Boxing Day

On the whole, I dislike advertising as only someone who has studied the stuff for a living can. But I have been enjoying the "Beer from the Coast" summer campaign from Adnams - enough so that I not only downloaded their screensaver, I also ordered a print and some postcards of the graphics.
( And this is what the postman brought: )

Despite this overkill (and the realisation "oh, that's why they charge so much for postage!"), I continue to be charmed by these images, and will be looking out for more about the artist, Chris Wormell.

Local films for local people

Spent the afternoon at the Tyneside Cinema, watching a showing of films from the Mitchell and Kenyon archive.

Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon set up their business in 1897. This was before dedicated cinemas existed, but they made films that could be shown in Town Halls, in fairground tents or as an item on the bill at the Music Hall. Some of their films were overt fiction, some pretended to be documentary (like a series of films purporting to report the Boer War, but transparently shot in the hills around their office in Blackburn, Lancashire), but they had their biggest success with simple reportage of daily life. Films of workers streaming out of the factory at lunchtime, or the fire brigade driving out of the station were made and processed within the day, and shown the same evening to audiences who didn't want to see exotic wonders, they wanted to see themselves.
( The films )

Credit is due to the bfi for undertaking the preservation of films which are not extraordinary works of art, but whose value is that they record the ordinary.