Denis Mitchell (filmmaker)
Encyclopedia
Denis Mitchell was an award winning British documentary filmmaker, renowned for his innovative radio and television documentaries. His radio and television career can broadly be characterised by the constant interest Mitchell displayed in "giving voice to the voiceless" and in the rhythms and prosody of everyday vernacular speech.
pursuing an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to become an actor, at the age of 18 he moved to South Africa, the country his parents had emigrated to several years previously. At the outbreak of war he joined the South African Army, first in the artillery, and later in Cairo, where he attained the rank of Captain, and organising entertainment for the troops from visiting celebrities such as Bob Hope
and Noel Coward
.
On demobilisation, he gained a job with the South African Broadcasting Corporation
(SABC) as a writer-producer. Mitchell began to develop an interest in recording equipment, after experimenting with wire-recorders which had been left by the American army. He used wire recording
to record interviews with agricultural workers, and this led him to the revelation that entire radio programmes could be based on recorded speech, and that "the ability to record people talking at their jobs and in their homes was not a mere novely but a most important new means of communication."
and Dylan Thomas
. Mitchell took him up on the offer and joined the Features Department in London.
After a brief period in the Features Department, Mitchell joined the BBC North Region in Manchester, in 1950, becoming Features Producer in succession to Norman Swallow, who would later become Mitchell's close friend and collaborator. After producing several radio series' based on British and American folk, blues and jazz music (including Ballads and Blues) with luminaries such as Alan Lomax
, Ewan MacColl
, Big Bill Broonzy
and others, Mitchell initiated the occasional series People Talking (which ran between 1953 and 1958). This was when he established his own style of programme-making, based on the lives and words of ordinary people, and forsaking narration and commentary. This was innovative, as the routine manner by which the working classes were represented had always been subject to heavy mediation, in scripting and programme presentation. Mitchell took the portable tape recorder, which had just come 'on stream' in the BBC, out to the streets, pubs, clubs, hostels and boarding-houses of the North, recording hours and hours of unscripted and spontaneous speech, which he then edited into radio features.
, where he worked on his first television documentary, a 15-minute contribution to an edition of the pioneering current affairs Special Enquiry, about teenagers. His idea was to combine extracts from tape-recordings as the basis of the film's soundtrack (a style known as wild track
), for which he then found accompanying non-synchronous images. This was the basis of 'the Mitchell style', which he would refine during the rest of his work for the BBC. The 'Teenagers' film was enthusiastically received (not least by documentary filmmaker Karel Reisz
) for its technical experimentation and impressionist portraiture of everyday life. This led to Mitchell's first television feature for the BBC in 1957, In Prison. This was the first film to be shot inside a prison in Britain - Manchester's Strangeways - during the making of which Mitchell spent a month in a prison cell.
In Prison was the first of several adaptations for television of radio features from the People Talking series. Others included Night in the City (1957), On Tour (1958), Morning in the Streets
(1959) and Soho Story (1959). For the classic Morning in the Streets
, Mitchell and his 'camera team' (Roy Harris and Gerry Pullen) used the lightweight 16mm camera, which afforded greater mobility, allowing the film to get closer to the 'texture' of everyday life. This film, which won the Prix Italia
, was an atmospheric impression of life and opinion in the back streets of an unnamed Northern city during the morning hours, and featured wonderfully amusing and moving vignettes of working-class life (shot in Liverpool, Manchester, Salford and Stockport). It is one of the few televisual documents from this era to truly capture a sense of everyday life, and also to puncture the myth of cross-class post-war affluence.
After travelling abroad to make the award-winning and controversial Chicago (1961, researched by Studs Terkel
) and his South-African trilogy (1960), Denis Mitchell tutored a young Dennis Potter
in documentary filmmaking, resulting in Potter's 1960 documentary Between Two Rivers.
