Edwardians and the Cinema: Bringing the World Home to the Empire

The advent of the motion picture in the late 19th century brought a new level of interaction for the people of the world and their relationship to media. Such a relationship had, in previous times, existed primarily on the subjective level of interpretation of the reader vis a vis the word on the page or the voice on the radio. With the emergence of film as a new medium for conveying information, the once static pictures of the newspaper began to come to life on the silver screen. Some of the first films presented in England were those made by the French Lumière brothers, they were usually presented as part of travelling Cinematograph or Kinematoscope shows. Many of their films depicted scenes of everyday life, workers leaving a factory, or the arrival of a train. People would line up and pay their money to watch snippets of everyday life from across the Channel.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, a pair of men from Lancashire, James Kenyon and Sagar Mitchell, began producing films which captured the essence of Edwardian life. Some were similar in nature to the Lumière productions, films which showed factory workers leaving work at the end of the day, however, some of their films had a greater cultural relevance, films like the Bradford Coronation Procession (1902), which displays the city’s celebrations to mark the coronation of King Edward VII, show the pride of Empire which was evident throughout England at the time.
As with other emergent mediums, film was viewed at first as a novelty with no practical purpose outside of simple observation and documentation. Kenyon and Mitchell’s films might prove this, however, as the industry grew it became increasingly clear that film could also inspire and inform the general public, be it through retellings of true stories or fictional narratives. This does not diminish the importance of Kenyon and Mitchell’s collection of films as important documents of Edwardian culture, untainted by any kind of narrative flair or convention of the cinema which followed.
The emergence of such a medium at so crucial a time in human history cannot be overlooked. Film was another step in the rapidly increasing industrialization process. As the Lumière brothers show in their film La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon which displays factory workers heading home. Although the films of the early twentieth century were predominantly separated between narrative and pure documentary, cinema evolved throughout the years to provide historical documentation not only of the events that were occurring but also the way in which the films were presented to their audiences. The news reels commonly shown during World War II were cast in such a patriotic light so as to spin the war in Britain’s favour, regardless of whether they were victorious in their endeavours or not. Such propaganda greatly aided the war effort. Unfortunately, very little film of World War I still exists, some of what does exist can be viewed here and here.