The Camera Never Lies

From the Mitchell & Kenyon collection: Outside Alfred Butterworth & Sons, Glebe Mills, Hollinwood. c. 1901. Courtesy British Film Institute.

We’ve just had one of those weeks when it seemed like most of England felt a little sickened by the goings-on of the modern world. Over the course of two days, the headlines offered up a beheading in north London and a case of cannibalism over in the east end. (“Delicious!” announced the Sun’s front page.) A little good news was welcome. It came from the British Film Institute, which announced that its Mitchell & Kenyon Collection would continue to tour to some of the country’s finer cinemas. Made up of footage shot on the streets of northern England between 1900 and 1913, the M&K collection was a salve, a reminder that life wasn’t always brutal and nasty. Or if it was brutal, it was brutal in a much different way. At least people didn’t, you know, behead each other.

Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon were two enterprising filmmakers from Blackburn, Lancashire, who travelled the north of England at the turn of the last century with a state-of-the-art hand-cranked camera shooting footage of ordinary people in public places. They were not in the business of making educational films. They had no aspirations for documentary greatness. M&K sold back their product immediately. They shot in the towns of Lancashire; they shot in Ireland and Wales. And in each place, they encouraged workers to come watch the footage of themselves and their neighbours. There’s no entertainment like local entertainment, they said. Cinemas had not yet been built, so the films were shown in fairgrounds. Trying to appeal to as many people as possible, the duo cranked up their tripod near factory gates at lunchtime. They travelled the tramlines, set up on the sidelines of football pitches, shot crowd scenes and in the process offered a rare bit of flickering screen time for those who had never seen themselves caught on film.

The crowds that encountered Mitchell & Kenyon’s camera responded with rabid enthusiasm. There’s so much hat movement in the footage that it seems England’s entire electrical supply was powered by young boys waving flat caps. People were ecstatic to be seen and recorded. But as the years passed, Mitchell & Kenyon’s partnership crumbled. The films were tucked away in sealed barrels in a cool place — the basement of a shop in Blackburn.

In the early ’90s — 70 years later — a few movers were chucking stuff out of the shop. They uncovered the forgotten barrels, but instead of simply dumping them, they had a look inside and found 800 rolls of Mitchell & Kenyon’s nitrate film. A local film historian named Peter Worden got involved and carefully transferred the material to his own home. Sensing the importance of the find, Worden kept the film in his freezer. “Of course, the freezer wasn’t switched on,” the BFI’s Patrick Russell points out. Russell has the slightly Orwellian title of Keeper of Non-Fiction at the British Film Institute’s National Film and Television Archive. He was involved in bringing the M&K footage to its current state. Restoration of the Mitchell & Kenyon collection has been a constant task in his life for the last five years. The 35-mm film from the early 20th century was scratched, worn down, shrunken and discoloured.

The BFI's restoration experts had to modify their existing transfer equipment to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the film. Because the films were recorded using a hand-crank, the speed of the motion onscreen varied from one reel to the next, depending on which of the two filmmakers pulled the crank, and whether or not he was feeling particularly vigorous on that day. “People think they know how silent films should look,” says Russell. “They think they should look scratchy, herky-jerky.” The restored Mitchell & Kenyon footage, however, looks nothing like a stilted music hall melodrama; it flows at the speed of real life.

From the Mitchell & Kenyon collection: Opening of Accrington Electric Tramways. c. 1907. Courtesy British Film Institute.

Before the films were found in the basement of the Blackburn shop, Mitchell & Kenyon had been mere footnotes in the British cinematic world, two enterprising men with a gimmick. The discovery of so much material has given the duo a new measure of posthumous respect. They weren’t setting out to document real life for posterity but in the process of pushing as many people into frame as possible, Mitchell & Kenyon caught the constant stream of faces in Edwardian football grounds, cricket pitches and city streets.

“To me, it is the factory gate films that are most powerful,” says Russell. “There’s a resonance with film history. The Lumiere brothers shot at factory gates a few years before, in 1895. It’s such a basic concept: a factory’s gates open and all the workers come out. But in those films in the Mitchell & Kenyon collection there are so many subtle variations crammed onscreen.

You can feel the weight of humanity on these Edwardian streets. And it’s important to remember all of these films are just outside living human memory. None of the people coming out of those gates can be living. The films are all populated with ghosts.”

Most of the working-class children waving their flat caps onscreen would go on to fill the trenches of France in a few years. Most of the ornate buildings lining the busy streets in the footage would be bombed in the Second World War and replaced by the concrete planning mistakes of the 1960s.

The films capture the individuality of the British High Street before corporate blandness crept in. More vividly than any book, they demonstrate how important labour was. The sheer number of men trudging off to work and swarming out of the factories. The never-ending parade of moustaches and the hints of noise, heat and the clacking of clogs on Lancashire cobbles. The films especially hint at the strict limitations of life. Sundays were the only day single men were able to really mix with women. It’s one thing to read about this stricture, and quite another to see the scenes Mitchell & Kenyon film in the parks, which hint at desperate courtship.

Unfortunately the only way most of the British public has been able to view the footage so far was in a recent tepid BBC documentary called The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon. The host, a historian named Dan Cruickshank, has the habit of gesticulating and speaking like Tony Blair throughout — halting… when… necessary… and emphasizing strange syllables.

As an alternative to the BBC documentary, in the months to come the BFI will be releasing a DVD of intact originals with a specially commissioned score. Best of all, the films will continue to be shown in venues around the U.K. For anyone made weary by the recent gore of English life, or the endless coverage of Victoria Beckham's latest pregnancy, the Mitchell & Kenyon reels provide a rare look back at a simpler time.

Craig Taylor is a feature writer for The Guardian in London, England.