Paul Merton's Weird and Wonderful World of Early Cinema

Imagine a world without moving pictures.

Cinema began in 1895.

Moving pictures projected onto a big screen.

Among the very first movies shown was this,

the world's first screen comedy.

The boy stands on the hosepipe, blocking the flow of water.

When he removes his foot...

A running hosepipe on stage would ruin the scenery

or soak the audience but on film it's not a problem.

It's...It's only a problem

if you're the person on film that's being soaked.

The first special effects in the movies

was running the film backwards.

If you watch a film like Demolishing A Wall,

you see the action backwards and you see things

that no human being has ever seen before.

I think it's going to rain!

Simple, but effective.

On December the 28th 1895,

the Lumiere brothers demonstrated their invention of motion pictures

for the very first time in this room.

They hung up a cloth screen, they put a projector in a stall.

100 chairs were optimistically laid out. In fact, 33 people attended.

The press had been invited, but didn't turn up.

But word of mouth was so strong that within a few days

2,000 people were outside this building trying to get in.

Before cinema we had machines where we looked into a little aperture,

turned a handle and saw moving images

but the first time they were shown on a cinema screen

was in 1895 in Paris.

And we're going to see now the very first film,

that these people saw in Paris, that they were startled by.

So this is all it is at this stage,

but this is what absolutely astonished people

because, to us, it's just a simple shot

of people not looking at a camera, just coming out.

You'll see a dog in a minute that livens it up.

He's the best thing in it. There he is!

He's your actual first film star. He's the star of this picture.

The rest is just people walking.

To us, now, it doesn't seem to be even worthy of comment

but at the time people were absolutely astonished by this.

So that was basically the very first film that was shown.

The next film, this is A Train Coming Into A Station.

This film I suppose is probably the first sensational film

in the history of cinema.

People were terrified, particularly people

sitting where you are, that side of the cinema there.

Let's run A Train Coming Into A Station.

So it's round about this point that people over there

just started to get a bit worried

and apparently people did scream and shout

because they did think they were going to get run over

by a silent, two-dimensional black and white train.

That moment of horror was satirised in this British comedy from 1901.

The Country Man is scared by a moving image

in a way that he wouldn't haven't been scared by a photograph.

A photograph was a very exciting thing, but it was static.

If you moved you became a blur.

Oooh, nearly went off then.

In very early photographs of this period

we catch bizarre images - part human, part ghost,

flashing across monochrome landscapes.

This is very nearly a horse.

Theatre audiences in the 19th century

enjoyed magic lantern shows like these.

This is a zoetrope.

In 1872, Eadweard Muybridge was asked to settle a bet

one way or the other.

At any point in a horse's gallop, are all four legs off the ground?

Five years later, in 1877, Muybridge settled the bet

by setting up a system of 12 separate stills cameras,

spaced 21 inches apart.

Each camera ran on trip wire that was triggered by the horse's hooves.

Here a succession of photographs gives the impression of movement,

the very basis of film.

This early experiment was delayed by the fact

that Muybridge shot his wife's lover dead,

but was acquitted due to justifiable homicide.

The Lumiere brothers were just two of many people

working on the principle of projecting moving photographs.

Both in Europe and America, inventors were separately

and simultaneously racing towards the invention of cinema.

In 1891 the American inventor Thomas Edison

had perfected the Kinetoscope.

A year later, in 1892, Emile Reynaud projected the first animated film

on his Praxinoscope.

In England, two pioneers Robert W Paul and Birt Acres

had invented the first British 35mm camera in 1895.

Robert W Paul demonstrated his projector, the Theatrograph,

on 21st February 1896, the same day that the Lumieres' system

was displayed in London.

His most successful early film was The Derby,

shot four months later in June 1896.

When Robert W Paul showed his film the day after the race

at two music halls it caused a sensation.

It is one of the earliest examples of newsreel.

In Germany, Max Skladanowsky and his brother Emil,

had invented the Bioscope and had shown a paying audience in Berlin

projected moving images two months before the Lumieres' screening.

But the Skladanowsky system was technically inferior

to the Lumiere's Cinematographe and it became a dead duck.

