The Training of Infantry

1900
Silent
1m

Fragment of an epic, starring the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment

The King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment bestrides the plains. This precious half a minute is all that remains of a veritable Victorian docu-epic. Film pioneer RW Paul premiered his whopping two hour long patriotic portrait of the British army in September 1900 at the Alhambra Theatre, Leicester Square.

The programme was screened in two parts divided into discrete sections taking viewers from enrolment through training and camp life to various regiments on polished show. All is now lost save this vivid fragment leaving us some sense of what a spectacular viewing experience it must have been.

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.