Remembering H.A.V. Bulleid

By Thomas Gladysz
San Francisco Silent Film Examiner

Chances are you’ve never heard of Henry Arthur Vaughan Bulleid. He died a year ago today, on May 5, 2009.

H.A.V. Bulleid, or Anthony to his friends, was many things. Born in Britain in 1912, he was a trained locomotive engineer and the son and grandson of notable figures in the field. Bulleid himself authored three books on British locomotive history. He was also a renowned expert on musical boxes. He authored two books on that subject, each of which is still in use today.

Recently, however, yet another area of Bulleid’s eclectic expertise has come to light – silent film. Bulleid wrote a pioneering book on the subject more than 60 years ago. It even featured a preface by the great German Director Fritz Lang. The book, however, was never published. Like steam locomotives and cylinder musical boxes – silent film too went the way of those seemingly outdated technologies. And Bulleid’s book, an early appreciation of a major 20th century art form, was forgotten.

Until now.

Famous Library Films by H.A.V. Bulleid, with its preface by Lang and a new introduction by world renowned silent film historian Kevin Brownlow, has been published as a book on the internet. It is a notable work in many ways - as is its history as a book that almost never came to be. As Brownlow states in his introduction, “I was most impressed by Bulleid's knowledge and perception and feel that now silent films are being taught in film courses, these articles deserve revival.” What Famous Library Films offers contemporary readers is a now somewhat uncommon perspective; one can read about silent films through the eyes of someone who came of age during the silent film era.

In his preface, Lang put it this way. “The roots of all aspects of our life, especially our cultural life, are in the past. The motion picture of today rests firmly on the foundations created by the motion pictures of yesterday. The modern motion picture did not spring full-grown from the brain of any current genius. Only with complete understanding of what has been can the sincere student of motion pictures hope to understand what is and what can be. And since it is regrettably true that some of the great motion pictures of the past are no longer available for viewing, we are fortunate to have this book as a guide and source book. The great value of this book lies in the opportunity it affords the reader to understand the beginning of the art of motion pictures as a living process and as the art of our century.”

Like many of his generation, Bulleid was enamored of the movies. He had been so since his youth, when he learned to project films while a schoolboy in the 1920’s. (Brownlow recounts a couple of amusing anecdotes about this “connoisseur of home-movie presentations” in an article in the Independent.) Later, while at Cambridge in the early 1930’s, Bulleid made amateur films. At the time, he had hoped to enter a career in film, but was deterred by his Father, who directed him into the more practical field of railway engineering.

All along, Bulleid had already been writing articles for Amateur Cine World. During World War II, when film stock dried up due to shortages, amateur enthusiasts like Bulleid had to settle for projecting movies instead of making them. Bulleid switched from writing about filmmaking to reviewing “library films” (movies which could be borrowed or rented); his column became devoted to the subject of the silent cinema.

As Brownlow notes in his introduction, not all were as enthused with the change. “‘I feel I must draw your attention to a matter which makes me boil,’ said a correspondent from Surrey. ‘Why devote so much of your very excellent magazine to a commentary on a film that is l6 years old and in such detail that I don’t need to see the film?’” Fortunately, Bulleid’s editor was not swayed, and eventually his pieces became much admired.

Bulleid was industrious. Remarkably, some of the information found in his articles was obtained through correspondence with directors and other individuals connected with the movies he wrote about. (It should be mentioned that when Bullied was writing these pieces there were few books about film. Information on particular movies was scarce. And of course, there were no home VHS or DVD.) Bulleid’s factual and insightful articles were groundbreaking efforts.

Bullied planned to publish his articles in book form in 1947, but because of Britian’s still weak economy following the Second World War, the book was shelved. The manuscript was filed away.

Fast forward to 2008.

Brownlow, who had been aware of Bulleid’s articles and had been in touch with him over the years, wrote to Eugene, Oregon film historian Lon Davis asking him to recommend a website that would be willing to post his then 95 year-old friend's book. Davis, himself the author of a handful of recommended books on silent film, suggested www.silentsaregolden.com. It’s a fine site operated by Tim Lussier, of Carthage, North Carolina.

For the past year and a half, Brownlow and Davis have been editing the articles, and Lussier has been doing the layout. And on the first of each month, Lussier has posted one of Bulleid’s now 60 year old pieces. In all, twenty-two films have been covered, including classics like East Street (1917), The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), The Covered Wagon (1923), Cinderella (1923), The Battleship Potemkin (1925), The Lost World (1925), Faust (1926), An Italian Straw Hat (1928), The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), Picadilly (1929), and others. There is also a piece on Metropolis (1927), the restored version of which will be shown this July at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Bulleid’s collected articles have now been published under the title, Famous Library Films. One more article is still to come. And then the book will be done. Unlike the others, this last article - on The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) - was written not in the Forties, but just recently. It will be posted June 1st.

Brownlow, Davis and Lussier are calling their nearly complete self-publishing project an e-book. It may not be that, as it’s perhaps unlikely you’ll ever find these pioneering analyses of silent films on an Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader. Nevertheless, the internet provided Bulleid with what had long eluded him. He lived to see the first few articles published on-line and was “thrilled,” according to Brownlow. It was something he had dreamed of for more than sixty years.

For more info: Famous Library Films can be found at http://www.silentsaregolden.com/HAV%20Bulleid/Bulleidbookcover.html

If you enjoying reading this column, don’t forget to subscribe (at the top of the page) and receive email updates each time a new article appears. Your interest is appreciated by both the author and the editors at examiner.com.