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.

This comic short has a similar plot to Smith's previous 'Grandma's Reading Glass' - a male protagonist looks at the world through the eyes of an optical instrument. Where the visions of the first film, however, were appropriate to a young boy - curious, novel, fresh, surprising ways of looking at the world as if for the first time (e.g. like the first cinema goers), the development of an individual consciousness as it were - the point of view in this film is typical of an aged lecher, as he gawps at the incipient sexual tease performed by a man and a bicycled woman as he ties up her shoelace, slowly raising her long dress to reveal a titillating glimpse of stockinged leg.

The move here from the encyclopaedic to the sexual and voyeuristic may be symptomatic of the 'wrong' turning taken by cinema, bemoaned by the likes of Godard, away from a curious interest in the world to vulgar, voyeuristic, prurient peepshows. But Smith is no fool, and the clatter the scopophile receives from one of his 'victims' is given to us too - we are no better than this pervert.

The set-up cries out for voyeurism - a distanced shot of an environment offers us a brief glimpse of the couple in the background - the only way we can learn more is with the aid of this man's instrument, significantly more phallic that Grandma's female lens. There is no distortion here, as was the case with the first film, but clarification, a feeling of being close to the action, but apart from it: enjoyment without risk, the dream of every voyeur.

In a sense, this simple plot - voyeur attacked by the man he spies on - foreshadows one of the great masterpieces of cinema and the ultimate analysis of cinematic voyeurism and the invasion of privacy, 'Rear Window'. The man's instrument may be phallic, but it is onanistic and sterile, especially in comparison to the fertile sexual relations presumably to be enjoyed at a later date by the couple. The cinematic gaze is already being made negative, anti-social, hidden, something to be punished, something unhealthy, anti-family, solitary. The watcher must be watched, controlled, as the victim's punitive action suggests.

But it's not that simple. The framing circle of the close-up is linked to the circles of the wheels and pedals of the bicycle, maybe even the circle of life that this courtship intimates, just as Jeff's voyeurism is framed against his reluctance to settle down with his girlfriend. A surprisingly ambiguous, analytical piece of self-reflexive cinema.

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.

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.