The Medium Exposed? Or, A Modern Spiritualistic Seance

1906
Silent
6m

Faking the ability to contact the dead proves to be a big mistake for one Edwardian charlatan.

This ingenious six-minute saga sees a gathering of affluent suburban Spiritualists almost duped by a con artist whose elaborate 'séance' goes awry. While his fright-wigged assistant escapes, the phoney medium is manhandled into a trunk, thrown down a hill and paraded along the local high street as a warning to others: woe betide those who feign the power to contact departed loved ones. The RW Paul company was a pioneer of the early 'trick film'; the neat tricks seen here include the lowering of the light and the disembodied ghost.

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.