The Cinematographe was a much more reliable system.

Oh, it's, it's much smaller than I would have imagined.

I've seen pictures of it

but I imagined it to be a bigger thing.

In Paris, Eric Lange and Serge Bromberg

showed me the Lumiere brothers' invention.

So this is in camera mode?

How does it, how can you change it into a projector?

Quite easy. Uh-huh.

You just got to change the lens also.

Wow, look at that.

Genius.

The majority of silent films were always shown with live accompaniment

and we are thrilled to have one of the greatest exponents

of accompanying silent films, will you please welcome Mr Neil Brand!

APPLAUSE

So we're at the stage where we have the invention of film

but of course there were no cinemas because is such a new invention.

So films were often shown in music halls between the variety acts.

A lot of these early films utilised those same variety acts

and put them on screen as subject matter.

This is an act called The Serpentine Dance.

This was very popular at the time. Here are two examples of it.

PIANO PLAYS

This has to be said - it's not much of an act.

It's basically like trying to watch a woman put a cover on a duvet.

Let's have another look at the The Serpentine Dance,

this time under more extreme circumstances.

You can see there was no culture of health and safety at all.

She is in that cage with a couple of lions,

doing her "putting a cover on a duvet" routine,

and I suppose at the time, it was seen as a way

of enlivening the act because, of course, cinema is about novelty

and once you've seen somebody put a duvet cover on,

you have to do something different with it.

Let's see a couple of the odder variety acts filmed at the time.

You'd have seen these films in the middle of a music-hall bill.

The first one's fairly straightforward,

and the one after that's a bit special.

This is Miss Dundee and her performing dogs.

It took these dogs six months to train Miss Dundee.

Isn't that utterly grotesque?

It's the most extraordinary costume.

This was a very popular act in France in the 1900s,

a very popular act indeed.

But remember, don't have nightmares, it's just a man in a costume...

who's trying to kill you. Don't worry about it.

Those were clips of two variety acts as they existed at the time.

We're going to look at another couple of pieces here

where they seem to be variety acts,

but they're actually filmed using cinematic techniques.

The first one involves a chicken and the second one doesn't.

In answer to the question, which came first, the chicken or the egg?,

in this film, it's both.

This Spanish film has been hand-coloured,

each separate frame individually painted.

These incredibly vivid images are over one hundred years old.

Here's another example of early colour, from 1907.

Women use to do this all the time.

Here's a version of Madame Butterfly.

Is this every woman's secret dream?

APPLAUSE

Attending that first Lumiere showing

was a theatre owner and stage magician Georges Melies.

He went onto become the most famous of all the early film-makers.

When he was younger Melies wanted to become an artist,

but his father, who was a luxury shoe manufacturer, said no.

He wanted his son to follow in his luxury footsteps.

So instead, he sent Georges to London, where,

instead of concentrating on his work manufacturing ladies' bloomers,

Georges became interested in magic tricks.

Georges Melies' trademark style was filming the fantastic.

About a hundred years ago, Georges Melies imagined the future.

We're heading towards the Channel Tunnel now.

Melies made a film about a Channel tunnel about a hundred years ago.

He imagined the future, but he didn't imagine it quite like this.

Yes! Although some of what I said was meaningless.

Melies, like many other early film-makers,

enthusiastically embraced hand-colouring.

The films of Georges Melies often starred Georges Melies.

And such tricks as double exposure turned the camera into a magic box.

Double exposure meant the same actor

could appear twice in the same scene.

"This is like looking in a mirror."

"Give us a hug." "All right!"

And this is the real Melies.

How is this magical effect achieved?

Melies stops the camera here,

he places the black cloth over his head

and throws a fake head up in the air.

He stops the camera again

and substitutes his own head for the fake head.

'Film collector and conservator Serge Bromberg told me

'about Georges Melies' attempts to buy his first movie camera

'from the Lumiere brothers.'

When he said to the Lumiere brothers,

"I'd like to buy a machine like this,"

because he knew he could use that kind of device

on stage between the magic acts.

The Lumiere brothers wanted to keep the system for themselves,

and said, "Oh, it has no commercial future. Don't bother."

