The Sick Kitten

It certainly did not take long for cats to break into the movies.

Here we see a kitten sitting in some kind of homemade cat bed when a little girl picks the kitten up and begins to rock her, making it look as though the cat is ill. A little boy in a top hat enters the room, inspects the situation, leaves, and then returns with a bottle of something labeled "fisik". The little girl gets a tablespoon of the "fisik" and feeds it to the kitten who eagerly gobbles it down.

The cat is neither sick nor being fed medicine, for the kitten is not fighting whatever it is they are feeding to her. The mother cat - I assume because of size and resemblance - comes to see what is going on and quickly leaves. She obviously does not think her offspring is in danger.

George Albert Smith was the director, the British counterpart to George Melies as far as experimenting with different techniques for special effects during the early days of cinema. He also patented Kinemacolor, which was the world's first commercial cinema color system, in 1906, which was extremely successful for a time, in spite of the extra equipment needed for projection.

Some might say this rather simple film was an experiment in magic, as you must be a magician to get a cat to eat something if it is not their idea. I say that as a lover and owner of cats for decades.

Despite the tongue-in-cheek Marxian film-school analysis of the films in THE MOVIES BEGIN DVD set by Ms. Liddell-Hart and the amiable and seemingly unsophisticated enthusiasms of Snow Leopard, these films retain a fascination for those of us who are interested in old films for their own sakes. For those of us who are not fascinated by history, it is still interesting to see that there was cinema before, say, Adam Sandler ... and to see things done for the first time is always interesting. There is a freshness about the first time that sophistication cannot repeat.

But we can also appreciate these films on their own terms, and further, in their ability to engage us today. It is interesting to put oneself in the mind of someone a hundred years ago, and, given the short lengths of these pieces, thirty seconds can give us a complete film.... and is that such a great investment? If we can appreciate the works of Sophocles and Plautus and Shakespeare, why can we not admire the work done by Mr. G.A. Smith?

And, speaking from a historical viewpoint, Smith's work is amazing, since he seems to have invented the 'grammar of cinema' as Lilian Gish claimed D.W. Griffith did, ten years before Griffith set foot on a movie stage! True, his compositions are not as sophisticated as Griffith's, but Smith was an experimental film-maker, while Griffith was trying to use the results of those experiments. He tells little stories that, because of their subject matters, often do not age well. Well then, they are stuck in their times. This year (2002) saw a new film production of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST, filled, as comedies of manners usually are, by people who would be spending their time in medical wards under heavy dosages of drugs in today's world. Yet we can laugh at Oscar Wilde's comedy and can, I hope, take pleasure from Mr. Smith's.

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.

Having seen Smith use new techniques with his last few films this one was a bit of a letdown at first to me. It shows two children giving medicine to a sick cat and that's it. However only after reflection did I realise what was worth noting about it and, again, it is not the material (although the cat is cute). No Smith does two things of importance herein. Firstly he gets natural performances from the children and the cat, clearing that old saying had not been coined in his day. More importantly, although the film is one scene, it is broken up with close-ups on the action edited together to give the impression that it is all one continual time frame. OK this is nothing new and indeed it is so ordinary now for so long that I didn't even notice that it was happening in the same way as we don't notice breathing until we think about it.

So not a brilliant film but yet again an example of Smith experimenting with methods and devices in his films. The material is weak otherwise with only the cute and natural performances being of merit.

This is George Albert Smith's remake of his own film "The Little Doctors" (1901), which probably had its negatives worn out due to reprints--hence it being remade. The original film is probably lost forever. These two pictures must have been quite popular in their day. Smith essentially introduced the close-up to motion pictures in 1900 with "As Seen Through a Telescope" and "Grandma's Reading Glass", enhancing upon the medium close-up that had been quite popular since the Edison Company's "The Kiss" (1896). In Smith's two aforementioned films from 1900, the close-ups are point-of-view shots, with a mask around the camera lens to create circular vignettes. In "As Seen Through a Telescope", a man with a telescope looks at something, then the film cuts to a close-up of what he's looking at through the perspective of the telescope.

"Sick Kitten" contains a similar one scene, three-shot structure. There's a long shot, or establishing shot, followed by a close-up and the end takes us back to the original long shot position. The close-up in this film, however, doesn't involve camera masking or any character's point of view. It's a standard (as we know it today) close-up. It's also a match on action shot. It's seamlessly done and creates a good continuity. The same year, Edwin S. Porter's "The Gay Shoe Clerk", which is a reworking of "As Seen Through a Telescope", used a similar three-shot continuity: two establishing shots with a close-up inserted in the middle. Smith took this idea further within the same year in what is probably his most advanced surviving film, "Mary Jane's Mishap". Films with multiple shots were nothing new by 1903, but the scene dissection on display in these films by Smith were quite rare. For comparison, the most popular film from 1903, "The Great Train Robbery", has multiple shots, but they are all scenes in themselves. Oh, "Sick Kitten" doesn't have much of a story itself--just a couple of kids feeding a sick kitten. The cut to the close-up occurs during the feeding. Additionally, the children demonstrate that they were very aware that they were being filmed; the boy bows and holds his hat at the end.

This isn't the most engaging of films, but it is important in the development of cinema technique because of the way in which pioneering British filmmaker George Albert Smith transforms what would otherwise be a flat and somewhat dull film with the simple insertion of a close-up. The film shows two children and a couple of cats, one of which is supposed to be unwell. The cat sits on the girl's lap as a boy in an over-sized hat fetches a jug. The girl spoon-feeds medicine to the little kitten and it is at this point that Smith switches to a close-up of the kitten so that we can see it happily licking its medicine from the spoon. The film then returns to what was the establishing shot to show the boy removing his hat and bowing. It's no great shakes,and is fairly unremarkable when seen today, but it has a place in cinematic history.