La Loupe de grand-maman

There's quite a little gang forming in these comments for films-so-old-that-no-one wants-to-watch-them-apart-from-a-few-die-hards. Apart from me there's Bob and Alice and the wonderfully informative Cineanalyst, and every now and then Plankton drops by to moan about how dull it all is. Hey-ho. Grandma's Reading Glass is notable today for its early use of 'point of view' shots, as we see through the eyes of a young boy looking through a magnifying glass. It's also an early example of extreme close-up as we're treated to a shot of Grandma's eyeball rolling about wildly for a few seconds. As Plankton has commented, given that the likes of Melies were already creating dynamic films filled with trickery by 1900, this all seems a little tame.

This is the first film to make sustained use of point of view shots. A small boy picks up his granny's magnifying glass, and looks at various items through it, the newspaper, a cat etc. The film in itself is utterly charming: the little boy with the huge glass, the grandmother in her nannyish Victorian clothes, the tiny, overstuffed room all contrive a surreal, Alice-like atmosphere, which is very English in its exaggerated normality. and the young boy's discoveries, his making the world strange by looking with someone else's eyes, is delightful, explaining logically why the last thing he sees is his grandmother's eyes (birth of Godard!).

This making strange the familiar is, again, surreal, but it is also what the cinema does, and what the cinema had largely been doing since its invention, photographing the everyday, workers, families, trains etc., but making them marvellous. The difference being that these things were marvellous, not in themselves, but because of the medium, because they were moving pictures, because people had never seen themselves, or people like themselves in such an art form before. That novelty soon wore off, hence the move towards narrative, fantasy, comedy, genre.

The point of view, however, suggested a new avenue altogether. where early films were shot with a calm, detached, effacing distance, its framing belonging ostensibly to no-one (whatever ideologies such objectivity implied), the point of view took the image, or narrative, from outside the frame within it, breaking it up as it were, creating two levels of looking - the audience looking at the fiction, and the character in the fiction looking at something. The inviolability of the image is shattered, is no longer objective - 'reality' exists at two removes. We don't see an unmediated image anymore, we have to ask about the state of mind of the looker. Subjectivity is born, paving the way for German Expressionism, 'Citizen Kane', 'Vertigo', the monuments of the medium.

Smith cannily understands this- the point of view here is deliberately distorted, a young person looking through the glass of an older person with poor sight. The image is heightened, almost unreal. The camera and the distorted glass become the same thing, objectivity dies. Hoorah!

For me, this 5th year of baby cinema welcomes its first steps to get up : all the previous movies were static in the sense that the camera was still, motionless. Here, it's always the case but at least we have different frames. We can conclude that editing is born with this new millennium as audience has now different points of view. This change of shots is particularly imaginative here as it's done trough a magnifying glass and thus we alternate seeing a boy with his grandmother sit at a desk and the examined subjects : a glass, a watch, a bird, Grandma's eye, a cat… What's striking for me is that once again, it's like watching a Lynch movie : it's a bit surreal, but visually stunning as the vision is pure, classic and close to daily life while looking in another dimension…

A series of views of things through a magnifying glass. None is all that interesting because size doesn't make any difference. The only feature is the circular pictures that we see, so we know it is Grandma's magnifier.

A young boy looks at various things through his grandmother's magnifying glass.

When people speak about innovation in films, the process of adding new shots that would eventually lead to modern film grammar, few people mention George Albert Smith. This stage hypnotist, magic lantern exhibitor and film maker was born in 1864. He entered film-making in the late 1890s and almost immediately began directing films that clearly investigated camera techniques that are still used more than a century later. He imported techniques from the magic-lantern shows, produced films that demonstrated the impact of close-ups and, with this film, was an early adopter and innovator in the point-of-view shot.

Later on, he would move to the more technical side of the industry. In concert with Charles Urban, he would develop Kinemacolour, the first really successful color film. He died in 1959.