The Public Value of the Humanities

Toulmin, Vanessa. "‘This is a local film’: The Cultural and Social Impact of the Mitchell & Kenyon Film Collection." The Public Value of the Humanities. Ed. Jonathan Bate. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 87–102. The WISH List. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 29 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781849662451.ch-007>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 29 September 2021, 17:30 UTC. Copyright © Jonathan Bate and contributors 2011. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 87 7. ‘This is a local fi lm’: The Cultural and Social Impact of the Mitchell & Kenyon Film Collection Vanessa Toulmin (University of Sheffi eld) ‘In 1994, the history of British fi lm changed for ever. In fact, British history as a whole would never look the same again. In a basement in Blackburn, Lancashire, three metal drums were discovered, containing more than 800 reels of original camera negatives of fi lms languishing unseen since 1922. The past was about to be reinvented’: so wrote Christopher Wood in the Times Higher Educational Supplement on 1 July 2005, reporting on the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection. This is the story behind the discovery and how the unimagined popularity of the BBC2 series The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon, broadcast in January 2004, together with the public engagement undertaken by the British Film Institute (bfi ) and the National Fairground Archive (NFA), helped to reinterpret the fi rst decade of the twentieth century. Before the creators of the television series ‘The League of Gentlemen’ and the fi ctional village of Royston Vasey popularized the idea of the ‘local town for local people’ through their anarchic view of the vales of Derbyshire, a small fi lm company from Blackburn called Mitchell & Kenyon were sending out cameramen to shoot local views of towns and villages across Edwardian Britain. From 1900 to 1913 they fi lmed the men, women and children of the time so that cinematograph showmen could reveal a new novelty – moving pictures. The footage that survived to become known as the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection is now a treasure trove of international importance that reveals snapshots of the working class at work and play, watching football (both association and rugby), participating in civic and religious events, and enjoying a range of other leisure activities. Individually, these long lost and forgotten fi lms can be described as vignettes capturing fragments of larger and more complex events, but on a more human scale the modern audience response to them is complex and emotional. The faces frozen on nitrate now gaze out at us a century later, revealing the secrets of Edwardian Britain. Described by historians as the lost generation, since so many of them died on the battlefi elds of the First World War, thanks to Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon these dead souls are now forever captured in a celluloid tapestry of smiles, gestures, motion and poetic grace, ghosts of the past who beckon the modern viewer into the dawn of the twentieth century. How were these ghosts brought back to life? What was the process that enabled fourteen million viewers to watch the BBC2 series ‘The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon’?1 Why did the material release such an emotional response Bate.indb 87 24/11/10 3:05 PM 88 PART ONE: LEARNING FROM THE PAST Figure 7.1 Frame stills from the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection, British Film Institute, and fl yers for touring shows from 2005 to 2008. © Mitchell & Kenyon Collection, the British Film Institute Bate.indb 88 24/11/10 3:05 PM ‘THIS IS A LOCAL FILM’ 89 Figure 7.2 Cover of BBC2 series ‘The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon’, released in April 2005. © Mitchell & Kenyon Collection, the British Film Institute in the British public, and how were the fi lms researched, contextualized and brought to life? This is my attempt as the curator and primary researcher of the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection to answer these questions; to bring together the real story of the research, the collaboration and often frustrating journey behind the television series, and to demonstrate in the words of Italian art critic, Giovanni Morelli, that ‘In people’s faces there is always something of the history of their time, if one knows how to read it’ (Burke 2001). This is the story of how we learned to read the faces of our grandparents’ generation and how from 2001 onwards, with the aid of an Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant, the British Film Institute (the holders of the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection) and the University of Sheffi eld’s National Fairground Archive, we joined together with scholars, fi lm archivists, historians and enthusiasts around the country to bring the treasures of the past back into the public domain. The Mitchell & Kenyon Collection is now the third largest fi lm collection in the world relating to the output of a single company from the early 1900s. 2 The Collection was acquired by the British Film Institute in June 2000 from Peter Worden, a local businessman in Blackburn who rescued the fi lms, and Bate.indb 89 24/11/10 3:06 PM 90 PART ONE: LEARNING FROM THE PAST Figure 7.3 Child workers leaving Alfred Butterworth and Sons, Glebe Mills, Hollinwood (1901). © Mitchell & Kenyon Collection, the British Film Institute researched by my team at the University of Sheffi eld. Since then, numerous books (Toulmin et al. 2004; Toulmin 2006a), articles and DVDs have been produced on the Collection, and 40,000 copies of the DVDs have been sold. 3 Millions of people have seen the fi lms on television and, in venues from Sunderland to San Francisco, Leeds to Luxembourg, and Blackburn to Boston, over half-a-million cinema-goers have watched the fi lms. The Collection is now internationally recognized as one of the world’s most important visual records of Edwardian life and society, and it has been embraced by more than just the academic community, but by the public at large. Students have made their own fi lms on YouTube in the style of Mitchell & Kenyon, modern bands such as In the Nursery and Lemon Jelly have written new soundtracks, and Flatpack Festival, an arts festival in Birmingham, commissioned new material from local band the Destroyers in 2009. A key to understanding why the material has been embraced by this atypical new audience is found in the words of Lemon Jelly’s Fred Deakin who remarked, ‘fi lms like this are an emotional trigger – in song writing you tend to create your own brief and then try to fulfi l it, but when you have the Mitchell & Kenyon fi lms as a starting point it’s already clear what your colours are’ (Hodgkinson, 2006). However, in the period between the rediscovery in 1995 and the AHRC- funded research project in 2001, the material was stored in a fridge in Blackburn and was generally regarded as inconsequential in the larger Bate.indb 90 24/11/10 3:06 PM ‘THIS IS A LOCAL FILM’ 91 picture of fi lm archiving and scholarship. Indeed, the small number of fi lms that were restored at great expense by Peter Worden were rarely seen outside the rarefi ed and elite surroundings of fi lm festivals and conferences. At a time when Worden was trying to persuade the British Film Institute and the University of Sheffi eld to work on restoration of the collection, a representative of the Film Council, the lead agency for fi lm in the United Kingdom, queried the relevance of acquiring and preserving non-fi ction local material. Fortunately, such doubts did not kill off the project. Once the Collection was safely at the National Film and Television Archive in Berkhamsted, an extensive programme of restoration and research collaboration was discussed, planned and timetabled for the next four years, with funding for restoration to come from the bfi and support for the research process from the University of Sheffi eld and the AHRC.4 It was essential that the two processes worked hand in hand, as without the restoration process the material would be inaccessible, but without the research process the newly restored material would go undated, with no location details or sense of how the 826 rolls of fi lms could tell a story and were part of a larger picture. Only a small percentage of the material had any identifying features on the negatives, such as the name of a showman or a factory, or just a location or an abbreviated title of an event. In the case of the fi lm of a Manchester United v Burnley football match, the date ‘6 December 02’ was inscribed on the fi rst frames of the negative. An extensive three-year research process funded by the AHRC was undertaken in 2001 in order to match the fi lms to the events and locations. It was this funding that provided the key to unlocking the material, as the names and dates inscribed on the negatives directly related to the exhibition routes of travelling showmen who operated around the turn of the century. The research trail Tracing the showmen was relatively easy, since these larger than life personalities left a trail of advertising in local newspapers and on handbills, posters and programmes which were held by the National Fairground Archive. Linking these to the fi lms and the locations became part of the research and two research assistants, one in the bfi and one in the NFA, scoured local archives, libraries, newspapers and private collections to put forward a pattern of exhibition that could lead to dates and locations, and then verifi cation from the experts brought together for the project.

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