Jean-Luc Godard once observed that, with the passing of time, the fantasy films of Georges Méliès have become actualities, now that man has in fact made a voyage to the moon, while the actualities of the Lumière Brothers have become fantasies, since they record lost worlds to which we can never return, as mythological now as Oz.
I thought of this while watching Electric Edwardians, the Milestone DVD of Mitchell & Kenyon actualities of Edwardian Britain. I must say I was blown away. It's the most gorgeous collection of cinematic images outside of Intolerance or Sunrise or Welles's Falstaff, lyrical and deeply moving.
With the possible exception of a few infants who lived to a great age, all the people in these films are dead. As a commentator on the DVD observes, the young boys in the films were part of a generation that would be swept into oblivion long before their time by the mass carnage of the Great War a decade or so later. The bustling street life that most attracted Mitchell & Kenyon becomes for us now a memento mori, incredibly sweet and sad.
I can't imagine that anyone who loves movies and owns a DVD player wouldn't want to have this DVD and to watch the films on it over and over again. They may constitute a kind of unconscious art, but it's art of a very high order.