Inventor of the close-up

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32703, 4 September 1971, Page 13

Inventor of the close-up

Like all arts, films have a technique. D. W. Griffith, the American cinema pioneer, is the generally-accepted discoverer of most of them. But there is evidence that three essential film-shots, the close-up, the tracking shot and the trick cut, were discovered not in the big American movie studios but in a British seaside town. A film made by a member of the British Film Institute called “It all Began in Brighton” contains excerpts from one made back in 1895 which shows a face in such detail that the actor’s toiisils are visible. The original film was caned “The Big Swallow” and was produced under the joint direction of a Brighton chemist and a portrait photographer. Other films by the same pair include tracking shots of a train entering a tunnel and trick effects like a man being run over by a steam-roller, squashed flat, and .then being re-inflated by a passer-by with a bicycle pump. The interesting point about those techniques, noted a 8.8. C. reporter who saw the film, is that they were used a dozen years before the dates generally accepted for their discovery by such men as Georges Melies, the French trick photographer, and D. W. Griffith.