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These four rolls of film were commissioned by A.D. Thomas and shot on 23 November 1901 at Newcastle United's St James' Park football ground, on the occasion of Newcastle's match against Liverpool that day. Several different camera operators were apparently involved. While some of the football films in the Mitchell and Kenyon collection use one roll of film to take several different shots, each relating to different aspects of the match, in this case the four rolls each relate to different aspects of the match. One captured the teams emerging onto the pitch, two more different stages of the game in progress, while one concentrates solely on the crowd. All of the films in the collection reveal an interesting dynamic between 'actuality' captured by the camera and events staged by the filmmakers. The football films illustrate this. While scenes of the match itself reduce the camera largely to the role of reactive observer, shots like these give the filmmaker more control, here used in a way very reminiscent of Mitchell and Kenyon's 'factory gate' films to fill the screen with faces (here, virtually all of them male, reflecting football's overwhelmingly male following at the time). Patrick Russell
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Mitchell and Kenyon 109 (0:54)
