Christy Edwall on Brighton’s pioneering Victorian filmmaker George Albert Smith.
Autumn, 1882. Two men hold hands. One of them, Douglas Blackburn, is shown a drawing of a bird. It has a long hard V for a beak, two wings held close to its swollen body, and flipper-feet. The other man, George Albert Smith, is not shown the picture. Instead, eyes closed, he begins to draw. He is watched by the committee with great interest as he makes a line, veering from the bottom corner of the page to the top and down again. Smith’s drawing looks like a fish.
Blackburn is shown the picture again. The men continue to hold hands and say nothing. This time, Smith works more purposefully. The image that emerges is definitely a bird. When he’s finished and the pictures are placed side by side, there is a clear kinship between them: like the original image, Smith’s drawing shows a prominent V-beak. The committee is delighted. They try Smith and Blackburn again, sometimes with a blindfold, sometimes without, to see if the men can prove once more what others think impossible: that an image can be projected from one mind into another. That thought transference is real.
This committee, the Society of Psychical Research, founded by prominent scientists in Cambridge, was only one manifestation of the era’s hunger for contact with the supernatural. The end of the 19th century gave rise to theosophists and ghosthunters, mesmerists and mediums, seances, pagan revivals and secret societies. Crowds devoured tales of extraordinary encounters: Jekyll and Hyde, Dracula.
The ebbing of faith in traditional religious structures and institutions had lead to a desire to make contact with the numinous, as well as a scientific interest in testing and theorising unexplained phenomena.
In short, the audience was ripe for the plucking. Blackburn later explained how he and Smith had pulled off the trick. They had developed a system between them by which Blackburn would break down an image into grids, as artists often do in order to establish their subject’s proportions. Working systematically through the grid, Blackburn would communicate its contents to Smith through hand-squeezing, small movements, and breathing.
You couldn’t really blame them: Blackburn and Smith were showmen by training, stage hypnotists who made a name for themselves performing for Brighton’s seasonal visitors.
It can be tempting to think of the past as less populated, but if you go by James Williamson’s short film, Early Fashions on Brighton Pier (1898), a summer’s day in Brighton at the end of the century meant hordes of tightly-packed promenaders: small-waisted women holding up parasols, children in starched white dresses, boys in waistcoats having a cheeky cig, men pushing prams with pipes in their mouths. Everyone stares at the camera.
By 1898, George Albert Smith was making a name for himself in the cinema business. He had acquired the lease to St Ann’s Well Gardens and set up a darkroom and a studio, from which he had produced several short silent films.
The Society for Psychical Research business had turned out badly. For a time, Smith had served as the secretary for SPR member Edmund Gurney. But after the general sidelining of the Blackburn-Smith experiments, which American scholars of mental phenomena had criticised for its lack of scientific rigour, Gurney had been found dead at the Albion Hotel in Brighton of an overdose of chloroform.
But Smith hadn’t left the business of thought transference behind. After all, what is cinema if not the projection of a picture from one imagination to another? Admittedly, the thoughts projected in his early films were not particularly profound. In The Miller and the Sweep (1897), two men have an energetic bust-up against the backdrop of a mill, largely for the visual pleasure of seeing the sweep turn white from the miller’s flour, and the miller turn black from the sweep’s soot. The film ends with the sweep ploughing the miller into the ground where they scrap in the corner of the frame, before being chased away by a crowd in flying skirts and pinafores.
But Smith’s films quickly grew more sophisticated. The X-rays, made in the same year as The Miller and the Sweep, features a courting couple, played by actors who appear in many of Smith’s films: his wife, Laura Bayley, and the comic actor, Tom Green. There is so much that comes between lovers in 1897: modesty, high pleated sleeves, a high collar, a lace bodice, a large hat, the ubiquitous parasol. When a lugubrious man with a scruffy beard appears, carrying a large ‘machine’ labelled ‘X RAYS’, a sly cut reveals the lovers as a pair of gesticulating skeletons.
Film is never good at interiority (the voice-over is almost always a confession of failure). But Smith’s X-Rays plays with the idea of what might lie beneath the surface. If flirting is all about trying to uncover layers of resistance, then the ultimate revelation is not sex but death. In Smith’s film, the female skeleton continues vainly to hold up the skeleton of her parasol, while the male skeleton ardently kisses and shakes her hand. The message? All flesh is grass. When the X-Ray machine is switched off, it seems the suitor has gone too far. The woman stands in outrage, swats him across the face, and exits the shot. Memento mori as the ultimate voyeurism.
Smith plays with the idea of voyeurism again in As Seen Through a Telescope (1900), in which a man with a telescope lingers on a woman’s shapely ankle as she allows her companion to tie her shoe. The drama lies in the slow raising and lowering of the hem of the woman’s skirts. The French remake, Ferdinand Zecca’s Par le trou de serrure (1901), is far less subtle. By having the peeping Tom peering through a hotel keyhole rather than the telescope, Zecca’s film is also less interested in forefronting the power and possibility of a lens.
