Prismark10 R W Paul was an influential British film maker in the early days of cinema. Sadly a lot of his output has been lost.The motorist from 1906 remains and we see the embryonic influence of early slapstick such as the policeman being run over and then chasing after car is something that will come to prominent a few years later in Hollywood silents with the likes of Charlie Chaplin.We also see here the debt to Georges Melies as there is a lot of trick photography as well as art and set direction inspired by Melies output such as a car driving in space and on the rings of Saturn.Some of the special effects are not on par with Melies but we see these short films moving on from being just point and shoot.

Film_Nitrate One of the unfortunate things about early cinema is that we can only judge that which is currently available to us. The vast majority of silent films are now considered lost, and though some directors' later fame ensured that their films endured (Hitchcock for one), some, such as Robert W. Paul – one of the pioneers of cinema – have been less fortunate. Still Paul has fared better than many of his contemporaries, but much of his work sadly remains lost.R.W Paul was more an engineer than a filmmaker, and at first his only real incentive to produce his own films was to demonstrate their potential. He began by manufacturing replicas of Thomas Edison's revolutionary Kinetoscope in 1894, though by the turn of the century he had set up his own studios in London and was producing short films at a furious rate. After filming such historic events as Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and the ill-fated launch of HMS Bulwark, in 1900 he was commissioned by the army to produce what would now be called a 'recruitment' film, showing what it was like to be in the British army. The finished film, Army Life, was an epic 50 minutes long, making it by far the longest film produced in the world up to that point. Sadly, it's all but lost now, with just a short fragment remaining.From this point on Paul moved away from covering notable occasions and army reenactments, and moved towards short stories, such as those George Méliès was successfully making in France (incidentally, it was Paul who sold Méliès his first camera in 1896). As well as producing an incredibly ambitious adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol – most of which is now tragically lost – in 1901, he would go on to popularise a number of effects over the next few years such as screen wipes, closeups and double exposures. The culmination of this experience over the previous decade was in Paul's most famous film, The '?' Motorist.After watching the short film, certain similarities are obvious between The '?' Motorist and his old customer Méliès' A Trip to the Moon (1902). Though not necessarily more sophisticated, Méliès' space film was longer (14 minutes compared to barely over 2 minutes) and after going to the considerable effort of hand-colouring each of the films' individual frames, it's no surprise that A Trip to the Moon has endured far better than The '?' Motorist. There's certainly a whimsical humour here which is only enhanced by the inspiration for the film – Paul's frustration at being issued a fine for excessive speeding in his motorcar, a crime he tried unsuccessfully to defend himself from.However, though R.W. Paul is the better-known name here, the directing duties were carried out my another character who has become all but forgotten – Walter Booth. Like many of the early filmmakers Booth had begun his career as a magician, and had been collaborating with Paul on some of his more technically impressive films since 1899. By the time of The '?' Motorist in 1906 – his final film with Paul – he was a highly competent director and more than capable of filming some of the challenging effects that were hugely popular with audiences who wanted to see things on the screen which were impossible in real life. He was then recruited by Charles Urban – the most successful film producer and distributor in Britain – where he continued to refine his techniques, and in 1911 made The Automatic Motorist – a more sophisticated remake of The '?' Motorist. It's conceivable that Booth made an appearance in 1901's stop-motion masterclass Undressing Extraordinary – being able to know the exact position to hold as an actor would have required considerable knowledge of the techniques involved – though as no photograph is known to exist of the director we many never know for sure.The '?' Motorist – like many of Paul's films – is a great, charming little film which was still, even in 1906, ahead of much of the cinema in the rest of the world. The title though, is completely nuts. There doesn't seem to be any information on where it came from, but it seems it was the actual title given by Paul, no typos. Its ambiguity certainly gives almost nothing away, and the moment when what seems like a routine runaway film takes a turn as the carriage drives up a building, over the moon and around Saturn's rings cannot have ceased to surprise audiences.With his interest firmly in the mechanics of cinema, Paul's output swiftly reduced after Booth's departure, and by 1910 he had moved away entirely from the film business, concentrating his efforts on more scientific subjects. He died in 1943, living more than long enough to witness cinema emerge as one of the leading forms of entertainment – a form in which he'd played a large role in developing. It's just a shame he's not more widely credited for the advances he made in the medium, certainly in Britain. Maybe one distant day some ambitious director will see the potential in a biographical film about Paul, and it can do for him what Martin Scorsese's Hugo did for Méliès? Or maybe that's just my head in the clouds.

MartinHafer I saw this film today along with quite a few other silent shorts at the German Film Museum in Frankfurt. And, if you want to see it, perhaps you'll want to stop by as well. It is among the best of the shorts they showed--mostly because it was so incredibly stupid--and I mean that in a very positive way! This film begins with some insane drivers out for a ride. A cop tries to stop them and he gets run over for his troubles. But, since this is a wacky film, he's okay AND the drivers begin doing nutty things. I loved seeing the trick shot where the car seemed to drive up the wall! Later, it even flew through space. This was pretty cheesy, but for 1906 it was great. Overall, an incredibly creative and silly film--one that elicited a few laughs when it was played today.

Alice Liddel A charmingly subversive comedy-fantasy that pays handsome tribute to the cinema's sister invention, the automobile, suggesting both have the power to disrupt conventional society. It uses the kind of trickery perfected by Melies, but is arguably more potent because of its (relative) grounding in real life.A well-to-do couple speed down a sunny country road, ordered to stop by an approaching pedestrian policeman. They promptly, gloriously, run him over. As he gives chase, the motorists are blocked by a large building, which they drive up with exhilirating ease. While the blundering bobby gazes in bafflement, the drivers zip through space, circling the moon, skating Saturn's rings, before running out of petrol, freefalling, and collapsing on a court-case that was at any rate degenerating into farce.Although you can obviously see the joins, the inventiveness of this short holds up remarkably well, as it shows that cars are a nuisance off, as well as on the road. The invention of the motor-car brought with it a greater mobility, a shortening of distances, in effect shortening time and space; as it became possible to travel to more places more quickly, the world became a smaller place.Ditto the cinema, which could do so much more than the mere photographing of things - not only visiting new worlds, but creating them, inviting our imagination to soar above the mundane. Unlike our own fantasy films, however, audiences then were not hypnotised into forgetting real life, the mendacious absurdity of our social institutions, the arbitrary ineptitude of our law enforcers - is it any wonder we might want to escape?The film is treasurable for that glorious moment when the peeler, with doltish complacency, linked to the immemorial countryside as he attempts to control this new-fangled aberrance, is upended - thud! - against a steaming bonnet, the majesty of the law a sprawling punchline.