Output
Many of the unit's films celebrated the running of Britain's nationalised railway network; early titles such as Train Time, Elizabethan Express and Snowdrift at Bleath Gill aimed to document and celebrate the achievements and hard work of railway staff and their machinery. Others documented a particular aspect of running a railway, for example running a station as seen in This is York and later Terminus.
Somewhat paradoxically, many of the unit's films celebrated a quiet, unchanging image of rural Britain - with travelogues such as The Heart of England (1954), The Lake District (also 1954), Three Is Company (1959), Down to Sussex (1964) and Midland Country (as late as 1974) - while simultaneously invoking the "white heat of technology" in its other work, such as its Report on Modernisation series instigated in 1959 (renamed Rail Report in 1965).
The unit won many awards over the years, including an Academy Award in 1966 for the film Wild Wings, which had little to do with transport and concentrated on WWT Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, founded by Peter Scott. BTF also gave John Schlesinger an early breakthrough with the 1961 film Terminus, chronicling a day in the life of Waterloo Station in a style highly uncharacteristic of the unit. Oscar-winning cinematographer David Watkin also got his start lighting BTF films from 1950 to 1960.
BTF also produced the controversial The Finishing Line (1976) and Robbie (1979), which warned children against trespassing on railway lines and are often thought of as Public Information Films.
Some 700 films were made by it over its period of operation.
Read more about this topic: British Transport Films
Famous quotes containing the word output:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)