James Kenyon
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James Kenyon (1850–6 February 1925) was a businessman and pioneer of cinematography in Blackburn, Lancashire, England.
Having built a career in "penny in the slot machines" (which may have included Kinetoscopes) he went into partnership with Sagar Mitchell in 1897 to found the firm of Mitchell and Kenyon in Blackburn. Under the trade name of Norden, the company was one of the largest film producers in the United Kingdom in the 1900s, producing a mixture of "topicals" (films of street scenes, sporting events, rides through towns on the top of trams, and ordinary life, which were extremely popular as people loved to see moving pictures of themselves), fiction, and fake war films.
Their market faded after 1910 and their last surviving films are from the 1911—1913 period. The company continued to be listed under both men's ownership until 1915 when James Kenyon retired to Southport. The partnership was formally dissolved in 1922, and Kenyon died in 1925. Sagar Mitchell lived to the age of 85, and died on 2 October 1952.
They were known as minor contributors to film development, for the fake Boer war films and for 65 fiction films preserved in The Cinema Museum in London. Then in 1994, during demolition work at Mitchell and Kenyon's premises in Northgate, three large sealed steel drums were discovered in the basement. On examination, the drums were discovered to contain the original nitrate negatives of over 800 Mitchell and Kenyon films in a remarkably good state of preservation. After preservation work by the British Film Institute, they now form part of the National Film and Television Archive, where they extended the holdings of films of the 1900-1913 period by 20%, giving a new and fresh view of Edwardian England and an important resource for historians.
For more information on their film work and on the rediscovery of the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection see Mitchell and Kenyon.
