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Unidentified Marching Soldiers (c.1900)

Washed-out images of a military parade, just saved from the dustbin of history.

Non-Fiction 1900 1 mins Silent

Overview

These ghostly images of waving, cloth-capped boys and brass-buttoned soldiers offer few clues to either the location or the participants. The boys clamour to appear on camera, but their faces lose their expression in the white. The almost-lost, overexposed images are a poignant reminder of film's fragility, proving how lucky we are to have so many of Mitchell and Kenyon's films intact.

The kilted bagpipers leading the march suggest that this might be a Scottish regiment. It's likely, too, that like most of the other military parades and marches in the Mitchell and Kenyon collection, these soldiers were either leaving for active service in South Africa, or returning at the end of their tour - dating the film to sometime between 1900 and 1902. We can't be sure that the excited boys in the first shot were filmed at the same time, although the two shots were found joined together on a single roll of film.

Genres

Non-Fiction

Country

United Kingdom

Language

No Dialogue with English subtitles

Subjects

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