The Countryman and the Cinematograph

1901
Silent
1m

A country yokel gets a shock in an early example of a 'film within a film'.

A country yokel confuses film and reality in one of the first examples of the 'film within a film' device - and one of an intriguing handful of early films to draw attention to the properties of film itself. This RW Paul comedy is in fact the only surviving section of a longer film, in which the yokel responds to projected images of, respectively, a dancer, the approaching train seen here, and finally himself caught in a romantic clinch with a dairy maid.

The surviving sequence clearly alludes to the reactions reported at public screenings of the Lumiere Brothers' 1896 film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, when the projected images of an approaching engine apparently caused spectators to panic. However, historians have suggested such reports may have been mythical or exaggerated.

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.