p. 364

Text: Monday, 15 July 1929 / Berlin
Read in the BZ, midday edition, that Hofmannstahl’s elder son, Franz, has shot himself. At half past two cabled Hugo. In the evening went to Stroheim’s film The Wedding March. A work of genius which, with the savagery of a George Grosz, shows up the hollowness of pre-war Vienna’s glamour and its sugary trashiness of sentiment (that of Hollywood as well, incidentally). Here is the precise obverse of what has always enthralled Hofmannstahl and held him spellbound.

Comment: Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937) was an Anglo-German aristocrat and diplomat. His diaries are an exceptionally vivid and observant account of art and politics in Weimar Germany. The Wedding March (USA 1928) was directed by and starred Erich von Stroheim. Hugo von Hofmanstahl was an Austrian novelist and librettist. He died of a stroke at his son’s funeral the day after this diary entry.