Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee Paul (St Paul's: South 4)

1 Jan 1897
Silent

The moment preceding the arrival of the Queen's Carriage

Although it's almost identical to another piece of film showing this moment of the Jubilee (shot by the same camera), this scrap of celluloid, probably an early print from RW Paul's Animatograph Company sent to the colonies soon after the Jubilee, arrived back in England all the way from Canada. This journey is testament not only to the breadth of the Empire at the time (reflected in the number of colonial troops visible), but also of the scope of cinema as a medium of communication.

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From the collection

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.