And this is why Melies, who knew English,

he could speak very good English, bought his first camera in England.

So he takes it back to Paris, um, English camera,

and he discovers something about this English camera, doesn't he?

He discovers one of the early film techniques.

Well, one day he's filming the Place de L'Opera,

and a car is entering the shot and, all of a sudden, the camera stops.

"Oh, what's going on?"

He fixes it and then resumes shooting.

But the car had disappeared and when he watched the film,

all of a sudden, the car...instantly is...

"Oh! But this is a magic trick."

So, basically, Melies was a magician,

by pure chance discovered the first magic trick ever.

So, does it also say that because he couldn't get a French camera,

he bought an English camera,

and the English camera wasn't so good cos it broke down?

I didn't say it!

So if the Lumiere brothers had said, "You can have one of our cameras,"

-he may never have discovered that?

-That's quite possible.

In this film, Melies deploys seven multiple exposures.

His camera man has to rewind the film in the camera seven times

to exactly the same position.

BAND PLAYS

In 1897, Georges Melies built the world's first film studio,

here in Montreuil.

I'm here in Montreuil, on the outskirts of Paris.

Georges Melies' film studio was a few hundred yards that way.

This studio was built by Charles Pathe in 1904.

The glass ceiling allows natural daylight to flood in.

At that stage, electric light wasn't powerful enough.

And because no sound was being recorded,

you could make a couple of films at the same time in the same studio.

Pathe's motto was, "Produce more, and quicker!"

Soon they were producing 16 films a month,

employing up to 1,700 people,

and with a worldwide distribution network,

a cottage industry became a global phenomenon.

Meanwhile, back across the Channel,

the English were being equally silly.

In England, another film pioneer called George

was blazing his own trail.

George Albert Smith was a stage hypnotist

and magic lantern exhibitor.

Here's one of the magic lanterns he would have worked with.

George was the English Melies, or, if you prefer,

Melies was the French Smith.

Both men were experienced stage performers

and both wanted to make films that were entertaining and amusing.

Here is one of Smith's earliest efforts.

This is The Quaker Maidens,

a simple, single set-up, so typical of very early cinema.

Here at the Hove Museum and Art Gallery, near Brighton,

I'm transfixed by this Mutoscope, designed for the single viewer.

George Smith lived in Brighton.

'Suzie Plumb, the museum's curator,

'here shows me a special-effects camera

'specifically built for George Smith.'

And he wanted to make close-up shots and reverse motion shots,

so this camera was designed to do that.

-These plates would have been put over the lens.

-Can you show me that?

It would have created the effect of looking through something,

so a telescope or a magnifying glass.

But at this time, this is hugely pioneering.

This breakthrough film made by George Smith in 1900,

Grandma's Reading Glass,

shows the young boy's point of view of grandma's eye

as he looks through the magnifying glass.

Here, we are seeing the first building blocks of editing.

In terms of film technique at this time,

English George is far ahead of French Georges.

And yet, in comparison, his name is hardly known.

This is how the French talk about Georges Melies.

Melies - poet, magician, potato,

light, dark,

macaroon, genius.

And this is how the English talk about George Smith.

< I wanted to ask you about the film pioneer, George Smith.

I don't want any trouble, love. Move, before I set the dogs on you.

Woof, woof. Down, Janice, down.

Killers, absolute killers.

George Smith influenced other Brighton film-makers at this time,

particularly James Williamson.

He, too, made bold choices.

This is The Big Swallow, from 1901.

James Williamson was a chemist working in Hove,

and he also developed photographic film and film,

so this is how he started to know the pioneer film-makers

working in the city, and he later went on to build a film studio.

-This is it here, yes?

-This is it.

-This is their house and the studio.

-Oh, right, yes.

We've got the glass ceilings, letting the light come in.

Yes, and this is Williamson here, and his crew.

His family was involved with his films, so his sons appear.

Here's one of them, Tom.

He features in Our New Errand Boy.

And the important thing about Williamson,

he was very influenced by Smith's work.

But he took it further. He developed the film narrative,

so he was one of the first film-makers

to develop multi-shot films

and also, for dramatic effect,

cutting from one shot to another,

from different cameras and different camera angles,

-to create a dramatic effect.

