Flying a Kite

Streatham
1903
Silent
1m

In the year the Wright Brothers made their first flight, an Edwardian family film themselves taking to the skies… sort of.

The Passmore family were pioneers of the home movie at a time when few had access to film equipment, so these surviving films are a real treasure trove. It's strange to think that when this was filmed, even the box kite itself was a relatively new invention, developed in 1893 by another pioneer in the pursuit of flight, Lawrence Hargrave. Probably filmed on Streatham Common near the Passmore home, it appears the enthusiasm of the children - Brian, Mavis and Margaret - was greater than the wind speed that day.

Amateur footage of Brian, Mavis and Margaret Passmore, watched by an adult, flying a box kite with nurse and mother in attendance, possibly on Streatham Common.

Home Movies & Amateur Film

Celluloid scrapbooks: the most intimate and personal of films invite us into Britain's birthday parties, back gardens and beach holidays.

Home movies are intimate catalogues of everyday life: birthdays and holidays, childhoods and neighbourhoods. Each reel is a private scrapbook - memories of cherished people, places and times committed to film. Rarely shared outside the family, home movies are the most intensely personal kind of filmmaking. They are by us, of us, for us. Victorian inventors put filmmaking gear in the hands of wealthy amateurs, but decade by decade, home moviemaking technology has become ever cheaper, simpler and more ubiquitous. Our home movies look much as they always have: in and out of focus, thumbs over the lens, wobbly framing, over-enthusiastic pans. But these flaws can't diminish their warm authenticity. Collectively, the nation's home movies make up a patchwork archive of British social life, of whims and ways, loves loved and lives lived.