This educational film starts with the following intertitles: “To the general public the Cinematographer’s art is a mystery, and suggests magic yet it is a scientific process involving wide knowledge and hard work. Incidentally it is one of the first industries in the world.” Films about the ‘hidden process’ of filmmaking are fascinating and even today an eye-opener. The Austrian animation Ideale Filmerzeugung (c. 1913), screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2013, is a cinematic treasure, followed by last year’s A Movie Trip Through Filmland (a film about the production of film material at Kodak). This year we expand our portfolio and head into a British film lab. Secrets of a World Industry – The Making of Cinematograph Film shows the manufacture of film, including perforating, developing, drying, printing, grading, cutting and packing. It is a very rare look inside a film laboratory of the 1920s giving us a glimpse of the machines, people and processes that went into making and delivering the film prints to the film companies.

Bryony Dixon and Karl Wratschko