Farnborough Air Show
From the collection of
From the collection of
John P Mitchell captures many famous and exotic examples of Britain's once vibrant aviation industry at the 1961 Farnborough Show
John P Mitchell's film of the 1961 Farnborough Airshow starts with a view of Britain's ill-fated Blue Streak missile followed by various planes and helicopters flying past the appreciative crowds below. We see Hawker Hunters, a Bristol Beverley and the unusual twin-rotor Bristol Belvedere. A Victor represents the V-Bomber force while two experimental aircraft, the HP115 delta wing and the Shorts SC1, Britain's first vertical take-off jet, are put through their paces.
Film-maker, John Mitchell, was a member of the Brighton & Hove Photographic Club. He made several vibrant film portraits of Brighton and Hove and Sussex in the 1960s, primarily focusing on visitor attractions. Other films show excursions to London and to other locations including the Farnborough Air Show, the Bluebell Railway and the wildlife animal parks at Longleat and Bentley.
Home movies are always acutely personal - in subject and perspective - and most were never intended for audiences beyond family and close friends. But even so, these private films share generously with the uninitiated stranger. Watching home movies transports us into other lives and other times, where the actions of people we never knew, in places we've never visited, resonate with our own memories. The home movies of the stars, the rich and the famous, the royals - see past the familiar faces and they're much like anyone's: intimate film portraits of loved people and places, colourful moving picture albums of experience and emotion. These simple point-and-shoot home movies seem to connect with the past in a profoundly authentic way - their images unfiltered by filmmaking technique and artifice.