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Anglesey GP, Dr John Glyn Jones made amateur films from the 1950s to the 1970s, recording family occasions and his daughters as they grew up as well as events in the village community such as weddings, local football matches and outings. The National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales holds Dr Jones’s collection of home movies including one of the local chapel’s annual excursion to a funfair in the 1950s. This film indicates the significance of such events for the community as a whole, cutting across social barriers with everyone, from the chapel deacons to the children, enjoying the outing. Occasions such as this would have been a unifying element in small rural communities where the chapel played a central role. This film has been written about by Beth Thomas of the Museum of Welsh Life, in the archive film reader ‘You Can’t See What You Don’t Know: Amateur Film as Evidence’, edited by Piet van Wijk for the Association Européenne Inédits Colloquium in 1994. The National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales holds several other collections of amateur films ranging from inventive fiction such as ‘Pink Shirts’ (1934/5) to a film completed in 1965 by the pupils of Friars School, Bangor, 'Tryweryn, the Story of a Valley', an account of the creation of a reservoir at Capel Celyn, flooding the Tryweryn valley to provide a water for the people of Liverpool. However, home movies or family films such as those by Dr Jones, recording on film the every day activities and special events in family and community life are an equally important part of the collection. These include film collections by amateurs such as the landowning Buckley family from Carmarthenshire, who made films on a range of subjects including their time in India, and farming, hunting (fox and otter) and horse racing on their land in Carmarthenshire. |
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