The BFI is digitising all of its Victorian films as part of the Unlocking Film Heritage project by 2017 / 2018, and will be making films available on the BFI Player and producing a book to introduce audiences to this fascinating era in our national film history.
Bryony Dixon, curator of silent film at the BFI National Archive will introduce this Victorian collection from a new perspective, ‘travelling forwards’: seeing film as an exciting, ever-evolving new invention and interacting with the other visual media of the late 19th century, rather than ‘back projecting’ from the subsequent history of film to its supposedly ‘primitive’ antecedents. This view of Victorian film as the ‘new media’ of its day enables us to see it afresh.