How It Feels to Be Run Over

The great thing about this film is that these filmmakers, whether they had seen it or not, had the kind of movie that the Lumiere brothers happened to catch in mind - the Train coming in the Station that basically birthed cinema in 1895 - and they decided 'we can do a step further.' Now, it's not that the whole film is only the car coming at the camera, and we first see a horse and buggy go by the "person" sitting or standing in the road. It's a very basic feeling that the crux of this film does - terror - but it also is more primal, which is helplessness.

The whole 1 minute is meant to express a feeling, and whether you really feel it or not (it IS 116 years ago now), it does have a visceral impact: it's hard to not believe the car is going to kill "you" in place of the camera, since we're the camera-eye. This is one of the major accomplishments of cinematic grammar: if you can get an audience to feel something by how the camera is in place and how the frame is set in just such a position (and in this case there's even some odd text that comes over black in the last few seconds), then you win at cinema.

This was amazing work for the time period. If this was a 3D movie I might have had to leave the theater because WOW. While the film was short that was expected for being from 1900. I could've watched this film for hours however.

Some of these earliest features pack a good amount of creativity into a very short running time. There are probably as many signs of genuine imagination in less than a minute of this little film as you could find in two hours of most recent movies. The idea here is simple, but clever, and it is carried out with an unaffected liveliness that makes it work well.

The camera is set up so that it looks down an open road as different conveyances approach, to create an anticipation of what might happen when they get closer. It works well, and it also features what must be one of the very earliest uses of title cards - which themselves are done in an amusing fashion. A lot of pioneering films are worthwhile more for their effort and their intentions than for their content or their entertainment value, but this one does pretty well in both departments.

Automobiles were still the source of a lot of humour when this film was made so it is no surprise the Hepworth's made a comedy film about the perils of encountering a horseless carriage. The camera is in the middle of the road as a horse and buggy come by. They pass by without calamity and you fully expect some hapless pedestrian to wander into the road just as another comes by. Well guess what? In this movie the camera, and hence the audience, plays the part of the pedestrian. An automobile comes around the corner, drives straight at the camera and . ..well . . .THAT is how it (almost) feels to be run over; the film is a lot more painless than the actual experience. Seeing this film I wonder if the Hepworth's were doing a conscious parody of the 1896 Lumiere film THE ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN AT LA CIOTAT in which the sight of a train coming right at the camera is said to have panicked many people seeing their first moving picture? Perhaps.

OK so the title more or less gives away the entire "plot" of this very short short film but it is still quite interesting. The point obviously is to try and amaze the audience and draw a reaction by having a car rushing towards the viewer in the hope that audiences still dealing with this new technology will instinctively panic somewhat. Watching it now of course I didn't react this way but you can imagine how it once did (even today we do it in the cinemas – it now just means it has to move faster and have effects that make it a lot realer.

However the film is nicely done because the cart going by first makes us assume safety before the car is seen approaching and the music lifts to become more dramatic. Of course it also plays on the fear of that other "new" piece of technology – the motor car, so the combination of these factors would have got a good reaction I would guess. Nothing really to it now but it is still interesting to see how it is structured to achieve its aim and then hits it well.