News on Screen

Dates

1972 - 1983

Category

Cinemagazine - Industrial

History

At the end of the 25th Year of production of Mining Review, the National Coal Board, due to retrenchment in the mining industry and the decline in cinema audiences, decided to limit its sponsorship of the cinemagazine to six issues per year, rather than twelve. To ease this change, issues were remodelled to a single story, and the cinemagazine was re-named, Review. Review began with 26th Year Number 1 in September 1972, with alternate issues offered to outside sponsors who had a public service message to present. These sponsors included, the Spastics Society, the Metropolitan Police and the Dairy Council. Review continued to be made available on 16mm and distributed on 35mm to cinemas all over the UK, including West End venues. The final issue of Review, 36th Year Number 5 was released in April 1983, just a year before the NCB Film Unit itself closed. It is likely that the series’ demise was due to financial cut-backs in the NCB as a whole.

Provenance

The entire NCB film collection is now housed by the British Film Institute who have allowed the project access to their database records for the purposes of cataloguing. Other information has been taken from Film User and Kinematograph Weekly magazines, the North West Film Archive records, www.screenonline.org and ‘Coal Film Makers: an Appreciation’ by Henry Donaldson. Commentary scripts come from the National Archives records, in COAL.

Other Information

Please see MINING REVIEW for the previous history of this cinemagazine.

Films in this series can be obtained from:

Film Archive

Name

British Film Institute (BFI)

Email

For BFI National Archive enquiries: nonfictioncurators@bfi.org.uk For commercial/footage reuse enquiries: footage.films@bfi.org.uk

Web

http://collections-search.bfi.org.uk/web

Phone

020 7255 1444

Fax

020 7580 7503

Address

21 Stephen Street
London W1T 1LN

Notes

The BFI National Archive also preserves the original nitrate film copies of British Movietone News, British Paramount News, Empire News Bulletin, Gaumont British News, Gaumont Graphic, Gaumont Sound News and Universal News (the World War II years are covered by the Imperial War Museum).

Series held

View all series held by British Film Institute (BFI)