Paradoxical Horizons

“So I went to tea with Roland Haye on the following Sunday. He arrived to call for me, and we walked, in embarrassed silence, along misty muddy Essex lanes and along by the wooden fence of the Claybury asylum, through a bluebell wood, and so back into suburbia and privet hedges to the Hayes’ house; 210 Cranbrook Road; a house in the ‘better’, and older, part of Ilford, a house with some rudiments of refinement, and a maid in cap and apron to open the front door.”

Kathleen Raine, Farewell Happy Fields

In the film 'The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger' there’s a scene in which Tilda Swinton is making a dessert with apples (a crumble?–although it looks more like cobbler, or perhaps Eve’s pudding); as Swinton peels and cuts numerous apples, Berger begins to talk to Swinton about his father, and how he would cut an apple: Tilda Swinton changes how she has been cutting the apples, and begins to cut them in the way Berger describes as he talks. Somehow this distills a number of things that the film (or four films–one for each season) is about: a connection with the land, with the seasons (of course), repetition, reenactment, cycles, memory and time.

Having not contributed anything for this blog for many months, having a film shot on film being shown abroad for the first time has prompted me to write. 'Orchard/Asylum', a nine-minute black and white 16mm film, is being shown at the Sluice Film Festival in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland–at the time of writing–today. As the film is debuting there, I am not currently showing it online at the moment (in an ideal world, I would be there with a 16mm exhibition print, but it will be shown digitally). I have eschewed a voiceover for the film, which could explain it to the viewer as it unfolds, but if it could be reduced to a linguistic utterance, it wouldn’t need to be a film. However, its coming together in fits and starts, out of the pandemic, has echoes with other things I’ve written about recently, like the retracing of the M11 Link Road photographs, and, as such, I naturally had the desire to place the film.

Around the time I first shot some 16mm film, in the autumn of the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I had been making sure that I took advantage of the permitted exercise by making regular cycle rides that explored ever-wider circles around north-east London where I live. This was an opportunity to find places that I might otherwise have overlooked, or never have had a reason to be, to find different routes through the suburbs, particularly where it begins to peter out, to lose its density, along the Lea Valley, the Ching Brook, places like Larkswood, the Roding Valley Park, Aldborough Hatch. From some of these places one can see an ornate tower on a hill, a landmark on this particular edge of London. When I was at school, in the room that I studied maths for a few years, I could see this tower from the window, and I drew it on my maths folder sometime in the Autumn of 1990. We all knew its reputation, perhaps mistakenly so: this tower marked the Claybury Hospital, once the Claybury Mental Hospital, originally the Claybury Lunatic Asylum.

“Today these great 'museums of the mad', once such a familiar sight on the outskirts of cities and towns across the UK, have either vanished or metamorphosed into business parks, leisure centres or - as in the case of Friern - up-market housing developments. Their former residents are back with their families, or living in group homes or social housing; or they have vanished into the netherworld of the urban homeless.”

Barbara Taylor, ‘The Demise of the Asylum in late Twentieth-Century Britain: A personal History’

When I was growing up in those suburbs, there weren’t that many tall buildings around. There were a couple at Gants Hill, such as Wentworth House; other points of orientation would have been the narrow spire on the church on the Drive or a tall towerblock by the Green Man roundabout, demolished years ago; there was a day walking to school I realised I could see One Canada Square at Canary Wharf through a gap between houses towards Wanstead Park. The tower of Claybury Hospital was a fulcrum, one of the highest points for miles around, looming over a bend in the M11 coming into London, often blue-grey in the distance (it shows up in one of the views in the M11 Link Road photographs taken in 1994/2014, the last picture at the end of the post ‘SQUIBB’). Subsequently, in recent years, quite a few tall buildings have sprung up around central Ilford, diluting the impact these points once made.

In the second year of the pandemic, I cycled to Claybury for the first time. It was one of those places that one might otherwise have needed a reason to go to, certainly while it still operated as a hospital; Claybury finally closed in 1997, the era of ‘care in the community’. It appears as the phonetic ‘Clayberry’ in Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair’s Rodinsky’s Room, the misspelling a quote from a letter (David Rodinsky’s sister was a patient there). Rodinsky’s Room was published in 1999, the year I moved back to London after my degree; I had read Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory the year before, which was both part of but also a spur to the psychogeography which was then becoming prevalent and had visited the Princelet Street Synagogue that year during London Open House, which features in both books, being built behind the house where David Rodinisky lived. The publication of Rodinsky’s Room was accompanied by various events (I went to a talk by the authors at Toynbee Hall) and a couple of small chap-book-like publications:  Rachel Lichtenstein's Rodinsky's Whitechapel and Iain Sinclair’s Dark Lanthorns, both of which had walks that the reader could follow (the primary means of becoming a psychogeographer). Dark Lanthorns took the form of a series of walks Sinclair had made following lines traced in pen in David Rodinsky’s copy of the London A to Z, reproduced so that the reader could follow them. One of these was a route from South Woodford station to Claybury. In Sinclair’s narrative, he reaches the end of the walk to be met by the scene of Claybury Hospital being converted into the gated community it is today.

“As a tangible commodity, Dark Lanthorns asserts a powerful aura; it both palpably recalls those other A-Zs that the reader is presumed to have handled and evokes the unique singularity of a hallowed holy relic. This strange doubling makes the book’s facsimile maps feel like something of a challenge. Rodinsky’s drawings are generally more complex than the linear routes documented within Sinclair’s essays. It is hard, therefore, not to scrutinise his marks for some deeper significance, plotting out alternative routes that Sinclair might have taken, or which, by haptic invitation, one might now go out and walk oneself.”

Richard Hornsey,‘The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas’

I didn’t do any of these walks at the time. Possibly I felt that I was familiar with the walk traced around Whitechapel by Lichtenstein in Rodinsky's Whitechapel (and I had recently done Janet Cardiff’s 'The Missing Voice (Case Study B)', both Artangel commissions, contemporary to the publication of Rodinsky’s Room). I had also spent a year at college there five years earlier, then happened to be living with someone selling clothes at Spitalfields market on Sundays, so I naturally spent a lot of time in the area; the walks in Dark Lanthorns I think I possibly felt could be experienced sufficiently through the text and perhaps the walk from South Woodford to Claybury felt close to home or old ground–but ultimately, looking back twenty-six years, I’m unclear why I didn’t walk these. I finally followed the walk to Claybury in the spring of 2023.

Setting out by bicycle without a smartphone, once one begins to get close, the tower of Claybury is frequently hidden as the hill it sits so prominently on rises up around it. The route I took there the first time was not entirely unfamiliar, on the edge of my world growing up, with some friends in Snaresbrook, South Woodford, Hermon Hill, with the occasional school event in some odd venue around there. It was the last weekend of summer before the start of term, the rhythms of the academic year still dictating my seasons, with concurrent teaching and studying part-time. The initial spur to go there was nothing to do with Kathleen Raine or David Rodinsky: I wanted to investigate the community orchard there; the hospital’s grounds are now open to the public as Claybury Park which include the orchard. The oldest apple trees are believed to have been planted in the 1920s, possibly by the inmates themselves as part of what was then seen as the hospital’s progressive therapeutic regime; on the marked page from Rodinsky’s A to Z reproduced in Dark Lanthorns this area has the legend ‘Asylum Farm’. After years of neglect, most of the orchard has been restituted by The Orchard Project (some of the veteran apple trees are still surrounded by impenetrable undergrowth); the brief passage from Farewell Happy Fields that mentions the fence around the asylum was a felicitous coincidence. I arrived to discover signs prohibiting picking (it was no doubt far too early for almost every variety of apple , needing a couple more weeks to ripen then at least); my interest in the community orchard was as a result of wanting to discover where I could forage apples in the wider local area, something that had grown out of my cycle rides from early in the pandemic. With heavy overcast August weather, I took a few underexposed photographs as a record then.

