Up the River

1896
Silent
1m

A river tragedy is narrowly averted in this early dramatic scene

This early dramatic scene credited to RW Paul shows a daring rescue after a child falls from a steam launch into a river. It's a promising scenario, but sadly the power of the scene suffers a lot from an ill-chosen camera position. We (just) see the child fall into the water, and we get a sense of the urgency of the situation from the behaviour of the spectators on the bank, our view of the rescue itself is almost entirely obscured.

Still, it's a notable staging post in film's evolution: such missteps were a necessary part of the learning experience for early filmmakers.

Robert Paul: Giant of Early Film

The most prolific filmmaker of the pioneer period of British film

The multi-talented Robert Paul (1869-1943) was the first British filmmaker to project film for a paying audience, in 1896. A contemporary of the Lumiere brothers, Paul had been producing film, in partnership with Birt Acres, for his own brand of Kinetoscope viewer since April 1895. Shortly after, he began producing for his Theatrograph and Animatographe machines, enjoying a long run at the Alhambra in Leicester Square. As an engineer, Paul made a number of significant innovations - such as an intermittent mechanism for efficiently projecting film. But he also made key innovations in film language, such as the first two-shot fiction film, Come Along Do! (1898). To cap it all, he was a shrewd businessman, with an instinctive grasp of audience tastes.