-Can you give me an example of that?

Well, one of the earliest ones is Fire,

using multi-shots to develop the dramatic sense of the film.

Yes, yes. And particularly this shot here, in Fire here,

this horse-drawn fire engine gets remarkably close to the camera.

George Smith collaborated with his wife,

the stage actress Laura Bailey, in many of his early comedies.

In Mary Jane's Mishap, made in 1903,

George employs a close-up to show us the can marked "paraffin".

It also allows Laura's personality to come across.

Close-ups were still very rare at this time.

George cuts to a punch line on a tombstone.

It also shows the passing of time.

Here in George Smith's Let me Dream Again,

we go from a man dreaming of fun

to his bitter married reality, by throwing the edit out of focus.

George Smith not only uses extreme close-up, but in Let Me Dream,

he employs a cut to reveal the gag.

These things make you look ridiculous.

Back to France.

On the other side of the Channel, in 1897,

a woman called Alice Guy was making film history.

Here in France, Alice Guy became

one of the world's first female directors and producers

when she started making films for Gaumont.

And like a lot of film pioneers,

she became fascinated by the tricks of the camera.

-Non. Out of date.

-Out of date?

Alice Guy began making films for Gaumont in either 1896 or 1897.

By either date, she's a pioneer.

She was a very accomplished film-maker

with a keen sense of humour.

This is How Monsieur Takes His Bath, from 1903.

How do you introduce novelty into a standard street scene?

Well, Alice does this.

This is Alice Guy in Spain in 1905.

Compare these people's reaction to her camera with a modern crowd.

Today, individuals wave their hands, and yell and pull faces.

Some of these people aren't even aware they are being photographed.

Here is Alice in some extremely rare footage

of an early silent film studio at work.

In the foreground, she plays a gramophone record

to provide the dancers with music.

Every so often in these early films, we see an inexperienced actor

looking directly at the director when they are spoken to.

In The Cruel Mother, it happens several times.

This is my favourite.

"Hello."

In Alice Guy's wonderful film The Race For The Sausage,

she shows complete mastery of the comedy chase.

If you thought the baby in the pram in that last film

was harshly treated,

you'll find that this scene from a British film is in a similar vein.

This is Blood And Bosh, from 1913.

If you like babies, look away now.

At a time of high infant mortality,

babies were often used as comic props.

In this Fred Evans film, once the baby is knocked out of the pram,

it is then used as a fan.

Fred Evans was a very popular English comedian

whose career had begun in the music hall.

A predominantly working-class entertainment,

the music hall provided ready-made acts for the early years of cinema.

Fred specialised in parodies of dramatic stories.

In 1913, a British film company produced The Battle Of Waterloo,

but here is Fred Evans' version, released in the same year.

MUSIC: "La Marseillaise" played on piano

PLAYING FALTERS

PLAYING RESUMES

PAUL LAUGHS

Here is Fred Evans, appearing as his very popular character, Pimple.

Meanwhile, back on the other side of the Channel in France,

the brilliance of Georges Melies revealed its limitations.

By 1909, Georges Melies was outdated.

The action was so far away from the camera it was very difficult to get

personality across and audiences love personality.

The first comic star of the cinema was Andre Deed

and he had personality by the bagful.

He was a music hall comedian, acrobat and clown in France.

And, as early as 1901, he appeared in a couple

of Georges Melies films and so studied camera tricks first hand.

He was spotted on stage by Charles Pathe, founder of the Pathe Film

Production Company, and was given a chance to star in his own films.

This is how Pathe were happy to advertise their company

around the world.

Andre Deed nailing a dead duck to a door.

Andre Deed left Pathe in 1908.

He joined Itala, an Italian film company.

This is an extract from an Andre Deed film. Let's have a look at him.

We've had Neil accompanying these films brilliantly and beautifully,

but not always were these films accompanied by music,

they also had sound effects to them.

For our next film, please welcome to the stage Miss Suki Webster.

APPLAUSE

Now, for this, Suki's going to be on hammer and tray.

-Real skill.

-Real skill.

-Shall I get this out now?

-Yeah.

There's a bucket of water there, OK?

