The British film industry may have had its ups and downs since but in the pioneer days of cinema the UK stood alongside the USA and France as one of the most important centres of film making. Louis Le Prince shot the earliest known moving images in and around Leeds in 1888, while Bristol-born photographer William Friese-Greene patented his ultimately unsuccessful Chronophotographic movie camera the following year. Robert W Paul and Birt Acres shot the first British film, using a camera pirated from Edison's, early in 1895, about the same time the Lumières began their experiments in Lyon.
Friese-Greene worked on his invention from a studio in Brighton, which a few years later became the centre of a cluster of cinema pioneers, most notably George Albert Smith, who contributed numerous technical, formal and storytelling innovations to the evolving art of film. Though Grandma's Reading Glass might seem simple and innocuous today, it's highly remarkable for its time.
In the beginning films were single scenes shot from the same angle throughout. This is one of the first to have been edited together from several different takes using different camera angles at varying distances from their subjects but made to look like it takes place in a single coherent space and time frame. This is so commonplace today we're unlikely to think twice about it, but it's a big conceptual leap and Smith guides the audience through it in a particularly interesting way.
While his grandmother fiddles with her sewing basket, her grandson borrows her magnifying glass to look at various objects — a watch, a caged bird, a cat, grandma's eye. Each time, the film cuts to a presentation of the object enclosed in a circular mask, clearly intended to represent the view through the glass. The film is sometimes cited as the first to use closeup (though not all the viewed objects are shown in closeup); it's certainly one of the founding documents of the point-of-view (POV) shot, linking the images logically together through the performers' eyelines and actions.
The circular mask or vignette is inherited from magic lantern slides and graphic art where it was also used to frame detailed depictions of faces and smaller objects. It became a regular part of the visual vocabulary of early cinema, developing an animated offshoot, the iris-in and iris-out. For decades after such tricks went out of fashion, masking continued in use, as here, as shorthand for POV shots through restricted apertures — periscopes, binoculars, keyholes (even though the real experience of looking through these things is nothing like the sharp-edged cinema version).
This is also an early example of reflexive film making, reminding us that viewing a film is itself an act of looking. The most striking closeup is grandma's eye: disturbingly separated from the rest of her face, it still looks scary, particularly when hugely magnified on a big screen. Though the character is depicted as nothing more than mildly irritated, the eye startles and seems angry, as if it's just appeared unexpectedly on the other side of a keyhole. Its appearance is almost an act of visual violence, like the screen hitting back.
Later films self-consciously mined reams of dark Freudian scopophilic significance from images of eyes, lenses, mirrors and the act of looking. Smith is more innocent, and doesn't seem to appreciate the eye's power — he leaves us with a view of a cute kitten instead.
Friese-Greene worked on his invention from a studio in Brighton, which a few years later became the centre of a cluster of cinema pioneers, most notably George Albert Smith, who contributed numerous technical, formal and storytelling innovations to the evolving art of film. Though Grandma's Reading Glass might seem simple and innocuous today, it's highly remarkable for its time.
In the beginning films were single scenes shot from the same angle throughout. This is one of the first to have been edited together from several different takes using different camera angles at varying distances from their subjects but made to look like it takes place in a single coherent space and time frame. This is so commonplace today we're unlikely to think twice about it, but it's a big conceptual leap and Smith guides the audience through it in a particularly interesting way.
While his grandmother fiddles with her sewing basket, her grandson borrows her magnifying glass to look at various objects — a watch, a caged bird, a cat, grandma's eye. Each time, the film cuts to a presentation of the object enclosed in a circular mask, clearly intended to represent the view through the glass. The film is sometimes cited as the first to use closeup (though not all the viewed objects are shown in closeup); it's certainly one of the founding documents of the point-of-view (POV) shot, linking the images logically together through the performers' eyelines and actions.
The circular mask or vignette is inherited from magic lantern slides and graphic art where it was also used to frame detailed depictions of faces and smaller objects. It became a regular part of the visual vocabulary of early cinema, developing an animated offshoot, the iris-in and iris-out. For decades after such tricks went out of fashion, masking continued in use, as here, as shorthand for POV shots through restricted apertures — periscopes, binoculars, keyholes (even though the real experience of looking through these things is nothing like the sharp-edged cinema version).
This is also an early example of reflexive film making, reminding us that viewing a film is itself an act of looking. The most striking closeup is grandma's eye: disturbingly separated from the rest of her face, it still looks scary, particularly when hugely magnified on a big screen. Though the character is depicted as nothing more than mildly irritated, the eye startles and seems angry, as if it's just appeared unexpectedly on the other side of a keyhole. Its appearance is almost an act of visual violence, like the screen hitting back.
Later films self-consciously mined reams of dark Freudian scopophilic significance from images of eyes, lenses, mirrors and the act of looking. Smith is more innocent, and doesn't seem to appreciate the eye's power — he leaves us with a view of a cute kitten instead.