artist/filmmaker
The Outsider; George Higginson, 9.5 mm and the eternal amateur
George Higginson© North West Film Archive
Sometime in 1925, George Higginson, a 31year-old cotton engineer from Bolton, bought a complete Pathé cine kit, camera, projector, editor and developing racks, and started filmmaking. His photograph of the whole apparatus is a carefully composed shrine to his ambitions both as an artist, but also as a scientist and technologist. It memorializes what was to become his passion, as he later also did with his photos of his 16mm cameras and specialized photo micrography setup.
He was an early adopter. Pathéscope had only marketed the 9.5mm film gauge in 1923 with the hand cranked Pathé Baby cine camera, shortly after its launch in France. George would soon add a 16mm camera to his collection, but he continued to shoot with both formats, including an extraordinary informal portrait of art students in Manchester, on 9.5 alongside a more formal documentary, A Visit To An Art School (1929) in 16mm, the first films ever made within an art school. Higginson was an amateur, and would remain so all his life, but whose work was eclectic; he made scientific nature films filmed through a microscope such as Pond Life (1934), documentaries, more experimental film and animation, impressionistic travelogues, newsreels including a cricket test match and an air show, as well as home movies of family life in the pleasant suburb of Deane, in Bolton, all shot with an artist’s eye.
Far removed from the film society movement in London, he nonetheless knew of and was influenced by Soviet and German filmmaking, and regarded Eisenstein as the Michelangelo of the cine camera (Higginson 2003). As a cotton engineer in Paris before World War One he had seen and been impressed by the experimental science films of Étienne Marey, and was affected by the eclecticism of British 1920s filmmaking, where a science film could stand alongside a comedy which could stand alongside experimental and documentary film.
Higginson was an artist, a gifted painter, but it was his 9.5mm films that kickstarted his lifetime production in multiple genres. Unlike many 9.5mm pioneers we know a large amount about him and his life, because his family bequeathed much of his film production to the North West Film Archive in the UK, and his son Derek (who also appears in some of the films) had kept his voluminous artwork and archives of photos and newspaper clippings. The author is grateful to Marion Hewitt, the Director of the NWFA for drawing his attention to GHF’s life and work and for access to the many films in their collection.
George H F Higginson was born in the North of England in the Victorian era in 1894. His father was unusually for the time and place, Swiss German, and the F in his name stood for Frauenfelder. He was a fluent German speaker educated in Lancashire and Dresden, and as a young man worked in the cotton business in Europe, including in France where he first saw Marey's films, until the outbreak of the first World War in 1914. His daughter-in-law Susan Higginson, Derek's wife, remembered him ‘having as a boy lived in Saxony where his father was the Eastern European representative of the family textile machinery business. He joined the family firm and spent some years in Poland and the Far East as a salesman. I feel that it was possibly during those years that he became interested in film, as he was surrounded by unusual foreign lives unlike those in England’ (Higginson 2023).
Resuming work post war in the family firm, he married and had two children and settled in Deane, then a pleasant suburb of Bolton, in a prosperous looking house with a large garden, as can be seen in the early 9.5 mm films. Why he started filmmaking then is unclear. His son said that the family was not wealthy, they had no car for example in the 1920s, so it was a financial commitment, but perhaps having two young children, Derek and his sister Sylvia, prompted him to record their growing up, and three of the four 9.5 mm films he made around 1925 focus on the children playing along with other members of the family. Technology, and access for the first time to an amateur film format must have also played a part.
George Higginson’s complete Pathé outfit © Susan Higginson
The 1925 photo of the complete Pathé apparatus for shooting, processing, editing and screening the films, shows that the whole outfit was remarkably comprehensive, and the expense must have been considerable. In an interview in the 1930s he compares the cost of his 16mm apparatus to a comparable hobby of playing golf (Higginson n.d). In pride of place, in front of the projection screen, is a hand cranked Pathé Baby camera on a tripod, while on the left is a Pathé Baby projector on its stand. The Pathé Baby camera was the first truly amateur cine camera in any gauge, and while clockwork motor attachments were soon offered at this point Higginson seems to have been content with manual operation. The basic model C201 was supplied with a fixed f 3.5 fixed Focus lens at £5. Presumably this was Higginson's version, the fastest Zeiss f 2.7 lens added a considerable £7 to the total cost (Grahame L. Newnham 2018).
