Encyclopaedia

FILM

Wales has a long filmmaking tradition, reaching back to the 1890s. The first film shot in Wales, featuring a royal visit to Cardiff, was made in 1896 by the American, Birt Acres. Indigenous production began in 1896, when Rhyl-based Arthur Cheetham made films throughout north and mid-Wales. The first Wales-based filmmaker of enduring stature was the travelling showman William Haggar, who made over 30 fiction films between 1901 and 1908, many of which were circulated around the world (mainly through the Gaumont and Urban companies).

Other extant pre-First World War films shot in Wales were made by outsiders. The most impressive are the Charles Urban Company’s Wales, England: Land of Castles and Waterfalls (1907) and the British Biograph Company’s ‘phantom train ride’ film, Conway Castle (1898), which survives in a hand-tinted colour version and contains eye-catching panoramic shots. Footage from the 1906 Wales v Ireland soccer match at Wrexham, made by the Blackburn firm of Mitchell and Kenyon, is the oldest surviving footage from a football international, while Arthur Cheetham’s Blackburn Rovers v West Bromwich Albion (1898) is the world’s earliest known extant soccer film.

Little sense of early 20th-century Welsh industrial life may be divined from surviving images of the silent era, but rural Wales, from 1912 onwards, was a popular locale for visiting film companies such as Edison and British and Colonial – for instance, Charles Brabin made The Foreman’s Treachery in north and mid-Wales in 1913. In 1920 alone, nine feature films were set in Wales, all of which are lost. The most celebrated of all Wales’s ‘lost’ silents is A Welsh Singer (1915), one of three features adapted from novels by Allen Raine (Anne Adaliza Puddicombe), starring Florence Turner, the one-time leading player of the Vitagraph Company.

In the 1930s, two provocative agitprop documentaries emerged from London’s Strand company, the communist director Ralph Bond’s Today We Live (1937), set among unemployed miners in Pentre, Rhondda, and Donald Alexander’s Eastern Valley (1937), filmed in (then) Monmouthshire. The first Welsh-language sound drama, Y Chwarelwr (The Quarryman), was made in 1935 by Ifan ab Owen Edwards.

In the early sound era, British mainstream feature films generally offered little more than escapism. However, The Citadel (1938), based upon A.J. Cronin’s novel and set partly in a south Wales mining community, focused on public health problems. A MGM feature made by King Vidor, it did not fully express the novel’s political message. Other films from major British or Hollywood studios and set in Wales were similarly filleted, such as The Proud Valley (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1940); the latter, a handsome film by John Ford, won five Oscars but it reflected Ford’s predilection for mythology rather than any plausible Welsh industrial life. Jill Craigie’s Blue Scar (1949), on the other hand, raised serious, radical questions about the nationalization of the coal industry, but it was partly financed by the National Coal Board, and an awkward romantic strain was introduced to ensure distribution.

Social and political comment disappeared almost entirely from feature films set in Wales after the Second World War. The 1950s to the early 1970s were noteworthy for only a few fine genre films, including Tiger Bay (1959) and Only Two Can Play (1962). However, too many filmmakers, particularly from the 1960s to the early 1990s, suffered from a lack of funding, a shortage of talented producers and the absence of an indigenous production infrastructure. The nation’s cinema representations have too often reflected the prejudices and preconceptions of ‘outside’ filmmakers content to trade in stereotypes.

More promising was the work produced by Karl Francis from the late 1970s. Chronicling in often graphic, controversial images the contemporary life of the south Wales valleys, he produced several compelling films, including Above Us the Earth (1976), Giro City (1982), Ms Rhymney Valley (1985) and Milwr Bychan (Boy Soldier; 1986). By the late 1970s, the film workshop movement was gathering momentum in Wales; Chris Monger and Steve Gough, participants in workshops at the Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, went on to make notable features.

The launch of S4C (the Welsh-language television channel) in 1982 helped to develop an embryonic film industry. Most of its initial longer dramas lacked contemporary significance or a mature adult perspective, but the company had reassessed its responsibilities by 1986, when Milwr Bychan and Stephen Bayly’s comedy Rhosyn a Rhith (Coming Up Roses) made history as the first Welsh-language films to gain London West End cinema release, in subtitled versions. The establishment of the channel led to the production of Welsh-language features, complementing the few made from the 1970s onwards by the Bwrdd Ffilmiau Cymraeg (Welsh Film Board), and to the emergence of filmmakers of undoubted ability, notably Endaf Emlyn, Marc Evans and Stephen Bayly. In 1995, S4C announced a new policy, allowing one or two feature films a year to play in cinemas before television transmission. But filmmakers find it difficult to gain entry into a competitive marketplace; even the better Welsh-language films fail to find audiences, because of the reluctance of London-based distributors or agents to handle Welsh films.

Hedd Wyn (1992), the first Welsh film to gain a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination (in 1994), won a Royal Television Society Best Drama award, but failed to attract a British distributor. Endaf Emlyn’s Un Nos Ola Leuad (One Full Moon; 1991), adapted from Caradog Prichard’s novel and among the finest Welsh films ever made, enjoyed only limited exposure; the same fate befell his Gadael Lenin (Leaving Lenin), voted by audiences at the 1993 London Film Festival as the most popular British film.

