The Twins' Tea Party

1896
Silent
1m

These two little lovelies were captured on screen by RW Paul and were the hit of his 1896 Alhambra show.

The behaviour of small humans hasn't changed much in 120 years; they are very cute. Here, the simple set directs our attention to the actions of the girls, one of whom is being bossy and hits the other but then kisses her better. Like RW Paul's other 1896 films, this one was likely shot on the roof of the Alhambra music hall.

The film was much copied by other filmmakers including Paul himself who remade it in 1898 due to its popularity. He may have been inspired by the LumiÃ¨res' 1896 film of their baby and they may have been inspired in turn by his, as they released a similar film in 1898 with toddlers in high chairs eating breakfast (they added a kitten). Success was always imitated in early film.

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.