La Loupe de grand-maman

There's quite a little gang forming in these comments for films-so-old-that-no-one wants-to-watch-them-apart-from-a-few-die-hards. Apart from me there's Bob and Alice and the wonderfully informative Cineanalyst, and every now and then Plankton drops by to moan about how dull it all is. Hey-ho. Grandma's Reading Glass is notable today for its early use of 'point of view' shots, as we see through the eyes of a young boy looking through a magnifying glass. It's also an early example of extreme close-up as we're treated to a shot of Grandma's eyeball rolling about wildly for a few seconds. As Plankton has commented, given that the likes of Melies were already creating dynamic films filled with trickery by 1900, this all seems a little tame.

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.

In my comments on "As Seen Through a Telescope", I said that I preferred it to this film, "Grandma's Reading Glass" (which was made the same month and year and by the same director), because this film is merely a parading of point-of-view (POV) close-up shots of supposedly magnified things. The story is: a boy looks through a large magnifying glass (his grandmother's reading glass) at various objects, including his grandmother's eye. The set is primitive and the tight camera framing makes it seem small. The shadows make it obvious that it was made at an open-air stage.

"As Seen Through a Telescope", however, has a single POV close-up that functions within a narrative. And, its fictional story takes place outside. An analogy that seems somewhat appropriate is that "Grandma's Reading Glass" is like the modern-day special effects blockbuster that neglects further insight and compelling plot. Looking at a remake of each film further illustrates this point. Biograph's "Grandpa's Reading Glass" (1902) serves the same purpose of this film: to thrill with its novel trick. "The Gay Shoe Clerk" (1903), Porter's version of "As Seen Through a Telescope", however, is less of a clone; its setting and even its close-up is presented from a different perspective--the more standard one rather than a POV. George Albert Smith made at least one more POV close-up film in 1900, "Spiders on a Web", which is only a one-shot film of spiders (but, oddly, no web).

Regardless, "Grandma's Reading Glass" is noteworthy as an early example of POV close-ups inserted within something of a narrative. By 1900, story films of multiple shots still weren't the norm and had only recently come into existence. Film editing was only about five years old.

Another thing on a historical note: there's been some controversy surrounding the author of this film, but there shouldn't be. Some, although it would seem lacking sufficient evidence, have claimed that Arthur Melbourne Cooper made this film and a few other films attributed to Smith. This controversy originated from Melbourne Cooper himself, who made such claims to his daughter, Audrey Wadowska. Tjitte De Vries has recently argued the Melbourne Cooper claim. On the other end, Stephen Bottomore and Frank Gray, in the journal "Film History", have gone a long way to discredit these claims. Nevertheless, MOMA has attributed their copy of the film to Melbourne Cooper and the Wikipedia website (as of this date), among other places, is full of unfounded claims for Melbourne Cooper in their section on him.

The evidence for Melbourne Cooper, as of now, is entirely based on, at best, secondhand accounts originating from the memory of a now deceased man, and more likely originating from his faulty memory, or, at worst, his self-aggrandizing lies. Very little is known for certain about Melbourne Cooper's early film-making career, and his entire career isn't very well known, either; on the other hand, Smith's surviving financial records have made his film-making career probably the best documented of early British filmmakers. Concerning this film, Bottomore (in "Smith versus Melbourne-Cooper: An End to the Dispute") has pointed out that there's no documentation of an association between Smith and Melbourne Cooper, that the Warwick Trading Company grouped this film with other uncontested Smith films in its 1900 catalogue, and that the Charles Urban Trading Company credited Smith as the author of this film and others, contested and uncontested, in their 1903 catalogue. Moreover, the little boy in this film is probably Smith's son, Harold, who also appears in uncontested Smith films. The same tabby cat with a ribbon in this film probably appears in uncontested Smith films, as well. In addition, Smith's financial records reveal that he had the equipment--the camera masks--to make the POV close-ups. De Vries even admits now that "As Seen Through a Telescope", which demonstrates the same unique feature, was made by Smith.

G.A. Smith was one of film's most important pioneers. In addition to the POV close-up insert shot in these 1900 films, he helped introduce many developments in editing and camera placement within early story films, as well as some trick effects and a color cinematography process. In many respects, his films were the most advanced at the time--even surpassing those made by more acclaimed contemporaries Edwin Porter and Georges Méliès.

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.

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!