George Albert Smith (film producer)

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George Albert Smith, around 1900

George Albert Smith (born January 4, 1864 in London , † May 17, 1959 in Brighton ) was a British film pioneer who, as a member of the Brighton School, was instrumental in the technical and artistic development of film at the beginning of the 20th century . Smith's films were among the first to make innovative use of film editing and close-up , and he also invented the Kinemacolor system, one of the first practicable color film processes .

biography

Early years

George Albert Smith was born in London, where he also spent the first years of his life. After the early death of their father, the family moved to the seaside resort of Brighton, where Smith's mother ran a guesthouse . At the age of seventeen, Smith began a career as a stage artist in Brighton. He performed as a hypnotist and mentalist , in which Smith achieved such a great mastery that the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was actually convinced of his telepathic abilities. Smith became the private secretary and research object of the psychologist Edmund Gurney, a founding member of the SPR, and himself published some writings on parapsychological phenomena in the late 1880s .

In 1888 Smith married actress Laura Eugenia Bayley. The couple initially lived in Ramsgate , but moved to London around 1890. In 1892, George Albert Smith bought St. Ann's Well Garden in Hove near Brighton and set up a pleasure garden there. In addition to fortune tellers and trained monkeys , Smith also presented lavishly staged performances of the magic lantern to entertain the numerous visitors .

In the spring of 1896, Smith attended the Lumière brothers' film screenings in London. Smith took an interest in this new form of entertainment, purchased a film camera in late 1896 or early 1897, and began making his own films. Similar to the French magician Georges Méliès , Smith already managed to implement stage tricks and effects of the magic lantern in film with his first films . Thanks to the innovative use of stop tricks and double exposures , his film Santa Claus from 1898 is considered to be one of the earliest examples in film history of depicting a parallel plot.

Career as a film producer

In 1899 Smith built a film studio with a glass roof in St. Ann's Well Garden , which enabled him to expand film production. As early as 1897 he had set up a laboratory for the development of films, in which he not only developed his own works, but also those of other filmmakers in Brighton and Hove such as James Williamson or Esme Collings. The close collaboration with the film camera designer Alfred Darling and the film distributor Charles Urban created a network of film pioneers who played a major role in the artistic and technical development of the medium of film. George Albert Smith, along with Williamson, was one of the leading figures in this "School of Brighton".

In February 1899, Smith shot a comical scene in his studio, which he assembled into a Phantom Ride by Cecil Hepworth . The resulting film The Kiss in the Tunnel first shows how a train enters a tunnel. This is followed by the scene filmed by Smith in which two travelers (played by Smith and his wife Laura) in a train compartment take advantage of the darkness as they pass through the tunnel to kiss passionately. The film ends with another excerpt from Hepworth's Phantom Ride , which shows the train exiting the tunnel. Although there were before A Kiss in the Tunnel already a few films of several settings passed, but Smith is considered the film as one of the earliest and most influential examples of scenic film editing, which contributed to the invisible cut as the most important assembly technique of the classic film to establish.

In 1900, a series of films followed, which are among the most important works of Smith and which represented a departure from the then common tableau style . In Grandma's Reading Glass and As Seen Through a Telescope , close-ups and point-of-view shots of objects and events observed through a magnifying glass or telescope were inserted into the simple narrative structure of the films. In The House That Jack Built the movie is playing in the second part of the plot backwards and Let Me Dream Again is an almost seamless transition between dream and reality by a fade instead. In the 1990s, Smith's authorship of these films was challenged by Dutch film historian Tjitte de Vries and instead attributed to Arthur Melbourne-Cooper . The majority of film historians disagreed with these claims.

In addition to the films aimed at presenting the effects, Smith mainly produced comedies in which he shot his wife Laura Bayley (usually referred to in the catalogs as Mrs. George Albert Smith ). Instead of the long shot, Smith preferred close-ups in films like The Old Maid's Valentine from 1900, in order to depict the facial expressions of the trained comedian in detail. Laura Bailey also starred in Mary Jane's Mishap from 1903, considered one of Smith's final successes.

Kinemacolor

In 1903, George Albert Smith produced his last films at St. Ann's Well Garden . The following year he gave up St. Ann's Well Garden , set up a laboratory a few miles west of Hove in Southwick and worked on the implementation of a system for the production of color films .

