Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee - Paul - York Road - Front of Procession

1897
Silent

Carriages full of well-heeled guests continue in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee procession, filmed for RW Paul.

This film shows several open landaus (luxury convertible carriages) continue in the Jubilee procession as it moved along York Road on the south side of the Thames. Filmed on behalf of RW Paul, it records the procession after the ceremony at St Paul's. The Queen's eight-horse carriage was the star of the show, but these carriages were worth filming too. However comfortable they might look, their passengers had been riding for several hours by this point and the open parasols suggest that the afternoon was starting to heat up.

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.