User Reviews

Robert Paul's productions are usually held out as primitives in regards to editing; most of the editing seems to have been concerned with the matter of camera tricks. With this news short, however, we see something a little different. There are six scenes in all, including one sequence in which the Prince and Princess of Wales are preceded by their shadows.

The simple shots of celebrities were falling out of favor and edited news shorts, precursors of newsreels, were coming into existence. The Danish were particularly adept at this sort of short. Although this example does not use any particularly interesting camera work, its compositions show that the cameraman knew what he was doing.

This was a final in a particularly important news story in Britain in the year.

Between November 1905 and March 1906, the Prince and Princess of Wales (later George V and Queen Mary) embarked on a tour of India, which represented the most extensive survey of the sub-continent undertaken by members of the Royal Family. The tour began in Bombay, described by the contemporary observer Theodore Morrison as being 'a city in which, more than anywhere else, Indian society has assumed a Western complexion' (Morrison, 1905, 916). The royal couple then travelled throughout India and also visited Burma. Included in the itinerary was Bengal, which was then witnessing nationalist unrest, prompted by the decision of the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, to partition the state (Morrison, 1905, 916). Morrison describes the tour of the royal couple as being of 'great political importance', arguing that it would help to cement 'loyalty to the Crown' and also 'counteract the secessionist tendency' (Morrison, 1905, 915, 917).… There are also two six-minute Pathé film: The Prince and Princess in India and The Prince Concludes his Tour in India.

One finds also in the same year a British film of a busy street in India (Walturdaw Company) and another (company unknown) of a very dark Indian woman (probably Tamil) washing her baby. This film may perhaps have mildly racist overtones in the manner of similar US films of black women washing babies (ie they never get white). We know from their catalogue that Walturdaw produced several other films in India during the year - A Procession of Lepers, Sacred Bathing, Caste Marks, Scenes at the Mahorrian Festival, The Devil Drivers and Sacred Elephants. A 4-minute film from the year(there is only a fragment currently on youtube) shows a procession of elephants.

The other reviewer is quite right in emphasising the important role of such news-film news coverage (a role that would remain important, with many cinemas dedicated exclusively to the showing of newsreels, right up until the fifties when such coverage became increasingly the province of television.

Paul produced a considerable number of newsfilms (topicalities) and had already filmed in India during the 1902 Durbar. There was, however, nothing in the least bit new about this and it had been the case right from the beginning. In 1896, their first year of operation, the most important films made by the Lumières (they devoted an entire team of cameramen to it) was the coverage of the Coronation of Tsar Nikolai II of Russia (some 13-15 one-minute films) and a large proportion of Lumière films were devoted to such news coverage.

It is true that in the United States, where filming remained studio-bound and where films were still only available via peepshow viewers, the content of films was rather different (and extremely poor quality) but all that changed in the course of 1896-1897 as soon as Edison and Mutoscope found themselves confronted by the imminent arrival of the Lumière operators in the US. United only in their chauvinism, the two companies not only conducted a campaign of legal harassment and dirty tricks against the French company but also very rapidly got their act together with regard both to the introduction of projectors, of a lighter-weight more mobile camera and to the development of better content. Edison tended to concentrate on scenic views (one area in which the Lumières were already expert) but Mutoscope's principal response to the Lumières - an the most successful - was their coverage of the McKinley Presidential election campaign.

If the Lumières had not come to the US. who knows, the natives there might still have been watching naff little films through peepshow viewers in phonograph parlours to this day. Cocorico.