The Only Known Footage of George Orwell (Circa 1921)

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Although he died in 1950, George Orwell seem­ing­ly escaped the reach of mod­ern media. Orwell’s voice was nev­er cap­tured on audio. And his image nev­er appeared on film. His­to­ri­ans and lit­er­a­ture schol­ars lament­ed this for decades.

But then, in 2003, on the hun­dredth anniver­sary of Orwell’s birth, two researchers stum­bled upon a tan­ta­liz­ing piece of footage in the The Pathay Film Library in Lon­don. The very brief footage — watch in full here, or at the 50 sec­ond mark in the video above — shows an 18-year-old Orwell, then named Eric Blair, march­ing across a sports field at Eton Col­lege, where he spent his for­ma­tive years and stud­ied French with Aldous Hux­ley. In the line of march­ing stu­dents, Orwell is the fourth stu­dent from the left.

Note: the video above comes from a British Pathe clip that fea­tures celebri­ties before they became famous. If you’re curi­ous who appears in the film, see the list below the jump.

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