Come Along, Do!

1898
Silent
1m

A museum visitor takes an interest in a nude sculpture - to his wife's annoyance - in a sadly incomplete early film comedy

This was one of the earliest films to feature more than one shot, but sadly only survives as a fragment today. In the first shot, a couple sit outside an art gallery, idly eating their lunch. Noticing that others appear to be flocking to the exhibition advertised outside, they decide to follow suit.

Apparently, the second shot featured the man showing a keen interest in a nude statue, until his reverie was interrupted by his wife pulling him away, presumably uttering the film's title in the process.

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.