Bridport Arts Centre Tuesday 20th November 2012 at 8.00 pm Price £6
Box Office: 01308 424204 [email protected] www.bridport-arts.com
Old films of local life from the Windrose collection have delighted large Bridport audiences. Windrose now shows us that moving image can go on fascinating for ever. It has shot new video portraits of present day West Dorset people, their amazing lives and what they can show us about our area.
This show will combine archive films from the past with the new.
We are all part of history.
Trevor Bailey of Windrose Rural Media Trust, a registered charity, says:
“For some 28 years we have been saving old films of life in Dorset. Some of them go back to the 1910s and we have turned up plenty of films from every subsequent decade. It is amazing what you find with the help of local people. Work, school, social life, transport, eccentric interests – it is all there on old films because some very perceptive people thought to record it in moving image.
The shows that we have put on in village halls, theatres, arts centres and cinemas over the years have attracted tens of thousands of people in total.
It is vitally important to preserve and copy old films so that they can be seen again. But it is just as important to go on filming new records of life today and of the people who give richness to that life. People often ask us what they should shoot with their video cameras and we say ‘everyday things’; just life around you and the people that make it interesting. It is that which will change. It is our chance to create the archive of the future; the window through which our descendants will be able to see how we lived and what we were like.
This project, Forever Archive, is all about showing that film archiving is a great continuum, It goes on for ever. Our lives now are just as interesting as those of our forebears. To demonstrate that, we have created video portraits of local people, their lives and work and how they see the world around them. These are short pieces which we can show alongside old films”
James Harrison, who has worked with Trevor Bailey in shooting the new video portraits that will appear in the show and who has had the main responsibility for shaping them adds:
“What we have done is to find a very varied group of West Dorset people who are fascinating for themselves and for their view of life in the area at this moment in history. We were helped enormously by well-known West Dorset writer and journalist Margery Hooking whose local knowledge and contacts have helped enormously. In fact we ended up making one of the video portraits about Margery herself!”
The people we filmed were:
Penny Dunscombe
Kris Dutson
Alistair Chisholm
Lord and Lady Sandwich
Darren Batten
Rupert Best
Steve Davis
Emily Fearn
Margery Hooking
The show will combine the new video portraits with old films of Dorset life from the Windrose collection.
Contact:
Trevor Bailey
01747 840750 or 01747 840006
