Films offer a moving picture of city’s past

Apr 30 2008 by Phil Key, Liverpool Daily Post

Films offer a moving picture of city’s past

LIVERPOOL’S history came alive yesterday as film images from the city’s past, from the Victorian era to the present day, played out on a screen in Liverpool Central Library.

Cloth-capped men worked on the docks, nattily-dressed city gents strode boldly into offices, trams trundled along the streets and smudgy-faced children played in the streets.

The scenes were from priceless archive film that will now be available to everyone online as Liverpool became the first British city to be featured in a British Film Institute (BFI) project.

Titled Liverpool: a City on Screen, it was launched at the Hornby library in the central library yesterday at exactly 11am when the website went live.

Amanda Nevill, director of the BFI, said it was dreamed up, “as many of the best ideas are”, over a glass of wine, on that occasion with Alice Morrison of Northwest Vision and Media.

The plan was to feature every film image possible of a single city. Liverpool was chosen as it has been one of the most filmed cities in the country and because it was this year’s European Capital of Culture.

The result has been a website packed with film clips, text information, links and some extremely rare documentary film, some of it never seen before.

It includes documentaries like Homes for Workers from 1939 and A Day in Liverpool, a “beautiful and poetic account of a typical working day in the city” produced in 1929 and little seen since then.

There is even film of a Liverpool v Newcastle football game from 1901 and an Everton v Liverpool match from the same era (Everton won 3-1). Across the Mersey Docks reveals the docks in 1901 and Liverpool, Gateway of Empire was made in 1933 by the Merseyside Workers Film Society and reveals both the affluence and poverty of the time.

Feature films are also noted including The Magnet from 1950 and A Letter to Brezhnev of 1985 whose director Chris Bernard was among those at yesterday’s launch.

The initiative has received help from many organisations including the North West Film Archive, Liverpool Libraries, North West Vision and Liverpool University’s own City in Film project.

While home computers will be able to access the site, because of copyright reasons the moving image clips can only be accessed from public libraries, schools, colleges, universities and Fact.

The site will be continually developed and it is hoped home systems may get some moving images in the future.

The site is www.screenonline. org.uk/liverpool and is now available.

philkey