Review of As Seen Through a Telescope

I watched this film on a DVD that was rammed with short films from the period. I didn't watch all of them as the main problem with these type of things that their value is more in their historical novelty value rather than entertainment. So to watch them you do need to be put in the correct context so that you can keep this in mind and not watch it with modern eyes. With the Primitives & Pioneers DVD collection though you get nothing to help you out, literally the films are played one after the other (the main menu option is "play all") for several hours. With this it is hard to understand their relevance and as an educational tool it falls down as it leaves the viewer to fend for themselves, which I'm sure is fine for some viewers but certainly not the majority. What it means is that the DVD saves you searching the web for the films individually by putting them all in one place – but that's about it.

In Let Me Dream Again, George Smith showed us what a "dream sequence" looked like and in Grandma's Reading Glass he played with point of view presentation, which is again what he does here. We have the same effect used to let us see what a man is looking at down a telescope. Here though the material makes it worth a look in itself because it is quite amusing as the man gets his comeuppance for looking at the woman's lower leg (racy for the time I imagine). To me this is what makes it worth seeing more than the other film because the material is stronger even if the technical experimentation is the same.