 |
| The notoriously camera-shy Robert Paul, posing for an article about him filming the Derby (UK) in June '96, |
Working on my
long-promised book about the slightly mysterious founder of British cinema,
Robert Paul, has given me a chance to revisit some of the great stories that
emerged from the earliest months of showing moving pictures around the world.
One of the best of these is a story about how the international magician Carl
Hertz took one of the very first projectors all the way from London to
Melbourne in the summer of 1896.
Hertz, who
billed himself ‘the Modern Mystery Merchant’, was a determined American, intent
on getting hold of this new-fangled gadget while passing through London. The
Lumières’ Cinématographe wasn’t yet for sale, but the British electrical engineer
Robert Paul was selling his Animatograph – except he only had two working
machines, and a nightly slot in the programme of one of London’s premier music
halls, the Alhambra in Leicester Square. Hertz laid siege to the novice
showman, calling on him every night and upping the offer.
On the Friday
before he was due to sail, Hertz decided on direct action. As he later told the
story, ‘So we went back to the Alhambra, where he took me onto the stage and showed
me the whole working of the machine… We were there for over an hour, during
which I kept pressing him… Finally, I said: “Look here! I am going to take one
of the machines with me now.” With that I took out £100 in notes, put them in
his hand, got a screwdriver, and almost before he knew it, I had one of the
machines unscrewed from the floor of the stage and onto a four-wheeler. The
next day I sailed for South Africa.’
Hertz’s bold
move had several once consequences. One was that it forced Paul to work right
through the weekend, to produce a new standby projector. And in the process, he
introduced an improvement, which made feeding in the very short films of this
period much easier. But But Hertz now found himself literally at sea, with a
machine that he had little idea how to operate. Apparently the ship’s engineer
came to his rescue, and enabled the ‘mystery merchant’ to present what must
have been the very first film show at sea, probably on 31 March 1896.
Three weeks
later, Hertz had reached Johannesburg, to start a one month engagement at the
Empire Theatre of Varieties, which soon included the films he had brought,
along with several that must have been sent to him by Paul – one of these being
Britain’s very first fiction subject, The
Soldier’s Courtship, filmed on the roof of the Alhambra with members of the
dance troupe. This was long believed lost, like the majority of Paul’s films,
but has recently been restored by the Italian film archive, and turns out to be
unexpectedly polished, and funny. Longer and distinctly more dramatic than
anything produced by the Lumières or Edison.
 |
| Carl Hertz |
After a
whirlwind tour through Pretoria,
Bloemfontein, Kimberley, Durban, Maritzburg, East London, Kingwilliamstown,
Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town, Hertz set sail for Australia on 20
July and reached Melbourne on 11 August. This was towards the end of the
‘marvellous Melbourne’ era, when the city was at the peak of its social and
economic success. Hertz was on his second visit to Australia and booked to open
at Harry Rickards’ rather rickety old Opera House on Saturday 15 August, but
kept his new attraction secret. Then, on the following Monday, at a special
midnight session after the normal evening performance, Melbourne’s theatre
world was treated to the country’s first screening. The Melbourne Herald account is worth quoting at length: It was
after the opera was over. The occupants of the galleries had clattered noisily downstairs,
the pit and stalls had cleared, demurely, and the crutch and toothpick dress
circle had quitted, talking of oysters at Madame’s….And then, as if by magic as
wonderful as any of Mr Carl Hertz’s clever illusions, stalls and dress circle
filled up again…
The audience, there by special invitation to witness Mr Carl Hertz’s new
illusion, the Cinematographe, was a highly critical one. It consisted of all
the members of Mr Rickards’ Melbourne company, and of many other clever artists
now in the city… And they did not spare Mr Rickards, Mr Hertz or the leader of
the orchestra…
The ringing up of the curtain, however, showed that actors can teach a
useful lesson to certain classes of theatre goers. The audience became quite
silent and attentive, breaking out into loud applause as Mr Hertz brought out
pretty and laughable and wonderfully interesting scenes.