Reading Lights Out for the Territory and Rodinsky’s Room at the time of moving back to London at the end of the 1990s (as well as Peter Ackroyd, Clarence Rook, Blanchard Jerrold, Emmanuel Litvinoff, George Gissing, among others) was almost a conscious project of building a particular world in which the present, contemporary everyday was overlaid with a mythology of a certain vision of London. I have written before about my first real contact with the city of Paris early in in my degree, already-mythologised in comparison to my growing up in the suburbs (see ‘A Fragmentary Snapshot’). Kathleen Raine declared that there was ‘no poetry in Ilford’, seeing it as the epitome of lower middle class philistinism a hundred years ago; making art as a student in the 1990s I think I had an unspoken feeling as though nothing good came of the suburbs–very much a young artist’s cry–echoing Raine: ‘things’ happened elsewhere. Had I known about, or read Farewell, Happy Fields perhaps I might have felt differently about my suburban upbringing then; Raine went to the same infant school as I did, when it was new (she was born the year after it had been built), while it still looked out onto scrubland to the north where the march of bricks and mortar stopped for a time: coincidentally, Raine even mentions the road on which we lived by name. I felt there was a lack of mythology: there were hardly any buildings in Ilford older than a hundred years when I was growing up then, which I think contributed. There were intimations of course, bits of buried history, most of which had left very little trace, nothing to really grasp onto. London was something that happened after one got on the tube: Ilford had no distinct character of its own (or at least that was how it seemed to me then), apart from its paradoxical London/not-London identity, becoming part of Greater London with the formation of the London Borough of Redbridge in 1965 but retaining an Essex postcode. (I only really felt like I came from London when I went away to do my degree, being made to feel so). During my PhD, and particularly during the pandemic, I began to make work about where I was now, and making work about where I grew up in some form: photographs of cinemas or sites of cinemas where I would once have watched films (Gants Hill), traces of cattlegrids in South Woodford, a still unfinished film around Newbury Park, a project retracing the photographs I took along the destruction of the M11 Link Road, revisiting sketchbooks from what was twenty-five and then thirty years ago, rebuilding a world that had formed me (art school had made me disavow that particular way of working–simply drawing by observation from the motif–which I internalised, then, after my education, it became something located in the past, demonstrating a lack of sophistication in my thinking in my teenage years about what an artwork was or could be–despite having a father who was an artist, being brought up with art around me, I still had a narrow view of art to accompany my narrow horizons of the suburbs: I would have agreed with Raine then; as much as the particularity of Farewell Happy Fields makes it valuable, I don’t think I would like Raine as a person if I met her now).

After my first visit to Claybury, I thought I would to like to go back to film there, and planned to do so soon. At this point I had been thinking that it was a hundred years since the walk described in Farewell Happy Fields, and this seemed like enough of an excuse to expose some 16mm film (I had no thought then of making a it a record of this location through the seasons). However, leaving work during the first week back, the handlebars on my bicycle inexplicably snapped, and taking it to a local shop, there were a number of other issues which needed addressing, with the result that was simply not economical to repair. I had to wait for my first full month’s pay of the academic year before I could get a replacement. I finally returned with a new bicycle in October, carrying my Ciné Kodak BB Junior and fifty feet of Ilford film; the signs from my first visit were gone, and very few apples remained. I picked up a windfall cooker only. (This appears in the 16mm 'Three Colour Process' film in the post on the Ciné Kodak Model K.) Nothing quite cohered as neatly as I would have liked: perhaps I had retraced Kathleen Raine’s steps one hundred years on; the orchard is believed to have been planted in the 1920s, although this is not certain; the 16mm format was created by Kodak a couple of years later; the camera I was using came onto the market at the end of the 1920s; the Ilford film stock I was using, made in Ilford itself, dated to the 1960s. This first attempt at a film was not enough on its own: I had bought enough of this long-discontinued Ilford stock to film four seasons, and there was thus a certain logic in doing so.

Over the next two years I went back at intervals to film during winter, spring and summer to make a portrait of a place. Each section of film was edited in camera, with the exception of autumn, where there were a couple of false starts from forgetting to make sure the camera’s motor was fully wound (autumn being still relatively early in my use of a spring motor camera); the spring section I cut short at a shot of clouds in the sky: there were a few shots after this but it seemed to lend itself to the transition to summer. The shots weren’t planned as a result, but the general movement in each section is from details to wider views, with autumn, filmed first, showing a panning of London on the far horizon, travelling out of the park, and along the road that Kathleen Raine and Roland Haye might have walked along, where the boundary of the hospital’s grounds once, with a look back at the tower disappearing into the bleached-out light leak at the end of the roll (I did remove the film from the camera in a dark bag, so this should not have been affected by light; however before developing, I stored this in a film can before that was clearly not light tight–developing the roll in two halves, there’s the same light leak near the middle of the autumn section where the film was cut to fit in my developing tank which only takes 33 not 50 feet).

The stock, Ilford Fast Pan Film, came in cans with ‘date of test’ printed on the labels with dates of January and September. The reason for using this film was that it was double-perforated, so I could use it in the Ciné-Kodak BB Junior, I’d acquired it cheaply and the fact that it was branded Ilford did seem to fit; I kept the full overscan so that the name Ilford would periodically appear in the rebate, as well as emphasising the materiality of the film, although this can be a bit too seductive. Despite being well over fifty years old, I exposed the film at an exposure index of 80 and, with no information to go on other than a hunch from having used Ilford Mark V film in the past, I developed it as if it was FP4 Plus. Some of the spring and summer shots used a couple of different strength yellow filters too, highlighting dried grass and deepening skies just a little too. I neglected to keep records but I think most of the film was developed in HC110, possibly with a section in Ilfotec DDX. For titles I took sections directly from Farewell Happy Fields, in the text of which each season is mentioned at least once, and some seasons many times. The words orchard and asylum also appear, and were used for a title. I experimented with a couple of different ways of making the titles: I enlarged passages with a photocopier and filmed them taped to a wall, an played around with different overlays, but it all got a bit arch; the titles in the film were copied from the book, then filmed with the Kodak Ciné Titler, a vintage device made for just that purpose. The title roll does appear to be slipping in the gate, leading to a slight blurring, but I accepted that as a contingent effect in trying to make it all in camera. Finally, I added sound. The first section, winter seemed to fit no sound at all, so I left it silent. Spring is accompanied by sound recorded in the orchard at Claybury at the same time of year, but not at the time of filming; summer does have sound recorded concurrently with filming, although I frequently left the recording device in the same place as I filmed a few different shots around it, which is why the sound of the camera running varies in intensity. For autumn, filmed first, without sound, I thought I would overlay it with the sound of the camera running on its own; there seemed to be a logic to the sound progressing in this way for each section. Retrospectively, possibly I would have been more rigorous in how it was put together, the sound and visuals, choosing the shots and shot length more judiciously, with the idea from the outset that it would be a portrait of a place through the seasons, but the impressionistic qualities that its making effected feel apt.

