Cinéclub Podcast #1: G.A. Smith
I am pleased to announce the inaugral episode of The Cinéclub Podcast!
You can find the podcast on the following platforms;
This post will be updated with further links as I upload the episode to more platforms. If you can’t find “wherever you get your podcasts”, please let me know!
Today marks the 160th birthday of the Hove filmmaker George Albert Smith. To celebrate, this podcast takes a deep dive into Smith’s life and career including his involvement in spooky ‘thought transferrance’ experiments; the nature of his collaboration with his wife, the actress Laura Bayley; the films in which he expanded film grammar to include close-ups and sophisticated editing; and his experiments with colour.
This episode includes contributions from Dr. Frank Gray, author of The Brighton School and the Birth of British Film, and Alexia Lazou, assistant curator at Hove Museum.
You can email me at atthecineclub@gmail.com.
Show notes
Links to some of the key films discussed in the episode:
G.A. Smith films
Santa Claus (1898)
The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899)
As Seen Through a Telescope (1900)
Mary Jane’s Mishap (1903)
The Harvest (1908)
Fording the River (1910)
Esmé Collings films
Boys Scrambling for Pennies (1986)
Children Paddling (1899)
Bibliography
John Barnes, “Mary Jane’s Mishap”: An Early British Film Re-Examined in Film History 16 (1), 2004, 54-59
Frank Gray, The Brighton School and the Birth of British Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
Frank Gray, Smith the Showman: The Early Years of George Albert Smith in Film History 10 (1), 1998, 8-20
Trevor H. Hall, The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney 2nd edition (London: Duckworth, 1980)
Victoria Jackson, The Exhibition Context and the Contemporary Significance of Color: The Case of Kinemacolor in The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 15 (1), 2015, 1-21
Barry Salt, Film style and technology: history and analysis 2nd edition (London: Starword, 1992)
Benoît Turquety, Natural Colour Kinematography, a New Cinema Invention: Kinemacolor, Technical Network and Commercial Policies in Inventing Cinema: Machines, Gestures and Media History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019)