In principle, it is the kinetoscope of Mr Edison. In practice, it is a
marvellous improvement upon it. Life-size figures and pictures, true to nature,
are shown upon the canvas. A couple of scenes from a comical Trilby called
forth much laughter, and scenes of London streets and bridges, with crowds of
traffic, omnibuses moving rapidly, hansom cabs dashing speedily, fairly brought
down the English part of the house
And as the orchestra played 'A Home on the Ocean Wave' the audience
burst forth into general applause, and gave Mr Hertz a special call.”
Accounts of the midnight preview were widely
reprinted in other Melbourne papers, and it did indeed create a sensation. When
Hertz added the ‘cinematographe’ – as all moving-picture equipment tended to be
called - to his public performance on the following Saturday, it became the
talk of the city. On 4 September, The Sun
reported that ‘no alteration of bill has been found necessary at the opera
house, for as regards crowds, the cry is “still they come” to marvel over the
cinematographe’. The season was extended until 17 September, after which Hertz
and his wife travelled to Sydney, where they opened at another of Rickards’
theatres, the Tivoli on Pitt Street, on Saturday 19 September.
Hertz apparently had a standard press-release, sent
to newspapers ahead of his appearances, which gave a mixture of factual and
fanciful information about the ‘cinematographe’, as well as descriptions of the
main subjects on offer. Described as ‘a combination of photography, electricity
and stereopticon’, it was attributed, not inaccurately, as ‘an invention partly
of Edison’s, and partly of a man named Paul’, whom Hertz located at ‘the Royal
Institute in London’, before boasting that he had ‘added some improvements of
my own’. Invoking ‘electricity’ was rather opportunistic, since neither Paul’s
camera nor projector was electrically powered, even though Edison’s Kinetoscope
had been battery-driven, and Hertz certainly wouldn’t have been able to count
on a supply of what were then cumbersome batteries on his extensive travels.
The attraction of busy streets in London ‘where you can see the ‘buses, cabs
&c moving along as though gazing at the actual scene’ was stressed, along
with key events in the English calendar – the Derby and the Oxford and
Cambridge boat race – which would have appealed to many in colonial Australia. Ten
years later, Charles Urban’s Living London,
partially rediscovered at the Australian National Film and Sound Archive in
2006, would have the same appeal. And its
success would help fund The Story of the
Kelly Gang…
However, Hertz didn’t enjoy the same exclusivity in
Sydney as in Melbourne. Earlier in the same month, Joseph McMahon had given the
first film screening in Sydney; and on 28 September, a travelling Lumière
operator, Marius Sestier, would open the ‘Salon Lumière’ with his Australian
partner Walter Barnett, with much emphasis in the advertising of this as an
‘authentic Cinematographe… direct from the Lumière manufactury’. There seems to
be no contemporary account of any direct comparison between Paul’s and the
Lumière equipment, although some reviews emphasised the pictorial quality of
the latter, and it has been suggested that because the ‘Salon’ was not a theatre, it attracted ‘a more
elite patronage’, which soon included the Governor and various church
dignitaries.
Sestier remained in Sydney, and began to film local
subjects, as was the roving Lumière operators’ practice, before heading for
Melbourne to produce his famous film of the Melbourne Cup in November, which
remains one of Australia’s iconic early films. Meanwhile, Hertz finished in
Sydney on 14 October, and set off on a tour around Queensland before returning
to Melbourne and Sydney at the end of the year and setting sail for New Zealand
in mid-February 1897. Just to read his itinerary on this tour is exhausting,
and makes me wonder what state his film prints were in after such intensive
use!
Most of Robert Paul’s surviving films can be found
on a BFI DVD I curated a decade ago, and many have since turned up on YouTube,
complete with Stephen Horne’s sympathetic accompaniment. 2019 will be the 150th
anniversary of Paul’s birth, when I hope my book and various other attractions
will help boost his profile. Paul stayed in the business for fifteen years and
pioneered much of what we take for granted as ‘cinema’.
Ian Christie
Ian Christie is a London-based film and media historian who curates
exhibitions and teaches at Birkbeck College and for Gresham College. www.ianchristie.org.
The post above was derived from research conducted for his forthcoming book
provisionally called The Time Traveller: Robert Paul and the origins of British cinema, due from
Chicago University Press in 2019
 |
| The Age, 26 Aug 1896 Advertisement for the MelbourneTivoli featuring the Cinematographe |
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete