Grandma's Reading Glass

For me, this 5th year of baby cinema welcomes its first steps to get up : all the previous movies were static in the sense that the camera was still, motionless. Here, it's always the case but at least we have different frames. We can conclude that editing is born with this new millennium as audience has now different points of view. This change of shots is particularly imaginative here as it's done trough a magnifying glass and thus we alternate seeing a boy with his grandmother sit at a desk and the examined subjects : a glass, a watch, a bird, Grandma's eye, a cat… What's striking for me is that once again, it's like watching a Lynch movie : it's a bit surreal, but visually stunning as the vision is pure, classic and close to daily life while looking in another dimension…

I watched this film on a DVD that was rammed with short films from the period. I didn't watch all of them as the main problem with these type of things that their value is more in their historical novelty value rather than entertainment. So to watch them you do need to be put in the correct context so that you can keep this in mind and not watch it with modern eyes. With the Primitives & Pioneers DVD collection though you get nothing to help you out, literally the films are played one after the other (the main menu option is "play all") for several hours. With this it is hard to understand their relevance and as an educational tool it falls down as it leaves the viewer to fend for themselves, which I'm sure is fine for some viewers but certainly not the majority. What it means is that the DVD saves you searching the web for the films individually by putting them all in one place – but that's about it.

As with his Kiss In the Tunnel, British pioneer George Smith (an English name if ever there was one!) again works with the devices possible with the camera for telling the audience what is happening. Here it is the "point of view" technique where the screen is seen through a circular frame that makes the viewer understand that this is the view from the character's eye. It is a simple device that is not used any more because of how obvious it has become but at the time this was cutting edge stuff because these techniques were not developed and the audience was being told what this meant.

Substance wise the film is again like Kiss in the Tunnel in so much as, when the technical interest is put to one side, there isn't much else to be had from it. Still, worth seeing as part of learning more about why Smith should be a name that is mentioned alongside the work of people like Lumière.

A series of views of things through a magnifying glass. None is all that interesting because size doesn't make any difference. The only feature is the circular pictures that we see, so we know it is Grandma's magnifier.

This is the first film to make sustained use of point of view shots. A small boy picks up his granny's magnifying glass, and looks at various items through it, the newspaper, a cat etc. The film in itself is utterly charming: the little boy with the huge glass, the grandmother in her nannyish Victorian clothes, the tiny, overstuffed room all contrive a surreal, Alice-like atmosphere, which is very English in its exaggerated normality. and the young boy's discoveries, his making the world strange by looking with someone else's eyes, is delightful, explaining logically why the last thing he sees is his grandmother's eyes (birth of Godard!).

This making strange the familiar is, again, surreal, but it is also what the cinema does, and what the cinema had largely been doing since its invention, photographing the everyday, workers, families, trains etc., but making them marvellous. The difference being that these things were marvellous, not in themselves, but because of the medium, because they were moving pictures, because people had never seen themselves, or people like themselves in such an art form before. That novelty soon wore off, hence the move towards narrative, fantasy, comedy, genre.

The point of view, however, suggested a new avenue altogether. where early films were shot with a calm, detached, effacing distance, its framing belonging ostensibly to no-one (whatever ideologies such objectivity implied), the point of view took the image, or narrative, from outside the frame within it, breaking it up as it were, creating two levels of looking - the audience looking at the fiction, and the character in the fiction looking at something. The inviolability of the image is shattered, is no longer objective - 'reality' exists at two removes. We don't see an unmediated image anymore, we have to ask about the state of mind of the looker. Subjectivity is born, paving the way for German Expressionism, 'Citizen Kane', 'Vertigo', the monuments of the medium.

Smith cannily understands this- the point of view here is deliberately distorted, a young person looking through the glass of an older person with poor sight. The image is heightened, almost unreal. The camera and the distorted glass become the same thing, objectivity dies. Hoorah!

There's quite a little gang forming in these comments for films-so-old-that-no-one wants-to-watch-them-apart-from-a-few-die-hards. Apart from me there's Bob and Alice and the wonderfully informative Cineanalyst, and every now and then Plankton drops by to moan about how dull it all is. Hey-ho. Grandma's Reading Glass is notable today for its early use of 'point of view' shots, as we see through the eyes of a young boy looking through a magnifying glass. It's also an early example of extreme close-up as we're treated to a shot of Grandma's eyeball rolling about wildly for a few seconds. As Plankton has commented, given that the likes of Melies were already creating dynamic films filled with trickery by 1900, this all seems a little tame.