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W.R. Booth's earliest films made use of jump-cuts and miniatures to create crude but often effective illusions. Cheese Mites (1901), made two years into his film-making career, is rather more sophisticated in that he combined the jump-cut with superimposition, so that the miniature people (shot on an exaggeratedly large table-top set) appear on screen alongside the normal-sized diner. Thankfully, he seems to find the sight more amusing than alarming. The film's full title Cheese Mites, or Lilliputians in a London Restaurant, contains a reference to Jonathan Swift's satirical novel Gulliver's Travels (1726), in which the traveler of the title finds himself in the land of Lilliput, populated entirely by tiny human beings. Though Booth would be employed by the Charles Urban Trading Company a few years later, his film is not to be confused with Urban's pioneering 1903 production, also titled Cheese Mites, in which a diner has a rather less entertaining experience on examining a piece of cheese and discovering that it's infested with the genuine articles (shown in extreme and groundbreaking close-up). Michael Brooke *This film is included in the BFI DVD compilation 'R.W. Paul: The Collected Films 1895-1908', with music by Stephen Horne and optional commentary by Ian Christie.
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Complete film (0:56)
