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George Albert Smith: Film Experiments 1900
John Barnes continues: “Smith’s first films of this type were made in 1897 and bore the simple title Comic Faces. It showed a man enjoying a glass of beer and an old woman taking snuff. This has been called the first movie close-up. It was certainly not the first ‘screen’ close-up, for similar comic faces were already familiar in magic lantern shows. One of the most popular was The Grimace. An example in the Barnes Collection is truly remarkable in the variety of expressions the painted face is made to undergo by the simple manipulation of a pivoted glass slide." (op cit).The British Film Institute (BFI Screenonline) adds: ”In 1892 Smith acquired the lease to St Ann's Well Garden in Hove. Here, in 1894, he staged a public exhibition of a series of dissolving views, by means of a powerful long-range limelight apparatus. Smith's skilful manipulation of the lantern to produce an effective dissolving view would be very important to his role in the development of film editing from 1898-1900. Cutting between lenses - in effect from slide to slide - enabled lantern stories to deal with changes in time, perspective and location. In a film such as As Seen Through the Telescope (1900), Smith guides the viewer from long shot to close-up to long shot. The smooth and logical transition found in this sequence reveals this connection with the lantern.”
So the basic vocabulary of film - the essential components of what would, within a decade or so, become the building blocks of feature-length filmic narrative - was being invented by magicians, inventors and stage-performers - largely for the spectacular effects these innovations had on paying audiences. Both the Cinema of the Spectacle (Tom Gunning) and the building-blocks of filmic narrative were born right here.
Also in the UK, the electronics engineer Robert W. Paul was busy making copies of Edison’s Kinetoscope - a cumbersome, one-person-viewing movie machine (not yet patented in the UK) - and realised that a projector - throwing an image that many people could see at the same time, would be more efficient and profitable, and developed his own Theatrograph projector