At the Cinema in 1912

Aug 9th Electric Palace, Harwich

The Electric Palace (a restored cinema since 1911, as a promo DVD - eventually - demonstrated), in conjunction with the East Anglian Film Archive and the Cinema Theatre Association, staged this nostalgic and evocative hark back to the days of early silent cinema (following on from a previously successful show last year), complete with mock-up old cinema square screen, and an authentic hand-cranked projector (with arc light used for the last film only), as operated in turn by David Cleveland and Nigel Lister, who also played some pleasant melodies on his piano to accompany some of the films.

Starting off with A Race for a Bride (GB 1908. An incompetent runner cheats at cross country in order to marry the girl who loves him), which I think had some sort of local connection as some of the locations looked very familiar to the Harwich and Dovercourt area, then followed by A Dream of Toyland (GB 1899. d: Arthur Melbourne Cooper), an early example of British animation, long before the days of Nick Park and Wallace & Gromit.

Next came an early example of what became a staple diet in the cinema right up until the 1980s, the Pathe Animated Gazette (Fra/GB 1912):

(Douai: French Military Aviation Disaster -- London [Botanical Gardens]: Students' Revels -- Paris: The Battle of Flowers [Car Show with vehicles covered in floral displays] -- Chelmsford: Famous Aviator Married - Graham White & Dorothy Chadwell Taylor -- London: The [Horse drawn] Coaching Marathon -- Windsor: Prince of Wales rows.)

Later on in the afternoon came another, more poignant piece of newsreel from 1912, courtesy of Gaumont News: The Titanic Leaving Belfast Lough for Southampton. According to the projectionist, this is the only authentic piece of film of the actual ship ever recorded from the time (all others apparently, are of its sister ship Olympic.)

That Fatal Sneeze (GB 1907. d: Cecil Hepworth) is an amusing example of how early filmmaker's used to enjoy using the new medium for all sorts of playful tricks, such as making the camera shake to give the appearance that a man's sneeze is shaking the whole world! Other examples followed, such as Magnetic Fluid (French comedy where a mischievous tramp stumbles upon a scientist's manual on how to control people using magnetism), and also Her First Pancake (GB 1907. d: Arthur Melbourne Cooper), a recently discovered item from the archives, where a cook's badly prepared pancake gives her master hallucinations of being in the frying pan with the pancake!

Finishing off with The Aerial Torpedo (GB 1909. p: Charles Urban; d: Walter Booth. 9m.) which was re-released in 1915 after the real life air raids by Zeppelins over Britain, making this slightly dark sub-science fiction (about innocent civilians being bombed by airships), seem slightly topical for the time - perhaps even with echoes of September 11th about it, 92 years later.

All the films were short one-reelers (5 minutes or more), and quite quaintly done to entertain audiences of the time who were thrilled by the novelty, without any of the later sophistication that cinema later developed, but they are a fascinating and priceless example of how people behaved and how the world was all those years ago, and how certain themes are timeless through the ages.