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Obituary: John Barnes
Passionate collector and historian, he chronicled the early days of British cinema

by Frank Gray and Stephen Herbert
Wednesday June 25, 2008
The Guardian

The film historian John Barnes, who has died aged 87, was a leading authority on pre-cinema and early cinema, and co-founder - with his twin brother William - of the Barnes Museum of Cinematography, which opened in St Ives, Cornwall, in 1963. Their collection filled two whole floors of a house in Fore Street and, as one of the first film museums, it became a focal point for scholars worldwide.

The collection continued to grow as William, based in London, hunted for the marvellous at ephemera fairs and auctions, and ran an antiques stall dedicated to photography and cinema. The museum, where John's wife Carmen was assistant curator, closed in 1986; by then he was recognised as a great expert in the field, and he continued to devote ever more time to his work as a historian.

He was born in London. His father was involved with WH Barnes, piano manufacturers. John, together with William, developed an early passion for film. In the 1930s, they made films together of Kent and Cornwall, and while at Canford school in Dorset, they ran its cinema. In 1939, they studied film technique and design at the studio of Edward Carrick, in Soho Square, London, and bought several Victorian optical toys from a bookshop in Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road. This was the start of their collection and of their ambition for it to represent the history of moving pictures from the 17th to the 20th centuries, including magic lanterns, shadow play, panoramas, dioramas, silhouettes, peepshows and the early forms of cinema.

After wartime service in the Royal Navy, the brothers moved to St Ives and resumed their collecting. John began to research and write on the histories associated with what they found. An early essay, Dr Paris's Thaumatrope or Wonder-Turner, examined the origins of this early 19th-century philosophical toy and its place in the evolution of vision technology. (The thaumatrope is a card with pictures on each side, which is attached to two pieces of string. When the card is spun, the two images appear to combine into a single image because of the persistence of vision.)

Based in a studio that had been used by the painter James McNeill Whistler (and by the twins' mother, Garlick Barnes, a still-life painter who had been a pupil of Walter Sickert), the twins specialised in the 1950s in dealing in secondhand books related to the moving image. They organised the first exhibition based on the collection in St Ives in 1951, and in 1956 objects were loaned to an Observer exhibition, Sixty Years of Cinema. Contact with Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française led to John being asked to help establish a Musée du Cinema in Paris. He did not take up this invitation, establishing his own museum instead.

There was a plan to move the museum collection from St Ives to London in the mid-1980s, but contractual problems prevented this. After the museum's closure, its pre-cinema artefacts, including exquisite painted lantern slides, were acquired by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, and part of the early cinema collection found a new home at Hove museum and art gallery. This included cameras, projectors and material associated with the Brighton School of film pioneers - George Albert Smith, James Williamson and Alfred Darling - for which John had a particular fascination.

John's greatest contribution to the study of his subject was his five-volume opus The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901, a comprehensive investigation that charts the medium's technological, cultural, economic and geographical development. It was founded on a careful examination of surviving films (largely from the collection of the British Film Institute) and business records, autobiographical accounts, venue programmes and trade periodicals relevant to film and the complementary subjects of music hall, photography and the magic lantern. The Barnes collection provided a significant amount of this primary material.

John's methodology demonstrates the need for the historian to dig deep and wide; his painstaking research, an activity that he shared with his brother, can best be described as film archaeology. His major reference work will always serve as an essential tool for historians and archivists with interests in these formative years of British cinema.

In 1997 John and William Barnes were awarded the Jean Mitry prize by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy for their distinguished contribution to silent cinema. In 2006 they received honorary doctorates from Stirling University. In recent years, the films they made in the 1930s, engaging records of farming, fishing and Romany life near Canterbury, have found new and admiring audiences.

Always ready to defend passionately his own interpretation of his subject's history, John was the epitome of the independent researcher, working steadfastly for decades without any institutional support.

He is survived by Carmen, whom he married in the early 1960s; his son William from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; and his brother.

John Stuart Lloyd Barnes, film historian and collector, born June 28 1920; died June 1 2008

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John Barnes: Authority on the early days of film who with his brother created an unparalleled cinema collection

Monday, 30 June 2008
THE INDEPENDENT


John Barnes was a world authority on the archaeology and early history of cinema. The collection of books and artefacts which he formed over more than 70 years, in collaboration with his twin brother, William, could now never be paralleled in its extent and range.

