The French ukulele site ukulele.fr pointed me today to British Pathé.
British Pathé is one of the oldest media companies, the founder of the company – Charles Pathé – began already in the 1890s to work with moving images.
They produced weekly movies with the events and news of the week for the cinamas and by this have collected a huge archive of movies from between 1900 and 1970 when they stopped producing the cinema newsreel.
The movies are now freely available for viewing on their website British Pathé
You can search for words like mandolin, ukulele or banjo to find movies with those instruments.
Einige interessante Videos mit Mandoline habe ich hier einmal zusammengestellt:
Dyke’s Romany Mandolin Band (1938)
This video shows some nice mandolins, obviously Calace models, and also a big mandoloncello. There are also some other videos with groups of mandolins and guitars.
Dieses Video zeigt die Spieler des Ensembles, die teilweise schöne Calace Mandolinen spielen, ausserdem ist ein großes Mandoloncello zu sehen. Es gibt noch einige andere Videos mit Ensembles mit Mandolinen.
Gaston Palmer (1937)
Gaston Palmer is using a mandolin with a small bowl and juggels with it, and at the end plays some notes on this mandolin.
Mario De Pietro Issue Title – All In Good Time (1943)
There are many more videos with Mario de Pietro playing mandolin or banjo. Mario de Pietro also plays a Calace mandolin.
Mario de Pietro (1930)
In this video Mario De Pietro plays Kreislers ‘Schön Rosmarin’ on his mandolin, accompanied by Jean Melville on the piano.
Music Festival on Strings (1949)
The videos do also contain events like festivals of the BMG, the British Banjo, Mandolin and Guitar society.
Plenty of Pluck (1951)
There are also many videos with ukulele players and of course many videos with guitar players. Just use the search function on the British Pathé site, it works fast and produces a list of videos with a short description.
An interesting resource, which is worth looking through if you are interested in historic videos between.
Most of the videos are now available in the youtube channel of British Pathe British Pathe
Ed Sheeren – Divide (Amazon partnerlink)