FILM PIONEER

Southland Times, Issue 23199, 14 May 1937, Page 15

FILM PIONEER

Forgotten Inventor

A TRAGIC COLLAPSE Nearly 50 years ago a young photographer in Bath showed “a picture which moves” to an audience that had gathered in a house in Gays street for a penny reading, says a writer in TitBits. He threw on to a magic-lantern sheet the flickering photography of a girl; and, to everyone’s amazement, the eyes moved from side to side. With a cry of astonishment, an old lady rose from the audience, marched down the gangway, stopped before the screen, and poked a finger at the moving eyes to make sure there was no trickery in the phenomenon. How many film-fans today know that this was the origin of “the Pictures” Mr Leslie Wood, who for eleven years served on the staff of Tit-Bits, made a serious study of the films from youth up, and left to join a film journal, tells the story in “The Romance of the Movies.” The photographer, William FrieseGreene, had laboured day and night in his workshop on a camera costing £l5O to achieve this miracle. Ribbons of paper soaked in castor oil to make them transparent, on which he made his first movies—including a Brighton street scene in 1888—did not satisfy him, so he purchased raw celluloid and sat up night after night in a room filled with the steam of thirty kettles, endeavouring to clarify the crude material, and using an ordinary mangle to compress it. Margins Perforated Then he conceived the idea of perforating the margins to steady the film as it passed through the lantern. Thus, the film as we know it had, in all essentials, arrived. In 1890, at Brooke street, Holburn, he developed and printed the first moving picture photographed on an endless band of celluloid I film: shots of hansom cabs and people moving round Hyde Park Corner. A section of it is in the South Kensington Science Museum.

.He rigged up a screen, ran off the picture through a primitive projector. “His excitement knew no bounds,” Mr Woods records; “rushing hither and thither like a man demented, he found himself in the street clutching at a passing policeman.

“The constable decided to investigate the cause of the uproar. Accompanying the young inventor back to his laboratory he watched with bulging eyes while the frail film was rethreaded on the. crude projection machine.” This policeman was the first cinema audience!

The second was a crowd which jammed Piccadilly when Friese-Greene showed in a shop window a film of a skeleton dancing. Hidden by brown paper framing the screen, a small pageboy turned the handle of the projector. The crowd became so thick that the police had to intervene and the boy had to be tom from the machine by force! Friese-Greene got scant professional recognition, so turned to other inventions, got into debt, and in 1891 was committeed to 'Brixton Prison, his household effects, including the pioneer cinema apparatus, being sold by auction in lots for a few shillings each. His Patents Lapse .

On his release, his patents were allowed to lapse for want of funds; yet he set to work again and designed an improved movie camera. In all, he spent £16,000 perfecting the moving picture. By 1916 he was so poor that a subscription appeal was made to the heads of what had now become the motionpicture industry, to provide him and his family with bare necessities. The sum of £136 0/2 was raised! And now for the dramatic climax. On May 5, 1921, he attended a meeting at the Connaught Rooms, which had been called to decide whether Britain should continue to produce her own pictures or submit to American domination.

When the British film executives present looked like capitulating, an elderly man rose from the audience and earnestly pleaded with them to sink their petty differences and make yet another bid to ensure the supremacy of British pictures on British screens. Few knew him, or had even heard the name of Friese-Greene.

Humbly he resumed his seat A few seconds later, those sitting near were horrified to discover that he was dead in his chair! “Great limousines purred at the kerb outside to bear away the august ones of the cinema industry,” Mr Wood observes with irony, “but the greatest of them all was wheeled away on a hand ambulance brought by two police-constables.” His purse contained 1/10—his total worldly wealth. . . . Actors: Four Shillings Each

It was a policeman, too, who saw the premiere of the world’s first perfect movie. Mr Robert W. Paul, a Hatton Garden instrument-maker, evolved a method of arresting the movement of the film so that each separate picture would stay on the screen a fraction of a second instead of moving continuously* behind a slotted wheel.

He first achieved this, in the early hours of the morning, by means of a little wheel cut in the shape of a Maltese cross; and a policeman patrolling the street of the diamond merchants suddenly heard excited cries. He found Paul and his assistants roaring out warwhoops of joy. The first photoplay, “The Haunted House,” was filmed by an English journalist, J. Stuart Blackton, and a friend of . former music-hall days, Albert E. Smith, on the roof of a New York skyscraper with only 100 feet of film. It showed a man being visited by a ghost, and lasted one and a-half minutes. The actors, two servants in the building, were paid 4/- each!