Silent Film Echoes: "Electric Edwardians"; "Hollywood" and "Unknown Chaplin"

One of the things that fascinate me is how early film-makers either told stories in an early soundless medium, or simply filmed people in everyday life.  Recently I saw a film that introduced me to the work of two Edwardian moviemakers, Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon.  "Electric Edwardians" is a DVD that shows everyday life in England as it was lived over a hundred years ago.  The filmmakers would visit a city with their equipment, film ordinary life and then develop the footage quickly so it could be shown at a local theater.  They made money at it by filming as many people as possible, so they could presumably get them into an auditorium to see themselves and their neighborhoods  and their family members. 

For more on this amazing film discovery, check out this link for additional rare  footage.  

http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/mk/

  

There was similar small roving film units working at this time in the United States and Canada as well. Some of the footage has survived, but most of it was lost due to deliberate burning (to get the valuable silver out of the old nitrate stock that filmmakers used until 1950) or it simply deteriorated away in a vault, forgotten by all but a few dedicated archivists who have tried to save this extremely rare glimpses of history. 

     The difference with the Mitchell/Kenyon footage is that it was lost for decades in Blackburn, England, and was only found a few years ago in a basement of an old building--but  that the footage is in great shape and you can see images so clearly. It gives me the feeling of truly seeing "ghosts".       

This from the Amazon.com website 

"The astonishing discovery of the original Mitchell & Kenyon negatives in Blackburn, England — in a basement about to be demolished — has been described as film’s equivalent of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Preserved and restored by the bfi National Film and Television Archive in collaboration with the University of Sheffield National Fairground Archive and featuring a hauntingly beautiful score by In The Nursery, this treasure trove of extraordinary footage provides an unparalleled record of everyday life in the years before World War I." 

This early type of commercial film had its obvious limits, and was soon dwarfed by the major motion picture studios.

  After winning the battle for control of the film camera patent against the Thomas Edison Company around 1910, American film-making began to sell films that could be seen over the world. What was lost in the scramble for dollars and lire and pounds and francs at the box office was replaced by a more theatrical style.  As Hollywood came to dominate world film production in the midst and after World War I, talent flocked to the West Coast to set up studios. Gradually, all the small fry were pushed out of business by the big film production giants (Metro, Universal, United Artists, etc).  The second clip on this blog is from one of the best documentaries about silent films, the opening to the early 1980's series "Hollywood", produced by Thames Television.   

  The final clip is from another Thames production devoted to the well-preserved cinema vault of the most famous living man of the early 20th Century, Charlie Chaplin.  This clip shows how he incorporated ideas in random home movies and used them later in his features.