BFI

A companion-piece to the same year's The Big Swallow (which also starred professional comedian Sam Dalton), James Williamson's Are You There? is less immediately striking. However, it contains an important innovation in that it presents one of the earliest examples of what would become a familiar film cliché, though Williamson's split-screen telephone conversation is achieved not through post-production trickery but via the far simpler expedient of constructing a set featuring both telephones. The second scene, where the girl's father comes round to remonstrate with her sweetheart, abandons the split-screen, allowing the action to take place across the entire frame.

The film contains a lot of spoken dialogue, but no explanatory intertitles, which had yet to become a silent-film convention. The attached synopsis reproduces the one in Williamson's own catalogue, and fills in a lot of information that only a lip-reader would otherwise register. Historian Martin Sopocy has pointed out that these synopses served a dual function, both providing information about the film for booking purposes, and to convey vital information to the people presenting the film to audiences. Sopocy suggests that Are You There? would have been screened in situations similar to Williamson's earlier lantern slide shows, with the dialogue supplied by an offscreen showman, possibly impersonating each voice for added comic effect.

Michael Brooke

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