Page 197 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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George Albert Smith: Film Experiments 1900
Much like George Melies, Smith created for himself a career as a stage hypnotist, a psychic and a magic-lantern lecturer in Brighton - the seaside city 60 miles south of London. He was also an inventor, a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, and in the late 1890s, he became a focus figure in the ‘Brighton School’ of early, experimental film-makers that included Arthur Esme Collings, James Williamson and the engineer Alfred Darling. The learned expert in this period of great motion-picture innovation and invention, as we were inventing the technology and the basic grammar of film, is the film historian John Barnes, whose detailed and definitive account The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894-1901 is a treasury of information: “More than half of Smith’s film output for 1900 consisted of what came to be referred to by early film-makers as ‘facials’. These simple films depicted comic actors engaged in situations which were conducive to the wildest forms of facial expression. The actors were filmed in close-up or media close-up so that every movement of the face could be clearly seen by the audience.”
This intimacy and relative immediacy of a film-maker with an audience - perhaps showing ‘facials’ a few days - or even hours - after they were made - is probably the first time that film-makers could immediately gauge the effectiveness (and the comedic/commercial value) of their experiments. Interestingly, the Russian civil-war film-makers (Alexander Medvedkin, Dziga Vertov) devised a similar rapid turn-around from shoot to public projection in their KINO-Agit Trains in the early 1920s (Medvedkin: Kino-Agit Trains 1922). Also you should note the work of Jules Duboscq: Grimatiscope Stereo Image Processing 1870 - Duboscq builds on the work of David Brewster (see Brewster: Kaliedoscope 1816), and introduces a simple key to adjust the lenses so that the user can distort the stereo photograph of a human face. The Brighton School in the UK, like Melies in France, were inventing both the cinema of spectacle and the basic components of the art of film narrative at this time.