The Kiddies' Cakewalk

1903
Silent
2m

Four-year-old girl and boy dance a mean cakewalk

Around 1903, there seems to have been a sudden spike in the popularity of the 'cakewalk', a dance originating in American plantations around the mid-19th century. It was introduced into Europe around 1899 and featured in touring pantomime in Britain in 1900. A spoof by Dan Leno was shoehorned into Blue Beard, the Drury Lane Christmas pantomime of 1901. Children would perform the dance in competitions up and down the country, so perhaps that's how this four-year-old pair came to the attention of filmmaker Robert Paul - although they are so good that they could be a professional 'act' from a theatrical family.

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.