The Fatal Hand
- 1907
A comic traffic incident
This elaboration of the early film 'motor accident' mini-genre was filmed in the streets near RW Paul's Muswell Hill studio. It's reminiscent of earlier films such as Hepworth's How to Stop a Motor Car (1902) or his even earlier Explosion of a Motor Car (1900), in which people run over by vehicles are replaced by dummies for comic effect. Paul's film, though, has more characters and a more fully realised storyline. Paul would go on to make an even more elaborate and imaginative multi-scene film, The ? Motorist, in 1906.
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.