The Barnes twins' passion for every aspect of cinema was born in traumatic circumstances. Their father, who was involved in the family business of the piano makers W.H. Barnes, died when the boys were 12 years old. A sympathetic uncle, seeing them marooned in a house of weeping grown-ups, gave the twins a 9.5mm projector to distract and console them. From that moment, they were possessed by film.

Soon, they had a camera and were spending their holidays making films about rural life in Kent and Cornwall, which are now appreciated as a precious documentary record. They seized upon every available book about the cinema. In 1936 they found and bought a tin box of films which turned out to date from the 1890s. At Canford School in Wimborne, Dorset, they established and ran a school cinema.

As teenagers, too, they discovered the Will Day Collection, then on loan to the Science Museum, which became a guide and model for their own future collecting. Day, who died in 1936, was an early film industry figure, with extraordinary foresight for the historical importance of the detritus of early cinema, who had collected omnivorously since the 1890s. "I cannot remember," wrote John Barnes,

the exact date when we first encountered the Will Day collection, but during the 1930s we often visited the Science Museum where we would spend many happy hours engrossed in studying the great collection which was displayed, or rather, shown, in rows of antiquated museum showcases. Drab it may have looked, but how

splendid the objects appeared, just placed there, without the intrusion of a designer's hand to distract the mind from the object of our gaze.

I do not think we were much aware of the man who had amassed these cinematic treasures. That came later. But his influence was already being infused unconsciously into our brain, so when finally we caught up with him, it was as if greeting an old friend, though, alas, we never met.

There were then no regular film schools, but in 1939 the brothers joined a course in film technique and design run by Edward Carrick, the art director son of Gordon Craig. The course took place in a studio in Soho Square, and, William Barnes recalls:

The premises were heated by a coal stove, and we had to go down to the cellar to bring up coal. The cellar belonged to an old antique dealer called Facciotto, and there among the coal we found this battered projector. We took it up and Mr Facciotto said we could have it for half-a-crown, so we bought it. . . Carrick was annoyed that he had not found it himself, and Facciotto said it was a mistake and that he wanted it back. But we kept it. It is a projector of 1897 patented by C. Stafford-Noble and F. Liddell, and is now the logo on our visiting card.

They had begun collecting at a perfect moment. After Day's death, here were no rival collectors of this disregarded stuff; and London's junk- and book-shops were virtually unmined. In Cecil Court was an antique shop with a cellar full of apparatus dating from the time when (long before Wardour Street) the court was the centre of the British film trade. In Bloomsbury Court was the bookshop of Andrew Block, piled to the ceiling with ephemera which he had been gathering and filing since 1910.

The war and service in the Royal Navy interrupted their activities, but on demobilisation the Barnes twins moved into a studio in St Ives which had been used by Whistler and subsequently by the twins' mother Garlick Barnes, a pupil of Sickert. Having already organised an exhibition of the collection in 1951 in the bookshop William had opened, in 1963 they opened Britain's first film museum in Fore Street, St Ives. The collection covered all the shows and science that had anticipated the cinema: peepshows, panoramas, shadows, magic lanterns, photography and chronophotography, as well as projectors and cameras from the first years of film.

The museum closed in 1986, leaving John free to devote himself to his research and writing. He wrote fundamental articles on cinema pre-history (many published in The New Magic Lantern Journal) and two volumes of a projected five-volume catalogue of the collection. His magnum opus, however, is Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901, whose five volumes appeared between 1976 and 1998, by which time he had already enlarged and revised the first volume. Covering the technology, aesthetics, economics and exhibition of films, the books represent a range and depth of research made possible only by John's decades of study, collecting and first-hand knowledge of the films, machinery, documents and allied practices, like stage magic and music hall.

When there was neither enthusiasm nor funds in Britain to acquire the Will Day Collection, it passed in the 1950s to the Cinémathèque française in Paris, where it is worthily displayed. The Barnes brothers decided that they would not wish their own collection, either, to end up in a British national institution, having seen the cinema collections of the Science Museum, the Kodak Museum and the Royal Photographic Society swallowed up by the National Museum of Film and Photography in Bradford, where the great treasury of precious historical objects is relegated to the reserves (albeit visible by appointment) with only a pitiful sampling on display.

