Denis Mitchell (filmmaker)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Denis Mitchell (11 August 1911 – 1990) was a British documentary filmmaker, known for his radio and television documentaries.[1] 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.[2]
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 RADA pursuing an 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 Noël Coward.[3]
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 the equipment 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 novelty but a most important new means of communication."[3]
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 Features Department, alongside such poetic talent as Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas.
After a brief period in the Features Department in London, Mitchell joined the BBC North Region in Manchester in 1950, becoming a 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 musicians including Alan Lomax, Ewan MacColl and Big Bill Broonzy, Mitchell initiated the occasional series, People Talking, which ran between 1953 and 1958. These programmes were based on the lives and words of ordinary people, forsaking narration and commentary. The routine manner by which the working classes were then represented was usually 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 many hours of unscripted and spontaneous speech, which he then edited into radio features.[4]
