Prehistory (R. W. Paul - The Complete Surviving Films 1895-1908 (DVD))

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Product:	R. W. Paul - The Complete Surviving Films 1895-1908 (DVD)
Date:	22.04.08 (55 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: If you like this kind of thing, this is great

Disadvantages: If you don't, it will leave you unmoved

This is a DVD put out by the BFI, collecting all the surviving work of pioneering British film-maker RW Paul.

One of the best things about film as an art form is that we know when it started and can trace its development from the beginning. This isn't something you can do with many other art forms. Moving pictures were invented sometime in the 1890s, and enough films from 1895 onwards still exist for us to be able to follow the early development of film as people began very gradually to realise what this wacky new invention was capable of. Sadly, the vast majority of silent film is lost forever - film stock disintegrates over time, and very few people considered early film to be worth preserving.

Perhaps unexpectedly, one of the countries that pioneered very early cinema was Britain, and one of the key film-makers of the early era was RW Paul. Films in those days were almost all either basic reportage (stick a camera in the street and film whoever walked past), chase films, or trick films (which used basic special effects to create rather charming little fantastical narratives). And this DVD gives us more than two hours of all of those.

These really aren't like films as we know them today. This was soon enough after the invention of moving photographs that the novelty value alone was enough to keep people amused. So fictional films of the time are incredibly basic and often consist of filmed snippets from plays or music hall acts rather than anything original. Cameras couldn't move easily, so if a performer wanders out of frame then we're often left watching nothing. And of course the age of the films means that absolutely none of them are in anything like pristine condition. Most have a fascinating layer of scratches and other damage lying on top of the pictures, which creates some enjoyable visual effects but also adds to our emotional distance from what we're seeing.

It's striking that it took a long time for the most basic film-making rules to be worked out. One of the films on this DVD is reputed to contain the first ever instance of editing - gluing two pieces of film together to create the illusion of a story taking place in more than one location. Early films are more interested in camera tricks - things appearing and disappearing suddenly, for instance - suggesting that people were unable to see beyond the technology at this stage, and certainly weren't thinking much about how to use it to tell better stories.

Anyway, the films included here were made between 1895 and 1908. Paul was the most prolific film-maker in Britain during this era, so I guess more of his films exist than anyone else's. You'd be hard-pressed to tell them apart from anyone else's, though - early film is pretty homogenous. These are very typical of the various genres of the time.

There are quite a few interminable films of soldiers marching past the camera, militarism being very fashionable in the early years of the last century. Paul filmed parts of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebration and even went to South Africa to film parts of the Boer War (although most of the scenes he filmed there were actually recreations - one included here shows Boers shooting British soldiers, which was a curious choice of subject). There's also a lengthy film about Norwegian whalers, which includes footage of a whale being harpooned and then dismembered which isn't so nice (and goes on *forever*).

There are also action or comical films, and various sentimental genre films. We get a version of a Christmas Carol that's four minutes long. Chase films suffer from the lack of editing - DW Griffith in America was about to figure out that cutting rapidly and frequently between two sets of characters could create tension and urgency, but you won't find anything so ambitious here.

A typical film has a boat going along a river. Someone falls in the water and is rescued. A nice bit of excitement that is marred by the fact that almost all the action takes place off camera, and what little we could have seen is obscured by poorly choreographed actors. The whole thing is about a minute long. Screen acting in those days doesn't resemble what came later - people don't seem to be acting at all, certainly not in the exaggerated way that silent film stars did later. The actors actually seem incredibly un-selfconscious by later standards. Some films are shot on location, others in constructed sets that are basic to say the least (painted backdrops, perhaps with a table or bed in the foreground).

The trick films are probably the best from a modern perspective. There's a great little story about fraudulent spiritualists (which, interestingly, presents its trickery *as* trickery rather than pretending it's real). Disembodied heads and floating skeletons are a staple of these films, and there's one film - 'The ? Motorist' - that takes in space travel, rather like the more famous trick films of Frenchman George Melies. It's safe to say that a modern science fiction story wouldn't have the moxy to have a car driving round and round on Saturn's rings, and I feel that we're poorer for it. One film, The Magic Sword, involving castles and witches and the like, had a special effect that genuinely surprised me, and reminded me of something in Terry Gilliam's Brazil (Gilliam once presented a TV show on the BBC about early cinema).

There are 62 short films on this DVD, so obviously you won't sit down and watch it in one go. There's a good piano accompaniment to them, and a film scholar explains the context of things, both in terms of Paul's career and of British history.

This is certainly a niche offering, which is reflected in the price. BFI DVDs are typically expensive, and this one will set you back about £20. This is aimed very much at film history enthusiasts (or just history enthusiasts, I guess). When I studied this stuff at university there was very little available to the general viewer. Now, thanks to the BFI (and others) there are plenty of early films available. The fact that almost no-one will want to watch them is beside the point. It's lovely that they're there, and whether you just want a glimpse into the past or whether you enjoy tracing the slow development of film as a narrative medium, there's something for you here.

Summary: A BFI anthology of short films from the birth of cinema