References
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, 'The Missing Voice (Case Study B)', https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/the-missing-voice-case-study-b/
D. Fulton, 'Heaven of hell: Representations of Ilford in the writings of Denise Levertov and Kathleen Raine', 2010
'Repton Park formerly Claybury Hospital', Historic Hospitals: https://historic-hospitals.com/2015/06/21/repton-park-formerly-claybury-hospital/
Richard Hornsey, ‘The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas’, Cultural Geographies, Vol. 23, No. 2, April 2016, pp. 265-280
Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky’s Room, Granta Books, London 1999
Rachel Lichtenstein, Rodinsky’s Whitechapel, Artangel, London 1999 https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/rodinskys-whitechapel/
Kathleen Raine, Farewell Happy Fields, Hamish Hamilton, London 1973
Iain Sinclair, Dark Lanthorns, Goldmark Uppingham, Rutland 1999
Iain Sinclair, London Orbital, Granta Books, London 2002
Tilda Swinton, Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth, 'The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger' https://seasonsinquincy.com/
Barbara Taylor, ‘The Demise of the Asylum in late Twentieth-Century Britain: A personal History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2011, Sixth Series, Vol. 21, pp. 193-215
The Orchard Project:
https://www.theorchardproject.org.uk/blog/claybury-orchard-a-sanctuary-for-wildlife-and-the-mind/

Workers Not Leaving The Factory (Once More)

Two years ago, I made a very short film called 'Workers Not Leaving the Factory'. The rationale for this was to record moving images onto Ilford film of the sites of the Ilford’s Britannia Works factory in the town of the same name, identifying two locations that would have been exits from the site at the time that the Lumière brothers filmed La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon, its title variously translated into English as Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon, Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory, or Exiting the Factory, the first film to be projected in front of an audience, at the Société d'Encouragement de l'Industrie Nationale, on 22nd March 1895. Last year I had the desire to revisit this, 125 years to the day on which the Lumières’ films were first shown to a paying audience in London, but did not do so due to the pandemic restrictions in force on that date. Instead, I made a rather imperfect contact print of the first film to project it at home, alongside a digital projection from a webcam that provided the nearest possible view to those which I had filmed, a visual representation of how the moving image and its dissemination has fundamentally changed the experience of time and space, echoing Patrick Keiller’s desire to make a film of “distant landscapes […] without leaving home.” This was 'ADDITIONAL POURTRAYALS [sic]', the name derived from a phrase in the original programme for the Lumières’ first exhibition of the cinématographe in England, in which I speculated, that, although La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon was not named as one of the films shown, it could have appeared as one of these ‘ADDITIONAL POURTRAYALS’.

ADDITIONAL POURTRAYALS [sic]

The original Lumière programme appears in reproduction in a souvenir booklet produced for an event in 1936 to mark forty years since the first public exhibition of the Lumières' Cinématographe in London at the Polytechnic on Regent Street. As well as recreating the Lumières' original programme of short films in the same institution (which now boasted a School of Kinematography), there was also an exhibition showcasing the history and development of the technology of moving pictures, with a number of manufacturers keen to display the very latest advances. Among these were Ilford and Kodak Ltd: Kodak Ltd had a number of Ciné-Kodak cameras and projectors “Showing how Cine Kodak has advanced since introduction in 1923” with dates: the last camera listed is the “Cine Kodak “BB” Junr. f3/5” from 1930. Subsequent to 'Workers Not Leaving the Factory', I’d acquired a Ciné-Kodak Model BB Junior, but that with the faster f1.9 lens. In the exhibition, Ilford showed Dufaycolor, frame enlargements from 9.5mm Selo film and also the “ILFORD CINE SERVICE. Showing processing and control of 16 mm. and 9.5 mm. Ilford Cine Films”. Ilford stopped manufacturing ciné film many years ago, and when making 'Workers Not Leaving the Factory', specifically to shoot this on an Ilford emulsion, I cut FP4 Plus film down to 16mm, unperforated of course, but was able to use this–not without problems–in a Bolex 8mm camera. 

Ilford Fast Pan 16mm Film

For an Ilford motion picture film stock to use in the Ciné-Kodak BB Junior camera, I’d found a couple of 100ft rolls of 16mm Ilford Fast Pan film. On the labels of both there is a stamp "date of test 6.1.69", meaning that the film would almost certainly have been made at the Britannia Works site in Ilford before production there stopped in the mid-1970s. This is very reminiscent to the Ilford Mark V film I used a few years ago, presumably being an emulsion test; when researching that particular film stock, I found a suggestion that this lead to the fifth iteration of Ilford’s HP film, currently HP5 Plus today. It’s possible then that the Fast Pan film could be a version of the FP emulsion, although in the original FP film, the letters stood for Fine grain Panchromatic.

Roden Street, Ilford

Unable to revisit the Ilford sites in February 2021, enacting 'ADDITIONAL POURTRAYALS [sic]' to mark the date instead, I did then return last year as soon as the general 'stay at home' order was lifted on 29th March. I shot the Ilford Fast Pan film where it was originally manufactured in the Ciné-Kodak BB Junior–and subsequently did not develop the film for several months, until very recently, almost a year since the film was exposed. The Ilford Fast Pan film labels do not specify a film speed, and over fifty years since being made, I supposed that the film would have lost sensitivity regardless. My initial tests showed the film had a lot of fog, and I shot the film at an exposure index of 25. 

The Ciné-Kodak BB Junior takes 50ft daylight loading spools, which equates to around 2 minutes at the camera’s frame rate of 16 frames a second. When I filmed 'Workers Not Leaving the Factory', as the 2x8mm format requires the film to be passed through the camera twice, there was a logic to shooting two separate scenes, between which the film needed to be unloaded from the camera, the spools flipped over and then reloaded to shoot the second side of the film. In doing this, I chose the locations where two entrances to the Britannia Works site had been, having researched the site history in some detail in 2013. The first location was the entrance to Sainsbury's car park on Roden Street, the other a section of brick wall on Riverdene Road, which appears to align with what was once the entrance to an alley that led into Britannia Works. The Ciné-Kodak BB Junior runs for just over 30 seconds with its clockwork motor fully wound, this would determine the duration of each scene: I assumed that I would then get four different shots on the 50ft spool; in the event, there was enough film for five scenes, partly due to unloading the camera after shooting in the dark (the footage indicator on the camera suggests that there’s about five feet of film after the zero mark which would usually be exposed when removing the film from the camera). 

Riverdene Road, Ilford

I filmed the same two locations as in 'Workers Not Leaving the Factory' for the first two shots. The next two sites where those related to 'ADDITIONAL POURTRAYALS [sic]': the CCTV camera which records the scene that I had projected digitally, and then I pointed the BB Junior in the same direction as this CCTV camera, but from the ground level of course. This viewpoint was as close as I could get to the scene of the Britannia Works site remotely: at some point in the evolution of Ilford’s sprawling site, it might have been possible to see part of it from here, namely the skating rink which Ilford rented in the 1930s. Reading accounts of the history of early film in Britain in In the Kingdom of Shadows recently, I couldn't help noticing that the cinema was linked to skating in a couple of accounts, usually in the nature of popular fads or crazes:

“SEVERAL EXPLANATIONS have been given of the bad theatrical business in the provinces, reports of which daily reach the managers most concerned in sending out companies. […] Mr. George Dance, who has as much experience of the business side of the theatre as anyone in England, is inclined to think that the comparative effect of cinematograph shows and skating rinks has been exaggerated.”

The World’s Fair, 30 October 1909

“AT THE PRESENT MOMENT the popularity of picture palaces and the reason for it are directing a good deal of attention to the public mind. But these sudden crazes are not new: 30 years ago it was croquet, 15 years ago it [was] cycling, ten years ago it was roller skating…”

The Times, 9th April 1913

Site of Alfred Harman's house, Cranbrook Road

With the nominally-50ft roll not entirely used up, I went to the site of Alfred Harman’s house on Cranbrook Road, where Harman first coated glass plates in the basement, the very beginnings of what would become Ilford, Limited. When I developed the film, I used the developing times for Ilford FP4 Plus with Adox Adonal, an iteration of Rodinal. The developing tank I have been using for 16mm is really designed for 2x8mm: a normal 2x8mm camera roll is 25ft, but, with enough film for a leader and trailer, usually removed after processing, the actual length is closer to 33ft; this does still mean that a 50ft daylight spool has to be developed in two parts, if not strictly halves. The cut appears part way through the third scene shot, spliced together again after developing. 