The rest of the scene is made up of the developing tank, film racks and films but interestingly at the extreme right at the bottom of the frame is what appears to be a film splicer, although Pathé referred to film splicers or joiners as film ‘menders’, implying that they existed to repair damaged perforations or torn film rather than actual editing. But Higginson's joiner is the first indication of his fascination with editing as a tool for creative filmmaking. His son remembered him holding strips of film up to the light by the window to identify shots, as well as his admiration for Eisenstein. The Pathé Baby film joiner is a simple device with locating pins, a centre peg to allow the use of perforation patches, and a pressure plate to keep the two film ends securely in place whilst the film cement dries. A set of instructions which still exist in English dated 01/25, suggested that to join a broken film, which would also be the process for splicing/editing, the film would be cut straigt (sic) with a pair of scissors. In the photo next to the joiner is a firmly stoppered glass bottle, probably film cement, as the final instruction on the sheet in English is ‘important note- keep the bottle well corked’ (Grahame L. Newnham 2018). The total cost of the outfit must have made his hobby a costly one for 1925. There would have been little change out of £20 or the average UK monthly wage at that time.
With his outfit fully assembled, Higginson immediately got to work, making at least four films in 1925 that still survive. Three were home movies, of the children and extended family, and one was rather ambitiously a travelogue shot during the family holiday to Switzerland. It includes footage shot in the garden of a large house, street scenes in a small town, shots of a man with an Alpine horn, children in traditional Swiss costume, and a horse and cart. The Swiss film also has some home movie footage spliced onto the end of it, possibly shot in Bolton, of various members of the family. The film is over 10 minutes long, well shot and focused, and shows signs of being edited both in camera (flash frames), and of having cement splices, therefore deliberately constructed. Whilst it is fairly conventionally structured, it does have some interesting shots of a woman, possibly Higginson's wife, walking through a tunnel contra-jour inside a glacier. Some shots appear to be hand held, and set up deliberately, for example the Alpine horn player, but most of the film seems to have been shot with a tripod. If it is his first ever film then it is remarkably competent, and shows an understanding of film language, for example the wide shot of the family in the horse and cart which cuts firstly to a close-up of the family and then the horse’s head (Higginson 1925).
The other three films are home movies of his children and family, including his wife and parents, and other unidentified adults. These are fairly conventional, but have well designed titles in white on black, presumably in Higginson's own hand. In some cases later film of the children from 1927 or 28 is spliced onto the original films to show them growing up. The Animated Portrait Gallery (1925), 7 minutes 27 seconds, could be the earliest film as it is the least ambitious, merely showing family members in medium close up in a garden, presumably at the house at Junction Road Deane. In an article from 1934 by Leslie Beisigel called Hard Words to Amateurs, this kind of filmmaking is explicitly criticized. ‘The percentage of amateur film worth preserving for exhibition to intelligent audiences cannot be more than 10% -the remaining 90% being, to put it bluntly, drivel. The animated family album type of exposure can be dismissed at once with giggles and groans; but any amateur who attempts editing deserves enlightenment upon the use of films’ (Beisegel 1934). Higginson moved quickly from the former to the latter.
Higginson in The Animated Portrait Gallery (1925) © North West Film Archive
However The Animated Portrait Gallery (1925) has two shots spliced in at the end where George himself appears, and not as a passive subject. The first 37 second sequence shows him dancing, mugging to the camera and jumping around wildly, doing semi-handstands and forward rolls, a pretend Charlie Chaplin walk, and basically animating the frame in any way he can. In the second, with Sylvia in his arms, he wittedly and exaggeratedly apes the kind of goodbye a performer might give on stage, blowing kisses, waving and trying to get Sylvia to wave. These two shorts use the capacity of the camera to reveal personality through movement, and are still very funny, and hint at some of his future filmmaking, especially in the art school films. In all, the 45 minutes of film he had shot in his first year with the 9.5 mm camera was an ambitious and auspicious start.
