Alfred Hickling 

Britain’s film pioneers: once destined for the dump, now feted on stage

With their two-minute 'topicals', Mitchell and Kenyon gave us an unparalleled picture of Edwardian life – then split in mysterious circumstances. A new play sets out to tell their story, writes Alfred Hickling
  
  

The Life and Times of Mitchell and Kenyon is on at the Dukes, Lancaster, until 15 May, then touring
Topical drama … The Life and Times of Mitchell and Kenyon is on at the Dukes, Lancaster, until 15 May, then touring Photograph: PR

Twenty years ago one of the most significant finds in British cinematic history occurred in the basement of a ladies' outfitters in Blackburn. Builders renovating the property removed three rusted milk canisters that were found to contain thousands of feet of old film stock. The hoard was destined for the tip before a local historian, Peter Worden, recognised the footage as the work of the pioneering Lancashire film-makers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon.

Prior to the find, Mitchell and Kenyon were known only to a handful of film specialists for a thin corpus of silent dramas and some undistinguished Boer war re-enactments that had been shot entirely in Lancashire. But what the canisters contained were some 800 two-minute "topicals", illustrating everyday life in the north of England at the turn of the 20th century: workers streaming from factory gates, images of fairgrounds, panoramas shot from moving trams, even the earliest footage of Manchester United in action.

The British Film Institute undertook the restoration of the fragile, flammable negatives (which Worden had carefully preserved in plastic ice-cream tubs in his freezer), and a selection was aired in a 2005 BBC series entitled The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon. But for all their posthumous fame, the two men behind the camera remain a mystery. How did they come together? What prompted them to film the working classes? And more significantly, why did they stop?

The theatre director Amy Leach was brought up in Blackburn and is fascinated by the fact that her home town was once the centre of the British film industry. "It's astonishing to think that the country's first professional film studio was established in the industrial north," she says. "And for a period of about 10 years, it was extremely successful. Sagar Mitchell owned the first motor car in Blackburn."

Yet in 1913 the partnership ceased producing films and the studio dispersed. Kenyon, the elder of the pair, died in 1925. Mitchell stashed the negatives away in milk canisters and returned to his former profession as a cabinet maker until his death at the age of 85 in 1952. "What caused the breakup?" Leach says. "I was convinced there had to be material for a play."

The outcome is a musical drama entitled The Life and Times of Mitchell and Kenyon, jointly presented by Oldham Coliseum and the Dukes in Lancaster. The work has been scripted by Daragh Carville, who searched hard for any business records or clues as to the characters of the two men, with little success. "Ultimately, all we have are the films," he says. "The personalities behind them we can only surmise."

Carville's researches took him to the BFI, but also, less obviously, to the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield. "We now classify these films as documentaries," Carville says, "yet Mitchell and Kenyon were not documentarians. They were showmen. There was no such thing as a cinema in their day: the films were intended to be shown in fairground booths alongside bearded ladies and dancing bears."

There is no question that subjects of the films were chosen for commercial rather than artistic intent. The reason Mitchell and Kenyon placed their camera outside factory gates (as the Lumière brothers had done shortly before them in Lyon) was to capture as many faces as possible so that people would pay to come and see themselves on screen. The images would be developed and processed at astonishing speed – footage shot during the day was advertised as being ready for view the same evening.

"It's very hard to compete with that – it must have seemed like witchcraft," says Simon Wainwright, whose audiovisual company, Imitating the Dog, is responsible for the video design of the show. Wainwright's 3D projections make use of technology originally developed for flight simulators, and he warms to Mitchell and Kenyon as fellow geeks: "There's no question that they'd be total tech-heads if they were living today – the ones with all the latest gadgets and the fastest Macs."

So why did such an innovative and profitable partnership fall apart? "We simply don't know," Daragh Carville says. "It might have been increased competition from bigger studios, such as Pathé in France. Then there was the war – the last films Mitchell and Kenyon made record military manoeuvres and enlisted men marching through northern towns. But it might simply be that the novelty wore off: people lost the taste for seeing their daily lives reflected back at them and became hungry for escapist entertainments made in Hollywood."

With over 800 films of remarkably consistent quality, is it possible to pick a favourite? "I'm particularly drawn to the long takes shot from moving vehicles," Carville says. "They called them 'phantom rides', which seems a perfect description for what Mitchell and Kenyon achieved. Between them they bequeathed a whole pantheon of celluloid ghosts."

The Life and Times of Mitchell and Kenyon is at the Dukes, Lancaster, until 10 May (box office: 01524 598500) and at Oldham Coliseum from 15-31 May (0161 624 2829).

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

*