Hence, in the 1990s the Barnes' unparalleled collection of magic lanterns, slides and pre-cinematic optical devices and toys was acquired by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema of Turin, where it is now displayed in all its spectacular glory. That part of the collection which relates to the early years of cinema in Britain has been passed to the Hove Museum and Art Gallery – appropriately, since Brighton and Hove were a centre of Britain's first production.

In 1997 John and William Barnes were jointly awarded the prestigious Jean Mitry Prize by the Italian Giornate del Cinema Muto (the Pordenone Silent Film Festival) and in 2006 they received honorary doctorates from Stirling University. While John remained in St Ives, with his wife and collaborator Carmen de Uriarte, whose Spanish volatility admirably complemented his own characteristic pensive, smiling reserve, William stayed in London, where he is still one of the most dedicated and perceptive devotees of ephemera fairs, always the first to spot some unregarded treasure of pre-cinema history.

David Robinson

John Stuart Lloyd Barnes, film historian and collector: born London 28 June 1920; twice married (one son); died St Ives, Cornwall 1 June 2008.

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From The Times
July 2, 2008

John Barnes: his legacy will benefit early film research for many years to come

John Barnes: film historian and museum owner

John Barnes was one of Britain’s leading independent early-film historians. Not content with spending decades researching and writing an authoritative multi-volume work on the origins of cinema in England, he, with his wife Carmen, also ran a private cinema museum at St Ives, Cornwall.

The first venture of its kind in the UK, the museum operated at a time when public funding for such projects was almost non-existent. When it closed in the 1980s much of the collection was lost to the nation and ended up in Italy.

John Stuart Lloyd Barnes was born in 1920 in London, where the family had a business, W. H. Barnes, making pianos. His mother, Garlick Barnes, was an artist, though Barnes’s creative inclinations took him in other directions.

He and his twin William showed an interest in film from an early age. By their midteens they were making their own documentary films, including one recording sports and a fire at their school, Canford, in Dorset. Several of these were shot in Cornwall and at other venues in the Southwest of England, a region with which he had long ties. Others were filmed in Kent, including With the Gypsies in Kent and In the Garden of England (both circa 1938).

Both brothers also attempted fictional films. Screen Archive South East’s catalogue includes a seven-minute film which John Barnes made when he was only about 15, entitled Kidnapped.

The plot summary was to the point: “Two boys kidnap a young girl as she sleeps in her bed and hold her to ransom. The girl’s father is slow to respond to the kidnappers’ demands — they carry out their threats to kill the girl. The kidnappers shoot dead two other men before they are caught and hanged.”

The brothers spent some time working with the art director Edward Carrick and at the same time built up a collection of Victorian optical toys, other “pre-cinema” items, books and original documents.

They served in the Royal Navy during the war, after which they moved to St Ives, where they staged an exhibition of cinema artefacts in 1951 during the Festival of Britain.

John Barnes was not only a passionate collector; he also recognised the importance of explaining and contextualising his collection. He preserved items, from lantern slides to cameras and projectors, and regularly leant them to museums and exhibitions, along with advice and information about their function and significance.

In 1962-63 Barnes and his partner Carmen, who was later to become his wife, opened the Barnes Museum of Cinematography in St Ives. A treasure trove of all-but-forgotten cinema artefacts and equipment, it attracted scholars and visitors from overseas.

There was a plan to move the collection to London, but it never happened and the museum closed in 1986. Many of the earliest items went to the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin — much to the regret of British historians and collectors, though at least some are at Hove Museum.

Equally important was Barnes’s five-volume work, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901, which documents films, equipment and personalities of the early days. The first volume appeared in 1976, and Barnes spent more than 20 years researching, writing and revising the series.

Later books were devoted to a single year each. Gleaning information from catalogues, adverts, business records, oral testimony and other sources, he tried to record every film made in the period.

The film historian Luke McKernan paid testimony to Barnes’s achievement on his Bioscope website: “Few of us who work in this field will be able to leave behind so much of such solid and lasting value: objects rescued, identified and their importance recognised; documents saved, preserved and republished.”

Barnes is survived by both his wife and brother.

John Barnes, film historian and museum owner, was born on June 28, 1920. He died of cancer on June 1 2008, aged 87