The Derby

1896-06-03
Silent
1m

A pioneering example of filmed news: from Epsom to the screen in record time

This pioneering film stands as one of the very first examples of filmed news - rushed to the screen just a day after the events it captured. RW Paul's partner Birt Acres had been at Epsom a year earlier for the 1895 Derby, but by this time the two had gone their separate ways. Paul's increasingly professionalised operation rose to the challenge of not only shooting the race, but processing the film overnight, in time to present it to paying audiences at his regular public screenings in London's West End (at the Alhambra Theatre of Varieties in Leicester Square and the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly) on Thursday 4 June 1896.

The race was won by Persimmon, owned by the Prince of Wales.

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.