The Golden Age of British Film Laboratories (2023)

The era of the film laboratory is over. In the early 1960s, British film laboratories employing 6000 people, processed millions of feet of film for newsreels, studios, advertisers, and television. Labs were big and small with such names as Colour Film Services, Kodak, Technicolor, as well as Henderson, Humphries, Kay’’s Pathe and Rank film laboratories. Some were household names. As memory fades so might our understanding of the vital importance of film labs disappear.

Forgetting is made easier because, even in their heyday, labs were the Cinderella of the industry, the poor cousin, overlooked by a public and an industry attracted to glamour and spectacle. Their reputation remains in the shadow of the studio. Labs were seen as dark, unattractive places where film rolled through tanks of noxious chemicals churning out hundreds of movies for general release. Those who worked there felt forgotten.

But the reality is a good deal different: inside the labs was a complex and changing world – part mass production, part craft -- where the assembly line of Henry Ford fused with the artisan ideals of a William Morris. Just as the studio made ‘movie magic’ so the lab was a locus of creativity in its own right. Labs enabled a whole new fantasy world of special effects. By adding dissolves, wipes and fades between scenes they also embedded movie punctuation, the foundation of film grammar.

Labs were also places of turmoil, where the pride, aspirations and prejudices of men and women mingled with recurring conflict between workers and management.

The impact of video tape heralded the end of the Golden Age, although it was a further thirty years before laboratories, as an industry, disappeared. Special effects moved outside the lab. Conditions deteriorated; the balance of power swung toward management; demoralisation set in.

Time passes and the memory of film labs dims.  To a generation raised on digital media, the technology and the work processes they housed mean nothing. What little that remains is distorted by a worship of stardom.

This documentary draws attention to the importance of British film laboratories, it records their golden age, and it gives a voice to the people who worked in them.

Andrew Dawson and Sean P Holmes