By 1927 he started making 16mm films, one of the first being an edited film titled Sylvia and Derek (1927) that includes numerous intertitles, carefully designed and exposed in white on black to tell a story, or rather describe daily life from the toddler's point of view. But he continued to film in 9.5mm at least until 1929, from the evidence of the surviving films, by which time his life and career had changed completely, in a way that was to influence his future films. Around 1927 he either gave up or was let go from his job as cotton engineer in the family business, and at the age of 35 with a wife and young family went to study painting at the Manchester School of Art for four years. This would be unusual in such circumstances even now, but at the time was extremely rare indeed. How he was able to afford this, his son Derek professed himself to be baffled by. It was just before the start of the Great Depression in British industry, he had always loved painting and drawing, and perhaps saw - wisely as it turned out - an opportunity for a change of career to something closer to his heart. His daughter-in-law Susan speculated ‘that perhaps his wife's family helped with the fees, or even the directors of the family firm he had worked for’.
Whatever the means, the next few years saw a creative flowering of his film work, alongside his drawing and painting. He shot and edited the first ever film made in and about an art school - A visit to an art school. This is certainly also the first ever film made by a student at art school, five years before the celebrated animator Norman McLaren made Seven till Five (1934) about the Glasgow School of Art. And Higginson's film was no impressionistic short, but an ambitious 32 minute documentary with many touches of sly humour. There had been film produced at the famous Bauhaus in the late 1920s, especially by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, but these were abstract films by a teacher working there, and not by a student about the school itself. In fact three films exist made by Higginson at the school of art, which show quite different approaches; the documentary on 16mm, a separate eight minute 16mm film of scenes from the art school, possibly outtakes from the finished film, and The Manchester School of Art (1929), a 13 minute 9.5mm film with beautifully designed title and intertitles, featuring the filmmakers logo, his initials GHF wrapped inside a circle.
Around the same period in 1925 the Film Society in London was launched, and this was followed by the Salford Workers Film Society (later Manchester and Salford Film Society) in 1930, where Higginson was soon to screen his films. It was an exciting time for amateur and experimental film in the UK, both in terms of screenings of avant-garde European film as well as film production, made possible by access for the first time to the relatively affordable 9.5mm and 16mm formats. This was accompanied by the development of filmmaking clubs and societies, such as the Bolton Filmmaking Society in which Higginson had a leading role, and filmmaking magazines such as Close Up, edited by filmmaker Kenneth Macpherson, and Film Art. The gulf between the amateur and professional was for a while to narrow, although some technologies such as sound on film were to remain prohibitively expensive, and the brief period of silent film alongside amateur film formats democratized the means of production until the commercial sound film was widespread.
The Manchester and Salford Film Society in particular played a key role in exposing to the public of the North West, the wider world of socially concerned and experimental film, and Higginson must have been aware of their screenings - he showed two of his own films at their meetings in the 1930s. In fact it was in the same year that Higginson had bought his Pathé apparatus and started filmmaking that the Film Society in London had been founded. The founding members were drawn from a wide range of leading cultural figures not involved in film, including HG Wells, Ellen Terry, George Bernard Shaw and John Maynard Keynes. There was a movement to accord film the same cultural status as other art forms, especially compared to the historic British traditions of literature and the theatre. The first ever films screened were the highly avant-garde and abstract Opus II (1922), III (1923) and IV (1925) by Walter Ruttman, which was a statement of high intent, but actually the first season was remarkably varied. It included science films on x-ray cinematography, Krazy Kat cartoons, the expressionist masterpiece the Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), and a film by The Institute Marey, ‘Rapid Motion’ - possibly Human Motion part 2 (1893) which Higginson may have seen in Paris before the war.
It is interesting to compare this eclecticism with Higginson's own. It is unlikely that he was aware of the Film Society programme at the start of his filmmaking career, based as he was far from London, but there was a lot of crossover between the films they screened and those shown at the Manchester film society. Vertov’s masterpiece The Man With The Movie Camera (1929) for example, which was screened in January 1931 in London and then ten months later the same year in Manchester, in a season which included Higginson's own art school film. The London screenings learned more towards experimental/art cinema and Manchester to social realism, but there was a great deal of comparison in terms of eclecticism and variety.
The London Film Society provided space to view new films and encouraged debate about cinema, however, the Manchester and Salford Film Society had a more left-wing slant, and arose from the development of the Federation of Workers Film Societies in 1929. Higginson himself was no socialist, he taught later at a direct grant grammar school, had fought in the first war, made patriotic documentaries in the second war and was fiercely loyal to his regiment. But he held contradictory views at the same time; appalled at the slaughter of war, he was an admirer of Soviet cinema, and anti-German despite his heritage. Despite or because of these contradictions he screened work at what is now the oldest continuing Film Society in the UK and one of the oldest in the world.
