The Big Swallow

The first film that shows a man devouring a camera from the camera's perspective. This takes some mundane, contrived event and makes it quite interesting. I'm sure early audiences must have found it quite fascinating and humorous.

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.

Like Hepworth's film "How It Feels to Be Run Over", made the previous year, James Williamson's "The Big Swallow" is self-referential in its parody of film-making. (The third early self-reflexive film I discuss, "The Countryman and the Cinematograph", reverses this and parodies cinema viewing.) Both are about the camera and the cameraman (and, in a way, through their point of view, the spectator) coming to a violent collision with their filmed subject. That Williamson's film seems more likely to involve a still photographer rather than a cinematographer doesn't matter. In Hepworth's film, a motorist drives his automobile into the camera. In this film, the person being photographed swallows the camera and cameraman. Another notable difference between these two scenes is that Hepworth's film ends with the collision, as the screen goes blank and only intertitles end the film. In Williamson's film, the film (or point of view) we are watching (or were watching) is shown from another perspective, which shows the swallowing and the satisfied munching afterwards by the subject. It would seem more logical if the film ended as a single shot film with the subject's mouth taking up the entire frame, and thus blackening the entire frame in the way of Hepworth's film. Yet, it would be less clear in that way and would lack the added self-reflexive moment of showing the film we're watching being shot. This is likely the first movie to show, in a sense, itself being filmed--a self-referential device later used, for example, in François Truffaut's "Day for Night" (La Nuit américaine) (1973).

A similarity between "The Big Swallow" and R.W. Paul's film "The Countryman and the Cinematograph" is that they were both part of the early cinema genre of trick films. Although their special effects seem of rather secondary interest now, they were still novel for 1901. Positioned within the trick film also adds further layers of self-reference to these films because the special effects (the swallowing shot here and the superimposed films within Paul's film) show the films' main self-reflexive devices. Additionally, cinema itself is a kind of trick. On a note of technique, Williamson's refocusing of the image as the subject approaches the camera was very rare for 1901.

"The Big Swallow" was also part of the facial expression genre, which tended to be one-scene films framed in a close-up of a person's face. There were quite a few of these films, but none that I know of were nearly as interesting as this. Most of them were merely curios of the newfound close-up.

Furthermore, the scene being photographed within "The Big Swallow" reminds me of actualitiés, which was still the most popular motion picture genre in 1901. "The Big Swallow" seems to parody this type of documentary. In it, a man is merely reading something until disturbed by a cameraman photographing him--recording the image of the man that we see, which is the film proper. Michael Brooke, for the BFI website, however, suggests that "The Big Swallow" was inspired by Williamson's experience with "savvy" passers-by while filming his actuality films.

"The Big Swallow" is the beginning of a thread of films that goes through "Kid Auto Races at Venice" (1914) to "The Truman Show" (1998).

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.

A man sees he is being filmed and starts to remonstrate with the camera crew about it. Finally losing his temper the man closes in the camera and, well, eats it. This sounds simple and it is but I had assumed that the film would merely end on the darkness of the man's mouth as the punchline. Instead the delivery is cleverer than that and we step back to see the camera and the cameraman falling into the "mouth" before we then cut back to the man walking backwards chewing. It is a clever combination of camera shots to create the gag and invention work from Williams. Not brilliant but quite clever when you look at it in context.

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.