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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Author
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Topic: Sound formats
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 03-27-2003 06:37 AM
quote:
I heard that the movie museum in London had been closed, but I forgot why they closed it...?
Internal politics within the organisation which ran it, the British Film Institute. The BFI operates on two sites in London: one in the city centre, just off Tottenham Court Road (which houses the National Film and Television Archive's office space, the BFI's reference library and administration offices) and one on the South Bank of the Thames, near Waterloo station. This housed the National Film Theatre, and until 1999 also contained MOMI. There are also other cultural facilities in the South Bank Centre, most notably the National [live stage] Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall (a classical music venue) and the Hayward [art] Gallery.
The South Bank Centre as a whole is a 1950s/60s concrete complex resembling a Soviet gulag. From the early '90s plans were afoot to knock the whole lot down and start again. The NFT/MOMI complex is far from perfect: one particular problem is that, being right under Waterloo Bridge, traffic noise tends to get into the auditoria. The BFI, therefore, wanted to put up a purpose-built complex to house NFT Mk. II, a revamped MOMI and the reference library relocated from their other site.
The official line is that in anticipation that this scheme really was going to happen, the BFI closed MOMI in 1999 in order to carry out preparatory work. Another official argument is that when the incoming Labour government abolished admission charges for the big public museums in London, the business case for a museum which levied a substantial admission charge (which MOMI did) was instantly undermined.
Both of these arguments are, IMHO, seriously flawed and were used as a hook on which to hang a politically motivated decision. On a public forum such as this I can't repeat what I have been told (by some of the key players involved) the actual reasons were, but they boil down to backstabbing and ego-massaging by a small number of senior figures.
Needless to say, the grand South Bank redevelopment scheme has so far come to very little. The BFI Imax cinema has been built next to Waterloo station, some of the access roads and paths have been tarted up and two new pedestrian bridges across the Thames have now appeared (which some genius of an architect has managed to position in such a way as to extend the time needed to walk from Waterloo into central London by 5-10 minutes), but really that's about it. The 1960s concrete jungle remains, and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. MOMI, which was probably the most successful venture (if measured by the criterion of visitor numbers) the BFI ever did, has almost certainly gone for good.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 03-27-2003 09:17 AM
quote:
And they provided no public funding instead?
Yes, they did provide funding. They increased the public funding level for some of the main London museums to make up the money lost by no longer charging members of the public to get in. MOMI, however, was never part of that system and therefore continued charging. The BFI argued that MOMI, which charged, would be competing for visitors with other museums (e.g. the Science Museum in South Kensington) which did not, and therefore its income was likely to decrease sharply.
As against which, (i) MOMI was a subject-specific museum, and (ii) a large proportion of its visitors were toursits from overseas, who tend not to worry so much about that sort of expense while on holiday. Where I live, in York, the National Railway Museum abolished admission charges only last year. There was a lot of speculation in the local press that this would reduce the revenues of tourist attractions which did charge (e.g. York Minster and the Viking museum); but so far, this has not proven to be the case.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 03-27-2003 04:18 PM
Leo wrote:
quote:
two new pedestrian bridges across the Thames have now appeared (which some genius of an architect has managed to position in such a way as to extend the time needed to walk from Waterloo into central London by 5-10 minutes)
I don't understand this, One of the new Hungerford bridges is about four metres east of the old one, the other is maybe fifteen metres to he west, and they are slightly lower than the old one. The stairs are in a slightly different place, but this could only add a few seconds to the journey, not 5-10 minutes.
The only other bridge to have opened (eventually) is the'wobbly' one at Bankside, about a km to the East, and there was no bridge there before, so I don't see how this could lengthen a journey.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 03-28-2003 03:12 AM
OK, I'll rephrase that: it's not so much the positioning of the bridges themselves, but the arrangements for getting at them. Attempting to do so on my last visit to London, the high-level walkway out of Waterloo station, which used to lead straight to the old Hungerford footbridge (the one attached to the same physical bridge as the railway line) was closed. So it was out of the main entrance, an interminable wait to cross the road, through Sutton Walk, failed attempts to get through a number of blocked-off footpaths, walk along riverbank and eventually up the stairs onto the footbridge.
At the other end of the original bridge there used to be a direct footpath straight into Charing Cross station, so you could walk from Waterloo to the Strand really very quickly. That has now gone, and now you have to walk all the way up Northumberland Avenue into Trafalgar Square. When I walked from Waterloo to Wells St. for a meeting earlier in the month (I usually stay overnight with relatives in Wimbledon to take advantage of the cheap off-peak tickets: £57 from York to London if you go the previous evening and stay overnight, compared to £210 for a day trip leaving before 0930 in the morning), I reckon that the new arrangements extended the walk by about ten minutes.
One welcome change, though: Red Ken's congestion charge did seem to have reduced traffic levels quite a bit, so at least I didn't get gassed on the way!
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Gerard S. Cohen
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 975
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: Sep 2001
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posted 04-04-2003 11:03 PM
I twice visited the laboratory of Theadore W. Case, who worked with Sponneville to develop the first glass vacuum tube for recording sound on film. It was once a greenhouse, and after Lee De Forest took over their invention and proclaimed it his own, the building was used as am art studio for children. It is behind the Ithaca Museum in Auburn, New York, by which it is
administered. A young curator, Peter Jones, rescued the structure and returned it to use as a historical laboratory, called The Case Museum, containing much of the original apparatus, and a recreation of the studio where the first attempts to record sound on film were successful is located in the adjacent barn-like structure.
I attended an anniversary celebration there, sponsored by the Case descendants, and the non-profit society that supports the Case Museum.
Gerard
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but it just goes to show how the old equipment still rocls on! ![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
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