Magic Film Clips

[Jerry Harrell]

Magic historians on the Genii Forum might be interested to know that the British Pathe Archive has digitized 3500 hours of material and made it available on line.

The Pathe Archive is a vast collection of photographic and cinematic footage which was founded in Paris in the 1890s by moving image pioneer Charles Path. The British archive was set up in London in 1902 and now houses more than 3,500 hours of video and over 12 million still images, covering topics as diverse as politics, sport and fashion.

Entering the word magic into the sites search engine turned up 115 clips, including Illusionist Jasper Maskelyne delivers comic monologue whilst swallowing razor blades. (1937) Will Goldston demonstrates magic secrets (1928) Earl Mountbatten visits Magic Circle and sees various magicians in action. (1968).

Most consumers and organizations have to pay a small fee to access the recently-digitized high-resolution files on the British Pathe Web site, but free previews of clips are available.
British Pathe

[Ian Kendall]

Hello,

The ones with Alan Alan are a scream.

The preview clips are watermarked, and fairly low quality but are still watchable. The downside to the service is that you need to fill in quite a lot of information for each clip (at least this was the case a year or so ago, last time I looked). There was no method for batch download, you had to do the same thing for each clip.

Personally, I'm hopeing that Greg Dyke's plan to put the BBC archives online for all and sundry do not get sidelined after he was Huttoned.

Take care, Ian

[Adrian Kuiper]

Curious....what does "Huttoned" mean?

Adrian

[Dale Shrimpton]

It refers to the hutton report, a big story over here. You would be bset do a search on google for the details, however it did result in Greg Dyke resigning his post as the head of the B.B.C.

[Dale Shrimpton]

as an adendum, the B.B.C, has announced today, that they will be opening their archives up on line in the very near future.

Good news eh?
More reason to put the licence fee up.(Grumble, moan, Bitch..grr....)


Dale

[Ian Kendall]

Deep Joy. I see a very large stress testing of my connection scheduled in the not too distant...

Take care, Ian

Edit: found this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainmen ... 525455.stm

[Guest]

If you type in "piddington", "fogel" or "Tommy Cooper", there are clips of them as well.

PSIncerely Yours,
Paul Alberstat
AB Stagecraft
http://www.mindguy.com/store
Supplying unique mentalism and magic world-wide

[Tom Ladshaw]

Many of the magic clips are "must-see." Several feature a *VERY* young Sir William McComb, in addition to his then-wife, June Merlin.
My favorite? Arnold DeBiere performing his Egg Bag routine.