The Lost World Of Mitchell And Kenyon : Complete BBC Series [2004]

Absolutely fascinating look at what life was like in the Edwardian era. The dvd contains film reels found by some builders by chance in a basement in the North of England. The footage reels had been taken by a couple of local photographers around 1900 and provide an insight into everyday life in that era. Little did people looking into those cameras at that time know that someone from 125 years later would be looking back at them!

i love this stuff, it really makes the hairs stand up on the back of your kneck. think back, before satelite and digi tv, beyond that even , before dvd, and even before video, in fact, think before tv and even radio! now think even further back, think before cinema feature films. mitchell and kenyon were a couple of forward thinking photographers who bought themselves a cine camera around the turn of the century, the last century that is!! they hit on the idea of entertaining the masses by filming ordinary people doing the things they did every day, working, playing, going to church, watching the football etc, they would then show these at the cinema, and people would flock in to try and see themselves on the screen. its easy for us to dimiss these things, but remember that this was an age where the average person didnt even own a photograph, let alone a camera. eventually when the bubble burst and cinemas started showing films as we now know them, the pair gave it all up. but instead of the films being thrown away, they were sealed up in containers and stored under the stairs in a blackburn shop and the wall bricked up. there they lay for 80 years untill builders discovered them and they were restored. this really is a fascinating archive of normal life, people living normal lives recorded on film, just think, when did you ever take a camcorder to work? and this is an age where almost every home has one, thats how rare and unusual this film is, the faces of the men women and children that stare out of these films are only a generation or two ago, but when you see how we lived, you realise how far we have come in a century. totally absorbing stuff, and highly recomended for anyone who is interested in the history of the recent past. buy it for your granny, see if it rings any bells!!

I own another DVD on Mitchell and Kenyon films called "Electric Edwardians: The Films of Mitchell and Kenyon". While "Electric Edwardians" shows a small selection of complete Mitchell & Kenyon films, this DVD shows mostly only excerpts, but from a much larger selection of their films, and they are excellently presented by Dan Cruickshank. Unlike "Electric Edwardians", the narrator tells us the stories behind the films, starting with their discovery and preservation. He then provides some historical information about their content, often based investigative research.This involves visiting newspaper archives and interviewing the descendants of various individuals who appear in the original footage. This gives us a valuable perspective and some additional information about the original footage.The excerpts are presented in chronological order that together forms the arc of a greater story - the story of Britain through the eyes of Mitchell & Kenyon from 1900 until the First World War, and also the story of Mitchell & Kenyon themselves.This documentary is very engaging and led me to watch the whole DVD from start to finish when my intention was just to take a quick look at what I'd bought. It is certainly the better of the two DVDs and I highly recommend it, despite the fact that the original narrow aspect ratio footage is truncated to force it into wide screen.

I'm amazed there aren't hundreds of reviews for this totally absorbing DVD. We, or I at least have tended to think of these times in a somewhat two-dimensional frame, chiefly evoked by those stern faced poses photographs of frowning moustachioed men and their anaemic looking spouses staring into the 'light-boxes' Yet here we have this mesmerizing pre-documentary-documentary of real people doing real things! Alas It's 'stars' are all long dead now...even the babies and toddlers have returned to the dust, their world is no more, yet now, so many generations later we can watch them go about there business, spilling out of the factories, shopping, working & playing [the panning shots taken from the trams are utterly superb, even by today's standards!] in a world a thousand worlds away from ours. This is *before* TV & Radio, before WWI and the Titanic. Such innocence captured for all to see. Everybody should see this moving DVD. This is not somebody's biased account of "the way we lived" this is *real* history...the peoples history.

I bought this for my husband but ended up watching wit him, The bits of film from around 1900 offer a glimpse into how people lived, worked and relaxed at the time. They can be a bit repetitive but well worth a watch,

another good film of the life and times of ordinary folk harshness twelve hour days and the life expectancy in those days was 45-50 years when the class system was rife upper class looked upon the masses and there was no family allowances and no nhs it was a hardlife but the landed gentry with servants a whole different world and of course the idle rich of these peoples and everyone knew their place in society when people tipped there hats to the upper class or the dukes and landowners

Not quite as good as "Electric Edwardians" but fascinating for all that.

This is an entrancing insight into Edwardian Britain. You can freeze the footage at just about any moment and find something intriguing going on. The narration is also very educational and entertaining. Highly recommended.