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The film is an 11 minute 50 second amateur recording in colour of both the day leading up to and the actual wedding of Hazel Guy to Brian Williams in 1950. The presence of colour film is not uncommon as by the 1950s the cost to buy and produce colour film had been dramatically reduced.[1] The film progresses through two distinct parts before displaying the actual wedding, the first (from 00:05 to 00:39) appears to be a drinks reception for one or both families involved, while the second (from 00:40 to 01:39) records a beach and individuals, likely to be family members relaxing on it. The film then (from 01:47 onwards) records the actual wedding and wedding reception.
The reason for the good quality footage can be explained by Rascaroli, Young and Monahan who note that by 1950 several companies such as Kodak had released popular and successful manuals on how to shoot home movies.[2] This is further supported by an advertisement for home cameras as an ideal Christmas present in The Times newspaper in November 1950.[3] Therefore, both the quality of the footage and the fact that the wedding was filmed presumably by a family member is due to both the ease of access to filmmaking equipment and the presence of instructions on how to best use it.
In addition, it is important to analyse the way in which the film has been made. For example, despite the film from 01:46 covering the wedding day the actual ceremony is not filmed and the newly married couple are not shown until 05:45, indicating perhaps that the individual filming the wedding could not or did not film for long inside the church. This appears to be a personal choice by the filmmaker rather than there being a ban on filming in a church, clearly evidenced by an article from The Times in 1951 (a year after this film was recorded) concerning a church that had won the right to continue to play films in its crypt without a licence, thus making the likelihood of a ban against recording wedding services unlikely.[4] Therefore, the people and events the filmmaker chose to record is likely due to their personal preference and not restrictions on what they could film.
It is also vital to understand why home movies such as this were created. Baron notes that home filmmaking was often popular due to its use within families to promote togetherness and as a result many home films were tailored towards a specific and limited audience, i.e. immediate family and friends, while developments in technology meant these films could be preserved for longer.[5] This is further supported by a similar homemade film of a wedding which focuses on similar areas to the first film, for example it dedicates the entirety of its three-minute runtime to recording the post-service reception and celebration.[6] Therefore, it can be argued that main reason the film was made was for later viewing by family and friends of both Hazel Guy and Brian Williams.
This links to the significance of the film as the popularity of creating amateur films such as this led to the development of new 8mm film to meet the growing public demand.[7] Holmes further supports this by arguing that home television viewing of films was on the rise, thus home films such as the Wedding of Hazel Guy and Brian Williams represent part of a shift away from cinema film viewing and towards a more home centred experience consisting of television and amateur moviemaking.[8] However, Roberts counters this interpretation by noting how throughout both the 1950s and 1960s amateur filmmaking was ‘still a relatively expensive hobby’, thus the film represents a very specific part of home leisure rather than major part of home film consumption.[9]
Therefore, the overall significance of the film is that it is an example of the growth in home moviemaking during the 1950s. However it must be considered when using films such as this that both their creation and showing was expensive thus making amateur film highly useful for research when used alongside other primary sources (notably newspapers), but not as a standalone source as its limited audience and production make general inferences difficult.
[1] Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell, A Dictionary of Film Studies (Oxford, 2012), 89.
[2] Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young and Barry Monahan, Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web (London, 2014).
[3] ‘Public Notices’, The Times, 27 Nov. 1950, 1. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 26 Feb. 2018. http://find.galegroup.com/ttda/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=TTDA&userGroupName=ulh&tabID=T003&docPage=article&searchType=BasicSearchForm&docId=CS17386363&type=multipage&contentSet=LTO&version=1.0. First Accessed 26/02/2018
[4] ‘Films in Church Crypt’, The Times, 15 Sept. 1951, 8. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 26 Feb. 2018. http://find.galegroup.com/ttda/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=TTDA&userGroupName=ulh&tabID=T003&docPage=article&searchType=BasicSearchForm&docId=CS135089455&type=multipage&contentSet=LTO&version=1.0. First Accessed 26/02/2018
[5] Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (London, 2013), 83-85.
[6] ‘Wedding’, Media Archive for Central England, University of Lincoln, https://vimeo.com/248125714.
[7] Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard, British Cinema in the 1950’s: An Art in Peacetime (Manchester, 2003), 210.
[8] Su Holmes, British Television and Film Culture in the 1950s (Bristol, 2005), 35.
[9] Les Roberts, Film, Mobility and Urban Space: A Cinematic Geography of Liverpool (Liverpool, 2012), 104.