30/7/2014 - The BFI takes us out to "A Night at the Cinema in 1914"

After the focus from this year's edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy (arguably the most important and influential retrospective festival in the world), the cinematic year of 1914 will be celebrated in London with a programme compiled by the BFI which will be released from the 1st of August called "A Night at the Cinema in 1914". Needless to say, it is not to be missed!

 

This year also marks the centenary of the start of the WWI, and cinema had already become one of the main forms of escapism. The selection was compiled of archive films from the BFI National Archive. While feature films were still not the norm at the time, this ensured a wide variety of different types of films and this special program will aim to recreate a typical night out at the cinema in 1914 with a mixture of comedies, adventure films, travelogues and newsreels.

Among the highlights of this programme of 14 shorts are a quirky comic one about a face-pulling competition, a sensetional episode of the American film serial The Perils of Pauline and an Allied troops celebrating Christmas at the front. There is also an early anti-German animation film and an early sighting of one of cinema's greatest icons...this was after all the first year Chaplin unleahsed his famous Tramp alter ego.

Click here for more info on the event and a complete list of the dates.