Portrait

Dates

1959 - 1965

Category

Cinemagazine - Government

History

Portrait was a black and white series of thirteen minute films, each describing a different occupation followed in Britain. Forty-six jobs were described throughout the course of the series, including BRICKLAYER, issue no. 1, SCHOOLTEACHER, issue no. 10 and NURSE issue no. 23. Portrait was produced by the Central Office of Information (COI) for the Foreign Office and Commonwealth Relations Office, with each issue contracted out to one of two production companies, New Decade Film Ltd and United Motion Pictures (London) Ltd. Although originally intended solely for distribution in the Middle East, its working title was Arab Televiews, it was soon ‘re-versioned’ and dubbed for different territories. By 1964 it was produced in Arabic, French African, Brazilian Portuguese, Persian, Latin American Spanish, Malay English and Hindi. Initially the release was quite sporadic but by 1962 the intention was to release it on a monthly basis, primarily for television audiences. The production did become more regular but never reached these levels by the time the series ended in 1965.

Provenance

The data for this series was compiled from the following sources: the COI catalogue cards held at BFI Footage Sales, the COI monthly divisional reports (INF 8), production documents (INF 6) held at The National Archives and the Films From Britain catalogue 1968/1969. There is no record of the actual release date, in terms of day and month, for issues of Portrait. Where there is a month and year mentioned, this comes from the completion date mentioned in either the production documents, the date which the show copy was approved or the COI monthly division reports for the period. The year release date has been calculated from these.

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)