And so Suki is on tin tray, hammer and bucket of water.

Neil is on piano and I'm on clarinet.

I cannot play the clarinet, but it doesn't matter too much, I hope.

So this is a film from 1912, a French film.

This is called Arteme Swallows His Clarinet.

HE PLAYS CLARINET BADLY

CLARINET PLAYS TUNEFULLY

CLARINET TOOTS

Suki Webster!

When Andre Deed left Pathe in 1908,

he gave the chance to another star to rise.

Max Linder was born in 1883. He'd been a stage actor

before making his first film appearance in 1905.

Unlike Andre Deed, Max was a recognisable human being,

behaving along recognisable lines.

He was handsome, charming, seductive.

He was a well-dressed man about town.

Here is Max with his real life sister

at the family home in south west France.

One of the first things you notice are his eyes, powerfully expressive.

He's inventive, creating gags that other comedians would remember

and later use themselves.

And here's Buster Keaton in The Goat.

Within a couple of years of Max's debut,

he was the most popular comedian in the world.

The Work of Max Linder will hopefully be celebrated

in a new institute that's the brain child

of Maud Linder, Max's daughter.

I had so many women saying how wonderful your father was.

I mean, he was certainly a good lover.

But anyhow he, at the beginning, really had signed

-to do one very short film a day.

-In a day?

-A day.

Something like six, seven, ten minutes.

He'd took his own experiences.

So an incident that might have happened to him in real life,

-he develops into a comedy?

-Yeah.

In this film, Max is equally stuck to a lioness.

I get the impression when I see him on the screen,

he seems a very sort of physically brave man.

There's a story about him in Spain isn't there, when he went to Spain?

Can you tell me about that?

He had a bet with a journalist that had said that he never did

something that was dangerous, so he said, "I do everything myself.

"If it's dangerous, I do it, if it's not, I don't."

So someone said, "Why not a bull fight?"

He said, "OK, I'll do a bull fight."

-The bull isn't enormous. It's a little bull.

-I've seen it, yeah.

-But it's a bull.

-It could still...

It's still a bull. It's still a bull and he does kill it as you have to

-kill a bull with that...and I have the sword here.

-Do you?

-Yes.

-What we have here is the sword that he actually used.

-He did, yes.

Here Max plays a scene in which he stabs his wife.

It's unusual to see Max play such a heavy dramatic role.

But there is a twist.

A camera move reveals the reality.

When the audiences first saw him on the screen in 1905, 1906,

what was it about him that led to his enormous success at that point?

I'd think one thing.

He's one of the first ones that was natural on the screen.

He didn't act, he just lived in front of a camera, and I believe that

all the sort of little stories he did of his life, they liked it.

People liked little stories that come every week

and every week someone had another little story of Max.

Here is Max in Max And The Lady Doctor.

He starts off ticklish before becoming aroused...

When Max was travelling to the studio if he ever had an idea

or some inspiration, did he make a note of it there and then?

Yes, generally on his cuff.

How do you say? Shirt cuff?

He had a little pen and wrote on the clothes

so he kept the ideas that he had.

Some ideas took on a life of their own.

EXPLOSIONS

1914. The First World War.

During the Great War, most able bodied men volunteered

and sought active service, including many people from the film industry.

Fred Evans provided entertainment for army recruits.

Max Linder also volunteered.

He was shot through the lung above the heart in the Battle of Aisne.

The Washington Post said "Movie King Killed".

And then three days later,

the same newspaper reported a totally unexpected twist.

Max Linder, who was reported as having been killed, telephoned today

saying that he was ill, but he's convalescent

and soon will return to the service.

As if by magic, Max had come back to life.

The photographs of him in recovery are odd and disturbing,

he doesn't look like Max.

He was in sort of - how do you call it? - a hole by a...

-A bomb crater.

-Yes.

And this probably, he probably stayed a few days or few nights or whatever,

in the cold and in the water.

So he was out of there

and I heard many different things,

but I do believe that he was really almost dead,

and that someone said,

"but this guy, in between all the dead, this looks like Linder."

And someone looked at him and he probably was pulled out of the...

all the people that were there,

dying there and he probably got saved like that.

