A Film Canon

Despite the iconicity of later shorts made under the auspices of his production company, especially such vehicles for 'animal stars' as Rescued By Rover (1905) and Black Beauty (1906), Hepworth's most distinctive works date from the relatively brief period in which he directed. These fall into two experimental categories, or, alternatively, separate and purify the narrative and sensory components of the standard short. On the one hand, films like Alice In Wonderland (1903) present narratives of unprecedented length and sophistication, while How It Feels To Be Run Over (1900) takes the (by that stage) conventional movement towards the screen to its logical conclusion, simulating a confrontation between car and camera that constitutes the most affronting cinematic experience since Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat, as well as an implicit challenge to it. The contrast is all the more notable in that Hepworth prefaces the crash with just such a movement towards and past the camera as occurs in Lumière shorts, tactically attributing it to a horse-drawn carriage to make the mechanical collision all the more shocking. That said, this sophisticated internal editing (also evident in the time it takes for the car to reach the screen) is itself an extrapolation of the Lumière Brothers' techniques. The same sense of shock is evident in The Explosion Of A Motor Car (1900), while That Fatal Sneeze (1907) provides a rudimentary example of how shock might be integrated into a narrative, telling the story of a man whose persistent sneezing leaves a catastrophic chaos of urban violence in its wake.