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

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Customer reviews

review by: Graham date: 2007-11-29 rating:
Brilliant
Can't fault these films, as a piece of social history. BTW, played this as a ' backdrop ' at a 100th Birthday Party recently it was fantastic..

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review by: date: 2007-03-07 rating:
Good but Electric Edwardians is miles better
This series had a real purpose i.e to introduce people to the world of Mitchell and Kenyon. The silly slapstick acted interludes were very irritating and so was the cooing Cruickshank .

A much wiser buy is the BFI edition " Electric Edwardians " - far more footage that is allowed to speak for itself with an illuminating interview with Dr Vanessa Toulmin of the National Fairground Archive , who was the historical consultant to this series and whose painstaking research has allowed us to know what M & K were filming , where and when .

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review by: date: 2005-07-27 rating:
TOTALLY SPELLBINDING!!! 99 STARS
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.

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review by: date: 2005-03-08 rating:
Fascinating & infuriating
This documentary is in equal parts fascinating and infuriating. Fascinating for the richness of Mitchell & Kenyon's films, the remarkable quality of the images and the often startling content. But infuriating for the way the producers have chosen to present this material. The approach taken fragments the material and distances the viewer, too often reducing the images to the status of stock footage illustrating an often trite, potted social history lesson, with Dan Cruickshank's breathless (and seemingly interminable) narration an added layer of distraction. Worth buying for the wonder of Mitchell & Kenyon's images ... but it leaves you hoping desperately that the BFI will soon release an edition of these films without the imposed documentary baggage.


review by: date: 2005-02-04 rating:
faces from the past
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!!

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Similar categories

Video . DVD & VHS . Categories . Documentary . All Documentaries
Video . DVD & VHS . Refinements . Format (binding_browse-bin) . DVD
Video . DVD & VHS . Refinements . Editions (feature_two_browse-bin) . Standard Edition
Video . DVD & VHS . Refinements . Region(feature_browse-bin) . Region 2
Video . DVD & VHS . Refinements . Release Date (feature_three_browse-bin) . 2000 and later
Video . DVD & VHS . Refinements . Language (theme_browse-bin) . English

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