The Society soon ran into censorship problems, and in 1932 a cinema manager was prosecuted for screening films to non-members and it was barred from hiring a 35mm theatre for future screenings. It was in the hastily arranged revised programme of concerts, talks, and 16mm screenings until a further cinema could be found, that Higginson showed some of his films to the society for the first time. On April 27th 1932 the society records show an ‘address by G.H. Higginson at Hope Street school, on Amateur Film Production. Films shown - Round North Wales, Through the Austrian Tyrol, Cloud Scenes and Effects, (all of which are now lost), and the Story of Manchester Art School’ (actual title A Visit To An Art School (1929)). Although this was a substitute programme he was nonetheless in exalted company, for example Dziga Vertov had commenced the programme in the second season. In the fourth season was screened Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925), that Higginson admired so much, and later in the 1930s they showed Jean Vigo’s Zero de Conduite (1933), Len Lye’s abstract hand painted Colour Box (1935), and Dreyer’s The Passion of Jean D’Arc (1928).
The last existing 9.5mm film made by Higginson was The Manchester School of Art (1929). He was shooting on 16mm alongside the smaller format from 1925, and in the 1930s all of his output that remains is in 16mm, although later in his life he did make films on other formats including standard eight colour. Far from being a home movie style film the 9.5mm art school film is a remarkable freewheeling set of portraits of staff, students and the activities at the art school, quite different in tone from the official 16mm documentary. The 16mm film itself is beautifully shot, made with humour and insight. ‘It is curious but true', said the Principal Mr R.A. Dawson to the Manchester Evening News, "that few people have any ideas what takes place behind the doors of an art school" (Anon 1929). How right he was.
We see the students being interviewed, their nervous first meeting with their tutor, and a typical day in the various classes. But the real joy is the humour that Higginson slyly inserts through his subtle editing. Architecture students are seen drawing furiously, but it is then revealed that they are playing noughts and crosses; in the library the only thing the students are reading is Punch. The 16mm art school film was very well edited and got quite a lot of recognition - there were reviews in the Manchester Guardian and other newspapers. The Guardian compared it to European film; ‘the faces of these Manchester students make excellent photographic studies at least as interesting as German or Russian ones’ (Anon, 1931).
A visit to an art school invites comparisons with Norman McLaren, who made the celebrated experimental film Seven till Five (1934), about the Glasgow School of Art, McLaren, discovered by John Grierson who invited him to work at the GPO Film Unit, was gay, with passionate anti-war views, who moved to Canada to escape the draft (and is now almost regarded as Canadian). As an experimental animator, he continued to make work until the end of his life, but also received an academy award. GHF was much older (by nearly 20 years), conservative, a conventional family man, and very much pro the military in which he had served. McLaren moved away from Scotland to eventually gain his Oscar, whereas Higginson despite his broad European perspective on film never moved from Bolton, and his work whilst known in the Manchester area and through the awards he got in Europe, never made the leap from amateur circles to wider fame.
The 9.5mm Art School film however, lasting 13 minutes 28 seconds is a very different film to the rather straight documentary, but it was still made with high production values, and with well-designed and written intertitles. The film starts with a shot of students drawing, but soon gets into its stride with a series of informal shots of staff and students who seem to have a very remarkably relaxed and playful relationship, very different to their formal photographic portraits in the archives of the present university. The Headmaster Mr Dawson beams, Mr Dodd a sculpture lecturer larks around with ‘Tubby’, a female student, pretending to comb her hair with a sweeping brush, and the over exuberant School librarian exclaims to camera ‘it's me!’- easily lip read - and collapses in glee. Mr Mayer the head of the foundation course is announced as the Big ‘un from Wigan, and shamelessly dances and gurns for the camera. The actual buildings of the art school, now part of Manchester Metropolitan University, are scarcely changed from today, and there is one shot past the Grosvenor building to All Saints Square just off the city centre, that apart from the vintage lorries rolling past is instantly recognizable now. Students, both men and women are seen working and larking about, and it is interesting to remember that the art school in 1929 was one of the few places of further/higher education where women could get an education on the same footing as men, and in relatively equal numbers.
