Uma História Interessante

A gentleman is so engrossed in his book that he serves tea in his hat, walks into people, animals and things, and eventually is crushed by a steamroller, the lumbering approach of which he is oblivious. Fortunately, a couple of cyclists witness the flattening and with aid of their trusty tyre pumps reinflate the hapless reader, whose main concern is finding his book and his hat. Whoever was in charge of continuity goofed - the victim's hat was moved during the substitution splice that returned him to 3D corporality, revealing the 'trick'. Silly but funny and likely the inspiration for decades of comic steamroller shtick.

This short comedy is constructed quite well. It gets a lot of mileage out of a simple story idea, combining some obvious slapstick with a few touches of more subtle humor. In developing several scenes based on the same basic gag - a man reading "An Interesting Story" who is thus oblivious to his surroundings - it is quite resourceful, and it reminds you of some of the more carefully developed silent comedies that would come a little later. Williamson was more known for a couple of significant short dramatic features, but this shows that he knew how to make a comedy, too. It's an entertaining little feature that was made with skill.

"An Interesting Story" follows a man whose attention is consumed by a book; nevertheless, the man attempts to have breakfast and walk somewhere while continuing to read. It's a rather amusing film for being made in 1904, as we see him pour his coffee in his hat, run into people, and be run over by a road roller. The film also features some early, not so seamless, stop-substitutions (jump cuts) to switch the actor for a dummy.

Otherwise, the continuity between shots is good. The film's author James Williamson was early cinema's foremost pioneer of continuity and direction of action across the screen--that is, from shot to shot. The grammar of this six-scene film is more interesting when compared to his other films that also develop the rules of continuity editing, which include "Attack on a China Mission" (1900), "Stop Thief!", "Fire!" (both 1901) and "Our New Errand Boy" (1905). As opposed to the usual lateral left/right staging of action across the screen, which was used more frequently in "Fire!", "An Interesting Story" follows mostly an in depth staging of background/foreground and employs reverse angle shots. He also did this in "Attack on a China Mission". Additionally, this is the only example of Williamson's work in editing that I've seen where the characters and action aren't in a hurry.

A man reads an interesting book at breakfast. It absorbs him so completely that he pours coffee into his hat. He continues reading it as he walks into the street, colliding with various people..... and a steam roller in this amusing variation on Walter Booth's AN EXTRAORDINARY CAB ACCIDENT.

The director this movie, James Williamson, 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.

The IMDb trivia for this movie notes that it is considered to be the earliest slapstick film -- obviously no one has ever heard of at least three version of THE MILLER AND THE SWEEP released in 1897.

This is the kind of film Chaplin might have made had he been making movies in 1905, its' humour and inventiveness are that impressive. But then it's a film made by James Williamson - one of the Brighton School of early British filmmakers - and by 1905 he had already demonstrated that he was a man capable of producing quality material.

The story is slight but fast-moving and humorous. Our hero is so absorbed in the book he is reading that he can't bear to raise his head from it which means he is fortunate to somehow survive a number of potentially fatal encounters with scrubbing housewives, skipping children and slow-moving steamrollers.