Mitchell then left the BBC to form the first independent production company, Denis Mitchell Films, with friend and colleague Norman Swallow. Mitchell made films for ATV
and Rediffusion
, and then in 1964 he and Swallow joined Granada Television
. For Granada they made the first documentaries to be shot on videotape, which represented a challenge, as it necessitated bulky equipment and was difficult to edit. Nevertheless, in 1964 they made The Entertainers, temporarily banned by the IBA
for a brief shot of a topless dancer, and A Wedding on A Saturday, a memorable evocation of a Northern mining community, which won the Prix Italia that year. As part of their contract at Granada, Mitchell and Swallow executive-produced the series This England. The seies, which documented various aspects of regional English culture, ran from 1965 to 1967, and provided essential training for new directors, such as Dick Fontaine
, Mike Grisgby, Michael Apted
and Mike Newell
.
After This England Mitchell's reputation for innovation began to wane (he was by that time in his late fifties), yet he continued to make documentary films on a wide variety of themes for all the major television companies. In 1977 he made his final major work, Never and Always, a study of unchanging rural life in Norfolk, with its seasonal, cylical changes.
was screened in 2007 to mark Liverpool's status as 'Capital of Culture'.
On 25 March 2009, the exact 50th anniversary of the transmission of Morning in the Streets
, a one-day retrospective was held at Lighthouse, Poole's Centre for the Arts.
Early life in Britain and South Africa
The son of a Congregationalist minister, Mitchell was born in Cheshire, and his family moved from one church community to another throughout his childhood. After some time spent at RADARoyal Academy of Dramatic Art
The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art is a drama school located in London, United Kingdom. It is generally regarded as one of the most renowned drama schools in the world, and is one of the oldest drama schools in the United Kingdom, having been founded in 1904.RADA is an affiliate school of the...
pursuing an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to become an actor, at the age of 18 he moved to South Africa, the country his parents had emigrated to several years previously. At the outbreak of war he joined the South African Army, first in the artillery, and later in Cairo, where he attained the rank of Captain, and organising entertainment for the troops from visiting celebrities such as Bob Hope
Bob Hope
Bob Hope, KBE, KCSG, KSS was a British-born American comedian and actor who appeared in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in radio, television and movies. He was also noted for his work with the US Armed Forces and his numerous USO shows entertaining American military personnel...
and Noel Coward
Noël Coward
Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy...
.
On demobilisation, he gained a job with the South African Broadcasting Corporation
South African Broadcasting Corporation
The South African Broadcasting Corporation is the state-owned broadcaster in South Africa and provides 18 radio stations as well as 3 television broadcasts to the general public.-Early years:Radio broadcasting began in South Africa in 1923...
(SABC) as a writer-producer. Mitchell began to develop an interest in recording equipment, after experimenting with wire-recorders which had been left by the American army. He used wire recording
Wire recording
Wire recording is a type of analog audio storage in which a magnetic recording is made on thin steel or stainless steel wire.The wire is pulled rapidly across a recording head which magnetizes each point along the wire in accordance with the intensity and polarity of the electrical audio signal...
to record interviews with agricultural workers, and this led him to the revelation that entire radio programmes could be based on recorded speech, and that "the ability to record people talking at their jobs and in their homes was not a mere novely but a most important new means of communication."
BBC Radio career
In 1949, the SABC invited the radio producer D.G. Bridson to spend a year in South Africa. He befriended Mitchell and suggested to him that he should come back to Britain to work in Laurence Gilliam's famous Features Department, alongside such poetic talent as Louis MacNeiceLouis MacNeice
Frederick Louis MacNeice CBE was an Irish poet and playwright. He was part of the generation of "thirties poets" which included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis; nicknamed "MacSpaunday" as a group — a name invented by Roy Campbell, in his Talking Bronco...
and Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
. Mitchell took him up on the offer and joined the Features Department in London.
After a brief period in the Features Department, Mitchell joined the BBC North Region in Manchester, in 1950, becoming Features Producer in succession to Norman Swallow, who would later become Mitchell's close friend and collaborator. After producing several radio series' based on British and American folk, blues and jazz music (including Ballads and Blues) with luminaries such as Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.In his later career, Lomax advanced his theories of...
