A Film Canon

G.A. Smith's shorts are the most formally inventive that I have seen to date, drawing upon his extensive career as a magic lantern operater to formulate cinema's first point-of-view shots, dissolve, vertical wipe and breakdown of a single event into a number of discrete camera angles. The point-of-view shots are particularly impressive, largely because of the elegance with which Smith allows them to subjectivise the camera's gaze, transforming viewer into voyeur. In Grandma's Reading Glass (1900), we are repeatedly shown images of the world as it appears through a heavily distorted magnifying glass, while As Seen Through A Telescope (1900) identifies itself with the protagonist's covert observation of a young woman's sandals being laced. This subjectivism culminates with a series of dreamscapes, most famously in Let Me Dream Again (1900), but perhaps more strikingly in Mary Jane's Mishap, whose frisson stems more from the comically nightmarish incorporation of a superimposed ghost into an otherwise realistic mileu, rather than any real engagement with fantasy. Smith also provides an interesting instance of the heavily syncretic, intertextual quality of early cinema in The Kiss In The Dark (1900), which brackets a scene of his own shooting with footage borrowed from Cecil Hepworth's studios.