PBS: Saturday 9 March at 3.50pm
The birth of photography coincided, more or less, with the start of Victoria’s reign. The sub- sequent invention of the motion picture cam- era would make that era the first to leave not only a photographic legacy, but a cinematic one.
With input from historians, filmmakers and authors, this documentary offers a fresh perspective on a bygone world familiar from count- less period dramas, with the careful addition of colour helping to lend the footage a vivid immediacy.
Not only recording big events, but capturing Victorians going about their lives, these films bely the stiff poses of the photographic studio and testify that, although the past may be a foreign country in some respects, these were people not so unlike ourselves.
