The Amateur Films of Sydney Bligh
- Submitting institution
-
Canterbury Christ Church University
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- U34.025
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Screening: [premiere] Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards; Archive: Canterbury Amateur Film Archive.
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This research comprises two inter-related outputs investigating the work of early amateur filmmaker, Sydney Bligh: Seeking Sydney (2016), a 26-minute documentary directed by Jones, and Canterbury Amateur Film Archive, an online archive created by Jones. Bligh’s films were presumed lost, but through Jones’s research 72 amateur films were discovered, digitised and catalogued. These materials were contextualised with extensive research such as interviews with family members and local historians and unearthing materials in local archives. Bligh’s work is important for the valuable insight it provides into the ambition and technical sophistication of amateur filmmaking during this period.
Jones’s research reveals a rich cinematic pre-war record of Kent, offering new perspectives on amateur filmmaking in South East England. It explores the wider context of Bligh’s social position in Canterbury, which enabled him unique access to film events for his newsreels. Jones’s research provides a fresh insight into amateur newsreels, a neglected area within amateur cinema studies, and reveals that Bligh’s films had a surprising breadth and variety of subject matter beyond simply recording public events. Bligh’s films also include sequences that are of historical importance in their own right, including the only known filmed sequences of the Canterbury Plays, featuring the writers T.S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers and unique footage of Count Zborowski - the inspiration for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
The dissemination of this research has been through a variety of approaches. The award-winning documentary Seeking Sydney has been exhibited at several international film festivals in the USA, Canada and New Zealand. The development of the Canterbury Amateur Film Archive website has allowed online access to Bligh’s films, some of which are on the BFI Player. Finally, local screenings have been an important means of community involvement in this ongoing research project.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
