In the year 2005, Mitchell and Kenyon, a late Victorian and Edwardian film
company, went from being a footnote in the received film history of cinema
scholars to becoming a virtual household name. The company is certainly of
interest in its own right, but this remarkable re-evaluation also makes it the
perfect illustration of how film history - both popular and academic - is
influenced by the survival and availability of materials.
James Kenyon (1850-1925) and Sagar Mitchell (1866-1952) formed their
partnership at the very end of the 19th Century and continued making films until
1913, but the bulk of their film activity was in the first five years of the
20th Century. They were thus among the wave of filmmakers who swiftly followed
in the footsteps of Britain's film pioneers - rather than themselves being
pioneers of British filmmaking itself.
Generally, film historians had tended until recently to characterise the firm
in terms of its relatively modest surviving output: fictional, or fictionalised,
films, notably relating to the Boer War. They were thus interesting, minor
regional figures. However, buried in the nation's paper archival sources was
considerable evidence that most of their work was in a different type of
filmmaking altogether. In fact, the great bulk of the firm's work was the making
of non-fiction 'actuality' films across the UK (largely excepting only Southern
England, and being especially active in the North West and Yorkshire). These
were generally shot by the firm's camera operators, having been commissioned by
travelling showmen. In other cases, the firm supplied the materials needed for
the showmen or associates to arrange for the filming themselves.
The resulting films, typically two minutes in length, can be grouped into a
few basic categories such as 'Factory Gate' scenes; films relating to sporting
events; records of local processions; 'phantom rides' filmed from trams; and street scenes. In most cases, the commissioner's requirement would have been
that as many people as the operator could possibly film in two minutes be
captured somewhere in the frame, if only for seconds, thereby increasing the
film's audience when it was screened at the fairground or other venue. The
motive behind such films (which we might today prize for their 'documentary'
qualities) was therefore almost always a highly commercial one!
The rediscovery and archiving (by the bfi National Film and Television
Archive) of the Peter Worden Collection of Mitchell and Kenyon films - some 800
of these early films, unusually in the form of the original negatives - was
accompanied by a major research project (at the University of Sheffield)
exploring this generally neglected history. Interestingly, this has tended to
reveal more about the colourful lives and characters of the showmen, and about
the company's practices, than perhaps it has about Mitchell and Kenyon
themselves as individuals. This is despite the fact that the sheer quality of
their rediscovered films - explored through television, DVD releases and
screenings - has made their names almost synonymous with early British
filmmaking in the public mind. Future film histories may reach a
settled judgment on Mitchell and Kenyon's real importance. It is likely that
this will leave them neither the footnote they were for so long, nor perhaps the
key filmmakers that they have now become. What future histories cannot take away
from them is their place in the imagination of the early 21st Century British
public. They owe this partly to the attention brought by the rediscovery of so
much lost material, partly to the wealth of research that now supports it - but
also to the skill, humour and humanity the films display.
Patrick Russell
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