From 1901, Charles Urban had supported the engineer Edward Turner in developing a color film system for which Turner and F. Marshall Lee had already applied for a patent in 1899 . After Turner's death in 1903, Urban entrusted Smith with the further development of the system, which was based on the principle of additive color mixing . Smith quickly realized that Turner and Lee's system was impractical, but it took him three years to develop a working system himself. In November 1906 Smith registered his "cinematographic apparatus for the production of colored films" for a patent.

Two more years passed before the first public demonstration of the procedure; the first commercial demonstration finally took place in London on February 26, 1909. The system called Kinemacolor proved to be the most commercially successful color film system before Technicolor's subtractive color process was introduced in the mid-1920s. Urban produced numerous films for the specially founded Natural Color Kinematograph Company , but Smith only acted as a background consultant.

The success of Kinemacolor suddenly ended in 1914, when the British film pioneer William Friese-Greene successfully sued Smith's patent, thereby enabling competitors to develop their own systems based on Smith's invention. George Albert Smith then withdrew completely from the film business. From then on he devoted himself to astronomy and slowly fell into oblivion as a film producer.

It wasn't until the 1940s that Smith and his films were rediscovered. The French film historian Georges Sadoul paid tribute to Smith as a film pioneer and coined the term "School of Brighton"; Rachael Lowe portrayed him in her History of British Films , published in 1948 . British film producer Michael Balcon called Smith the "father of the British film industry" . In 1955 Smith was honored with a gala from the British Film Academy .

As one of the last film pioneers of the 19th century, George Albert Smith died at the age of 95 on May 17th, 1959.

Filmography (selection)

Notes and individual references

  1. ↑ Some websites incorrectly state Brighton as Smith's birthplace, see Robert Murphy (Ed.): Directors in British and Irish Cinema. A Reference Companion. BFI, London 2006, ISBN 1-84457-126-2 , p. 558.
  2. ^ Simon During: Modern Enchantments. The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA et al. 2004, ISBN 0-674-01371-9 , pp. 274-275.
  3. ↑ Michaela S. Ast: History of the narrative film montage. Theoretical principles and selected examples. Tectum-Verlag, Marburg 2002, ISBN 3-8288-8435-0 , p. 13.
  4. ^ Robert Pearson: Early Cinema. In: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Ed.): The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 1996, ISBN 0-19-874242-8 , p. 16.
  5. ^ Frank Gray: The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899). In: Lee Grieveson, Peter Krämer (Eds.): The Silent Cinema Reader. 2004, pp. 51–62, here 52–54.
  6. ^ Robert Murphy (Ed.): Directors in British and Irish Cinema. A Reference Companion. BFI, London 2006, ISBN 1-84457-126-2 , p. 559.
  7. ^ Tjitte de Vries: Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, Film Pioneer Wronged by Film History. In: KINtop. No. 3, 1994, ISSN  1024-1906 , pp. 143-160.
  8. ↑ Stephen Bottomore: Smith versus Melbourne-Cooper: An End to the Dispute. In: Film History. Vol. 14, No. 1, 2002, ISSN  0892-2160 , pp. 57-73.
  9. ^ Don Fairservice: Film Editing. History, Theory and Practice. Looking at the Invisible. Manchester University Press, Manchester et al. 2001, ISBN 0-7190-5777-9 , p. 33.
  10. ↑ BP 26671 from 1906 , accessed on esp @ cenet on June 23, 2009.
  11. ↑ Charles Harpole (ed.): History of the American Cinema. Volume 2: Eileen Bowser: The Transformation of Cinema. 1907-1915. University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 1994, ISBN 0-520-08534-5 , p. 228.
  12. ^ Georges Sadoul : L'Ecole de Brighton (1900–1905): Les origines du montage, du gros plans et de la poursuite. In: Cinema. No. 2, 1945, ZDB -ID 20225-3 , pp. 45-51.
  13. ^ Quoted from Matthew Sweet: Inventing the Victorians. St. Martin's Press, New York NY 2001, ISBN 0-312-28326-1 , p. 27.

literature

  • John Barnes: The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901. 5 volumes. University Exeter Press, Exeter 1996-1998.
  • Frank Gray: The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899). GA Smith and the emergence of the edited film in England. In: Lee Grieveson, Peter Krämer (Eds.): The Silent Cinema Reader. Routledge, London et al. 2004, ISBN 0-415-25284-9 , pp. 51-62.
  • David B. Thomas: The First Color Motion Pictures. Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London 1969, ISBN 0-11-290014-3 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Smith, George Albert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Smith, GA
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British film pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH January 4, 1864
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH 17th May 1959
Place of death Brighton