In that and many senses, the film seems highly contemporary. In one sequence titled Work, the students are seen painting whilst listening to music and moving to the rhythm from a wind-up gramophone, just as art students do today, given a change in technology. A man then demonstrates with flashing feet the latest dance craze, the Charleston, and a male student gives an exaggerated and highly camp impersonation of a fashion model on the catwalk. There are also visual and verbal jokes; in one sequence of two sculpture staff Willock and O'Brien, one repeatedly pops his head from behind the other as he gazes into the camera. and later, a staff member speaks to the camera and the following title reminds us, ‘good job these are not the talkies!’
Higginson seems to have had a strong rapport both with the students, of which he was one himself despite his age, and the staff who were his contemporaries, and where his distinguished war service would have given him some status and respect. In fact the final shot of the film emphasizes both his military background and his technical command of the film medium. Announced by an intertitle GHF Higginson and the Colonel, in a trick double exposure shot, he walks into one half of the frame in a perfectly matched shot having been invited in by a duplicate of himself standing in the other half. This is a technically perfect shot and quite funny, a fitting end to this improvised picture of a time and place, reminiscent of much later free-wheeling US underground films of the 1950s. Higginson was interested in the technical and creative possibilities of the film medium and used them in other films. In the outtakes section of the 16mm art school film there is an extended slow-motion sequence where ‘Putoff and Takeoff’, two male students dressed as ballerinas, leap slowly into each other's arms.
Double exposure at the end of The Manchester School of Art (1929). © North West Film Archive
This was Higginson's last 9.5mm film that we know of, although some of his films have been lost, and he continued making films in 16mm up until his death in 1965. A Fly’s Eye View (1964), an animated close-up film from the previous year, was also shot on colour standard 8mm, so he was open to experimentation in other smaller formats. In the early 30s he continued to innovate, with films such as Pond Life (1934) and Crystal Growth (1934), which were experimental and award-winning scientific documentaries. Pond Life is a film made using photo micrography, using a specially built setup created for him by a fellow Bolton resident John Slater, an expert on microscopic study. The film shows a man collecting water and algae from a pond and then magnified many times, a wide range of microscopic creatures from the samples.
The film, unusually for Higginson, is not silent but has a rather stilted voice over, which seems to have been added later as it refers to his films in the past tense. The idea of looking beyond the everyday was a common trope in natural history films, such as the series Secrets of Nature (1922-34), some of which had been screened at the Manchester Film Society in 1931, and The World In A Glass Of Water (1931). According to newspaper clippings of the time Higginson was told ‘it can't be done, you'll be wasting your time’, but the completed film went on to win the bronze plaque of the Royal Photographic Society, incidentally in a class open to both professional and amateur filmmakers. Higginson remained proud that he had beaten Pathé and Gaumont who had entered the same competition.
Cine-micrography outfit used for Pond Life (1934) © Susan Higginson
It was feted internationally, with an award at The Budapest Film Festival. It was also his second film to be screened as a principal feature at the Manchester film society, and was reviewed in the Manchester Guardian – ‘regarded as one of the most brilliant films of its kind’ (Anon, n.d.).
The 1930s was a fertile time for Higginson, who continued to make films in all genres except fiction. He was a member of the Bolton Amateur Cine Association and shot short films for their club productions as well as appearing before the camera as an actor. The work of the association was featured in the Berlin Film Monthly, in an article on amateurs in England, perhaps because of his German connections. It was said that the club was working, in 1935, on a social theme, that of slum clearance (Anon, n.d.). At that point Edgar Anstey’s Housing Problems (1935) had just been produced and in fact screened at the Manchester society, the first film to feature informal synchronized sound interviews with working-class people. British documentary at this point was dominated by an Oxbridge educated and London-based group of upper-class filmmakers, who wanted to depict the noble working class but not necessarily give them a voice. Higginson's own education was very different, in the first war, in the north, and at art school. His films are often about revealing hidden societies, the art school, the grammar school, or hidden visual phenomena, rather than a particular social theme. but there was something in the air. It is interesting to note that the famous social research project Mass Observation was founded by three Cambridge graduates in Bolton in 1937, called Worktown pseudonymously in the published results. Filmmaker Humphrey Jennings was himself a member of the project.
