Attack on a China Mission

Attack on a China Mission (1900)

It's hard to full judge this film because it originally ran four minutes but now it's just under 90 seconds. What we've got is a woman is pulled and dragged by a man as a group of people attack the mission. There's a violent gun battle that follows. ATTACK ON A CHINA MISSION is one of many films that were drawn from the headlines. Producers realized that people would go see movies about stories they had read about in the newspaper and this here is just one example. For the most part the film is entertaining thanks in large part to the gunfight, which actually leads to quite a few dead bodies, which wasn't all that common in 1900. This British film is certainly worth watching but lets hope the rest of it is located at some point.

A man tries to defend his family from the attack of Chinese boxers in revolt. A row lines up and shoots towards the camera and then towards the viewer as in the episode of "The great train robbery" by Porter.The house is under siege

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.

This film recreates a scene for the audience and I for one am willing to forgive it for clearly not being made anywhere other than England and certainly not China! That aside then I was looking for something that would be considered "epic" for 1900 but sadly this is not it. The pyrotechnics are something I supposed (well, smoke and powder) but it is all too stagy and stiff with nothing in the way of flow coming out in the edit. OK it was 1900 but I have seen films of the period do better than this with less.

Interesting for what it is but there are more important and impressive films out there from the very same period.

Attack on a China Mission is a 1900 British film, directed by James Williamson showing British sailors coming to the rescue of the wife of a missionary killed in the Boxer uprising.

The film made of four separate shot, consisting of the innovative use of the reverse-angle shot. Before, most films had the action performed in front of the camera in a single shot sequence. This new editing technique not only foreshadowed the development of film narrative, but also gave ample added time for the commentator/lecturer to explain the action for the viewers.

It should first be made clear that "Attack on a China Mission" is not known to exist in its entirety today. As the British Film Institute (BFI) says, just under half of it survives. Originally, it was 230 feet and, reportedly, around 4 minutes, which was comparatively long at a time when most pictures were a single shot-scene lasting about a minute. Additionally, two different prints, or versions, have been made available on DVD and neither of these is as complete as the one the BFI has on its website (with limited access, by the way). "Attack on a China Mission" was a four-shot film, and the website version includes all four shots, although in shortened forms. The version available on Kino's "Movies Begin" and the BFI's "Primitives and Pioneers" (the version most of the previous comments seem to be based on) is only the second shot of the film. A three-shot version (the final shot is missing) is shown in the "Silent Britain" program.

Historian John Barnes ("The Beginnings of the Cinema in England") said, "This is one of the key films in the history of the cinema and has the most fully developed narrative of any film made in England up to that time." From my studies of early film, it appears that at the close of 1900, the two most innovative places in development of narrative film were in Georges Méliès's studio and in England (that is, filmmakers R.W. Paul, G.A. Smith and, with this film, James Williamson). Méliès, however, hadn't explored continuity of shots within scenes, although he made some of the earliest multi-scene subjects, including "Cinderella", "The Dreyfus Affair" (both 1899) and "Joan of Arc" (1900). It seems that continuity of multiple shots within scenes was invented in England--at least in respect to fictional subjects. Paul's "Come Along Do!" (1898) is the earliest two-shot fiction film that I know of to feature action continuing across spatially separate locations and camera viewpoints. In 1900, Smith produced "As Seen Through a Telescope" and "Grandma's Reading Glass", both films of which contain insert close-ups within an outer establishing shot. Williamson's film here may be even more advanced.

The first shot of "Attack on a China Mission" shows the Chinese "boxers" breaking through a gate, which has a sign "Mission Station" printed on it. Some of them crouch and shoot before proceeding farther. The camera position is from outside the gate, which shows their backs.

The second shot is of the mission house--showing the missionaries reacting and preparing for a fight: the male gets guns, and the women hide inside. The second shot ends with the male missionary wrestling with a boxer and a woman waving a handkerchief from a balcony. As with all the camera positions, it's a stationary long shot staged in depth. (The supposed white-haired, mustached Chinese man who wrestles with the missionary and does some sword waving turns briefly towards the camera for a frontal view at the beginning of the shot, revealing that he is clearly not Chinese. Probably none of the actors were.)

Shot three is, again, of the front gate, but, this time, it's a reverse angle take of the film's first shot. Thus, we're now inside the gate, and the camera shows the front sides of the bluejackets (really, some local sailors) as they come to rescue the missionaries. Some of them also crouch and shoot before proceeding farther.

The final shot is a continuation of the second shot from the same camera position. The bluejackets save the day, including an officer escaping with a female missionary by horseback.

There seems to be no documented indication that Williamson meant to mislead viewers to thinking this was actuality (or documentary) footage of the real Boxer Rebellion (extant catalogue descriptions that I've seen make no mention of it being staged or not). Moreover, Barnes cites Méliès's 11-scene "The Dreyfus Affair", which also recreated scenes from contemporary news, as an influence on Williamson making this. Today, at least, it's clear that Williamson staged this production in Hove, England. It also doesn't appear to be based on any particular real incident of the Boxer Rebellion. A further note: this film shouldn't be confused with a Mitchell & Kenyon production and Wrench & Son distributed film, which is sometimes listed by the same or similar title and the same year as this separate Williamson film. That film isn't as of much historical importance, being shorter and probably only a single shot; it's also probably lost.

Besides being an early multi-shot film and one to feature continuous action across shots, Williamson's "Attack on a China Mission" is possibly the first film to feature a reverse-angle shot and brief crosscutting (the continuity being: A / B / reverse-angle of A / B). Additionally, the production values are somewhat elaborate for 1900, with a couple dozen actors, costumes and weapons, and a good amount of smoke from fake gunfire. This is a milestone in cinema history.