Local films for local people
Aug. 7th, 2005 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustSpent 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.
It seems that reality tv is not such a modern vice: a hundred years ago, it was still worth the cinematographer's while taking his camera to the football match (the collection includes footage of Manchester United in 1902) and shooting at least one of his four reels of film with the camera trained on the audience - who reacted as people still react when they see a camera facing them: waving, pulling faces, smiling, swearing, thumbing their noses or running round the back to get back into shot, again and again. The rule in local journalism is Every picture printed is a paper sold - for Mitchell and Kenyon, every face filmed was a ticket sold.
It's fascinating for us, too, to see on film the faces of a hundred years ago, some of them completely modern, despite the formal clothing - even shipyard workers are heavily dressed, complete with hats (almost everyone wears a hat), but many marked as historical by their heavy beards and moustaches. They flood out of the Elswick works in their thousands, taking for granted a world in which heavy industry employed huge numbers of skilled and unskilled men - all men, although a few women are seen entering the works, presumably taking lunch in to the handful of workers who for some reason were not going home for lunch (and that's another change: how many people now work so close to home that they can go home for lunch?). Meanwhile, at North Shields, the women gutting herring look the camera straight in the eye.
For the camera is democratic. It is hard to manoeuvre, and the lens does not zoom. A telephoto lens is available, but it does not zoom, and each reel of film is shot at the same distance: there is no zoom in on the star in close-up, or out to show the crowd as pinpricks, all figures are much the same size. And each reel of film is shot from a single viewpoint, so the showman can be seen directing the crowd in front of the camera, and whoever walks in front of the camera will be seen. One innovative lens only allowed the camera operator to see through the viewfinder when there was no film in the camera - the cameraman at a swimming gala at Tynemouth (in the sea) was close enough to his subject that he had to choose whether to show contestants poised to dive, or whether to show the splash as they went into the water (he changed his mind after the first reel).
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.
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.
It seems that reality tv is not such a modern vice: a hundred years ago, it was still worth the cinematographer's while taking his camera to the football match (the collection includes footage of Manchester United in 1902) and shooting at least one of his four reels of film with the camera trained on the audience - who reacted as people still react when they see a camera facing them: waving, pulling faces, smiling, swearing, thumbing their noses or running round the back to get back into shot, again and again. The rule in local journalism is Every picture printed is a paper sold - for Mitchell and Kenyon, every face filmed was a ticket sold.
It's fascinating for us, too, to see on film the faces of a hundred years ago, some of them completely modern, despite the formal clothing - even shipyard workers are heavily dressed, complete with hats (almost everyone wears a hat), but many marked as historical by their heavy beards and moustaches. They flood out of the Elswick works in their thousands, taking for granted a world in which heavy industry employed huge numbers of skilled and unskilled men - all men, although a few women are seen entering the works, presumably taking lunch in to the handful of workers who for some reason were not going home for lunch (and that's another change: how many people now work so close to home that they can go home for lunch?). Meanwhile, at North Shields, the women gutting herring look the camera straight in the eye.
For the camera is democratic. It is hard to manoeuvre, and the lens does not zoom. A telephoto lens is available, but it does not zoom, and each reel of film is shot at the same distance: there is no zoom in on the star in close-up, or out to show the crowd as pinpricks, all figures are much the same size. And each reel of film is shot from a single viewpoint, so the showman can be seen directing the crowd in front of the camera, and whoever walks in front of the camera will be seen. One innovative lens only allowed the camera operator to see through the viewfinder when there was no film in the camera - the cameraman at a swimming gala at Tynemouth (in the sea) was close enough to his subject that he had to choose whether to show contestants poised to dive, or whether to show the splash as they went into the water (he changed his mind after the first reel).
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.