Cut between two lengths of the film developed separately

The direction of the film through the camera means that the second half of the film was first to be developed first, for which I used a dilution of 1+50 for 15 minutes; the negative looked dense, so I reduced the time for the second half of the film to 12 minutes, which possibly could have been cut further (subsequently using the Ilford Fast Pan film, I’ve rated it at 40 or 50 rather than 25; in the image above it's just possible to discern that the image is brighter, thus the negative is denser, below the cut.). The nature of the film's age and overexposure and/or overdevelopment is that the images have quite pronounced grain as a result. Having developed the film by hand, the cleanness of the process itself could clearly be improved. In addition, by letting the camera’s motor run down entirely while exposing the film is that the frame rate slows close to the end, before the motor stops, with the result that the exposure time increases, the image getting brighter at the end of each scene. With the methodology determining the location and duration of each shot, anything happening in front of the camera was at the mercy of what Siegfried Kracauer would describe as ‘the contingency of the street’: the entrance to the supermarket car park and the road underneath the A406 flyover inevitably provided movement; the CCTV camera was shot hand-held, and a bird can be discerned flying through the shot at one point; the brick wall on Riverdene Road is only animated by subtle signs of the wind in the netting on the scaffolding which appears in the corner of the frame and the shadows from a tree on the right. Movement is also provided by the lack of stability of the frames and the vibrations the camera itself is subject to as the motor unwinds, rotating the shutter, pulling the film from supply to take up spool inside the camera, the intermittent motion briefly pausing its travel at the film gate for sixteen exposures every second.

'With Workers Not Leaving The Factory', showing the two individual frames next to each other had a logic thanks to the nature of the 2x8mm film format. In 16mm, there was a coherence to keeping the revisited scenes in juxtaposition; with the following shots as an angle-reverse angle pair, this had also had a reason to be placed together after the first two. The fifth shot I discarded.

Sources/Further reading:

Lumière Celebration programme (PDF)

Colin Harding and Simon Popple, In the Kingdom of Shadows, Cygnus Arts, London 1996

Patrick Keiller, 'The Robinson Institute', The View From the Train, Verso 2013

Siegfried Kracauer, Nature of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, Dobson Books, 1970

'ADDITIONAL POURTRAYALS [sic]'

"One of the internet's most intriguing capabilities, for a topographical film-maker, was that it offered contemporaneous views of distant landscapes. During 1996, I had heard that there were websites where one could access the cameras that observe traffic on UK motorways, and immediately conceived a strong desire to explore, and perhaps to sample, what I imagined would be a large and increasing number of real-time moving images of landscapes throughout the world. I wondered, perhaps, one day, I might be able to make a film without leaving the house."

Patrick Keiller, 'The Robinson Institute'

"And then, again, a sudden light, and recurring darkness.”

O. Winter, ‘The Cinematograph’, May 1896

Just short of a year ago, I filmed two views in Ilford, with an 8mm camera facing the locations which had once been entrances to Britannia Works, a large factory site that was the main manufacturing base for the photographic company that became Ilford, Limited, and wrote about this as 'Workers Not Leaving The Factory'. Due to a sense of dissatisfaction with the results, I had a desire to revisit the location and film the site again. In the latter part of last year, I realised that the opportunity might coincide with either one of two significant anniversaries: in December, it would 125 years since August and Louis Lumière demonstrated projected moving photographic images to a paying audience, which, despite other prior claimants, is seen to mark 'the birth of cinema'. The other anniversary was 21st February, when the Lumières' films were first shown before a paying audience in London in 1896.

Original 2x8mm negative, digitally inverted

Last year, I shot the film on Ilford FP4 Plus, using a length of 16mm-wide film cut down from medium format. As a result, this did not have perforations, but I found that, imperfectly, this would be driven through a Bolex B8 camera by the friction of the pull-down claws alone. Using this film involved many compromises, particularly in duration, so I had been looking out for Ilford ciné film on a certain well-known auction site, and, eventually, a couple of rolls of 16mm Ilford Fast Pan film turned up, and were purchased. The labels on both read "date of test 6.1.69", meaning that the film would have been made at the Britannia Works site in Ilford before production there stopped in the mid-1970s. In addition, I also acquired a couple of Kodak 16mm movie cameras, one of which was made in England, so I was set to film a new version of 'Workers Not Leaving The Factory' at the site of the now-demolished factory, with vintage Ilford film made there, and possibly with an English-made 16mm camera. The ideas that I had touched upon in writing about the filming last year were still appropriate of course, but I hoped the material aspect of this action now had more resonance.

Ilford Fast Pan 16mm Film

The current coronavirus pandemic, and its particular severity in the UK, upset my plans. I had filmed last year on the 3rd of March. Less than two weeks later, my workplace moved to remote working, preceding the government's general 'stay at home' injunction by a little over a week itself. In December 2020, I was still recovering from Covid-19, having contracted the virus in mid-November, which precluded filming on the 28th, the date of the Lumières' first public showing at the Salon Indien du Grand Café, Paris, in 1895. With daily new infection rates in the tens of thousands, and infections in London running at an estimated rate of around 1 in 30 of the population by the beginning of January, new restrictions were put in force across the UK. Having largely recovered from the virus myself by the second anniversary date of 21st February when the Lumières' films were first shown in London, I could have returned to Ilford to shoot these two locations again. However, the 'stay at home' injunction still applied. Reasons to leave home included travelling to a workplace if that work could not reasonably be carried out at home; arguably, this filming could have come under this definition of 'work', but I felt it was hardly within the spirit of the rules. Another reason for leaving home would be for daily exercise, once a day, and I have used my daily exercise to take photographs while walking a route around my local area; in this rule, the 'local' is stressed: although Ilford is less than 5 miles from where I currently live, again, this feels outside the spirit of the rules, particularly so when one uses a tripod, which makes the act of taking photographs (or filming) seem less like an incidental aspect of daily exercise and something more intentional.

Given the 'stay at home' order, nevertheless I still wanted to mark this anniversary. The act of projection itself, appropriately, would take the place of location in importance. Last year's film physically existed as two negatives, 16mm-wide, without perforations, the frames running in both directions along their lengths. Having been given a dual-format 8mm/Super-8 projector for Christmas, if I could make a positive print from these negatives, I could project my film. With perforations it would have been possible to make a contact print by sandwiching the negative film on top of a roll of unexposed film and, running both through a camera, this would expose the fresh film through the negative, and, once developed, this would result in a positive print. However, in using cut down Ilford FP4 Plus film, my original negative didn't have perforations. Although the film had gone through the camera without perforations at the time I shot it, trying to run this back through the camera with perforated film underneath might have worked, but my Bolex B8 had developed a fault with its motor, and wasn't running properly (I also think that there would be a high likelihood of the unperforated negatives slipping against the fresh film; if the negative had perforations this would keep the two layers of film aligned while running through the camera).

The only practical solution within easy reach was to expose the two separate negative lengths as a contact print with fresh film underneath. As the original negative had erratic frame spacing, there was no way of ensuring that the frames would be correctly aligned with the perforations in the positive print, so, as a fait accompli, there was simply no point in worrying about accurate registration. The hardest part of the exercise was lining up the long strips of 16mm-wide film in complete darkness before exposing these, only partly successful, and this became another contingent fact in the print, whereby the successive frames wander in both horizontal and vertical directions as a result. Not having a single sheet of glass large enough to cover the whole film, I used two sheets in an attempt to keep the film as flat as possible during exposure, with some of the film not held flat at either end and the edges of the glass showing in the prints. 

