L'astronome indiscret

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.

This early Smith film is a later experiment of the POV shots and masking that he was experimenting with in his movies. Though made the same year as "Grandma's Reading Glass" this is actually technically better than that film, having an actual story to tell; in the other film, Smith was more just having fun filming POVs without really trying to incorporate any sort of plot. Thus, this can be seen as a more important short in that respect.

A man with a telescope is outside of a shop, looking around at different things with his instrument. He spots a scene happening on the other side of the road and uses his telescope to spy on a man tying a woman's shoe, and glimpses the woman's leg!!!!!!!!!! Whoa, don't look! Woman's showing her leg!!!! AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH! is the reaction it probably got at the time, though it seems pretty harmless now. Not especially great but important and still somewhat entertaining today.

As Seen Through a Telescope (1900)

*** (out of 4)

An old man is looking around with his telescope and notices a woman's ankle. He keeps looking at it and thinks he's gotten away until her husband walks up to him. AS SEEN THROUGH A TELESCOPE isn't a masterpiece but it's a fairly fun film that clocks in just under a minute. While there's nothing ground-breaking here there is one big laugh that makes the film worth sitting through. This comes from the same director of GRANDMA'S READING GLASSES but the effect here is put to much better use.