British Pathé - Masks

There is such a wealth of visual material to be found online and delving into it on a daily basis is as refreshing as taking a swim in a cool pool. One of the most interesting fountains in the Youtube stream of entertainment is the British Pathé Collection, an archive of 85,000 newsreel and documentary clips dating from the 1910s to the 1970s. 

Since we enjoy sharing the film/TV treasures we are continually discovering, we are going to launch a new series highlighting some of the gems to be found in the British Pathé collection. These short posts will be released on a monthly basis, but please don't let this schedule stop you from perusing these clips in your own free time. They're inexhaustible. And quite entertaining. 

With Halloween fast approaching, we're going to start the series off with Masks, an approximately 4-minute collection of three separate newsreels dating from the mid-1930s. The first briefly shows the famous Polish artist Władysław T. Benda and his wife with some of the beautiful life-like masks that he made for costume parties and theatrical shows. Benda also created the original mask for the 1932 film The Mask of Fu Manchu. In the photo above, Jean Arthur is holding up one of Benda's creations. 

The next is a short clip of Swiss people in costume for their annual springtime celebration, and lastly, we see Duncan Melvin displaying some traditional ancient masks of African, Indian, and Australian cultures for initiations, witch-doctoring, and devilry. 

Mr. Melvin was the host of a 1937 television documentary series called Masks of the World ( yes, by golly, television was around back then ). For this series, he not only showed his audiences various masks from around the world but he would also demonstrate different mask-making techniques from artists such as Oliver Messel, Angus MacBean, and Henry Moore. 

For the British Pathé series, we'll be showcasing clips that cover a wide variety of rare and unusual subjects: the history of beards, miniature model-makers, cowboy artists, legends of Scotland, convent life, English royalty, sheep-herding, wallpaper production, etc. We hope you'll follow along and enjoy the series! 

Ready to watch Masks?

British Pathé  - Masks