BFI

G.A. Smith's Grandma's Reading Glass (1900) is a film designed to show off the then relatively new technique of the close-up, as a small boy (identified as "Willy" in Smith's catalogue) examines various objects with a huge magnifying glass - the newspaper, the innards of a pocket-watch, a canary in its cage, his grandmother's eye, a cat.

The close-ups themselves were simulated by photographing the relevant objects inside a black circular mask fixed in front of the camera lens, which also had the effect of creating a circular image that helped them stand out from the rest of the film.

Grandma's Reading Glass was one of the first films to cut between medium shot and point-of-view close-up, though the editing is no more ambitious than this - in fact, there is very little narrative to speak of besides the boy looking around for further objects to examine. But at the time it was released, that would in itself have been sufficient novelty to maintain the audience's interest.

Smith would develop these techniques in the more narrative-based As Seen Through A Telescope, made the same year.

Michael Brooke

*This film is included in the BFI DVD compilation 'Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers'.

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