The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon

An amazing discovery of 800 short films from the Edwardian Age is the basis for a new BBC2 series called "The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon". Shot at the turn of the century by pioneering film-makers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, the films have been rescued after lying hidden in a cellar for over 80 years. Restored to their original clarity, these films take the viewer into a lost world. Presenter Dan Cruickshank shows how they throw new light on Britain at work and play before the First World War. The Guardian has written a very positive review of the series. The series will be released on DVD (country code 2, PAL format) on January 31 from BFI.

Most of them showed the industrial working class of northern England, with occasional forays north to Scotland, west to Wales and Ireland, and south to the Midlands. This was working Britain at its apogee as the world's supreme imperial and industrial power, brought alive in black-and-white pictures that were wonderfully clear and sharp, unscratched and unfogged. Watching them was to see generations of people, known to us mainly through still and stiff family photographs, become more fully human. They walked, they ran, they clowned at the camera or self-consciously ignored it. There was a lot of humour and confidence in them. Some of these people - the old woman weaver, a white-bearded mechanic - must have been born before 1850. ...

In 1994, workmen stripping out an empty shop at 40 Northgate, Blackburn, Lancashire, went down to the cellar and discovered three large metal drums, like big rusting milk churns, which turned out to contain more than 800 rolls of nitrate film. A cinephile and film historian, Peter Worden, knew of the site as the old studios of two Blackburn men, Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, who had made and processed films there until 1913. ...

Most were made between 1900 and 1907, but the age of the films is not in itself the most significant thing. ... To the film historian, what was exciting about the discovery was its size - translated to DVD or video, the films take up to 28 hours of viewing time - and its technical quality. The reels were the original negatives, kept in good condition for most of the century in the cool of the cellar. Their positives, the film actually projected on to the screen, would have been damaged by the wear and tear of machinery, the heat of the electrics, the carelessness of the operator.

Posted by Tom on January 22, 2005