George Albert Smith: Fictional and Fantastical Films

George Albert Smith was a pioneer in creating special effects, such as superimposition, to create fantastical scenes in films.  He and James Williamson set up a film factory in Brighton in the late 1890s.

The following text is from Brighton Royal Pavilion Museums and Libraries website and tells of Smith's creation of techniques to create special effects to be used in his fantasy films, and his use of a studio shot piece of footage set in a train carriage which he inserted into the exterior footage of a train going into, and coming out of a tunnel to create a continuous film across three shots.  For this George Albert Smith is regarded as a pioneer of film editing.


From Brighton Royal Pavilion Museums and Libraries website:

George Albert Smith was one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation and was one of the first to explore fictional and fantastical themes. Smith's experience of using bi-unial and tri-unial magic lanterns (lanterns with two and three lenses) informed his filmmaking and helped him develop new cutting techniques. Smith was an inspired innovator and revelled in the freedom that the new medium afforded him. Indeed, Smith pioneered processes such as superimposition, double-exposure, reversing, close-up shots and dream sequences.

Special Effects

George Albert Smith developed a variety of manipulative techniques to achieve special effects, many of which are still used in modern filmmaking. Smith used superimposition to create the illusion of ghostly figures and the use of cutting and interspersing film made it appear as though figures materialised out of nowhere. A good example of this is Smith's 1898 film Santa Claus. The effect of superimposition was achieved through the double-exposure of film and, in 1897, Smith patented a double-exposure system.

Smith employed the use of reversing film to make seemingly impossible feats possible. For instance, in The House That Jack Built, a young boy destroys a toy house that his sister has built before seeing the house mysteriously rebuild itself. This effect is achieved by reversing the section of film that shows the house falling down.

Editing Techniques

George Albert Smith is widely regarded as the inventor of film editing. Films such as Grandma's Reading Glass, The House That Jack Built and Let Me Dream Again demonstrate a vast array of editing techniques including the close-up shot, subjective and objective point-of-view shots and reversing. For example, Smith used a studio shot from Kiss in the Tunnel in Cecil Hepworth's View From an Engine Front - Train Leaving Tunnel to create a three shot sequence. In As Seen Through the Telescope, Smith smoothly cuts from long shots to close-up shots. These techniques created a new sense of continuity and simultaneity that revolutionised narrative thought.

As the film academic Frank Gray notes, Smith rejected the traditional theatrical perspective (a fixed view from the stalls) which had been the model for film production until 1900. For instance, in Grandma's Reading Glass, we enter the grandson's mind and see close-up shots of objects through the reading glass. Smith thus pioneered multi-angle and multi-perspective cinematography. Furthermore, Smith originated a number of transitional processes that aided continuity editing. These included wipes, dissolves, pulls and cuts.

The following text is from BFI screenonline:


Smith's films in the years 1897-1903 were largely comedies and adaptations of popular fairy tales and stories. His wife, Laura Bayley, influenced his work within these genres. Her life in popular theatre before 1897, particularly in pantomime and comic revues, placed Smith in intimate contact with an experienced actress who understood visual comedy and the interests of seaside audiences. Laura performed in many of his most important films, including Let Me Dream Again (1900) and Mary Jane's Mishap (1903).
Smith made only the studio shot of the train carriage in The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) but when he inserted it into Cecil Hepworth's phantom ride, View From an Engine Front - Train Leaving Tunnel (1899), he created an edited film which demonstrated a new sense of continuity and simultaneity across three shots. This filmic imagination was radical for the time and Smith used this innovation to develop a series of films in 1900 that, along with The Kiss in the Tunnel, are the most important works of his film career. They are Grandma's Reading Glass, As Seen Through the Telescope, The House That Jack Built and Let Me Dream Again.

The Kiss in the Tunnel

These four films depict a number of short narrative actions and as such are probably best described as narrative fragments. However, they each introduced editing concepts that would be central to the future development of film form, such as interpolative close-ups, subjective and objective point-of-view shots, reversal, the creation of dream-time and a dissolve effect. They revealed film's distinctiveness as a new visual medium and demonstrated to his contemporaries how to create a filmed sequence. These films established Smith's significance as a major film pioneer.

Grandma's Reading Glass merits close attention because it offered a new way of entering into a fictional world by sharing a very particular kind of vicarious visual pleasure. The logic of the narrative is that we can see what the Grandson can see through the reading glass. Magically, as if through the action of a spiritualist medium, we enter into his mind in order to share his vision. The sights revealed by this cinematic illusion are of everyday objects but they all possess a degree of charm and beauty, especially the close-ups of the human eye and the cat's head. This film renounced the conventions of a theatrical perspective - the fixed view from the stalls - that had been the dominant model for film production up to 1900 and continued to be a feature of Méliès' new and longer multi-scene narratives. In its place, it presented a new filmic understanding of space and time, which was designed to reveal a new subjectivity. Grandma's Reading Glass, in effect, expressed a revolutionary new form of visual representation because of its embrace of multiple perspectives within a comprehensible linear narrative.

After 1900, the two-colour additive process known as Kinemacolor came to dominate the rest of Smith's career in film. It was launched in Paris and London in 1908 and transformed by Urban into a new enterprise: the Natural Color Kinematograph Company. It had success in the period 1910 to 1913, producing over 100 short features from its studios in Hove and Nice. However, a patent suit brought against Kinemacolor by William Friese-Greene in 1914 led to its collapse and ended Smith's career in the film business.