Like Hepworth's film "How It Feels to Be Run Over", made the previous year, James Williamson's "The Big Swallow" is self-referential in its parody of film-making. (The third early self-reflexive film I discuss, "The Countryman and the Cinematograph", reverses this and parodies cinema viewing.) Both are about the camera and the cameraman (and, in a way, through their point of view, the spectator) coming to a violent collision with their filmed subject. That Williamson's film seems more likely to involve a still photographer rather than a cinematographer doesn't matter. In Hepworth's film, a motorist drives his automobile into the camera. In this film, the person being photographed swallows the camera and cameraman. Another notable difference between these two scenes is that Hepworth's film ends with the collision, as the screen goes blank and only intertitles end the film. In Williamson's film, the film (or point of view) we are watching (or were watching) is shown from another perspective, which shows the swallowing and the satisfied munching afterwards by the subject. It would seem more logical if the film ended as a single shot film with the subject's mouth taking up the entire frame, and thus blackening the entire frame in the way of Hepworth's film. Yet, it would be less clear in that way and would lack the added self-reflexive moment of showing the film we're watching being shot. This is likely the first movie to show, in a sense, itself being filmed--a self-referential device later used, for example, in François Truffaut's "Day for Night" (La Nuit américaine) (1973).
A similarity between "The Big Swallow" and R.W. Paul's film "The Countryman and the Cinematograph" is that they were both part of the early cinema genre of trick films. Although their special effects seem of rather secondary interest now, they were still novel for 1901. Positioned within the trick film also adds further layers of self-reference to these films because the special effects (the swallowing shot here and the superimposed films within Paul's film) show the films' main self-reflexive devices. Additionally, cinema itself is a kind of trick. On a note of technique, Williamson's refocusing of the image as the subject approaches the camera was very rare for 1901.
"The Big Swallow" was also part of the facial expression genre, which tended to be one-scene films framed in a close-up of a person's face. There were quite a few of these films, but none that I know of were nearly as interesting as this. Most of them were merely curios of the newfound close-up.
Furthermore, the scene being photographed within "The Big Swallow" reminds me of actualitiés, which was still the most popular motion picture genre in 1901. "The Big Swallow" seems to parody this type of documentary. In it, a man is merely reading something until disturbed by a cameraman photographing him--recording the image of the man that we see, which is the film proper. Michael Brooke, for the BFI website, however, suggests that "The Big Swallow" was inspired by Williamson's experience with "savvy" passers-by while filming his actuality films.
"The Big Swallow" is the beginning of a thread of films that goes through "Kid Auto Races at Venice" (1914) to "The Truman Show" (1998).
