In 2023, BFI Southbank will host a major new festival, BFI Film on Film Festival, the first festival in the UK to be wholly dedicated to film, with every title screening from a film print preserved in the BFI National Archive – spanning formats including 16mm, 35mm and 70mm as well as rare nitrate. The festival is designed to deliver a unique, cinema-based experience enabling audiences to enjoy the physical materiality of film in all its glory, exploring its aesthetics and challenges – and celebrating the skills required to work with it, with expert voices from the BFI’s world-leading conservation and projection teams.
With that in mind, we’re delighted to present a screening of two WWII-era Christmas-themed treats that reflect the BFI National Archive’s work – seasonal short Christmas Under Fire (1941) followed by Marcel Varnel’s quirky domestic comedy, This Man is Mine aka Christmas Weekend (1946). We’ll be joined by Robin Baker, Head Curator of the BFI National Archive, to discuss BFI Film on Film Festival and the power of film projection for audiences.
Christmas Under Fire
Despite the Blitz, it’s ‘business as usual’ as England prepares for Christmas in this propaganda film intended for US audiences. It’s a Christmas of holly and barbed wire, guns and tinsel, yet the British, we are told, are determined to make it as cheerful as possible.
“England is fighting for her life”, asserts the American narrator, but it is admiration rather than pity that the film seeks to evoke. The filmmakers achieve this with emotions bigger than most 10-minute films could contain, as we watch plucky Londoners creating a subterranean Christmas on Underground platforms and the choristers of King’s College sing their hearts out.
While no doubt intended to encourage US support in the War, Christmas Under Fire ultimately offers a portrait of a nation “unbeaten, unconquered and unafraid”. (Poppy Simpson)