Grandma's Reading Glass

For me, this 5th year of baby cinema welcomes its first steps to get up : all the previous movies were static in the sense that the camera was still, motionless. Here, it's always the case but at least we have different frames. We can conclude that editing is born with this new millennium as audience has now different points of view. This change of shots is particularly imaginative here as it's done trough a magnifying glass and thus we alternate seeing a boy with his grandmother sit at a desk and the examined subjects : a glass, a watch, a bird, Grandma's eye, a cat… What's striking for me is that once again, it's like watching a Lynch movie : it's a bit surreal, but visually stunning as the vision is pure, classic and close to daily life while looking in another dimension…

A series of views of things through a magnifying glass. None is all that interesting because size doesn't make any difference. The only feature is the circular pictures that we see, so we know it is Grandma's magnifier.

Grandma's Reading Glasses (1900) ** (out of 4)

This film from George Albert Smith features a young boy looking at various objects in his grandmother's glasses. This of course magnifies the objects for the movie viewer to enjoy. You can watch a film like this and understand why people in 1900 might have been entertained by it. With that said, there's very little here to keep a modern viewer interested and even those film buffs such as myself who love these early movies will find very little here. The optical effect really isn't all that impressive and nothing he's "seeing" is that that interesting either.

I watched this film on a DVD that was rammed with short films from the period. I didn't watch all of them as the main problem with these type of things that their value is more in their historical novelty value rather than entertainment. So to watch them you do need to be put in the correct context so that you can keep this in mind and not watch it with modern eyes. With the Primitives & Pioneers DVD collection though you get nothing to help you out, literally the films are played one after the other (the main menu option is "play all") for several hours. With this it is hard to understand their relevance and as an educational tool it falls down as it leaves the viewer to fend for themselves, which I'm sure is fine for some viewers but certainly not the majority. What it means is that the DVD saves you searching the web for the films individually by putting them all in one place – but that's about it.

As with his Kiss In the Tunnel, British pioneer George Smith (an English name if ever there was one!) again works with the devices possible with the camera for telling the audience what is happening. Here it is the "point of view" technique where the screen is seen through a circular frame that makes the viewer understand that this is the view from the character's eye. It is a simple device that is not used any more because of how obvious it has become but at the time this was cutting edge stuff because these techniques were not developed and the audience was being told what this meant.

Substance wise the film is again like Kiss in the Tunnel in so much as, when the technical interest is put to one side, there isn't much else to be had from it. Still, worth seeing as part of learning more about why Smith should be a name that is mentioned alongside the work of people like Lumière.

There's quite a little gang forming in these comments for films-so-old-that-no-one wants-to-watch-them-apart-from-a-few-die-hards. Apart from me there's Bob and Alice and the wonderfully informative Cineanalyst, and every now and then Plankton drops by to moan about how dull it all is. Hey-ho. Grandma's Reading Glass is notable today for its early use of 'point of view' shots, as we see through the eyes of a young boy looking through a magnifying glass. It's also an early example of extreme close-up as we're treated to a shot of Grandma's eyeball rolling about wildly for a few seconds. As Plankton has commented, given that the likes of Melies were already creating dynamic films filled with trickery by 1900, this all seems a little tame.