As Seen Through a Telescope

This light-hearted short feature is fairly good both in concept and in execution. The story is simple but not trivial, and it has a rather detached perspective on events that provide some interesting insights into the perspectives of the film-makers. It is also reasonably resourceful in the way that it films the story.

Movies that dealt with voyeurism and similar themes are relatively common in the earliest years of cinema. Some of the early film-makers must have appreciated at once the implications of what they were doing, and the ironies that were often involved in making motion pictures that tell private stories to unknown audiences.

This one verges on becoming a morality play, but its dénouement is too buoyant to make it only that. It's also helped considerably by the on-screen performers, who act pretty naturally, without any really exaggerated gestures or theatrics. It comes across as though simply presenting the characters for what they are, rather than forcing judgments on the audience.

The technical side is also good. The "telescope" effect is believable, and as simple as the story is, the way that it is edited together works well. There are some physical defects in the print, but otherwise it all looks pretty good.

(Note: This is the first of four films that I've decided to comment on because they're landmarks of early narrative development in film history. "Le Voyage dans la lune," "The Great Train Robbery" and "Rescued by Rover" are the others.)

George Albert Smith was the most important filmmaker of the so-called "Brighton School." His pioneering use of close-ups is one of his greatest contributions to the development of the art form. He also experimented with editing to make some of the earliest multi-shot films and with trick effects. In the same year as this short film, he made "Grandma's Reading Glass," which is an extravaganza of point-of-view (POV) close-ups. I prefer "As Seen through a Telescope," however, because the use of a POV close-up serves the plot; whereas, a thin story--a boy, like the director, fascinated with magnification--served the parading of POV close-ups in "Grandma's Reading Glass."

"As Seen through a Telescope" begins with an establishing shot. Why a man is outside during daylight looking up at the sky with his small telescope is anyone's guess. Anyhow, the old pervert then uses the telescope to peer over at a younger man tying a woman's shoe. The old man and us see the woman flirtingly pulling up her dress via a POV close-up shot. A mask over the camera lens creates the illusion that we're looking through a telescope.

The third shot returns to the original long shot, where the comicality is that the younger man pushes the voyeur off his seat as he and the woman pass by. Elementary enough, but the use of a POV close-up within something of a narrative is a landmark in film history.

Edwin S. Porter remade this as "The Gay Shoe Clerk" (1903). Besides the story, the main difference between it and "As Seen through a Telescope" is that Porter's close-up wasn't a POV shot, but a privileged camera position.

The guy in the top hat, sits on a little chair and looks at things through a telescope, circa 1900. He spots the ankle of a woman as she is assisted by a man. He does not move from the shot. This is an early, simple example of a camera technique. We see most of the film through the lens of the telescope.

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.

In Let Me Dream Again, George Smith showed us what a "dream sequence" looked like and in Grandma's Reading Glass he played with point of view presentation, which is again what he does here. We have the same effect used to let us see what a man is looking at down a telescope. Here though the material makes it worth a look in itself because it is quite amusing as the man gets his comeuppance for looking at the woman's lower leg (racy for the time I imagine). To me this is what makes it worth seeing more than the other film because the material is stronger even if the technical experimentation is the same.

A man looks through a telescope... at a woman's ankles.

It's a naughty film for 1900, but what's really shocking is the use of cutting and close-up to tell a story. George Albert Smith is largely unremembered in the history of cinema, but he's one of those guys who figured out how to do something right and then everyone went about their business as if he had never existed, until some one actually checked the record. Mendeleyev springs to mind.

What Smith did was figure out the basics of modern film grammar, the elements of a close-up and cutting, working from 1898 through 1904, then went on to do other things in cooperation with his buddy Charles Urban.... and seems to have vanished from film history. After him, other film-makers went about making films in exactly the same old way as before. Melies had his own grammar, Edwin S. Porter and associate developed their own grammar at Edison, but everyone else assumed that the movie screen was just like the stage, and you wanted to be seated in the front row, center. Just take less time with the scene changes.

Unless, as I suspect, while D.W. Griffith was looking through old movies at the Biograph warehouse -- Biograph had been the American distributor for Smith's pictures -- he had chanced on them and realized that they matched some stage techniques of lighting alternate parts of the stage to show action that was happening simultaneously. And sixteen other things that most people had forgotten.

I'd like to think so.