Breakers

1896
Silent
1m

A handful of passers-by watch waves breaking gently onto a shore

This was one of a number of films made to exploit the filmic possibilities of flowing water in the wake of the popular appeal of Rough Sea at Dover (1895). It's believed to have been shot in 1896, possibly in Spain or Portugal, by Henry William Short, a cinematographer-inventor whose films were distributed by the more celebrated pioneer RW Paul.

A friend of both Paul and his former colleague Birt Acres, Short is credited by film historian John Barnes as a vital catalyst in the development of the cinema, particularly for introducing like-minded people to each other (including Acres and Paul).

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.