The Thirties In Colour

This opening part looks at the work of socialite and amateur film-maker, Rosie Newman, who used her high society contacts to secure extraordinary access to the social elite. Between 1928 and her retirement in the 1960s, Newman criss-crossed the globe and shot some of the most important colour documentary footage of the period. Some of her colour films have been seen before, but this programme features some of Newman's work that has never been broadcast and has not been seen publicly for over 70 years.

Together with his younger brother Bolling, the American industrialist Harry Wright was wealthy enough to indulge his twin passions for travel and filmmaking. Both siblings collected and shot films that captured the world at a pivotal time in history. They captured astonishing images acquired and filmed in the islands of the South Pacific, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, as well as South Africa, Morocco, Palestine, and several countries in Europe, including Britain. These destinations were visited during the golden age of ocean travel, when the well-off could escape the Great Depression and travel the world on luxury cruise ships. The sea had become a playground but it would soon become a battleground, as the world lurched towards the bloodiest war in history.

One of the most prolific collectors of colour film in the period was the American industrialist Harry Wright. A self-made millionaire with a passion for film, he acquired and commissioned hundreds of films, which he screened for guests at the private cinema he had built in his home in Mexico City. The programme examines Wright's extraordinary colour films of Africa and Central America, including his so-called Ethnographic Series of Unknown Mexican Indians, a unique visual record of the lives and customs of indigenous peoples living in the remote rural regions of Mexico.

It was Golden Age for international travel, a decade when advanced transport systems allowed people to journey all over the world. Travellers with the means recorded their experiences by using the new colour film technologies. Often unintentionally, their home movies captured defining moments at a time when the nations of Europe were about to be plunged into the disaster that was The Second World War. The final episode features colour films shot by travelling film-makers in Europe, including footage shot on the streets of Berlin decked in red swastikas at the time of the Olympic Games, rare pictures of the Jewish quarter in Warsaw just weeks before the Nazi invasion and, in London, tourists wearing gas masks amid fears of imminent bombing raids by the German Luftwaffe.