Customer Reviews

Electric Edwardians - The Lost Films of Mitchell & Kenyon

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If you have any interest at all in early cinema OR the edwardian period(and in that latter class I include people like myself--artists, costumers, reenactors, buffs), then this DVD is an absolute must. I'd never heard of the early silent films of Mitchell & Kenyon, but a New York Times mention of the new release of this collection made me order it the same day.
These are short documentary films made in industrial towns in England and Belfast in 1900-1910. They were shot and (hard to believe) shown on the same day in special shows, some of which attracted thousands of people hoping to catch a glimpse of themselves and their friends on screen: promenading on a pier, riding incredible contraptions at a Whitsuntide holiday fair, or hanging around one of the huge factories that employed so many men, women and children. If this sounds boring--far from it: what you see are gorgeous, sharp prints of people behaving naturally in a time totally lost to our own. It's obvious that different clothes aside men and women haven't changed much since 1900. There's little prim and proper or stiff behavior here.
Best of all for me there are often loads of kids in front of the camera. It's touching and charming to see boys and girls dressed like E. Nesbit's "Railway Children", but laughing, making faces, goofing around, pushing each other and generally behaving exactly as kids do in 2006...all of them long, long dead, but fully alive via the camera in a way a still photograph could never show. Truly a form of time travel, like discovering your own relatives' home movies of over a hundred years ago. Well worth adding to your library, the sort of thing one can pull out over and over and amaze others with.

The multitude of short films presented on this disc are ones that the viewer can just watch over and over again. With so much going on, one can literally watch them scores of times and catch something new every time. Short as they are, I love these films of everyday people and things from the 1890s and early and mid-Aughts. The films on this collection in particular span the years 1900 to 1906, covering the early Edwardian period (and the very end of the Victorian era, as Queen Victoria died in 1901). Unlike the films produced by Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers, however, Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon actively encouraged these people they were filming to interact with the camera. The majority of the people in these films were from the working masses (sadly, quite a few of them were child laborers), the main audience for films in the medium's infancy, and they got a real kick out of seeing themselves onscreen. In many instances, these films were shown the very day they were shot, sometimes under 4 hours afterwards. Watching these films is like a time capsule, what with the horse-drawn transportation, early automobiles, clothing styles, store signs, and early amusement parks. It's also haunting to realise that all of the people in these films (but for maybe a few very young children here and there) are long dead, and that many of these little boys and teenage boys would, not that many years down the road, be sacrified on the altar of WWI, capturing this lost generation before their world changed forever. One also can't help but wonder what these people's hopes and dreams were, what went on in their lives after they stopped waving at the cameras and went home, what it was really like to live in that long-ago world.

Extras include a featurette on how this treasure trove came to be discovered and the painstaking process of restoration, several extra films, an interview with Vanessa Toulmin, one of the restorers, audio commentary by Ms. Toulmin, and an essay read by Tom Gunning, accompanied by images from several more films. This really is an invaluable resource for discovering how people really lived in the Edwardian era and for learning more about early film and how fast it changed. This type of film was no longer popular by the end of the decade because people now preferred narrative storylines with real actors, not seeing themselves or other ordinary people on the screen. And even though one usually thinks of films from the Aughts as being like this, in actual fact movies were no longer seen as a novelty or something experimental and faddish by 1900, and there were more and more films with a narrative structure being made at the same time as these people in Ireland and the United Kingdom thrilled to seeing themselves on the screen. The films included here are just the tip of the iceberg; over 100 Mitchell and Kenyon films are known to survive, and all of them restored from their original negatives. Hopefully there will be more volumes just like this one!

Before viewing the actual films, I would suggest watching the brief documentary about the restoration work. Although the films presented on the DVD were prepared from the original negatives, seeing what the restoration team actually had to work with might temper your expectations a bit, and make you more forgiving for those films that are less than perfect and show signs of deterioration. After all, the reels of negatives were kept in a basement for a century.

Having said that, most of the films here are the clearest, most detailed moving images I have ever seen from that time. While films from that era are not that uncommon, most of what we see today come from prints that are either worn and battered, or several generations removed from the original negatives, or both. Since these films were created from the original negatives, they retain the detail and clarity that audiences saw when they were originally shown (some of that, of course, is the result of restoration work).

What makes these films even more interesting is that many of those pictured are interacting with the camera, so it almost seems that they are interacting with us over the space of a century. It's also fascinating to think that although everything about that period seems so far in the distant past, there are many people born in that era who are still alive today. It's not as far away as we might think.

This is definitely worth purchasing for those who have an interest in history or the early years of film.

The past truly is a foreign country. So often, the early newsreels in extant focus on the luminaries of the period at ceremonies or at play. These films show the lives of the everyday people. Worth repeat viewings. You'll notice something new every time.

The soundtrack alone is worth purchasing this DVD for! The music by In the Nursery is so lovely that I find myself sometimes putting this DVD on when I am cooking or cleaning, so I can hear the beautiful music and then visit with "old friends" when I pop in and out of the living room--I find it very soothing. I highly recommend this mesmerizing look back at the "regular people" from the turn of the century.