Higginson made newsreels, an air show, a Coop congress in Scarborough, the Manchester England v Australia test match of 1930, as well as a commissioned film for the Manchester education committee on pastry making, to be used in domestic science lessons in schools. He also made numerous films at the fee-paying Bolton school, and travel films - Dovedale, the English Lakes, Germany and Switzerland. The Germany trip is interesting as he filmed in 1937 in Dresden where he had been educated, at the time of the rise of Hitler, and Nazi banners are seen on several buildings (Higginson, 1937).
After his success with Pond Life, Higginson was interviewed by The Daily Express about his prize-winning film. However, to the obvious surprise of the journalist, he dismissed the subject in a few words, and went on to talk about his favourite topic, the educational film of the future. He then continued to say that the trouble with many educational films is that they are about 20 years out of date, inaccurate, and their artistic values small (Anon, n.d). In fact as the correspondent found out he had highly progressive views on film in education, and proposed in the early 1930s what we would now call practical film and media studies. At a meeting of the Colne Literary and Scientific Society in 1934 he talks about the role of film within education in schools. He says that in Germany 65,000 projectors are going to be provided in the classroom, and praises the British Film Institute which had started just three years earlier and the GPO for its films. He also makes a case for children making films themselves in schools. He was very liberal as to what children could see. ‘If they wanted to see gangster films he would let them (laughter)’. He said that film could show children how and why films were made, and how to choose and make the best use of a camera and give them an understanding of the scenes and how they were put together (Anon, 1934).
He also proposed a central film library, ‘in London or some other big city’, from which films could be borrowed. He said, ‘that for the huge amount written about cinema in schools, most was pure theory which he did not agree with. Some of it was in such highfalutin’ language that he did not think the writers knew what they were writing about’. He also decried the deterioration of the cinematic image now sound had come in, so that many of the pictures today were ‘nothing but gramophone records’.
Higginson in his studio, 1950s © Susan Higginson
Higginson was at this point teaching at the Bolton School of Art, and it is unclear whether he was able to put his ideas into practice, although World War II was not a good time to suggest innovative but expensive educational initiatives. He continued to make films throughout his time teaching but his main responsibility was practical art. He had by his death been shooting film for nearly 40 years since his beginnings with 9.5mm. and in all that time he had come as close to the notion of a professional filmmaker as he could without relinquishing his status as an amateur.
The stratification of amateur and professional by the late forties was becoming greater, but Higginson's life and career raises the question of what defines an amateur? It was a question frequently raised during the 1930s. Higginson had bought and filmed with a 16mm camera which was said to be in a class by itself, and one of only two in the UK, probably the Cine Kodak special of 1933, which was made in the US to provide 35mm technique with 16mm running costs. It could shoot at four times slow motion, was motor driven, had a fully adjustable shutter allowing fades, backwind for double exposure, single frame for time-lapse and animation, and a fast two lens F 2.1 turret. It cost a not inconsiderable £45 but he also had an advanced Ensign Auto Kinecam which cost about the same with similar capabilities. These were semi-professional cameras which could also be used by the amateur.
In Leslie Beisigel’s Hard Words To Amateurs in the Cinema Quarterly of 1935, he derided attempts to emulate the commercial film industry, ’in slickness, glitter, gaudiness and empty headedness.’ He also criticized filmmaking societies as merely social clubs (‘for matchmaking’), am dram societies, and gossip shops, but he does praise the amateur who is ‘more interested in cinema than themselves, those with something to say, revealing insights into commonplace activities, and trees, clouds, smoke, birds everything that moves’. He could have been describing Higginson. In his longer works he was concerned with closed institutions, the public school, the army regiment, the art school, and revealing actually what goes on behind closed doors. The shorter works are either founded on art-based cinematography, or reveal European countries and landscapes at the time when international travel was highly constrained. He also pushed the limits of what was possible technically, including multiple exposures, slow motion, montage and filming through the microscope, combining his engineer's ability with the eye of an artist.
The great film artist Maya Deren wrote in Film Culture in 1965 that, the amateur should make use of the one great advantage which she maintained that all professionals envy, a freedom both artistic and physical. So that the non-professional can devote himself to ‘capturing the poetry and beauty of places and events and explore the vast world of the beauty of movement’. This is essentially what Higginson chose, and used fully over his filmmaking decades.
