Scrooge; Or, Marley's Ghost

1 Jan 1901
Silent
10m

Debut film outing for Dickens' Yuletide classic

This first filmed version of Dickens' beloved story is packed with charm. In common with other filmed literary works or this time, it's a heavily condensed 'scenes from the book' tableau rather than a full-scale adaptation. For contemporary audiences, the pleasures lay in seeing familiar scenes and characters brought to life, and from the ingenuity of the visualisations. Sadly, the only known surviving copy, preserved by the BFI National Archive, is missing its ending, leaving us to fall back on our memory of the villain's contrition.

There's some neat double-exposure effects - particularly when the head of Jacob Marley, Scrooge's late business partner, appears on the miser's door knocker - courtesy of director Walter Booth, a former stage magician and 'trick film' specialist. In Booth's version, a be-sheeted ghost of Marley replaces Dickens' three Christmas ghosts - an approach probably borrowed from a popular stage adaptation of the day. This was long believed to be the earliest filmed adaptation of a Dickens work, until the 2011 rediscovery of the Bleak House-inspired The Death of Poor Joe (c.1900).

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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.