A Film Canon

R.W. Paul's shorts are the first to extend action beyond the individual frame. At its most literal, this involves splicing two frames together, as occurs in Come Along, Do! (1898), which juxtaposes the interior and exterior of a railway station (or at least did, before it was partly destroyed). More subtly, Paul emphasises the porosity of the frame and, in doing so, revises the kind of cinematic movement pioneered by the Lumière Brothers. Hence the structure of The Derby (1896), in which a socially and physically momentous movement towards the camera - the victory of the Prince of Wales' prize racing horse - is subsumed into the milling, interchangeable mass of bodies clustered in the bottom right corner, whose stark parameters are thereby transformed into a fluid, semi-permeable membrane. The point is made even more dramatically in A Chess Dispute (1903), whose comic effect depends on our inability to see any more than the flailing limbs of the fighters. Paul also provides an interesting parody of the reception of Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat in The Countryman And the Cinematograph (1901), indicating the rapidity with which the designation of sensory 'normality' - and its corollary, sensory self-reflexivity - can change.