The British Primatives

Electric Edwardians: The films of Mitchell and Kenyon

Friday October 14 through Thursday October 20, 7:00 & 9:00pm, plus
3:00 & 5:00pm Saturday & Sunday Grand Illusion Cinema

Peter Worden discovered seventeen ice cream tubs filled with 826 uncored rolls of ancient nitrate film and changed the face of British cinema forever. Worden’s rescue of this exceptional document along with the British Film Institute’s beautiful restoration offers a rare and fragile glimpse into an all but lost and forgotten world.
Electric Edwardians is the first look at twenty-eight hours of preserved film. The variable frame speed is a bit odd but easily overlooked when the astonishing value of the images is considered. Due to the tenuous condition of the original negatives the BFI used a painstaking "optical" duplication process. Their efforts reward viewers with an extraordinary window to a lost world of Britain in all it's dreary gloom. The stuff of literature is brought to life in the faces of workers black with coal dust and in the smokestacks of factory towns. The staff of a Cunard liner in their starchy splendor offers visual proof of "ones place" in their world of service. The glass and iron of Blackpool, teeming with the working classes is anything but green and pleasant.
In the beginning Edison demonstrated control, planning and a hint of the structure to come. The Lumieres celebrated cinema with a joy and spontaneity that was uniquely French. Mitchell and Kenyon captured a desperate striving for hope and laughter amid despair that is somehow strangely familiar, but with proper manners!