I have a been a fan of silent films for over 40 years after seeing HAROLD LLOYD"S WORLD OF COMEDY in 1962 and after reading Kevin Brownlow's THE PARADE'S GONE BY shortly thereafter. However it was more than 25 years after that before I had the means to get a really good look at most of them. The technology of first VHS and now DVD finally allowed me the opportunity to see these old films in decent prints, projected at the right speed, and with the proper musical background. I am especially fond of early silent cinema which roughly dates from 1895-1918 before the domination of Hollywood began. I have a box set of DVDs called WHEN THE MOVIES BEGAN which features early efforts from England, Europe, and the United States. Another worthwhile set is THE ORIGINS OF FILM from the Smithsonian Institute and the Library of Congress.

This collection took me completely by surprise as 1) I was not at all familiar with the films of Mitchell and Kenyon and 2) the quality of these almost lost films was truly extraordinary. Not just the visual look of the films but the life from a century ago that they capture. The motion picture is the only true time machine that humans have come up with so far. Seeing these ordinary people doing ordinary things really makes you feel as if you are there. You are seeing living, breathing people even though they are long dead along with their way of life and the world they inhabited. For that reason alone this collection of short films and others like them (check out Kino's EDISON and LUMIERE BROTHERS) are worth their weight in gold and then some. A hearty thanks to Milestone Films and the British Film Institute for releasing this set and the extras it contains.

These films are an incredible gift to the 21st century observer. The viewer feels transported back to the 1900s as through a time machine to see soccer, rugby, and cricket matches; temperance parades and Catholic parades; factory openings and collieries with crowds of soot-blackened workers swarming toward the camera; schoolchildren proudly demonstrating their calisthenics; college graduations; the wealthy in elegant Edwardian finery and the working class in caps and shawls; and most marvelous--horse-drawn vehicles everywhere (including buses). There is a fascinating sense of reciprocal communication between our century and these early beginnings of the last--almost as though the subjects are peering into the future at us! They're all completely aware of the camera, curious, sometimes hamming it up and tremendously alive and excited to be a part of this new, magical technology. The musical score accompanying these silent films is quite moving and contributes to the mysterious sense that one is merely pushing aside a curtain and seeing real people living their real lives today.

This is a really fascinating piece of cinematic history from over 100 years ago. Of course I knew there was experimentation going on at that time, but I had no idea the quality of the film was so great. Right before seeing this I had been watching footage from WWI, and it was so grainy and dull that I could barely even make out the features of such well-known personages as the Kaiser or George V. However, this documentary from around 1904 is so clear and sharp that one would think it came from the 1930s, if not for the costumes and other obvious Edwardian details. And the impression one gets from such a film is akin to what you would get if you thawed a living woolly mammoth from a block of ice. Actually_seeing_these ordinary people- men, women and children- going about their daily business, mugging for the cameras, playing sports, etc., gives you a much better understanding of our ancestors and a greater connection to these ghosts than still-photographs ever could. This is a real treasure, and I hope that more such films exist and will be made widely available.

When I first heard of this DVD and ongoing the Electric Edwardians project I thought it couldn't possibly be all that I was told it was: but it is everything I read of it and more. Others have commented that watching the people in these discarded films is a sad experience reminiscent of seeing ghosts, but I think it's the closest thing to time traveling we have. True these merry people have the First World War soon in their future and I imagine they are all now, even the smallest children, dead, but that's the nature of the past and history, and mightn't some future society look back on our videos and think similarly of us? And are we to be pitied over the fact that someday our age will assuredly pass?

What an amazing discovery these films were! Who could guess that a trove like this would come to light and in a time in which they could not only be restored but improved upon in that now we are able to see the denizens of the Edwardian era move in realistic form, exactly as they truly did, rather than the jerky 15 frames per second style we used to associate with images of that period. The Edwardians in these awesome films are so very like us and yet so different. With their expressions and in their liveliness, their jollity and their aura of purpose in the things they are doing, they could easily be people of today. And yet here we also see the world as it was, with early automobiles and ornate horse-drawn carriages and soldiers in formal uniforms marching along, and we see festivals and holidays, grand events and the day to day undertakings of the ordinary, the milling about of factory workers and assemblies of schoolchildren and college graduates. We see horses and shaggy dogs, famous people and the anonymous, houses and public places... It's truly like re-visiting the north of England one-hundred and more years ago. Electric Edwardians is an archaeological miracle!

This is a fantastic compilation of old film reels shot around 1900. It's just totally mesmerizing to see people from a radically different era going about their lives. These are mind boggling images, especially when you consider them in their historical context. Queen Victoria would soon pass away, The Boer War was raging, the Belle Époque fashions, the time of the impressionist paintings. All this as film existed a mere 5 years. It's particularly the street scenes of Manchester, Glasgow and notably the tracking shots from the horse drawn trams in Dublin that are interesting, This is where these images almost have a documentary "vérité" feel, as you see men with bowler hats and women wearing long dresses and parasols promenading the boulevards on a sunny day. It's not all romantic. The shots of factory crowds show people of the working classes leaving or entering the gates. Watching those scenes, you can't help but notice that a lot of them are young children. The women wear blankets over their heads, in contrast to those parading the Morecambe waterfront.
Anyone interested in old or new film will feel the importance and excitement of the opportunity to see people moving about in an era we mainly know from paintings, still photo's or Hollywood movies.
What a treat!

Garrett K.