Watching old films, like Smith’s, means that you have to look carefully to recover its early radicalism: here, the cuts between wide shots and close-ups. Modern viewers are sophisticated consumers of a variety of shots, shuffled and interchanged at vertiginous speed. (Going by the speed of the frames, the makers of children’s television are all on coke.) To appreciate Smith’s reputation as a pioneering innovator of editing techniques, you have to slow down and look beneath the apparent naivety of his films. Even in his less interesting works one finds Smith anticipating major trends in visual culture. Santa Claus (1898) has been hailed as Father Christmas’ screen debut; Sick Kitten (1903) proves that cat videos have always been with us.
If the adult performances are a little silly, this is to be expected from actors trained in pantomime and music hall routines. Tom Green’s ‘face role’ in Old Man Drinking a Glass of Beer (1898) has more than a touch of Dickens about it, although he loses me with his commitment to nose thumbing at fellow drinkers just out of shot. Behind Smith’s gurning faces, one finds wit and ingenuity. In Mary Jane’s Mishap (1903), a slatternly housemaid (whose run-in with shoe polish seems to anticipate Charlie Chaplin’s toothbrush moustache) blows herself up along with the house when she heats a stove with glugs of paraffin. She disappears in a puff of smoke, shooting out of the chimney, only to rise again as a super-imposed spectre in search of her paraffin can. Here, as in Smith’s early work for the Society of Psychical Research, ghosts are an opportunity for special effects.
His film Spiders on a Web (1900) has been offered as one of the earliest examples of a nature documentary. In the film, which is 17 seconds long, two spiders in a confined space edge around each other before they start to struggle for a foothold – a visual metaphor for the film industry at the turn of the century.
Every movement needs a founder. Several men have been hailed as the father of British cinema – Robert W Paul, William Friese-Greene – but what is clear is the overlapping fertility of the moment, the general excitement and shared sense of experiment. Contemporary society’s narrative preference for ‘firsts’ and ‘originals’ doesn’t always serve us in understanding the collaborations, borrowings, and rivalries which led to the creation of a scene or movement, particularly in an age of loose international copyright.
t’s clear that Paul’s films, which were shown in Brighton in 1896-7, were a creative catalyst for Smith. Together with the chemist James Williamson – later the filmmaker of Early Fashions on Brighton Pier – he got his hands on a camera. Smith quickly became well-connected, corresponding with the French filmmaker Georges Méliès, with whom he later collaborated on a pre-enactment of the coronation of Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark.
The consequence of looking doggedly for a single originating figure has meant that George Albert Smith is not as well known as he should be. There’s a blue plaque on his house at 18 Chanctonbury Road in Seven Dials, where he spent his last years, and his name continues to appear every now and then at the end of internet rabbit holes. Smith is known to specialists, and to enthusiasts who come across his name on MUBI and BFI, but he lacks the general name-recognition he deserves.
I’d argue that it’s Smith’s meta-cinematic winks that raise him from an enthusiastic showman to an artist. The X-Ray machine and the telescope are variations on the camera lens. Smith may not have been much of an inventor of instruments, like Paul or Williamson, but he understood the camera’s capacity for playing with perception. In one of his most sophisticated films, Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900), a boy looks through a magnifying lens at a newspaper, the mechanism of his watch, a bird in a cage, a cat, and his grandmother’s revolving eye. Each close-up is a bright moving circle on a dark screen. Unlike Mary Jane’s Mishap, there is no narrative beyond the boy’s curiosity, and the formal pleasure of moving between medium shot and close up. This innovative editing – together with the point of view shot – is why the BFI has praised the film for enabling ‘film grammar [to take] a huge step forward’.
Smith’s final legacy was as the inventor of the first commercially successful colour motion picture process, Kinemacolor, first shown to the public in 1909. Little Lord Fauntleroy was filmed in Kinemacolor, as was Edward VII’s funeral. The process worked by projecting frames in alternating filters of red and green, and the result is startlingly garish, like the rediscovery of colour on Greek sculpture. Garish but alive.
This distinction came with a downfall. William Friese-Greene sued Smith over the patent for colour film, and Smith’s loss at the Royal Courts of Justice marked the decline of his career. Spiders on a web. There is very little information on how the filmmaker lived between the revocation of his Kinemacolor patent in 1915 and his death in 1959. How much did his ‘rediscovery’ mean to him in the 1940s, or being elected a Fellow of the British Film Academy at the age of 91?
From Brighton Pier to a society of occultists, from magic lantern shows to film studios, Smith’s varied life was marked by an interest in playing with the uses and pleasures of illusion. One wonders what illusions amused, frustrated, or sustained him in his final years. Was he the sort of man to go back over his life, with its successes and injustices: the tricks he had played on others, the tricks others had played on him? If so, he might have remembered his film Let Me Dream Again (1900), in which a man flirts with a pretty woman in a Pierrot costume, only for the camera to blur as he wakes up in bed to an old shrewish wife.
Who wants reality? Give us the reel again.
The Film Factory, an exhibition celebrating films made by George and Laura, is on at The Garden Cafe, St Ann’s Well Gardens (Oct 1–Nov 30). It includes a ‘walk & talk’ and special screening. Hove Museum has also created an immersive space and hands-on experience, Play Back Forward, that explores the city’s film heritage (Oct 4–April 12): brightonmuseums.org.uk. Watch the films on YouTube.