Rough Sea at Dover

1 Jan 1895
Silent
1m

Waves crash onto a jetty on the Kentish shoreline in one of Britain's earliest surviving films

One of the very oldest surviving British films, Rough Sea at Dover was shot in 1895 and intended for exhibition in peephole kinetoscopes - an early type of film exhibition device which allowed one person at a time to watch moving images through a peephole in its cabinet. Birt Acres, a professional photographer, shot the film with a camera designed and built by RW Paul, based on Thomas Edison's invention (Paul took advantage of Edison's failure to copyright his kinetoscope in Britain).

The film received its premiere (or, to be strictly accurate, its projected premiere in front of an audience) on 14 January 1896 at the Royal Photographic Society in Hanover Street, London - the first public film screening in Britain, a month after the LumiÃ¨re Brothers showed their films in Paris. It seems to have been a success, as projected screenings were subsequently a regular feature of RPS meetings.

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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.