Films from the Homefront
February 16, 2007 7:03 AM   Subscribe

'Films from the Homefront' is a (new) collection of amateur documentaries, newsreels, government films, and home movies documenting life for the ordinary people in Britain during World War II, with background text descriptions/explication. Browse the themes. The films are QT and wmv format. I found it both poignant and funny, for instance, seeing kids don gasmasks during air raid drills then attempt to continue writing in their lessons. [via Glasgow School of Art Library]
posted by peacay (4 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
The MovingHistory site in the UK has been posted twice before (i, ii) but I think this is a significant site expansion worthy of a new run up the flagpole. Or...flag, flag away.
posted by peacay at 7:04 AM on February 16, 2007


I'm in the unusual position of having seen almost all of these on tape since I made a number of documentaries about Britain in and around WWII and watched them for archive footage. However the download process from Pathe is really annoying. Sad. I remember the 1951 Ideal Home Exhibition footage being particularly excellent:

A wedding dress and an integrated kitchen are on display at the show along with a variety of domestic gadgets. The gadgets include a ‘flexaway’ ironing device, and a kitchen food mixer which has an attachment that turns the mixer into a furniture polisher. The final gadget shown is a fake champagne bottle that turns out to be a cigarette dispenser. A woman takes a cigarette from the bottle’s base and a man lights it for her from a lighter on the top of the bottle.
posted by unSane at 8:18 AM on February 16, 2007


This is cool.

I like this movie about the Home Guard, the Local Defense Volunteers (LDV), as the man says, called the "Look, Duck and Vanish" with some scorn. What was most interesting to me in the short clip was the notion, obvious to think about, but brought home viscerally by the clip, that if you found a German paratrooper way out in a field somewhere 5 miles from town, you actually had to run back to town in order to tell someone. No radios, no cell phones. Obvious, I know, but I don't think I'd ever thought of the logistics in quite that way, for some reason, before.

Thanks.
posted by OmieWise at 10:20 AM on February 16, 2007


Thank you.
posted by IndigoJones at 9:48 AM on February 17, 2007


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