The Cheese Mites; Or, Lilliputians in a London Restaurant

1901
Silent
1m

Discovering an infestation in a restaurant has never been as much fun as in this early trick film

Laughter and thigh slapping might not be the usual reaction on discovering your ploughman's lunch is infested with mites. But they're not all as delightful as these little fellows. Walter Booth worked as a stage magician before entering film, and combined visionary ideas and neat trickery to create impossible fantasies on screen.

TRICK. A man, sitting at a restaurant table, orders and drinks a beer. A miniature figure of a boy appears on his beer glass, then two more, a boy and a girl, appear from a large round cheese. The two boys rough and tumble together, while the man laughs heartily.

Inventing Film Language

As with any new technology, it was film’s early adopters whose innovations and discoveries began to map out what is possible.

The first filmmakers had a lot to learn, but they learnt quickly, driven by their own creative ambitions and by audiences' hunger for novelty. Most of the techniques we know today were in place by the end of the Victorian period.

It was the Victorian pioneers who developed the essential building blocks of film; close-ups, pans and travelling shots; editing and principles of continuity. And their ambition spurred them to innovate numerous tricks and effects, from jump-cuts, to double-exposure and even split screen. Generations of later filmmakers would refine these methods, but the groundwork had already been done.