Fine English-language films such as House of America (1996) and Human Traffic (1998) have emerged, bearing comparison with the powerful films of social realism made by Karl Francis. Over the past 20 years, Welsh films have reflected Welsh life more accurately and more sensitively than most features previously set in Wales, which were predominantly the work of British studios or units of Hollywood production companies. Yet, films such as House of America (1996) have tended to languish. Its director, Marc Evans, found persuasive visual ways to restructure the original Ed Thomas stage play, but the film received lamentable distribution. Kevin Allen’s brash comedy, Twin Town (1998), satirizing the older Welsh cultural traditions, found a ready British audience but failed to do quite as well as Justin Kerrigan’s Human Traffic (1999), a stylized comedy set in Cardiff and built around interior monologues, teenage paranoia, drug habits and club culture.

Despite rebuffs and generally low budgets, the nation’s filmmaking standards have risen since the mid-1980s. In 2000, Paul Morrison’s Solomon a Gaenor became the second Welsh film nominated for a Best Foreign Language Oscar. Since the late 1990s, Sgrin, the Welsh media agency, has encouraged new talent through short-film initiatives, and new projects have received lottery funding. Filmmakers have also sought money further afield for ambitious co-productions: House of America, for instance, had six funders, including British Screen and Dutch Screen. Multinationals directly funded two other noteworthy Welsh features, Polygram backing Twin Town and Miramax funding Chris Monger’s The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain (1995).

The quality of Welsh animation, shown at festivals worldwide, has been the most encouraging development – prior to the advent of S4C, Wales had produced virtually no animation work since the Cardiff projectionists Sid Griffiths and Bert Bilby created their mischievous canine character, Jerry the Tyke, for Pathé cinema news magazines in the 1920s. S4C’s animation executive, Chris Grace, built on the television success of the children’s series Superted, made by the Cardiff-based Siriol company (and eventually sold to the Disney Channel); in 1992, a revamped Siriol made the first Welsh animation features - an adaptation of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood and The Princess and the Goblin, a co-production with Hungary. An influx of talent to Wales, encouraged by opportunities at S4C, included Joanna Quinn, who, in 1987, with Girls’ Night Out, took three prizes at the world’s leading animation festival at Annécy,. She went on to win numerous international awards, with feisty comedies dealing with sexism and colonialism, and in 1999 gained an Oscar nomination for the Channel Four/S4C production, Famous Fred. Her Wife of Bath’s Tale segment was instrumental in S4C gaining a further nomination in 2000 for its Canterbury Tales.

S4C initially encouraged independents, retrenched, then expanded animation activities, with co-productions for worldwide consumption and niche markets, including schools - notably their series of truncated Shakespeare classics, bible stories and operas (Operavox). A 1999 animation feature, Gur Y Gwyrthiau (The Miracle Maker), from Cardiff’s Cartun Cymru and Moscow’s Christmas Films, was a by-product of S4C’s Testament bible series. Other promising talents included Aaargh Animation (with the Gogs television series), and the actress-writer Tracy Spottiswoode, whose witty, literate Code Name Corgi won top prize at the 2000 Bradford International Animation Festival.

The post-Second World War documentary tradition in Wales dates from the work of the journalist John Roberts Williams and the cameraman Geoff Charles, most notably Yr Etifeddiaeth (The Heritage; 1949). Cardiff’s Paul Dickson made two impressive films, The Undefeated (1950) and the Festival of Britain documentary, David (1951). Significant documentary talents have included Jack Howells, who made the Oscar winning Dylan Thomas in 1962, and the poet John Ormond. Working with the historian, Gwyn A. Williams, Colin Thomas produced outstanding drama-documentaries through the 1980s and 1990s for the Cardiff-based Teliesyn company. Fiercely partisan and politically provocative documentaries emerged from the Tenby-born actor Kenneth Griffith over three decades, notably his attacks on British colonialism such as Hang Up Your Brightest Colours (a long-banned portrait of the Irish Republican politician, Michael Collins; 1973), Curious Journey (1977) and Black As Hell, Thick As Grass (1979).

Welsh actors have made an impact on screen since Ivor Novello, Gareth Hughes and Lyn Harding thrived in silent cinema. The most significant period for Welsh talent was the 1950s and 1960s, when Richard Burton, Rachel Roberts and Stanley Baker helped inject much needed realism into British films. Since then, the most distinctive Welsh actor on screen has been Anthony Hopkins (1937-) who gained an Oscar for his portrayal of the cannibalistic killer, Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1992). Hopkins’ ability to embody stiff and repressed Englishmen is demonstrated in films such as 84 Charing Cross Road (1986), Remains of the Day (1993) and Shadowlands (1994). The 1990s produced a new breed of successful, often abrasive Welsh actors, including Rhys Ifans and Matthew Rhys, among the first generation to enjoy a worthwhile choice of international and indigenous feature roles. Swansea-born Catherine Zeta Jones has established herself as one of Hollywood’s highest paid female stars, appearing, notably, opposite Anthony Hopkins in the 1998 box office hit, The Mask of Zorro. In 2003, she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her part in Chicago.

The idea of a Welsh film culture has only slowly taken root, but it has been promoted less self-consciously since the early 1990s, mainly through the International Film Festival, BAFTA Cymru, Sgrin and the Wales Film and Television Archive (now merged into the newly-formed National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales). The archive’s recent rediscoveries, including the British silent film The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918) - lost for 76 years - and the colour version of Lloyd George’s visit to Germany and meeting with Hitler (1936), have focused attention on a century-old heritage much richer than many had hitherto suspected.