William Friese-Greene & Me

I know, I know. And I feel bad, OK?

I have horribly neglected, unforgivably neglected this blog. But hear me out. That’s all because I’ve been working hard on a PhD about none other than… Mr. William Friese-Greene. My phone is full of blog post ideas, many of which I was sure I was going to write. But there was always some other writing, more urgent writing, to do. It’s not as though I haven’t been putting anything out there, though. For instance:

I was interviewed for a podcast about my top films of the beginning of cinema, in which I revealed a major new Friese-Greene discovery.

I wrote a whole set of articles about Mr. F-G for Bristol Ideas, as well as making a couple of videos and contributing to two books.

I spent several months on a Smithsonian Fellowship in Washington DC, investigating the Early Cinema Collection of the National Museum of American History and did an online colloquium about it.

I’ve given quite a few other talks too.

I’ve co-authored a book about Birt Acres, another important film pioneer who shot the first 35mm film in Britain. The book will hopefully be out June 2025 (at an outrageously high price, because it’s an academic publication).

And there have been other things as well…

But at this moment, what I am MOST EXCITED ABOUT is that my first academic article is now published, online and available to read. In 2018, I gave my first ever public talk about William Friese-Greene, entitled “William Friese-Greene & the Art of Collaboration“, which can still be seen on YouTube, at the lovely British Silent Film Festival Symposium (BSFFS). It looked at how Friese-Greene worked with and acknowledged his collaborators, contrasting this with others in the field of moving pictures who did not.

A plan was hatched to create two special editions of an academic journal (with the catchy name of Early Popular Visual Culture) with highlights from years of the BSFFS, and mine was one of the subjects chosen. I wrote a first draft in 2019, but many things delayed these special editions. Then, in 2021, I got funding to do a PhD and the article evolved and changed considerably. It also grew into something quite substantial.

But now, at last, it is finished. Not only that but, unlike most academic journal articles, which are behind paywalls, everyone who wants to can read it. This is thanks to the support and generosity of De Montfort University (my current intellectual home) who have paid the considerable fee to make it Open Access. This is the first substantial piece of new writing about the work of William Friese-Greene to be published in over 60 years. You could say that it’s a warm-up for the discoveries I am covering in my PhD.

I hope you can find the time to read it. I hope you find it interesting. Please leave comments if you do, to say what you thought or ask me things. Here it is:

WILLIAM FRIESE-GREENE & THE ART OF COLLABORATION

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