Gaumont

Mm.

Uh, this is restored in 4K by Gaumont over in France.

Best known for his stripped-down crime films, When You Read This Letter shows a skill at melodrama, depicting the conflicting emotions inside of Sister Therese's, uh, a nun-in-training who is forced to quit her convent to run the family stationary store in Cannes.

Um...

And of course being in that area meant you had access to a great number of organs for recordings.

And one of my favourites of his was the album that he recorded on the Granada Studio Tours Wurlitzer, the ex-Gaumont Manchester instrument.

These are just two personal favourites from that recording, An Orange Coloured Sky and the popular song from Facade.

[organ music]The popular song from the facade, the type of novelty piece that I really thought that Kevin really excelled at when he was playing a theater organ.

About a couple of weeks or so ago now.

The, um, Cinema Organ Society, uh, Northern, uh, branch held, uh, an open day at the, uh, Saltaire, uh, Wurlitzer at the Victoria Hall there in Saltaire, where the home of the fine ex-, um, Oldham Gaumont, uh, Wurlitzer, which has been widely traveled.

And, um, a-a-again, a little while ago, uh, David Law, that marvelous brain, cavernous knowledge, and wit of the theater organ world, compiled a, an interesting historical piece in one of the old Theater Organ Club, uh, magazines.

And, uh, I looked at it and remember thinking, "That would be a really cracking little radio piece." So, I recorded it.

I'll have to give them another try.

Meanwhile, next door over at the Pathé Cinema, which I think is that it used to be Gaumont becoming or has become Pathé.

That's undergoing a multi-face renovation, which is starting.

And that will keep the theater open while completely updating the auditoriums with recliner seats, upgrading projection tech.

Only two words.

Championed by a pioneer of early cinema, Alice Guy-Blaché, who worked with Gaumont in Europe and then started her own studio, Solax, in 1910 in Flushing, New York, which then moved and expanded in Fort Lee, New Jersey, which for a time was the movie-making epicenter of the silent era.

She pasted her two-word reminder on the walls of her studio, and those words were, "Be natural." That's it.

That was Guy-Blaché's guiding principle.

She grew up in Paris and Switzerland, and actually Chile.

Her dad was a book publisher, so she was in Chile for a little bit.

But basically, she was French, and she started working, I think it's at Gaumont as just, you know, a job, and she fell in love with what she saw they were doing there, and said, "Hey, I could do that.

Would you let me?" And they were like, "I- I mean, okay." And then she basically invented narrative cinema 'cause they were really filming sort of documentary style stuff still and, and like joke things, and she created this thing called The Cabbage Fairy, which is like the first narrative sort of fantasy about fairy that births children out of cabbages.