1903 – A Daring Daylight Burglary

Directed by: Frank S. Mottershaw

This is one of the pioneers of the chase film genre and is among the first films to use the template of someone being chased escaping the pursuers by getting on a train. It features several outdoor locations, continuity editing, use of depth to convey distance (people running toward or away from the camera), fights and special effects. It is thrilling and shocking – a policeman is thrown off a roof (a substitution splice replaces the actor with a dummy) and a chase ensues through several locations. The film falters at the end when a jarring edit necessitates the assumption that the police officers signaled ahead to others for the conclusion to make sense (a quick scene of police communication before the train arrives would have fixed this). The shots of the train stations are reminiscent of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat / Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896).

Around the same time, another British gentleman, William Haggar, made a chase film known as Desperate Poaching Affray (1903). Both were a major influence on Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) and the American action movie scene.

Bibliography

Brooke, M. (n.d.). ‘Daring Daylight Burglary, A (1903)’, BFI screenonline. Available at: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/443089/index.html [Accessed: 28 January 2022].

IMDb contributors (n.d.). ‘Daylight Burglary (1903)’, IMDb. Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132077/ [Accessed: 28 January 2022].

JEC (2021). ‘A Daring Daylight Burglary (1903)’, A Cinema History. Available at: http://www.acinemahistory.com/2021/02/a-daring-daylight-burglary.html [Accessed: 28 January 2022].

1903 – The Sick Kitten

Directed by: George Albert Smith

This film builds upon the close-up technique introduced in Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900) by assuming audiences understand how to interpret continuity of shots and removing the black overlay intended to signal a particular point-of-view. The training wheels are off! Thus, we are introduced to the setting via a medium shot, get close on the action as the kitten is fed “FISIK” and end the scene with a medium shot as the child doctor concludes his business with a polite salutation.

While The Sick Kitten is noted as being released 1903, it is quite possibly a remake or an abridged version of The Little Doctor (1901) which is currently considered a lost film. Therefore, the origins of this technique could be even earlier.

It seems that after The Boxing Cats (1984), another cat video crops up in our journey though film history, this time with the addition of little kids being silly (dressed in oversized clothing and pretending to be adults) – another element of contemporary fascination. It seems the things we consider cute and silly haven’t changed all that much over the years.

Bibliography

Brooke, M. (n.d.). ‘The Sick Kitten (1903)’, BFI screenonline. Available at: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/443164/index.html [Accessed: 27 January 2022].

IMDb contributors (n.d.). ‘The Sick Kitten (1903)’, IMDb. Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000469/ [Accessed: 27 January 2022].

Kramer, F. (2018). ‘The Sick Kitten (1903) A Silent Film Review’, Movies Silently, 2 September. Available at: https://moviessilently.com/2018/09/02/the-sick-kitten-1903-a-silent-film-review/ [Accessed: 27 January 2022].