While the National Science and Media Museum’s Pictureville Cinema is temporarily closed, the cinema has launched an off-site offer, Pictureville Presents, at The Studio next to the Alhambra.
Pictureville Presents delivers classic and cult cinema and family favourites, alongside special screenings with added extras like film introductions and a chance to see films rarely been shown on the big screen before.
Throughout March and into the Easter holidays, there will be screenings of a variety of films, including Romeo + Juliet, Bend It Like Beckham and Peter Rabbit, as well as a gaming takeover and spring crafts for youngsters.
Women’s History Month is celebrated with a season of films written, directed by, and starring women. Screenings include modern classics like Lady Bird and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and recent releases such as How to Have Sex, Past Lives and Your Fat Friend.
The Yorkshire Games Festival returns to venues across Bradford from March 7-10 with a special takeover at The Studio on Saturday, March 9 which includes a Kids’ Club screening of Sonic the Hedgehog followed by The Super Mario Bros Movie in the afternoon. In the evening an exclusive adult-only gaming social will take over The Studio, where festivalgoers can play a range of tabletop games and explore all things analogue gaming with the team from Dungeon & Flagons. There’s also chance to experience gaming on the big screen with an favourite multiplayer games like Crawl, Heave Ho and Drink More Glurp.
Two years of Bradford Queer Film Festival are celebrated with a special screening of 2002 British film Bend It Like Beckham on Saturday, March 16. The film will be introduced by Alice Parsons, director of Bradford Queer Film Festival.
From March 21-28 Shakespeare on Screen pays homage to the theatrical backdrop of the Alhambra. Pictureville Presents will screen a season of some of the best adaptations of Shakespeare’s work, including Baz Lurhmann’s much-loved Romeo + Juliet, Shakespeare in Love and 10 Things I Hate About You. The Shakespearean season also features the return of National Theatre Live screenings, including new production The Motive and the Cue.
Easter Kids’ Club runs from March 29-30, with Saturday morning screenings of family favourites for the reduced price of £3. Over the Easter holidays, Kids’ Club will include four additional screenings on Friday, March 29 and Saturday, March 30.
And families can get crafty with spring activities prior to screenings of Peter Rabbit; Alice in Wonderland and Zootropolis.
* Visit scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/cinema
The National Science and Media Museum has revealed the story of photography through historic images of pets. The archive images of beloved animal companions show how photography and photographic processes have changed over time.
Pet images in the museum’s archive include:
* Mr Burbank’s Favourite Cat, which looks like a drawing but is actually a photographic print. In the mid-1830s William Henry Fox Talbot made major breakthroughs in photographic experiments, and successfully printed a ‘positive’ print from one negative. This revolutionary technique established the basic principle of photography as a negative/positive process and immortalised him as the father of the photograph. The cute kitty in this print is believed to be a copy of A Favourite Cat by JM Burbank, an artist who exhibited animal photos during the 1830s in Britain.
* Miss Mary Mitford’s dog: In the 1840s Talbot’s new photographic process was made available to the public at selected studios. In 1847, celebrity author Mary Mitford visited one of the studios to sit for a portrait and brought along her dog, insisting that her pet sit for their own picture. Much to everyone’s surprise, the dog sat perfectly still for four minutes as if he were dead.
* The dog’uerrotype: Calotypes weren’t the only photographic format on the market in the 1840s. Much toTalbot’s dismay, the invention of photography in France was announced to the world by Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre in 1839. Daguerre developed a new way of taking pictures, using a polished silvered plate and a camera. This produced a single image printed directly onto a plate, with astonishing clarity, named the daguerreotype.
Daguerreotype studios offered people the opportunity to create a one-of-a-kind keepsake of loved ones and pets. However, in the museum’s ‘dog-uerrotype’ you can see that the pet wasn’t keen on sitting still for their portrait, and the dog’s movement has caused blurred lines around his face in the image.
* The Old Batchelor: Introduced in the 1860s, the cabinet card became the next big photographic trend. Much like its smaller companion the carte-de-visite, cabinet cards were a highly social form of media, designed to be shared by family and friends. The distinctive brown hue of the cabinet card shows it was produced using the albumen process - a way of printing photographs using a thin sheet of paper and egg white. Albumen prints produce a sharp, rich image, perfect for capturing senior cats as handsome as this one.
Ruth Quinn, Curator of Photography and Photographic Technology, said: “The museum has an incredible collection of photography and photographic technology, including some of the world’s first images. It’s fascinating to see how photography trends and processes have changed over time just by looking at the various kinds of pet portraiture in our collection. Even in the earliest days of cameras and printing technology, our beloved pets have always been immortalised in photos.”
Visit blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/pet-photography
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