BBC
October 31, 2019
Forget Hollywood - the
world's first Western was shot in the countryside of Lancashire,
new research has suggested.
Kidnapping By Indians was filmed in 1899, four years
before The Great Train Robbery, which until now was widely seen as the genre's
first film.
Artist Jamie Holman made the link to Lancashire
in a study of records by the British Film Institute (BFI).
Mr Holman said the information, which showed a filming
location close to Blackburn, was "hiding
in plain sight".
The one-minute movie is now due to be shown in a public
screening in the town, which was once home to the pioneering film makers
Mitchell and Kenyon.
Mr Holman, who has researched links between the cotton
industry and film history, said: "Blackburn
had links to the Wild West.
"Cotton workers had worked in the USA and they
told stories of the wild frontier.
"Mitchell and Kenyon would have been aware of the
appetite for the Wild West at the time. Many of the stereotypes are there: the
head-dress; the tomahawks."
Analysis - Colin
Paterson, BBC Entertainment Correspondent
In Westerns, Lee Van Cleef played The Man in Black. Now
that could be The Man in Blackburn.
Mitchell and Kenyon's films documenting everyday life
around the British Isles have become much loved since they were discovered in
barrels underneath their former Blackburn headquarters in 1994.
That same haul also included their far lesser known work
in the field of what were known as "narratives", fictional films -
including this Western. Sixty-five of them are now stored at the Cinema Museum
in London.
Their factual footage has been pored over, broadcast on
BBC One and released on DVD. Now it could be time to do the same with their
"narrative films". Maybe there could a precursor to Star Wars in
there.
The film - which is owned by a private collector - will
be shown on Saturday alongside a Wild West-themed parade.
It follows the plot of a young girl being kidnapped by
native Americans before being rescued in a gunfight.
Shot in fields close to Blackburn,
the producers used local actors, including some made up as native Americans in
a way that might seem unpalatable in the 21st Century but would have been
regarded differently at the time.
Most film critics had cited Edwin S Porter's The Great
Train Robbery, based on a real raid by outlaw Butch Cassidy, as the first
Western.
It is celebrated for introducing techniques such as
composite editing and frequent camera movement.
But Mr Holman said the Lancashire-produced film had been
overlooked, and other film experts have agreed.
Mr Holman said: "The Mitchell and Kenyon film was in
plain sight on the BFI website. I just put it in context."
Who were Mitchell
and Kenyon?
From their shop
in Blackburn, Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon
produced commercial movies to be shown at fairgrounds
They produced
fictional features as well as dramatizing contemporary news stories such as the
Boer War
A 1994
discovery of their film negatives revealed the world's largest surviving
collection of early non-fiction films
YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPfiXGv4EUE
No comments:
Post a Comment