The Derby 1895

For its time, this is good footage of a horse race and of the crowds watching it. The film has been noticeably damaged over time, but it is still clear enough to evaluate it and to get an idea of what the original would have been like. It is one of the early efforts of R.W. Paul, one of the cinema pioneers who deserves to be a little better known. Most of his movies were fictional, and they often featured some innovative ideas. This one is footage of actual events, and it may have been influenced by Birt Acres more than by Paul, but in any case it does show some skill.

The vantage point is well chosen, with the footage of the derby taken at the kind of diagonal angle that the Lumières had shown to be so effective. As another reviewer has aptly described, it gives you precisely the perspective of someone in the crowd. In the foreground is a view of the crowd along the near side of the racecourse, and in the main part of the camera frame the horses come by, usually in twos and threes. The background shows the crowd on the far side of the course.

The level of detail decreases steadily as your eye movies from foreground to background, so that the most detailed portion is actually that of the spectators in the foreground. For much of the footage, this shows only the backs of their heads, but later you can also see their reactions after the horses have gone past. The horses are less distinct, which is too bad because they should be the main highlight, but that's the kind of thing that early film-makers would learn to improve on with experience.

This short is called 'The Derby', but the horse-racing is of minimal importance here. Rather than adopt a distant, god's eye view, the camera takes its place with the crowd, another observer. Indeed the crowd itself is more interesting than the sport, as we watch a policeman chat with an old hand, and wonder what they're talking about, as well as the thousands of other conversations the deafmute camera cannot overhear.

This sense of actual disparity between camera and audience is literalised when the race ends and the huge crowd swarms the turf, taking over the nominal stage, becoming the observed rather than mere observers, actors at a national event, while the camera stays where it is, hapless, passive.

It would be tempting to see this as a metaphor for the cinema itself, the way its controlling events only goes so far as an audience's interpretation of them; much to the discomfort of some producers and directors, audiences won't just sit there and take whatever's dished out to them, but will make it their own.