Grandma's Reading Glass

This little feature is both playful and innovative, with an idea that allowed plenty of room for creativity. Most of it simply shows a young boy playing with "Grandma's Reading Glass", and as simple as the idea is, it opens up a new realm of possibilities. This picture must have been one of the very earliest, if not the earliest, to experiment with different points of view in such a way.

Even aside from the innovation, it is also generally interesting to watch in itself. At least one of the boy's uses of the reading glass leads to a pretty unusual sight. Even the more commonplace images still do a reasonable job of bringing out the spirit of jaunty experimentation that characterize both the technique and the content of this pleasant little film.

A young boy looks at various things through his grandmother's magnifying glass.

When people speak about innovation in films, the process of adding new shots that would eventually lead to modern film grammar, few people mention George Albert Smith. This stage hypnotist, magic lantern exhibitor and film maker was born in 1864. He entered film-making in the late 1890s and almost immediately began directing films that clearly investigated camera techniques that are still used more than a century later. He imported techniques from the magic-lantern shows, produced films that demonstrated the impact of close-ups and, with this film, was an early adopter and innovator in the point-of-view shot.

Later on, he would move to the more technical side of the industry. In concert with Charles Urban, he would develop Kinemacolour, the first really successful color film. He died in 1959.

This is the first film to make sustained use of point of view shots. A small boy picks up his granny's magnifying glass, and looks at various items through it, the newspaper, a cat etc. The film in itself is utterly charming: the little boy with the huge glass, the grandmother in her nannyish Victorian clothes, the tiny, overstuffed room all contrive a surreal, Alice-like atmosphere, which is very English in its exaggerated normality. and the young boy's discoveries, his making the world strange by looking with someone else's eyes, is delightful, explaining logically why the last thing he sees is his grandmother's eyes (birth of Godard!).

This making strange the familiar is, again, surreal, but it is also what the cinema does, and what the cinema had largely been doing since its invention, photographing the everyday, workers, families, trains etc., but making them marvellous. The difference being that these things were marvellous, not in themselves, but because of the medium, because they were moving pictures, because people had never seen themselves, or people like themselves in such an art form before. That novelty soon wore off, hence the move towards narrative, fantasy, comedy, genre.

The point of view, however, suggested a new avenue altogether. where early films were shot with a calm, detached, effacing distance, its framing belonging ostensibly to no-one (whatever ideologies such objectivity implied), the point of view took the image, or narrative, from outside the frame within it, breaking it up as it were, creating two levels of looking - the audience looking at the fiction, and the character in the fiction looking at something. The inviolability of the image is shattered, is no longer objective - 'reality' exists at two removes. We don't see an unmediated image anymore, we have to ask about the state of mind of the looker. Subjectivity is born, paving the way for German Expressionism, 'Citizen Kane', 'Vertigo', the monuments of the medium.

Smith cannily understands this- the point of view here is deliberately distorted, a young person looking through the glass of an older person with poor sight. The image is heightened, almost unreal. The camera and the distorted glass become the same thing, objectivity dies. Hoorah!

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.

First - for modern spirit, for reminding the roots of cinema, for lovely simplicity and for the return to fascination about George Albert Smith, giving the spirit of magic lantern show as seed for film art. Seductive like an old letter , it is the fine definition of the profound meaning of cinematograph in the circle of magic.