Max's injuries led to bouts of depression and reoccurring illness.

In 1917, he met his only comedic rival in terms of worldwide fame,

Charlie Chaplin.

Charlie signed this photo for Max.

"To the one and only Max, the Professor,

"from his Disciple, Charlie Chaplin."

Here are the two of them together.

On the left in 1917, Max looks healthily robust,

but four years later he is gaunt.

This shows the ravages of the physical and mental trauma

he must have endured.

There are two Max Linders, the one before and the one after the war.

Would the younger Max recognise the older man?

In Seven Years Bad Luck,

Max's servant has smashed a mirror and pretends to be Max.

When Hollywood took over as the leader of world cinema at the end

of The Great War, the language of cinema was already fully formed.

Not only had early film pioneers invented the moving picture camera

and projector, they'd also invented film techniques.

Editing.

Fades.

Screen wipes.

Double exposure.

And early systems for colour and camera movement.

APPLAUSE

At the end of the war,

the previous dominance of the European Film Industry was over.

Hollywood took the lead and it never gave it back.

It became the new centre of the film industry.

So what about other film pioneers?

Fred Evans made his last film in 1922.

He then returned to his stage origins with his brother Joe,

performing a puppet act!

Andre Deed made dozens of short films well into the 1920s,

when his career began to fade.

Before the First World War, he'd been one of the highest earners,

but he ended up working as a night watchman at the Pathe studios.

Perhaps he wandered around the studios at night

after everybody else had gone home torch in hand,

and pretended that he was still making movies,

nailing imaginary ducks to imaginary doors.

The 1920s saw Georges Melies running a toy shop

on a railway station in Paris.

After the war, Pathe owned actually his property in Montreuil

and in 1923 the sad thing is that Melies

had to leave his pavilion in Montreuil.

He was so depressed that he dug a hole in his garden

and burnt the 500 negatives of all his films.

So, basically, the reason for which Melies' films are so rare

-is simply because he destroyed them.

-He destroyed them himself?

-Yes.

The Trip To The Moon, shot in 1902,

was one of the most famous films at the time, you know.

But that film has remained, with the moon and the rocket in the eye...

-One of the very famous images of early cinema.

-Absolutely.

And that film only survives in black and white and very bad print,

so we try to locate prints all over the place. We found two or three.

But one day in Barcelona,

I must admit this was the big time of our life,

we found the Holy Grail of all the archives,

a print of Trip To The Moon, 1902, in colour.

-In colour?

-In colour.

Women workers hand painting with a brush each frame.

It's like 13,000 frames.

This is an enormous thing.

Unfortunately, the print wasn't exactly in good condition.

I have to be very careful, it breaks like glass.

And this is... Can you watch this?

-Oh, look at that.

-Isn't it amazing?

The delicacy of just painting those individual...

-I mean the detail in each frame is just stunning.

-That's wonderful.

Even if there's half of a frame, this is important,

I mean, probably, we can work through that.

You can take a bit of this frame and put it into there.

Yes, absolutely. That's one of the most elaborate restoration processes.

It'll probably take six months of continuous work

and an enormous amount of money,

but this is the first ever worldwide success in feature film,

and one of the most important science fiction films ever!

Every archive in the world wishes to find a film of that significance.

And we've been very lucky.

Beautiful and sad at the same time.

The world will have to wait a little longer

to see George Melies' Trip To The Moon in colour.

APPLAUSE

And what of Max Linder? What happened to him?

In 1923, he married 17-year-old Jean Peters.

They had a child and called her Maud.

There's no easy way to tell you what happened next.

In 1924, Max attempted suicide, and tried to take his wife with him.

They were found in time and revived.

19 months later, he tried again.

This time, there was no revival.

World War I had claimed two more victims.

I don't want to end Max's story like this.

One of cinema's first effects was running the film backwards,

putting the beginning at the end, the end at the beginning.

Let's give Max a happier ending.

And today you can watch whatever comedy you want

on film, DVD, TV and the internet.

A vast ocean of entertainment, which began as a simple trickle

from a gardener's hosepipe in the world's first film comedy.

APPLAUSE

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd