The Big Swallow

This is a pretty clever little film made during the very early days of motion pictures. A guy is being filmed and he doesn't seem to like it. So, as the camera approaches, he opens his mouth and seems to swallow the camera,...followed by the entire camera crew as well! The film certainly deserves credit for being different and amusing! While the special effect isn't exactly perfect by today's standards, for the time it was pretty amazing stuff. And, unlike many of the films of the era, this one is still pretty entertaining if viewed today. This film would probably be of most interest to kids and film historians. Adults, however, probably will think it's all pretty silly--and that's exactly why I like it.

While quite simple both in concept and in execution, this early short feature is rather amusing. The self-referential idea that it explores is interesting, both as one of the earlier examples of its kind, and also for the way that it is handled. Whereas so many present-day movies handle references to themselves and to other movies in such a labored and often pretentious manner, the idea here is carried off not only with some skill, but also with an appropriately light touch.

Unlike many of the characters in these earliest films, who are sometimes too indistinct to have any real presence on the screen, in this feature the actor playing the main character, whose responses to being filmed form the basis for the story, does a pretty good job of carrying the movie with his mannerisms and facial expressions. He has a slight hammy touch that works pretty well here, and it helps in making a very simple feature turn out rather well.

Sam Dalton objects strongly as the camera slowly dollies in on him. As it approaches his face, he opens his mouth wide and swallows it, chewing lustily!

There are none of the usual claims for a cinematic first here, nor should there be, since Melies had been doing this for a couple of years. Nonetheless, it's using a cinematic technique for a laugh, something that Williamson was adept at.

Director James Williamson was born in 1855 and came into film-making not through photography, but because he ran a chemist shop -- where he presumably developed film -- and expanded into selling photographic equipment, in Hove, quite near George A. Smith's St Ann's Well Pleasure Garden. Besides shooting and directing his own films, he patented a couple of devices useful for film production, founded a company to produce photographic equipment that was active at least until the Second World War, and lived until 1933.

This early film by James Williamson's Kinematograph sees a man enraged by photographer who is setting up to take his picture. The yelling man gets closer and closer until all we see his gaping mouth, into which the hapless photographer falls, camera, tripod, and all. The film-maker's camera then pans back and we see the man, no longer angry, chewing in a very satisfied way. I imagine in 1901 the twist ending was quite surprising. Comical in an archaic, anarchic way.

A man swallows as he approaches, with the shot from an American field gradually becoming the detail of the mouth, towards the operator who swallows. A climax (graduality)of the fields of the framing.