Sirdar's Reception at Guildhall

1 Jan 1898
Silent
1m

Military hero Lord Kitchener is presented with the Freedom of the City of London.

Military hero Lord Kitchener, later the famous face of WWI recruitment, visits the Guildhall to be awarded the Freedom of the City of London. Sirdar was the title given to the British Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Army.

The film, shot for (RW) Paul's Animatograph Works, offers only fleeting glimpses of Lord Kitchener himself: once as he enters (in tall, white-feathered hat) and again as he exits at the very end of the film. These images before and after the ceremony reveal that what might seem like a single-shot film in fact manipulates time using subtle editing.

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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.