Birmingham and Film...

Birmingham and film - to some the coupling of those words might echo the famous French Director Francois Truffaut's remark that ³ there was a certain incompatibility between the terms Ocinema¹ and OBritain¹² But how wrong they would be, because without Birmingham's ingenuity and entrepreneurship there might have been no films at all.

No Chaplin or Keaton. No Garbo or Gable. No movies on the big screen lighting up our lives. No wonderful art deco palaces of the imagination. No marvellous Ealing comedies.

The Discovery of Celluloid

In 1862 in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter Alexander Parkes discovered celluloid (cellulose nitrate to be precise), and from then on we can chart the real beginnings of the film industry. With celluloid, and its US patenting, comes the flickering sensation known as moving images - the movies. And with Alexander Parkes's invention, Birmingham can rightly be proud that its entrepreneurship, in the tradition of the Lunar Society, played an Oscar style leading role at the birth of cinema.

Three Pioneers

Later three Birmingham film pioneers were instrumental in the early 20th century in getting the film industry in the UK going - this trio was Michael Balcon, Oscar Deutsch and Victor Saville. All three brought up close to each other in Birmingham , they began to conquer the film world in the early 1920's with their company Victory Motion Pictures, which produced in 1923 the silent classic, WOMAN TO WOMAN, the most expensive UK film at the time, and the first film to benefit from the creative input of Alfred Hitchcock.

In fact, it was Michael Balcon who discovered the young London director, later to achieve world wide fame with movies such as PSYCHO, THE BIRDS, NORTH BY NORTH WEST, VERTIGO, REAR WINDOW etc.

So, 'Birmingham and film' has after all a long and distinguished heritage, which Film Birmingham will now add to in many exciting and visionary ways, echoing the ingenuity of those Birmingham pioneers in the early years of cinema.