George Higginson worked all his post-first world war life in Bolton, far from the literary and artistic centre of London, which is perhaps why his work is little known today. In many ways his work bears comparison with professionals of the 1920s and 30s, but his roots were very much in the amateur movement. In fact his son remembered that his father was offered a job in the professional film industry, and had a memory of an envelope in the hallway that remained there some months, unsent (Higginson 2006). His daughter-in-law said that at one time he was offered a lucrative job associated with film abroad which he didn't feel he could take up even though he would have loved to do so, as his wife who he adored didn't want to leave her family in Bolton (Higginson 2023). So he remained himself, with a deep knowledge of European film, influenced by the Film Society movement, free to follow his many interests in film, art, and technology, all prompted that by that very first Pathé 9.5mm outfit he memorialized in 1925. In the end he was unclassifiable, a conservative man with progressive views, an artist with the mind of an engineer, a European who remained most of his life in the provincial North of England, and a polymath whose film subject matter ranged over the broadest of fields. His life and work remain a tribute to the notion of the eternal amateur.
Notes
A Fly’s Eye View (1964) Directed by George Higginson [Film]. Manchester, North West Film Archive.
A Visit To An Art School (1929) Directed by George Higginson [Film]. Manchester, North West Film Archive.
Anon (1929). ‘Art School makes film history’, Manchester Evening News, n.d.
Anon (1931). ‘Arts World Reveal’d’, Manchester Guardian 11 December.
Anon (1934), ‘The cinema in schools’, newspaper clipping.
Anon (n.d.), Film Making, newspaper clipping
Anon (n.d.). ‘A Film of Pond Life, Manchester Guardian.
Anon (n.d). ‘Amateur attacks educational films’, Daily Express.
Battleship Potemkin (1925) Directed by Eisenstein's [Film]. Sevastopol, Mosfilm.
Beisigel Leslie, (1935), ‘Hard Words To Amateurs’ Cinema Quarterly Winter 1935, pp 94-5
Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) Directed by Robert Wiene [Film]. Germany, Decla-Bioscop AG.
Colour Box (1935) Directed by Len Lye [Film]. London, General Post Office Film Unit.
Crystal Growth (1934) Directed by George Higginson [Film]. Manchester, North West Film Archive.
Deren, M. (1965). ‘Amateur versus professional’, Film Culture, No 39. Winter 1965 pp.87-93.
Grahame L. Newnham 2018 9.5 mm Pathé cine accessories. Available at: http://www.pathefilm.uk/95gear/95gearpatheaccess/95gearpatheaccess1.htm. (Accessed: 2nd Dec 2023)
Higginson D. (2006). Interviewed by Steve Hawley. 7 July, Poyntington, Dorset.
Higginson family, holiday to Switzerland 1925 Directed by George Higginson [Film]. Manchester, North West Film Archive.
Higginson G. (1930s). Untitled newspaper clipping, Bolton.
Higginson S. (2023). Email to Steve Hawley. 7.11.2022.
Housing Problems (1935) Directed by Edgar Anstey [Film]. London, British Commercial Gas Association.
Human Motion part 2 (1893) Directed by Walter Ruttman [Film]. Germany, Walter Ruttman.
On Holiday in Germany and Switzerland 1937 Directed by George Higginson [Film]. Manchester, North West Film Archive.
Opus II (1922), III (1923) and IV (1925) Directed by Walter Ruttman [Film]. Germany, Walter Ruttman.
Pond Life (1934) Directed by George Higginson [Film]. Manchester, North West Film Archive.
Secrets of Nature (1922-34) Directed by Anon [Film]. Surbiton, British Instructional Films.
Seven till Five (1934) Directed by Norman McLaren [Film]. Glasgow, Glasgow School of Art.
Sylvia and Derek (1927) Directed by George Higginson [Film]. Manchester, North West Film Archive.
The Animated Portrait Gallery (1925) Directed by George Higginson [Film]. Manchester, North West Film Archive.
The Man With The Movie Camera (1929) Directed by Dziga Vertov [Film]. Kiev, All Ukranian Photo Cinema Administration.
The Passion of Jean D’Arc (1928) Directed by Carl Dreyer [Film]. France, Société Génerale du Film.
The World In A Glass Of Water (1931) Directed by Anon [Film]. Surbiton, British Instructional Films.
Zero de Conduite (1933), Directed by Jean Vigo [Film]. Germany, Walter Ruttman.
