A man looks through a telescope... at a woman's ankles.
It's a naughty film for 1900, but what's really shocking is the use of cutting and close-up to tell a story. George Albert Smith is largely unremembered in the history of cinema, but he's one of those guys who figured out how to do something right and then everyone went about their business as if he had never existed, until some one actually checked the record. Mendeleyev springs to mind.
What Smith did was figure out the basics of modern film grammar, the elements of a close-up and cutting, working from 1898 through 1904, then went on to do other things in cooperation with his buddy Charles Urban.... and seems to have vanished from film history. After him, other film-makers went about making films in exactly the same old way as before. Melies had his own grammar, Edwin S. Porter and associate developed their own grammar at Edison, but everyone else assumed that the movie screen was just like the stage, and you wanted to be seated in the front row, center. Just take less time with the scene changes.
Unless, as I suspect, while D.W. Griffith was looking through old movies at the Biograph warehouse -- Biograph had been the American distributor for Smith's pictures -- he had chanced on them and realized that they matched some stage techniques of lighting alternate parts of the stage to show action that was happening simultaneously. And sixteen other things that most people had forgotten.
I'd like to think so.
It's a naughty film for 1900, but what's really shocking is the use of cutting and close-up to tell a story. George Albert Smith is largely unremembered in the history of cinema, but he's one of those guys who figured out how to do something right and then everyone went about their business as if he had never existed, until some one actually checked the record. Mendeleyev springs to mind.
What Smith did was figure out the basics of modern film grammar, the elements of a close-up and cutting, working from 1898 through 1904, then went on to do other things in cooperation with his buddy Charles Urban.... and seems to have vanished from film history. After him, other film-makers went about making films in exactly the same old way as before. Melies had his own grammar, Edwin S. Porter and associate developed their own grammar at Edison, but everyone else assumed that the movie screen was just like the stage, and you wanted to be seated in the front row, center. Just take less time with the scene changes.
Unless, as I suspect, while D.W. Griffith was looking through old movies at the Biograph warehouse -- Biograph had been the American distributor for Smith's pictures -- he had chanced on them and realized that they matched some stage techniques of lighting alternate parts of the stage to show action that was happening simultaneously. And sixteen other things that most people had forgotten.
I'd like to think so.