A very short post this month to draw your attention to my latest article. 'Filming A Biblical City' was published at the beginning of this month in History Today's recently launched online platform 'Miscellanies'. The article explores the history behind the creation of Lachish - City of Judah, a film made in the 1930s to document the Wellcome Marston Archaeological Expedition to the Near East's excavation of Tell Duweir. Hope you enjoy it!
By Amara Thornton
A very short post this month to draw your attention to my latest article. 'Filming A Biblical City' was published at the beginning of this month in History Today's recently launched online platform 'Miscellanies'. The article explores the history behind the creation of Lachish - City of Judah, a film made in the 1930s to document the Wellcome Marston Archaeological Expedition to the Near East's excavation of Tell Duweir. Hope you enjoy it! By Amara Thornton
This month's post is on the Filming Antiquity blog, where I've put together footage of urban spaces captured in the Harding films. These sequences show Amman, Jerash, Jerusalem and Gaza as they were in the 1930s when Gerald Lankester Harding encountered them. Accompanying the footage are some further details on the 1930s context of the films, and some wonderful images from the Horsfield and Harding archives at the Institute of Archaeology. You can read "Filming the City" here. Also recently added to the Filming Antiquity blog is a fantastic guest post from Caitlin O'Grady, Lecturer in Conservation at the Institute of Archaeology. Caitlin takes us through footage showing conservation practice (much of it done by women) in the 1930s and 1950s, using sequences from three separate films, all digitised through the Filming Antiquity project. Read Caitlin's blog "Sticking, Mending and Restoring: the conservator's role in archaeology" here. By Amara Thornton
Over the past year we at Filming Antiquity have been working with filmmaker Rob Eagle at UCL on a film about the project. It's been a great to be a part of the process of making a new film of the footage we've digitised, and seeing how sequences from Gerald Lankester Harding's archive films and the new interviews Rob did with me and my Filming Antiquity colleague Michael McCluskey came together in the final product. Rob's film is now available online to view here, with edited highlights (and closed captioning) here. Hope you enjoy it! By Amara Thornton
Over on the Filming Antiquity blog I've been contemplating empty film canisters in the Harding collection through research and filming. Far from being objects denuded of their original purpose (containing film stock), these canisters are still meaningful, drawing out a narrative of supplies and shopping in 1930s Jerusalem and Cairo. Read the post and view the film here. By Amara Thornton
Having spent many hours over the past few months playing with iMovie to see how it works, I've written a short post on my iMovie experience using the Harding footage for the Filming Antiquity blog. You can read "Introducing Gerald Lankester Harding" (and see the film of the same title I produced via iMovie) here. By Amara Thornton
Over the past year (and change) I've been working with a great team of collaborators on a digitisation project called Filming Antiquity, which was funded in spring 2014 to digitise and research the home movies of the British archaeologist Gerald Lankester Harding. Harding's footage shows his experiences on site in British Mandate Palestine during the 1930s, and we have recently put together some clips from the footage which you can watch on YouTube here. For further information about the clips featured, check out our latest Filming Antiquity blog post "Filming Antiquity Presents...". Comments are welcome! |
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