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1901: The Big Swallow
1901 was an important and successful year for Hove-based film-maker James Williamson: not only did he make one of the most important of early British films, he also created one of its seminal images. The film was The Big Swallow, starring Sam Dalton, a comedian who also appeared in Williamson's Are You There? and The Magic Extinguisher. In the film, Dalton plays a well-dressed man who takes offence at being filmed by a cameraman. Gesticulating as he advances toward the camera, Dalton's face fills the screen before he opens his mouth and swallows the cameraman. 'He retires munching him up,' says the film's catalogue entry, 'and expressing his great satisfaction.'
The film is important in two respects: firstly, it is possibly the first example of focus pulling in the cinema - the process by which a character or object is kept in sharp focus as he/it advances toward the camera - and would remain a rare example of the practice until the twenties; secondly, it was the first film to experiment with the audience's perception of film by effectively making them a part of the story. The effect would undoubtedly have made a big impression on contemporary audiences. Of course, the flaw in the story is that, had Dalton swallowed the hapless cameraman and his equipment, there would have been no camera to film the final shot of Dalton retiring and munching contentedly!
Two other films made by Williamson in 1901 are also of historical importance. Fire! was a dramatic story told in five tableaux in which first a house is seen aflame (the house was the Ivy Lodge in Hove, which was also the setting for Williamson's 1899 film Attack On A China Mission). In the following scene the alarm is raised, and we then see the fire brigade responding to the call. Following that, we see two shots of the rescue, one from within the building and one from outside. Like Attack On A China Mission, this film made use of multiple shots edited together to form a chronological narrative designed to tell an understandable story and to create an element of suspense; it also made early use of what is now called a match cut, when it showed, from inside the house, a fireman entering the burning house through a window to rescue its inhabitant, and then through use of an exterior shot, showed them both emerging through the same window. Fire! would prove to be a major influence on American filmmaker Edwin S. Porter the following year when he made The Life of an American Fireman (1902).
Williamson's third film of note - and of equal importance as the other two - was Stop Thief!, cinema's first example of the chase movie. Comprised of three scenes, the first shows a tramp stealing a joint from a butcher, who gives chase; in the second shot, the tramp is shown racing past a row of cottages from which curious residents emerge to watch the butcher - and a number of dogs - in hot pursuit; in the final scene, the thief jumps into a tub with his booty, but is found by the dogs who jump in after him. By the time the butcher arrives on the scene, the tramp is in a pitiful state and the joint has been reduced to a bone by the dogs - which the angry butcher uses to thump the hapless thief. The film was a successful combination of high-speed action and narrative story-telling that, while seeming primitive by the standards of only a couple of years later, gave birth to a genre that would thrive throughout the silent era. [ADD]
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