Orwo UP21 DS8 Film

I tried a test with 1970s Orwo UP15 2x8mm film stock, which, although I've had good results in the past from similar vintages, was too fogged to be of any use. For the final prints I used Orwo UP21 double Super-8 film with a develop before date of April 1991. Double Super-8 (or DS8) film and cameras use the principle of 2x8mm film in that the camera exposes frames on one half of the width of roll of 16mm-wide film, which is then flipped around at its end and run through the camera a second time, exposing the other half; once developed the film is split into two 8mm widths which are then spliced together–the crucial difference is that the DS8 format uses the much smaller Super-8 perforations, ensuring a larger frame size, while taking advantage of not using the plastic Super-8 cartridge with its built-in plastic film gate, supposedly allowing for better frame registration, as well as other aspects of 2x8mm, such as being able to run the film backwards through the camera for in-camera effects like dissolves made by the double-exposure of a fade-in over a fade-out.

I made one test with the UP21 DS8 film to get a rough idea of exposure, then contact printed the negatives onto the film, developing it in Ilfotec LC29 diluted 1+19 for 9 minutes at 20ºC. I cut these prints to 8mm width by hand, somewhat imperfectly (I had ordered a 2x8mm splitter the day before, realising this would be useful, but I went ahead with cutting the prints by hand, not thinking that the splitter would arrive a couple of hours later).

Contact print on Orwo UP21 DS8 film;
the diagonal white line lower right is the edge of one sheet of glass

Unable to film in Ilford on the 21st, I wanted to connect–visually–the projection of my film from last year to the site with some form of simultaneousness to Ilford on the 21st of February. I conceived that the manner of achieving this could be through streaming a live projection of a webcam from the town and recording both projections at the same time. I found just one such instance online with any kind of proximity to the site of Britannia Works: a traffic camera on the A118 Romford Road looking in the direction of Ilford Hill, across the river Roding underneath the A406 flyover. Britannia Works would have been off to the right of the field of view of this camera, but at some point Ilford Limited had expanded their operations to include properties between Roden Street and Ilford Hill, including the use of a skating rink, which would have been somewhere in the location of the building with the white double-height ground floor seen on the camera. Close by, there is another camera on Mill Lane, offline at the time of writing: in my research I found no connection between the paper mill which gives the road its name and the raw materials supplied to Ilford for the manufacture of photographic paper. There is also a webcam focused on a depth gauge in the Roding, although this only provided a still image; this could be 'animated' through refreshing a web browser window to update the image, but this had less of the 'liveness' of the traffic camera, although there was an association there to be had with the anecdote in Silver by the Ton of drying the glass used for photographic plates by the banks of the river while the area was still semi-rural at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the risk of flooding on Riverdene Road that caused the houses that once backed onto Britannia Works there to be built with a slightly raised lower storey.

Contact print on Orwo UP21 DS8 film; 
the second location on Riverdene Road

The passage from Patrick Keiller's 'The Robinson Institute' that continues from the quote at the top of this post quickly punctures its utopian idea: Keiller goes on to write about how this promise of electronic flânerie was more imagined than realised at the time, in the late 1990s, there being relatively few websites providing actual live streams rather than, like the flood gauge in the Roding, still images that needed constant refreshment. At the time of writing twenty-five years later, the idea of scouring the internet for websites showing live images from anywhere around the world–for some experiential form of spatially-dislocated dérive–seems to me something of a relic of the idealistic promise of those early years. Other forms have supplanted the simple live webcam view: the experience of Google Street View, for example, while affording the opportunity to travel virtually through many towns and cities around the world does not allow the user to experience the simultaneousness of the live stream; this simultaneousness is now part of the everyday with various videoconferencing platforms, but using these has a tendency to subsume any kind of pleasure in the experience of dislocation into pragmatic and productive concerns.

The traffic camera I found looking in the direction of Ilford Hill only provides a short loop of a few seconds: this loop is updated every few minutes online. However, this suited my purposes as the short lengths of film that I projected are only seconds long (I didn't have the right equipment to splice the film together into one continuous length), and each section would have to be separately threaded into the projector; in the interim I could refresh the page to update the loop from the traffic camera to its most recent version. This webcam stream also had a date and timestamp, functioning as evidence to the specificity of the day I projected and recorded it as 'live', returning to the location remotely. There was a provisional quality to the composition of these two projections, utilising an otherwise neglected corner of a room, furnishing it with some of the ephemera that I'd collected in my research into the history of the Britannia Works site in Ilford, sufficient to give a texture to the white walls. I had envisaged the possibility of recording this set up with multiple camera angles, close ups of the various elements within the frame: the business of just projecting the film and documenting this action took precedence over anything more complex than a single angle, static camera.

I had problems in the actual projection of the film I had made. The short lengths had no leader: I had made the contract prints longer than the negative strips, with this extra length acting as a leader, but leader material tends, I think, to be a little thicker than the film itself. The projector I used has automatic threading, which frequently refused the prints I'd made; sometimes these would go through smoothly, but did not always come out the other end of the film path of the projector (also an issue to do with the material's thickness), which then had a tendency to fold itself up inside the projector, and, once creased, was even less likely to cleanly run through the projector, jamming in the gate, which sometimes could be shepherded through by toggling the frame. In addition, thanks to being hand cut, some parts of the film were a millimetre or so too wide, which was relatively easily solved by trimming a sliver from the edge; some parts of the film were not wide enough, and this caused it to jam, possibly by having too much side-to-side play when engaging the projector's pull down mechanism. Despite these issues I was able to film the four separate parts of the footage (each location's filming having been broken over the two lengths of the original cut-down negative); I also kept a section where one length of film jammed in the projector's gate, partly as this print shows a good deal of the lettering in the film rebate, notably 'ILFORD' itself. The duration is shorter than the original film: this was shot at 12 frames per second; although the projector does have adjustable frame rates, it seems to only run at 16fps. I tried slowing the playback to 75%, but found the distortion of the slower audio (even at its original pitch) more distracting than anything gained by seeing the film at the rate intended. With all these contingent factors, the film itself as projected has become fragmentary and somewhat abstract, the image sliding across the frame, hard to fix. Perhaps, in terms of "photographs in motion" (a phrase from David Campany in Photography and Cinema, on the Lumières' first film) the least obstructive section is the very brief few frames in which a pedestrian crosses the screen, but the focus here is off, partly due to the contact print, compounded by the projection itself, in which, thanks to the hand-made quality of the material, needed constant readjustment.

Contact print on Orwo UP21 DS8 film showing both
irregular vertical and horizontal framing

Writing about the beginnings of Ilford, Limited under Alfred Harman last year, I described it as "literally a cottage industry" in that, having outgrown his basement on Cranbrook Road, Harman rented a cottage on the Clyde Estate as his first expansion into the location which would become Britannia Works, rapidly incorporating many more cottage buildings, some of which remained on the site until demolition nearly a century later. This use of domestic space as a site of production was something I wrote about at the end of 'Workers Not Leaving The Factory', or rather, more specifically, the de-localising or re-localising of production outside of a strict spatial definition of 'the workplace'. The global pandemic has accelerated some of these trends, while delineating what kind of work could be moved online easily (although not always pursued) against work impossible to carry out remotely. Surrounding the filming in Ilford a year ago, the consumption the supermarket that has replaced Britannia Works allows relies on the productive work, necessarily tied to a number of spatially-located specificities, non-virtual, culminating in the supermarket itself; the construction work just off-frame is also solidly tied to the real, real bricks, real concrete, and the physical labour required to configure these materials into living spaces, such spaces now co-opted into being the site of production for many, unforeseen a year ago.

The title used here comes from a reproduction of the original programme of the Lumière films shown in London in 1896: their first film, of workers leaving the Lumière factory, is not among the titles listed, but the possibility that it may have been shown is tantalisingly suggested by the promise that the programme "will be selected from the following subjects, and will be liable to frequent changes, as well as ADDITIONAL POURTRAYALS [sic]".

Sources/Further reading:

David Campany, Photography and Cinema, Reaktion Books, London 2008 (2012 reprint)

RJ Hercock and GA Jones, Silver by the Ton - A History of Ilford Limited 1879-1979, McGraw-Hill, London, 1979
Patrick Keiller, 'The Robinson Institute', The View From the Train, Verso 2013
O. Winter, ‘The Cinematograph’, The New Review, May 1896 (https://picturegoing.com/?p=4166 retrieved 21/3/20)

Programme of the 40th anniversary of the Lumières' projections being shown in London including a reproduction of the original 1896 programme (PDF)

See also the bibliography of 'Workers Not Leaving The Factory'.

Workers Not Leaving The Factory

“The lights leap up, and at their sudden descent you see upon the cloth a factory at noon disgorging its inmates. Men and women jostle and laugh; a swift bicycle seizes the occasion of an empty space; a huge hound crosses the yard in placid content; you can catch the very changing expression of a mob happy in its release; you note the varying speed of the footsteps; not one of the smaller signs of human activity escapes you. And then, again, a sudden light, and recurring darkness.”

O. Winter, ‘The Cinematograph’, The New Review, May 1896

“Immediately after the command had been given to leave the factory back in 1895, the workers streamed out. Even if they sometimes got in each other's way - one young woman is seen to tug at another's skirt before they part in opposite directions, knowing that the other will not dare to retaliate under the stern eye of the camera ­- the overall move­ment remains swift and nobody is left behind. That this is the case is perhaps because the primary aim was to represent motion, maybe sign­posts were already being set. Only later, once it had been learned how filmic images grasp for ideas and are themselves seized by them, are we able to see in hindsight that the resolution of the workers' motion represents something, that the visible movement of people is standing in for the absent and invisible movement of goods, money, and ideas circulating in industry.
The basis for the chief stylistics of cinema was given in the first film sequence. Signs and symbols are not brought into the world, but taken from reality. It is as though the world itself wanted to tell us something.”

Harun Farocki, ‘Workers Leaving the Factory’

La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon, known in English as Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon, Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory, or simply Exiting the Factory, was the first film to be projected in front of an audience, at the Société d'Encouragement de l'Industrie Nationale, on 22nd March 1895. It was the only film that Auguste and Louis Lumière then had available, and was shown, almost as an afterthought, following demonstrations of the Lumières’ experiments in colour photography. That this scene was chosen for the subject of their first film must be largely due to the pure, combined contingencies of proximity, of movement, and of light. The Cinématographe, fixed, unmoving, faces the entrance to the photographic plate factory in Lyon established by Antoine Lumière, Auguste and Louis’ father, and records the factory workers leaving through a large double gate and an adjacent doorway. The hand-cranked Cinématographe, a camera, printer, and projector combined in one device, was perhaps loaded that morning in the factory that ones sees in the shot; the film may well have been developed, and, now as a negative, dried, run back through the Cinématographe in contact with a fresh roll of film to make a positive print all in a day. Descriptions of La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon refer to it being “dinner hour”, “the noonhour at the factory”. Early film relied almost exclusively on daylight due to the limited sensitivity of the photographic emulsions available at the time, combined with the need for short exposure times in order to achieve sufficient successive frames with a fast enough shutter speed to create the impression of movement when played back. The noon hour outside the factory would provide the brightest intensity of available light during the day, and, additionally, the sun is behind the camera at that point in its path through the sky, ideal for defining the figures emerging into the street from the yard with the factory buildings behind (the factory entrances face south-south-west). Presumably, the first two contingent factors, of proximity and light, naturally suggested the third, movement:

“The Lumieres made several films of people filing past their camera, including one of workers leaving their factory, the first film to be screened publicly. The subject matter was ideal: endlessly different figures passing through a fixed frame express so much so simply, about photographs in motion.”

David Campany, Photography and Cinema

There are in fact three extant versions of La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon which suggests that the Lumières were sufficiently captivated by the subject to film it more than once, but perhaps also that they may have been unsatisfied with their first film itself. The version that Harun Farocki analyses in ‘Workers Leaving the Factory’ starts with the gates opening and ends with them closing, and appears the most organised visually (“In the Lumière film about leaving the factory, the building or area is a container, full at the beginning and emptied at the end. This satis­fies the desire of the eye, which itself can be based on other desires.” Harun Farocki, ‘Workers Leaving the Factory’): the detail of one of the workers pinching the skirt of another before they part in different directions appears a knowing gesture, an improvisation or a deviation from the script which may itself suggest a familiarity to repetition. Farocki’s assertion that the worker whose skirt is tugged “will not dare to retaliate under the stern eye of the camera” is emblematic of the direction that these workers are subject to. The three different versions of the film are known by the presence - or absence - of a horse-drawn conveyance: it appears in two versions of the film, drawn by one horse in one, two horses in another, absent in the third. Farocki uses the ‘no horse’ version in his film Workers Leaving the Factory; the figures streaming out of the factory gates, already open, in the one-horse film appear less organised than the ‘no horse’ version. The version of La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon was that was shown at the Société d'Encouragement de l'Industrie Nationale on 22nd March was filmed three days earlier on the 19th: in the one horse version, the shadow of bare branches can be seen on the ground, suggesting a date early in the year, as does the workers’ clothing - lighter clothes and bare arms are on show in the no-horse film and the shadow of the tree or trees behind the camera show that the leaves are out; all three variants were shot in sunlit conditions, and the visible shadows are relatively short, indicating a high angle of the sun in the sky, suggesting all three were filmed near midday. A more forensic analysis could no doubt place the time of day and year more precisely, given that the geographical location is known (the Institute Lumière reproduces the two-horse version on their website as the Lumières’ first film; this version is more tightly framed, but the workers' clothing here again appears lighter than the one horse version).

Following the Lumieres’ first showing of projected films to a paying public on 28 December 1895 at the Salon Indien in the Grand Café, Paris, the Cinématographe was demonstrated to the public in London, at the Regent Street Polytechnic, on the 21st February 1896, with an invited audience the day before. The Polytechnic's own magazine reported the event as:

"a special exhibition of a new invention by MM. Auguste and Louis Lumière – the Cinématographe. [...] For instance, a photograph of a railway station is shown, two or three seconds elapse and a train steams into the station and stops, the carriage opens, the people get out and there is the usual hurrying for a second or two, and then again the train moves off. The whole thing is realistic, and is, as a matter of fact, an actual photograph."

The Polytechnic Magazine, 26 February 1896

The initial showing had a very small audience, fifty-four paying viewers, but, as in Paris, the Cinématographe's popularity, no doubt gained through press notices and word of mouth, soon required showings every hour on the hour between 2 and 10pm. Forty years later, the Regent Street Polytechnic marked the anniversary of this showing with a repeat of the original films and an exhibition, which situated the Cinématographe amongst other technologies creating the illusion of the moving image, the phenakisticope, zoetrope, Edison's Kinetoscope, and was opened by Louis Lumière himself. 'The Lumière Celebration' programme reproduces the original list of films shown in February 1896: La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon is not listed; however, tantalisingly, there is a sentence that reads that the programme "will be selected from the following subjects, and will be liable to frequent changes, as well as ADDITIONAL POURTRAYALS [sic]".

The Lumière's Cinématographe used 35mm-wide film, but, unlike Edison's Kinetoscope, which essentially introduced the form of 35mm perforated film still in use today, this used a single round perforation per frame on each side. Smaller formats were soon developed for amateurs: Kodak developed 16mm film, and, a few years later, repurposed it by doubling the number of perforations, and created the 2x8mm format which was popular for home movies until Kodak produced the Super-8 cartridge which all but made 2x8mm obsolete. Despite its near-obsolence, I have used 2x8mm film in recent years; in experimenting with a Bolex 8mm camera, I discovered that unperforated 16mm film would run through it. I had tried some single-perforated 16mm Double-X film, to test exposure and development of that particular film with the camera. The perforated side ran through the Bolex with the frames overlapping in pairs, a result of the 16mm film having half the number of perforations of 2x8mm film. Having shot the perforated side, I turned over the film and tried shooting the unperforated side - which worked. As I had a length of Ilford FP4 Plus film cut down to 16mm, I tested this to see if I could shoot it with the Bolex camera, and it worked. With the #FP4Party returning this March, in my desire to do something different for it, I thought that I could actually make a short film shooting on Ilford FP4 Plus itself (coincidentally, when Ilford used to make ciné film many years ago, FP4 was one of the emulsions supplied in 16mm). Searching for a subject, I was provoked by seeing images of the location of Ilford's Britannia Works site on social media promoting this month's #FP4Party; these were of course familiar, as in 2013 I'd spent some time researching the Ilford company's beginnings in Ilford, writing a long post about this, illustrating it with photographs shot on Ilford document film with an Ilford camera.

Bolex test with unperforated Ilford FP4 Plus

Cutting medium format film to 16mm wide meant that duration would be fixed by its length. 120 rollfilm is about 82cm long; 2x8mm film has 80 frames per foot, meaning I could get something less than 240 frames per side on a cut-down section of film - not including losing a little of the length threading the film through the camera gate and on to the take up spool. The Bolex B8 has a wide range of filming speeds, so I was not constrained to shooting at the standard silent speed of 16fps, which would give just ten seconds of running time per side. To increase the duration of the film, I cut three lengths of medium format FP4 Plus, and taped these together in the dark; ideally, I wanted the film to be the same duration as those first Lumière films, which had a maximum running time of 50 seconds, taking 17 metres of 35mm film; shooting at 12fps, I thought it would be possible to shoot around 45 seconds on three lengths of cut-down FP4 Plus joined together. This also required loading, then opening the camera after shooting the first side to turn the film over, and finally unloading it all in the dark, to make use of as much of the film as possible. I took a changing bag with me to turn the film over on location after having shot the first side.

In my research into the Britannia Works site, I wrote briefly about my personal connection to Ilford, having grown up there, with my family moving to the town just before all the buildings on the Ilford site were demolished; we tended not to use the Sainsbury's supermarket that was subsequently built there at the time, but in the mid-1990s my brother bought his first house in a post-war estate at the far end of Riverdene Road from it. Away from London studying during this period, and after finishing my degree, I would stay there on occasion, as a result making it very familiar, but also associated with a particular period in my life. I think we may have also visited the Papermakers Arms pub on the corner of Roden Street and Riverdene Road once or twice, but around that time there were a number of pubs in the town that I only visited once or twice. I certainly went to the Cranbrook, a pub on the site of Alfred Harman’s home where he began making ‘Britannia’ dry plates in 1879, starting the business which was to become Ilford Limited.

As the FP4 film loaded into the Bolex, even with three lengths joined together, provided a short duration, I wanted a simple subject, one single fixed shot for each side of the film. I planned to film the locations where entrances and exits to Britannia Works, a factory manufacturing photographic plates like the Lumières', used to be, 125 years on from their first film. Changes to Ilford's Britannia Works site took place in 1896, the year the Cinématographe was exhibited in London, extending it to Roden Street, part of the current road layout. Revisiting the site this year in early March, around the corner on Riverdene Road, the two dilapidated houses next to the Papermakers Arms have gone since my post of 2013; these were demolished four years ago, and a new building is currently going up on their footprint. On Roden Street, opposite Sainsbury's, an area which also had some Ilford premises, Britannia Music Publishing had their headquarters, one of the few high rise developments while I was growing up in Ilford. In 2013, this too had been demolished and the site cleared, now populated with tall buildings in the process of being completed, typifying how land use has changed in the last decade or so.

Roden Street/Rollei 16 with Ilford FP4, develop before July 1975

I set up my camera opposite the exit to Sainsbury’s car park for the first shot. Before the changes to Britannia Works in 1896, the site boundary would have been roughly in the position of the ramp over the exit. I felt certain that the exit to car park itself would provide movement as I filmed: indeed, there was a worker painting the bollards between the way in and way out lanes as I set up the tripod. All around me, there was work going on as I filmed. Behind the camera, the understory car park beneath the new development was being surfaced with tarmac. In front, but just out of view of the lens, the pavement had been dug up and a lorry parked alongside. Two construction workers crossed the road behind this out-of-shot lorry as I filmed.

Riverdene Road/Rollei 16 with Ilford FP4, develop before July 1975

The second shot is of a narrow section of brick wall, projecting from the south-western corner of Sainsbury’s car park. In my research of 2013, I had identified this as fitting the size and position of an entrance to the alley that led to Britannia Works before the site was extended to Roden Street in 1896. As a subject, the blank brick wall is antithetical to the idea of “photographs in motion” and it looked as though there would be no movement at all when I began filming, perhaps appropriate to shooting what used to be an entrance but is no longer. The camera jammed as I filmed this. Opening it in the changing bag, one of the taped joins between two of the cut lengths of film was in the gate, and I moved this through manually. Continuing to film, a car and a pedestrian passed along Riverdene Road before the film ran out.

Rollei Super 16 cassettes loaded with Ilford FP4 film with a develop before date of July 1975

I also shot still photographs on Ilford FP4 with a “develop before” date of July 1975, the previous iteration of Ilford’s ‘Fine Grain Panchromatic’ film before the ‘Plus’ suffix was added. This FP4 is single perforated 16mm film, ready-loaded into 'Super 16' cassettes for the Rollei 16 subminiature camera. The film boxes state that the film is “Packed by Rollei-Werke Franke & Heidecke Braunschwieg Germany”. It’s entirely possible that this film itself was manufactured on the Roden Street site before the factory closed. The last photographic plates were coated there in November 1975; given that develop before dates are usually a few years from the point of manufacture, this FP4 film was possibly made around 1970, soon after FP4 film supplanted FP3. The 16mm film does not possess ciné film edge markings, but has frame numbering for the 12x17mm Rollei 16 format, as well as the stylised ‘R’ from the Rollei typeface. I did briefly consider using this film in the Bolex, but the Rollei cassettes only contain approximately 50cm of film, much shorter than the cut-down medium format FP4. In addition, the tests I’d previously made demonstrated that with standard 16mm perforations the frames would overlap on the perforated side, which would be hardly ideal.

Ilford Sprite camera in Redbridge Central Library/Rollei 16 with Ilford FP4, develop before July 1975

After shooting the film and taking some still photographs, I went to Redbridge Central Library, where I’d conducted my research in the local studies section seven years ago. There, in the non-fiction section, I photographed the small display case containing an Ilford Sprite camera, a box of R.52 Panchromatic plates and rolls of 35mm HPS film refills. The local studies section has been reorganised since I was there last (the museum itself appeared unchanged, with its case about Mary Davis, who worked at Ilford until it closed in 1976); upstairs there was a display about the various resources available to research local history, including a section on the 1911 census. This highlighted a family who lived in Margaret Cottages, the houses demolished four years ago next to the Papermakers Arms, and this included a photograph from 1984 I hadn't seen before of Riverdene Road with Margaret Cottages being overshadowed by the Ilford factory, of which I made a thumbnail sketch.

