On Chester Terrace, meanwhile, Alfred Darling’s workshop was turning out ground-breaking cameras as vital to the impact of the Brighton School as the filmmaking innovations of its directors. “Smith might say ‘I really want to do a close-up shot’ – then Darling makes a camera to achieve that,” explains Plumb. Which gave audiences the first ever close-ups in Smith’s 1900 short Grandma’s Reading Glass. His close-up film Spiders on a Web, made the same year, was also among the first ever nature films.
Darling’s iconic cameras – many now on display at Hove Museum – look much like devotional objects, their lenses like windows into another world, set in dark wood burnished by time. One 1896 camera was made to experiment with 42mm gauge film (before 35mm became standard), while the 1899 Biokam was Darling’s realisation of Smith’s desire for the world’s first amateur film camera. There’s also the world’s first special-effects camera built in 1900, plus a pioneering 1910 colour film camera.
Brighton’s movie-maker women
The key role of women like Laura Bayley is also increasingly acknowledged. “Given her understanding of acting and the professional stage, I just can’t see how Smith [her husband] could have conceived his scenarios and executed them without her active involvement,” argues Gray. “We should now refer to them as co-directors.” Another female Brighton film pioneer was Elizabeth Alice Frances Hawkins-Whitshed. Sometimes known by her married name, Mrs Aubrey Le Blond, this intrepid mountaineer shot at least 10 films of winter sports in Switzerland around 1900, her depictions of events like the Cresta Run bob-sleighing helping create the genre of sports coverage.
The Brighton School reached out to the US, too. Gray highlights a 1900 catalogue of films available to that market, in which 56 offerings were Brighton-made. “In terms of film form, Smith and Williamson also influenced their American contemporaries, especially Edwin Porter – a key figure in early American film,” says Gray.
The 2016 Brighton Museum exhibition also drew an intriguing parallel with the city’s most famous contemporary film director, Ben Wheatley, maker of boldly acclaimed features including A Field in England (2013) and High-Rise (2015). Wheatley turns out to be something of a spiritual successor of the Brighton School in his willingness to invent hardware for a specific effect. Among gizmos created in the past decade with cinematographer Laurie Rose is “The Mesmeriser” – fashioned using a lens from a cheap plastic toy telescope to create unique depth-of-field effects for innovative modern feature films. Brighton’s early cinema pioneers would have approved.
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