, Ewan MacColl
Ewan MacColl
Ewan MacColl was an English folk singer, songwriter, socialist, actor, poet, playwright, and record producer. He was married to theatre director Joan Littlewood, and later to American folksinger Peggy Seeger. He collaborated with Littlewood in the theatre and with Seeger in folk music...
, Big Bill Broonzy
Big Bill Broonzy
Big Bill Broonzy was a prolific American blues singer, songwriter and guitarist. His career began in the 1920s when he played country blues to mostly black audiences. Through the ‘30s and ‘40s he successfully navigated a transition in style to a more urban blues sound popular with white audiences...
and others, Mitchell initiated the occasional series People Talking (which ran between 1953 and 1958). This was when he established his own style of programme-making, based on the lives and words of ordinary people, and forsaking narration and commentary. This was innovative, as the routine manner by which the working classes were represented had always been subject to heavy mediation, in scripting and programme presentation. Mitchell took the portable tape recorder, which had just come 'on stream' in the BBC, out to the streets, pubs, clubs, hostels and boarding-houses of the North, recording hours and hours of unscripted and spontaneous speech, which he then edited into radio features.
Television documentaries
In 1955 Mitchell was sent on a training attachment to Lime GroveLime Grove Studios
Lime Grove Studios was a film studio complex built by the Gaumont Film Company in 1915 situated in a street named Lime Grove, inShepherd's Bush, west London, north of Hammersmith and described by Gaumont as "the finest studio in Great Britain and the first building ever put up in this country...
, where he worked on his first television documentary, a 15-minute contribution to an edition of the pioneering current affairs Special Enquiry, about teenagers. His idea was to combine extracts from tape-recordings as the basis of the film's soundtrack (a style known as wild track
Wild track
Wild track, also known as wild sound and wild lines, is an audio recording intended to be synchronized with film or video but recorded separately...
), for which he then found accompanying non-synchronous images. This was the basis of 'the Mitchell style', which he would refine during the rest of his work for the BBC. The 'Teenagers' film was enthusiastically received (not least by documentary filmmaker Karel Reisz
Karel Reisz
Karel Reisz was a Czech-born British filmmaker who was active in post–war Britain, and one of the pioneers of the new realist strain in 1950s and 1960s British cinema.-Early life:...
) for its technical experimentation and impressionist portraiture of everyday life. This led to Mitchell's first television feature for the BBC in 1957, In Prison. This was the first film to be shot inside a prison in Britain - Manchester's Strangeways - during the making of which Mitchell spent a month in a prison cell.
In Prison was the first of several adaptations for television of radio features from the People Talking series. Others included Night in the City (1957), On Tour (1958), Morning in the Streets
Morning in the Streets
Morning in the Streets is a BBC television documentary directed by Denis Mitchell and Roy Harris in 1959, for the BBC Northern Film Unit. It was broadcast on 25 March 1959....
(1959) and Soho Story (1959). For the classic Morning in the Streets
Morning in the Streets
Morning in the Streets is a BBC television documentary directed by Denis Mitchell and Roy Harris in 1959, for the BBC Northern Film Unit. It was broadcast on 25 March 1959....
, Mitchell and his 'camera team' (Roy Harris and Gerry Pullen) used the lightweight 16mm camera, which afforded greater mobility, allowing the film to get closer to the 'texture' of everyday life. This film, which won the Prix Italia
Prix Italia
The Prix Italia is an international Italian television, radio-broadcasting and Website award. It was established in 1948 by RAI - Radiotelevisione Italiana in Capri...
, was an atmospheric impression of life and opinion in the back streets of an unnamed Northern city during the morning hours, and featured wonderfully amusing and moving vignettes of working-class life (shot in Liverpool, Manchester, Salford and Stockport). It is one of the few televisual documents from this era to truly capture a sense of everyday life, and also to puncture the myth of cross-class post-war affluence.
