Tom Green

George Albert Smith

Comic Shaving

On Your Mark

A man comes in for a shave in this film of a popular stage act.

It&apos;s shot absolutely standard for a British film in this era, which is to say it&apos;s third row center of a theater, with no camera movement, and no allowances for the different nature of film. The Lumieres aside, movies had a bifurcated sense of aesthetics in this era. There were natural studies, compositions in movement, in which the handling derived from photography, and there were performances, in which the idea was to mimic the view from the best seats. So when George Albert Smith shot part of Tom Green&apos;s skit, he did it in am unmoving medium long single shot, straight on.

Then a most extraordinary thing happened. Smith started to wonder if that was the best way of doing things, so he got Green back into the studio. Over the next few years, he shot the scene with Green several times, in medium close-up, in profile... experimenting with the camera to glean what effects these differences made.

Smith kept on doing this sort of thing until about 1904, and then eased off direction to become more involved with technical issues, like a color movie system, and manufacturing. And then these marvelous things he had accomplished seemed to vanish...until suddenly, D.W. Griffith showed up at Biograph and began to direct. He seems to have gone into the film vaults and it looks to me like he dragged out Smith&apos;s techniques, regularized them, adopted them as a major part part of his film grammar. By 1915, every American studio used it, and by 1920, it was the lingua franca of the film world.

All because Smith wondered if he could shoot this movie better.

A man comes in for a shave in this film of a popular stage act.

It's shot absolutely standard for a British film in this era, which is to say it's third row center of a theater, with no camera movement, and no allowances for the different nature of film. The Lumieres aside, movies had a bifurcated sense of aesthetics in this era. There were natural studies, compositions in movement, in which the handling derived from photography, and there were performances, in which the idea was to mimic the view from the best seats. So when George Albert Smith shot part of Tom Green's skit, he did it in am unmoving medium long single shot, straight on.

Then a most extraordinary thing happened. Smith started to wonder if that was the best way of doing things, so he got Green back into the studio. Over the next few years, he shot the scene with Green several times, in medium close-up, in profile... experimenting with the camera to glean what effects these differences made.

Smith kept on doing this sort of thing until about 1904, and then eased off direction to become more involved with technical issues, like a color movie system, and manufacturing. And then these marvelous things he had accomplished seemed to vanish...until suddenly, D.W. Griffith showed up at Biograph and began to direct. He seems to have gone into the film vaults and it looks to me like he dragged out Smith's techniques, regularized them, adopted them as a major part part of his film grammar. By 1915, every American studio used it, and by 1920, it was the lingua franca of the film world.

All because Smith wondered if he could shoot this movie better.

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