The raised steps outside the doors of Margaret Cottages, something I’d noticed as being distinctive, indicated that the whole ground floor of the houses was raised to protect the properties from flooding by the nearby river Roding, with one notable flood occurring in June 1903, and another more recent one in 2000. Earlier in the day I had got down to the Roding at the end of Roden Street, between the flats built there, a development from a few years back now; I imagine this is all private land, but there was nothing to stop me getting alongside the railings bounding the river (on the other side, the A406 road essentially prevents access to the river for a long stretch). I had found a reference in Silver by the Ton to glass plates being dried in the open air by the river (presumably after cutting and cleaning, before coating); this stretch of the Roding also used to be known as the Hyle, from which Ilford is derived.

The Roding by Roden Street/Rollei 16 with Ilford FP4, develop before July 1975

I developed the FP4 Plus from the Bolex with D96; as there were three lengths, I developed one first, separated from the others, removing the tape from the joins so that these areas would also develop. The first length appeared thin, due to the D96 being close to exhaustion, so I increased the developing time of the second two, almost doubling it (the first length of film I’d developed for 10 minutes at 21ºC, the second for 18 minutes at the same temperature). One of these came out entirely blank, which must have been from the taped join here also getting stuck in the gate, and I had turned the film over in the camera at this point between exposing the first and second sides: out of two runs through the Bolex camera, only one taped join passed through the gate in one direction without getting stuck. I had tested this beforehand, but without doing this in the dark: it’s much easier to neatly tape a couple of lengths of film together when you can see what you’re doing. Once developed, it was clear that the frame spacing was more erratic than the previous test I had made on unperforated film, although the total running time would have been close to La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon if all three lengths of film had gone through the gate. The still images were developed in Ilfotec LC29 at a dilution of 1+19, and I had rated the film at an exposure index of 40, which gave rather dense negatives.

Inverted negative showing irregular frame spacing

“The first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory, but a century later it can be said that film is hardly drawn to the factory and is even repelled by it. Films about work or workers have not become one of the main genres, and the space in front of the factory has remained on the sidelines.”

Harun Farocki, ‘Workers Leaving the Factory’

Harun Farocki’s film Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Workers Leaving the Factory) was made in 1995, the centenary of the Lumières’ first films, of which there was revival of interest, notably with the compilation film, Lumière et compagnie; Farocki’s film is a collage of cinema’s originary motif, culled from documentaries and features (“I have gathered, compared, and studied these and many other images which use the motif of the first film in the history of cinema, "workers leaving the factory," and have assembled them into a film”). In doing so it would appear that this film itself reanimated the subject, with the caveat that this is largely in the realm of the non-fiction film:

“In recent years, a number of remakes of the Lumière Brothers’ Workers Leaving the Factory have appeared. This particular Lumière film has become a touchstone for filmmakers in the past two decades, beginning with Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory, which compiles footage of workers exiting factories from many different fiction and nonfiction films, drawing our attention to how frequent and yet parenthetical or unexplored this visual image is in film history.”

Jennifer L Peterson, 'Workers Leaving the Factory: Witnessing Labor in the Digital Age'

Peterson’s prime examples are Ben Russell’s Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai) from 2008, which clearly references the Lumières' film in its title and form, being a single long take of migrant workers leaving a construction site; Sharon Lockhart’s Exit (also 2008) which reverses the viewpoint of La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon by placing the camera inside the factory gates looking out, filming the workers leaving an iron works on five successive weekdays in five unedited shots; and Daniel Eisenberg’s The Unstable Object (2011), which contrasts three different factories, from a technologically advanced car factory, to handmade clocks by visually impaired workers, and the traditional casting and finishing of cymbals. Referencing David Harvey, the theme of uneven geographical development is touched upon, especially in the contrasts in Eisenberg’s film, but also with the use of migrant labour in Russell’s Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai); Lockhart’s Exit pictures a form of labour, once familiar to many, but increasingly outsourced from the global north.

“The title of the first film by the Lumière brothers (La sortie des usines, 1895) also prophetically describes the changes in working conditions that took place in the twentieth century.”

Volker Pantenburg, ‘Deviation as Norm—Notes on the Essay Film’

The site bounded by Roden Street and Riverdene Road can be taken as emblematic of changes from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st. Ilford’s Britannia Works did not start as a greenfield site, but literally as a cottage industry, expanding from Alfred Harman’s home to a rented cottage on the Clyde Estate and from there growing quickly during the very end of the 19th century into the beginning of the 20th. The factory incorporated social functions, with clubs, newsletters and such like, as evidenced by Mary Davis’ comments in the local museum. Without unnecessarily fetishising the solidarity of this form of labour, much of these functions have disappeared in the post-war decades. At the end of the 1970s, Ilford Limited moved away to Cheshire, and its other sites in Basildon and Brentwood were closed, consolidating production. The closure of Britannia Works in Ilford made possible the redevelopment of the town centre, the road scheme surrounding the site reflecting the increasing dominance of the private car in the 1980s, and the site moved from being one of production to a site of consumption with the arrival of the supermarket.

The title Workers Not Leaving The Factory alludes to two versions of ‘not leaving’: first, this is the site where a factory was, but is no longer, a simple temporal dislocation. At the time the Lumières demonstrated the Cinématographe in London, there would have been workers leaving the site each day (I could have waited until the supermarket closed at the end of the working day, but at 10pm, there wouldn’t have been enough light to film; I shot at lunchtime, appropriately, and the working patterns in grocery shops certainly do not include closing for lunch: in the shot on Roden Street shoppers are seen leaving the supermarket). Second, for many occupations, although not those physical, repetitious ones which typically take place in factories or on construction sites, obliquely seen in the film, work in the 21st century is never truly left behind when one exits the premises: the site of work is all pervasive in the digital realm. Of this kind of work, if 'the factory' stands in for work itself, then work is all around in a sense that the workers leaving the Lumière factory could never have conceived: once they had left the factory site, work had no call on them until they reappeared for their next shift.

Bibliography

All three versions of La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon are on YouTube here.
The Regent Street Polytechnic Lumière Celebration programme (PDF) http://www.cineressources.net/ (retrieved 12/03/20)

David Campany, Photography and Cinema, Reaktion Books, London 2008 (2012 reprint)
Harun Farocki, Imprint/Writings, (English translation by Laurent Faasch-Ibrahim) Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2001
Harun Farocki, Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Workers leaving the factory), 1995 https://vimeo.com/59338090
David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, Verso, London, 2006
RJ Hercock and GA Jones, Silver by the Ton - A History of Ilford Limited 1879-1979, McGraw-Hill, London, 1979
Joost Hunningher, 'Now showing at 309 Regent Street – Ghosts on ‘Our Magic Screen’. A screenplay' in The Magic Screen, Joost Hunningher, Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, Guy Osborn and Ro Spankie, University of Westminster Press, 2015
Sharon Lockhart, Exit, 2008. Available online at www.ubu.com/film/lockhart_exit.html 
Volker Pantenberg, ‘Deviation as Norm—Notes on the Essay Film’ in Farocki/Godard, Amsterdam University Press, 2015 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16d69tz.7 retrieved 21/2/20)
Jennifer L Peterson, ‘Workers Leaving the Factory: Witnessing Labor in the Digital Age’, The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, 2013 (https://www.academia.edu/5728999/Workers_Leaving_the_Factory_Witnessing_Labor_in_the_Digital_Age retrieved 1/3/20)
Ben Russell, Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai), (2008) Available online at http://vimeo.com/7528954
Ro Spankie, ‘The ‘Old Cinema’: a dissolving view’ in The Magic Screen, Joost Hunningher, Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, Guy Osborn and Ro Spankie, University of Westminster Press, 2015
O. Winter, ‘The Cinematograph’, The New Review, May 1896 (https://picturegoing.com/?p=4166 retrieved 21/3/20)