Independent Cinema Office
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cinemaoffice.org.uk

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Company number: 5369193
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The Big Smoke

Films from a Lost London 1896-1945

Experience London life in a bygone age, from the bustle of the Victorian commute to the ordeal of the Blitz, with this programme of silent films from the BFI National Archive - brought to dazzling life with a newly-commissioned score and featuring a selection of treasures from the Imperial War Museum and London's Screen Archives.

The Big Smoke explores the forgotten face of the capital with a tantalising tour through half a century of life in this most vibrant of cities. Highlights include Blackfriars Bridge (1896), an extraordinary glimpse of Victorians travelling to work by horse-drawn tram and on foot at an enviably elegant pace. Look out for famous landmarks in Old London Street Scenes (1903), where the traffic chaos seems strangely familiar, while sci-fi short The Fugitive Futurist (1924) sees an oddball inventor startle Londoners with a glimpse of their great city's future.

Scenes at Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park Corner Underground Stations (1931) offers an ethereal insight into the change and continuity of tube life. In Colour on the Thames (1935), the main artery of the city has never looked lovelier, an experimental colour film process bringing the ebb and flow of this great river into vivid focus. The Big Smoke closes with rare colour home movie images of a city under siege as the 1940s brought tragedy and triumph to the capital's crowded streets.

During the first half-century of the cinema - from the last years of the Victorian era to the close of the Second World War - Londoners of all ages flocked to see themselves immortalised in moving pictures. We now invite a new generation to join this journey into the capital's past.