After travelling abroad to make the award-winning and controversial Chicago (1961, researched by Studs Terkel
Studs Terkel
Louis "Studs" Terkel was an American author, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War, and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.-Early...
) and his South-African trilogy (1960), Denis Mitchell tutored a young Dennis Potter
Dennis Potter
Dennis Christopher George Potter was an English dramatist, best known for The Singing Detective. His widely acclaimed television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social. He was particularly fond of using themes and images from popular culture.-Biography:Dennis Potter was born...
in documentary filmmaking, resulting in Potter's 1960 documentary Between Two Rivers.
Mitchell then left the BBC to form the first independent production company, Denis Mitchell Films, with friend and colleague Norman Swallow. Mitchell made films for ATV
Associated TeleVision
Associated Television, often referred to as ATV, was a British television company, holder of various licences to broadcast on the ITV network from 24 September 1955 until 00:34 on 1 January 1982...
and Rediffusion
Rediffusion
Rediffusion was a business which distributed radio and TV signals through wired relay networks. The business gave rise to a number of other companies, including Associated-Rediffusion, later known as Rediffusion London, one of the first companies to win a terrestrial ITV franchise in the UK...
, and then in 1964 he and Swallow joined Granada Television
Granada Television
Granada Television is the ITV contractor for North West England. Based in Manchester since its inception, it is the only surviving original ITA franchisee from 1954 and is ITV's most successful....
. For Granada they made the first documentaries to be shot on videotape, which represented a challenge, as it necessitated bulky equipment and was difficult to edit. Nevertheless, in 1964 they made The Entertainers, temporarily banned by the IBA
Independent Broadcasting Authority
The Independent Broadcasting Authority was the regulatory body in the United Kingdom for commercial television - and commercial/independent radio broadcasts...
for a brief shot of a topless dancer, and A Wedding on A Saturday, a memorable evocation of a Northern mining community, which won the Prix Italia that year. As part of their contract at Granada, Mitchell and Swallow executive-produced the series This England. The seies, which documented various aspects of regional English culture, ran from 1965 to 1967, and provided essential training for new directors, such as Dick Fontaine
Dick Fontaine
Dick Fontaine is an English documentary filmmaker, currently head of documentary direction at the National Film and Television School .Fontaine was one of the founders of Granada Television's World in Action series. He has made numerous films on African American music and other closely related...
, Mike Grisgby, Michael Apted
Michael Apted
Michael David Apted, CMG is an English director, producer, writer and actor. He is one of the most prolific British film directors of his generation but is best known for his work on the Up Series of documentaries and the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough.On 29 June 2003 he was elected...
and Mike Newell
Mike Newell (director)
Michael Cormac "Mike" Newell is an English director and producer of motion pictures for the screen and for television. After the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2005, Newell became the third most commercially successful British director in recent years, behind Christopher Nolan...
.
After This England Mitchell's reputation for innovation began to wane (he was by that time in his late fifties), yet he continued to make documentary films on a wide variety of themes for all the major television companies. In 1977 he made his final major work, Never and Always, a study of unchanging rural life in Norfolk, with its seasonal, cylical changes.
Recent revivals
After his death in 1990, there were retrospectives both on BBC TV, and at the National Film Theatre. Morning in the StreetsMorning in the Streets
Morning in the Streets is a BBC television documentary directed by Denis Mitchell and Roy Harris in 1959, for the BBC Northern Film Unit. It was broadcast on 25 March 1959....
was screened in 2007 to mark Liverpool's status as 'Capital of Culture'.
On 25 March 2009, the exact 50th anniversary of the transmission of Morning in the Streets
Morning in the Streets
Morning in the Streets is a BBC television documentary directed by Denis Mitchell and Roy Harris in 1959, for the BBC Northern Film Unit. It was broadcast on 25 March 1959....
, a one-day retrospective was held at Lighthouse, Poole's Centre for the Arts.