Snowballs (1901)

Snowballs (1901)


Young scamps launch a snowball attack on a hapless bobby.

One of the rare fiction titles in the BFI's Mitchell and Kenyon collection, this is a comic sketch which takes place in a snowy exterior against a stage backdrop. Some boys make mischief by ambushing passers-by with snowballs. It's not clear whether the snow is real, but it's certainly convincingly powdery as the fight gets increasingly boisterous. The policeman doesn't come off well.

This film has been labelled as from Glasgow, but we have no clues as to who commissioned it, who the players were or where the filming might have taken place. Mitchell and Kenyon had made some fiction films on a stage attached to their photographic shop in Blackburn and had an arrangement to borrow costumes from E.H. Page, proprietor of the town's Lyceum Theatre. It's likely that the stage scenery came from the same source. At this early date it wasn't possible to film in the low lighting conditions of a theatre, so this would have had to be shot outdoors.


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From the collection

Fiction and Comedy

The other face of Edwardian local film specialists Mitchell and Kenyon.

For historian Rachael Low, writing in the 1950s, Mitchell and Kenyon was a minor film company, best known for some "faked topicals of the South African War". Thanks to the great 90s rediscovery, we now know that M&K’s specialty was non-fiction. But we also have more of their fiction than before: alongside the works presented here are some 80 more held elsewhere.

Alongside films recreating contemporary events, including the second Boer War and the 'Boxer rebellion' in China, are more straightforward short comedies and dramatic sketches. Together, they illustrate the kinds of entertainment enjoyed by British filmgoers around the turn of the 20th Century.


11 videos in this collection

Crimewatch Mitchell and Kenyon style, in the first ever film to recreate a true crime.
1

Arrest of Goudie (1901)

An old joke but a merry one.
2

A Morning Wash (1900)

The only two surviving scenes from an amazing Edwardian film about the work of Britain's coalminers.
3

Black Diamonds - the Collier's Daily Life (1904)

Young scamps launch a snowball attack on a hapless bobby.
4

Snowballs (1901)

Rare production footage of an early 'trick' film with a famous music hall performer.
5

Mr Moon (1901)

An Edwardian comedian is captured on camera - but who is he?
6

Lizars, Edinburgh (1904)

A policeman breaks up a gambling den, but is caught pocketing the proceeds.
7

Sporting Colliers and the Bobby (c.1901)

A faithless wife, with a penchant for men in uniform, entertains a sailor before her policeman husband comes home.
8

The Unfaithful Wife (c.1900)

A grisly early fictional reconstruction inspired by atrocity stories from China's Boxer Rebellion.
9

Beheading a Chinese Boxer

Out-takes of the world's earliest ever 'Western' film.
10

Kidnapping by Indians (1899)

11

Boer War Drama

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