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| Grandma's Reading Glass George Albert Smith | 1900 | 120 ft, 1 min 20 secs The film opens with a close-up pan across a newspaper in a circular vignette, settling on an advert for Bovril. The next shot shows that it is as seen by a boy, using the magnifying glass that presumably belongs to his grandmother, who is sorting through the darning. ('What's darning?') He then looks at the inside of a watch, the canary in the cage and grandma's eye and the kitten, eachtime cutting between a vignetted close-up and the scene in the room. This film has an unusual amount of cutting for the time: 10 shots, comprising one master scene of the boy and his grandmother, intercut with five close-ups. This uses the same device as in As Seen Through a Telescope but on a larger scale. There has been some dispute about who made this film, which had also bee attributed to Arthur Melbourne. However, the evidence of this cat being the one that appears in The Sick Kitten is just one of the pointers to the film's true authorship. |
Page created 13 July 2009
Film: public domain; Text © David Fisher