Magical Sword

I viewed the British Film Institute print of this early movie by Robert W Paul. Like his better-known contemporary Georges Melies in France, Britain's Paul was an early film-maker who experimented with the camera's possibilities to produce 'trick' films. While these very early movies must have baffled and delighted their audiences, I tend to dislike 'trick' films because what we're seeing is not any sort of stagecraft nor prestidigitation by a skilled conjuror: it's basically just jump cuts, the same device still being used sixty years onward to enable Samantha off 'Bewitched' to appear and disappear. While Paul and Melies deserve credit for innovation, from our modern jaded viewpoint the device has long since palled. (No pun intended on 'Paul'.)

'The Magic Sword', unlike so many Paul films but like quite a few of Melies's more ambitious productions, is lifted out of the genre of 'trick' films -- and is much more entertaining -- because it uses its camera effects in the service of telling an actual story, rather than merely showing objects appearing and vanishing. The IMDb synopsis of this film is accurate enough. Basically, this movie tells us the story of a 'mediaeval' knight and his fair lady. When the damsel is nobbled by hobgoblins, the knight must use a magical sword to help him rescue her. All of the supernatural events which we witness in this film are in the service of the story, rather than merely for the sake of "Hey presto!".

I'm impressed that these very early film-makers realised that the story is more important than the special effects. I can think of a few modern film-makers who need to learn that lesson.

The 'mediaeval' settings and costumes in 'The Magic Sword' are not remotely convincing, and not for one instant do we forget that these are actors performing on a proscenium stage. However, the story's a fantasy, so it doesn't need to be convincing. 'The Magic Sword' is a very charming film, which even modern audiences (jaded by CGI F/X) can appreciate. My rating: a full 10 out of 10.

Robert Paul is a largely forgotten name today, but he was a major pioneer of British cinema, and was quick to grasp the commercial potential of cinema in ways that better known pioneers such as William Friese-Greene were not. He was more of a mechanic than a filmmaker making, with Birt Acres, his own camera on which to shoot films in 1895, and also Britain's first projector, the Animatograph, with which to screen them in 1896. Early in the 20th century he had a custom-made studio built in Muswell Hill.

The Magic Sword is an elaborate fantasy film of which Robert Paul was justifiably proud. Featuring three separate scenes – something highly unusual for 1901 – it tells the story of a prince whose beloved is captured by a witch. The prince follows them to the witch's cave in order to save his love. The film is packed with special effects, including one particularly impressive moment when a giant ogre suddenly appears over a castle's battlements.

For 1901, "The Magic Sword" is an elaborate trick film attraction, or, to be more precise, it's what film historians like Richard Abel call a "féerie" (fairy film). Abel (such as in his book, "The Ciné Goes to Town") used this distinction to divide the films of Georges Méliès into the genre of narrative fairy tales and fantasies (féeries) and the genre of representative cinema of attractions (trick films). The influence of Méliès on "The Magic Sword" is obvious and is made more so by R.W. Paul's catalogue description where he offers his film as an English alternative to the French fairy films of Méliès, such as "Cinderella" (Cendrillon) (1899) and "Bluebeard" (Barbe-bleue) (1901). The catalogue says, "The facts of the actors and costumes being Old English, together with the original nature of the plot, cannot fail to please English-speaking audiences, who have become weary of foreign pictures of this kind."

"The Magic Sword" contains three scenes and a mediaeval fantasy story (as opposed to the Charles Perrault fairy tales of Méliès's aforementioned films). As in Méliès's fairy films, however, a good fairy and a witch battle over the guidance of the hero and the direction of the narrative. Film historian Ian Christie claims (in "The Magic Sword: Genealogy of an English Trick Film", printed in the journal "Film History") that this film also has English theatrical roots in the "fairy extravaganzas" of James Robinson Planché and the stage magic of John Nevil Maskelyne.

Nevertheless, "The Magic Sword" displays other influences of Méliès, including: the use of dissolves as transitions between every scene (a practice Méliès started), the elaborate (for the time) painted backdrops, the final theatrical tableau, and the use of trick effects such as stop-substitutions and multiple exposure shots. One of the best tricks in the picture, the giant ogre, was accomplished by double exposure of two scenes from different distances and by different camera focusing. The inventor of this trick seems to be contested, though, because Méliès and Paul and Walter R. Booth both introduced it near the end of 1901: Paul and Booth with this film and Méliès with "The Man with the Rubber Head" (L'homme à la tête en caoutchouc). (Unfortunately, I don't know the exact dates of the two films.) Paul's studio, however, seems uncontested in the flying witch trick, which required a moveable lens as well as multiple exposures. The same trick was also employed in 1901 by Paul's studio for "Scrooge; or Marley's Ghost". The use of an explosion in addition to a dissolve to transition to the final shot was also innovative. Paul's Animatograph Works also experimented with novel scene transitions in 1901 (a time when the grammar hadn't even been established yet) in the films "Scrooge; or Marley's Ghost" and "The Waif and the Wizard".

"The Magic Sword", however, was a unique production for Paul's Animatograph Works. According to Frederick Talbot, it was also "one of the best and most successful trick films Paul ever produced" (source: Christie). I agree. It's an interesting film for its time, and it's one of the earliest to display the far-reaching influence Méliès would have upon other early filmmakers. The next year, across the Atlantic, Edwin Porter and the Edison Company would do likewise with "Jack and the Beanstalk".