Animated GIFs From Vintage Film - London Terminus (1944)

During the 1940s, the British Council made a number of films to promote British values abroad and show other parts of the then Empire what was going on back at home. These are selected scenes from one film, London Terminus from 1944. It is quite sophisticated for what is basically propaganda - the couple you see at the end go to the newsreel cinema on the station and watch a film about the working of the station - meta!

I made these animated GIFs as part of my own work looking at how techniques we use for contemporary digital meme making could be applied to older media. This work was facilitated by the fact that the British Council has released it's whole collection of such films on the web under a Creative Commons licence.

Several trains arrive every minute - right up until the 1980s doors could be opened while the train was in motion and jumping off before the train had stopped at the platform was all part of the fun.

You can see the same scenes today as commuters stream through the station.

Now we have automated barriers but then one way of controlling the flow of the crowd was simply to shut the gate on them and let them squeeze through.

There was a cinema on the station when I first came to London 30 years ago, but it was only showing kids cartoons. In 1944 it was an important place to get your news and wartime propaganda.

This chap is in the Home Guard, a local volunteer defence force for those who couldn't join up the fighting services (in the film it's shown that he also works in the station so in a reserved occupation). You can see they're very pleased to see each other and are looking forward to sitting in the darkness of the cinema together!

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Update: I made another post from later bits of the film