The Extraordinary Waiter

1 Jan 1902
Silent
1m

Alarming so-called 'comedy' featuring an irate tourist and a recalcitrant waiter in blackface

This RW Paul film from 1902 describes itself thus: 'Scene at a Swiss Railway station. A Tourist being served in the refreshment room by a Negro waiter who will not leave the table. The Tourist picks up his stick and knocks the man's head off, which rises up again. The Tourist then knocks the man down, and thinks he's done for him but to his surprise the Waiter comes to life again. An exceedingly funny picture.' Attitudes and tastes change, and this film now looks not just unfunny, but unambiguously and grotesquely racist.

Like The Robber and the Jew (1908) and a handful of other surviving films, it's a reminder that while there's a great deal to celebrate in early British film, it has its objectionable side, too.

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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.