Electric company And Hineini challenges Jewish diversity BY GERALD PEARY

Packed with care into barrels, they spent a century orphaned in a cellar in Blackburn, England: the pristine negatives of 800 documentary shorts, 28 hours of film methodically recording public daily life in Great Britain at the turn of the 20th century. Electric Edwardians, which starts this Friday at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, offers a 70-minute sampling of these films, which were restored between 2001 and 2004 by the BBC National Film and Television Archive. A larger selection was offered on British TV in a surprisingly popular three-part series. It was titled The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon, and it celebrated Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, the filmmaking duo behind the non-fiction shorts.

Should we compare these British "actualities" to the earlier ones of the Lumière Brothers in France? Shooting from tripods, as did the Lumières, Mitchell and Kenyon are more skilled cinematographers, their images of people shaped and sculpted like the works of a talented portraitist. They’re also more skilled than the impersonal, work-for-hire Lumière cameramen at finding and isolating the human moment. As a boys’ military procession goes through its in-synch routines before the camera, one lad is caught merrily out of step, smiling mischievously as he screws up, his hat falling from his head and getting placed back on his noggin at a jaunty angle. Oh, you rascal, probably dead for half a century!

To me, there’s something sad and wistful and eerie about watching thousands of the long-gone marching backward from the grave, no longer dust, often directly addressing the camera, smiling and staring at us. Making meaning of it all is up to the viewer, though a bittersweet soundtrack score encourages a more pessimistic reading of the footage. Is this the pathetic, pickled chronicle of human anonymity, pale shadows who breathe and then die without making even a scratch on earth? Or is the footage a fabulous celebration of the quotidian, with the ordinariness of life preserved for immortality, like a gallery of shimmering antique paintings?

There are scenes of formally garbed strollers in parks — women with flowered bonnets, men with top hats — that resonate like Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte. What else can you see? Football and rugby matches, a cricket match, all circa 1905. A peek aboard a Cunard Line passenger ship embarking from Liverpool, with various employees of the boat stopping work to pose for a camera shot. My favorite: the graceful, elongated moving shot from a tram that ends the film, capturing the hubbub of a vacation spot on the British Atlantic. By the sea, by the sea, 1901.

The New Jewish High School of Greater Boston, "New Jew" to its lively student body, prides itself on a multiplicity of viewpoints within a religious context, starting with high-school kids who are Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed studying — and praying in their own way — under one roof. But the avowed open-mindedness was challenged when a brave lesbian student, Shulamit Izen, asked for a Gay/Straight Alliance to be allowed to organize and meet in the school. That’s the tipping point of Irena Fayngold’s absorbing and necessary documentary, Hineini: Coming Out in a Jewish High School, a film so well received at the recent Boston Jewish Film Festival, it precipitated additional screenings at the Museum of Fine Arts. A Happy Hanukkah to Jewish diversity!