Yesterday evening I joined the British Film Institute’s ‘BFI 75 – A Story in Pictures’ on London’s South Bank, celebrating 75 years of film and TV culture through a mix of archive clips and interviews.
75th Birthday
The evening was hugely enjoyable. What a delight to see Leslie Phillips, beloved of the Doctor and Carry-On films, take up the microphone with his trade mark saucy “Hello” . And to be transported back to 1901 with big screen footage from the Mitchell and Kenyon archive, beautifully restored, complete with live piano accompaniment.
Science and technology was represented by films about the railways and telephony. From John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit, that produced industry and transport films in the 1930s, was a sequence from ‘The Fairy of the Phone’, a fantasy involving female telephonists singing and standing atop telegraph poles.
Ironically, given the light coverage of science in the main program, later discussions and guest commentaries addressed the role of technology for enabling positive change in the industry, like the accessibility of professional quality, low cost, equipment. More exotically, Frank Skinner looked forward to a cinema world of wrap-around 3D, while another pundit held out for the holy grail of odorama (a low tech scratch ‘n’ sniff version has been done).
For further Reading on science in documentary film and T.V. See Timothy Boon’s Films of Fact: A History of Science Documentary on Film and Television
Monkey Brand Comes Clean
Charles Dickens’s Mudfrog Homeopathy
Darwin’s Many Origins
Getting Cute at Disneyland
A Century of Southern California Aerospace
Charlie’s Rose
Richard Feynman’s Grave
Total Lunar Eclipse 10th December 2011
Steven Pinker in conversation with A.C.Grayling at the Wellcome Collection
David Attenborough – Darwin Lecture 2011, ‘Alfred Russel Wallace and the Birds of Paradise’
Matt Melis Shares 30 Years of the Space Shuttle at the London Science Festival
Lawrence Krauss Sprinkles Stardust at the School of Life
Since the mid 1980s, I've worked in university and industrial research, as a manager and editor in technology and environment for an international industry association, and held senior business development, strategy, and procurement posts in industry. I hold a PhD in chemical engineering from Birmingham University, an MBA from Warwick University Business School, and an MSc in Science Communication from Imperial College. In 2008, I left industry to focus full-time on my passion for science and technology, and to share that enthusiasm with others as a freelance science communicator. I live in London with my wife Erin.
Contact me at timjones(at)communicatescience.com or through the tab above.
