A 1896 Fairground Programme - The George Williams Collection

A 1896 Fairground Programme - The George Williams Collection

Your opinion of this film

Comments

[Brendan C.Burchill]

As noted in the "brief history" section of this website, "A 1896 Fairground Program - The George Williams Collection" is a series of 11 short films made by the film pioneers Birt Acres and the filmmakers at the Thomas Edison Company. These are interesting early films: all of them are very short, but they show the varieties of topics being covered by Anglo-American filmmakers in the first three or four years of commercial film production (circa 1893-1896).

In my opinion, the most interesting subjects in this set are two films that hint at the possibilities of fictional film making. Hints of storytelling cinema can be found in "The Arrest of a Pickpocket," Birt Acres' film of 1895, and "The New Barroom Scene," an Edison Company film of the same year. Both films show signs of contexts where violent action can be made to seem more realistic and beliveable.

Both films have realistic settings. The walls of the sets are covered with posters and graffitti, or realistic furniture is present to suggest that these are actual barrooms or alleyways, where fights might actually take place.

In addition, the substance of these films is more complicated than the boxing films that are present in this collection. Whereas the violence of a boxing match is inherent to that kind of sport, the fights in "The Arrest of a Pickpocket" and "The New Barroom Scene" have a pretext: there is more reason to the men's hostility than just "being in the ring."

The other films in this series are also quite nice in their own right. There are adaptations of "Sandow" and "Carmencita." These films are well-known Edison Company productions, but the versions presented in this series appear to be different from other copies available for public viewing.

Another fine subject is a short comedy sketch from Birt Acres, in which a woman repeatedly fall out of a boat and has to be rescued by a somewhat inept male recuer. I speculate that this films is a variation on the Lumiere Brothers' films "A Boat Leaving Port" and "Watering the Gardener", although I suppose that heavy splashing in the ocean could have been loosely patterned after the Edison Company's "The Lone Fisherman." Then, who can reliably trace the patterns of influence that exist in films of this incredibly early vintage?

The last film that I would like to single out for praise is another Birt Acres' production, tenatively identified as "Skipping Dogs" (1895). The film shows an animal trainer making a small dig jump through two hoops. He then sends the dog off stage, and it returns dressed in a serpentine dancers' outfit and proceeds to dance on its hindlegs. Very, very funny! I am not a great fan of comedies where animals are dressed in human clothes, but I cannot resist such a clever parody of the serpentine dance, one of early cinema's finest genres. And, for what it is worth, this film has no story; it is nothing but a carnivalesque routine filmed against a white wall.

"A 1896 Fairground Program - The George Williams Collection" is nice, brief summary of some of early cinema's most characteristic genres. The program shows how early film makers could combine and reshape the "cinema of attractions" to make surprisingly clever films. It also shows some early prototypes of storytelling on film, where events are staged before a camera to create a build up to a climatic set of events.

[Mark Newman]

Thank God for Brendan's great description. Watching I thought, "If I went back in time and sat in a theater watching any of these, I'd have to wait until the rest of the audience laughed so I'd know when to laugh." Because while students of early film understand what's going on, I usually don't. But that's ok, isn't it? I feel like a being from another world --- or another time. Some things are obvious: I get the boxing. I even picked the winner in the first bout (I silently chided the opponent,"You don't just PUSH with your gloves, you HIT." Which the other guy, who won, was doing.) The idea of people seeing these films, or films like them, for the first time, really is like a view back in time. I would love to see a shot of the audience as one of these films played on a split screen so I can see what they react to and how.