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Comic Costume Race

1 Jan 1896
Silent
1m

Plenty of laughs to be had as these Victorian clowns attempt to run a charity race - if they can get their wigs on

In this sprint of a movie from British film pioneer Robert W Paul, athletes at the music hall sports day scramble to get togged up in clown outfits before they can run their race. The camera's positioning makes it clear that the spectacle is not the race itself, but the costumes. In fact, it's not the costumes but the sight of the men frantically dressing themselves at top speed that provides the laughs. The sports day was a charity event, held at Herne Hill in south London, on 14 July 1896.

Robert W Paul was one of Britain's earliest filmmakers, who pioneered many new techniques. Paul was a successful instrument-maker by trade and became the co-inventor of the country's first moving-picture camera in 1896. He built a studio in London's Muswell Hill in 1898 and continued to make films there until around 1910, when he turned his focus back to instruments and military technology.

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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.