Home 9.5 16 17.5 28 Pix Miscellany
ADVERTISING 17.5
The Seymour Hicks picture was given to me by Ian Green. The other pix are extracts from a promotional leaflet. As you see, 17.5 Home Talkie owners were expected to have a chauffeur to cart the equipment around, and an appropriate car. Ian has now sent more publicity images, see below.
I like the way brochures etc were produced to such a high standard, with no benefit of CGI. Here are some pix from the Home Talkie manual.
Images from the 1937 Pathéscope catalogue.
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Extracts from a 17.5 Film Catalogue
Rural Instructions
Here are some scans of an instruction card for oiling and a general instruction booklet for the Rural. NB the missing pages of the booklet were just blank. I just love the injunction on P17 - "Ne pas perdre son sang-froid". It conjures up an image of a film show in a rural village hall in the late 30's run by the French equivalent of Corporal Jones, who runs about shouting "Don't Panic! Don't Panic" when the film breaks.
I have included a much-cleaned-up version of the card and a modified scan of one of the booklet pages - the rest are raw scans. The nearest to what the booklet actually looks like is the front cover. It shows the problem of scanning old stuff in particular. Unless it is completely flat, you get shadows/shading across parts of the image, which are impossible to remove without considerable tweaking of the image, which can lose some detail. The scanner seems to decide its own colour cast for each page. I think the cleaned-up card looks much better, but it's a lot of work. There's still one bit at the end I couldn't read. Something I do quite often is to find a similar type-face and re-type words or letters, either completely or by super-imposing a new letter over the original. In this case, there is one group of three words re-typed and several super-impositions.
The adjusted image of P17 of the booklet shows the problems of having to tweak heavily - the text is simply not as clean/clear as the original. Depends a bit what we are trying to achieve, I suppose - conservation of original documents or preservation of information.
Rural Programmes
At a film fair in Argenteuil, I acquired a folio-size volume of posters, advertising silent "programmes" (main feature, cartoon or comedy, documentary or Pathé Revue) or packages in which Pathé Rural provided material to the proprietors of the small local 17.5 cinemas. This is the first information I have ever seen about French silent 17.5.
There are over 100; here are a few as a taster, together with the full index. I have now scanned the lot to DVD, although I have deferred cleaning them up to another day/year. I might be persuaded to provide a copy to the truly dedicated.
These are inserts, CD size, for the DVD's of films recorded from the screen. For some reason, I can't do Sleepless Nights in the usual way as I did for Lorna Doone, and I can't do The Avenger at all.
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SLEEPLESS NIGHTS |
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SLEEPLESS NIGHTS |
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This is the projector used to show
Sleepless Nights
and
other 17.5mm films for recording from the screen. |
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www.cinerdistan.co.uk |
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7
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5 |
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This is the projector used to show
Sleepless Nights
and
other 17.5mm films for recording from the screen. |
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www.cinerdistan.co.uk |
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This is the projector used to show
Sleepless Nights
and
other 17.5mm films for recording from the screen. |
|
www.cinerdistan.co.uk |