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BIOGRAPHY | TRIVIA | PRESS | QUOTES
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George Albert Smith (1864–1959) Date of Birth: 4 January 1864 Date of Death: 17 May 1959 Also Known As: G. Albert Smith BIOGRAPHY George Albert Smith is one of the most important figures in British cinema history, yet outside of a handful of historians and fans of Victorian cinema, he's virtually unknown today. Though long associated with the so-called 'Brighton School' of film-makers (which also included the likes of Esme Collings and James Williamson), Smith was born in London, moving to the seaside town with his mother following the death of his father. While his mother continued to run the boarding house she bought on Grand Parade, Smith left school to become a stage hypnotist, performing to the tourists in the town's many small halls, teaming up with Douglas Blackburn in 1882 to develop an act where one of them pretended to have psychic powers. The team was success, with Smith maintaining that genuine telepathy was on offer, though Blackburn denied it, even going so far as to have the Society for Psychical Research investigate them – the apparently believed that Smith and Blackburn did indeed have some genuine aptitude for "Thought Reading." His exposure to the world of psychical research piqued a hitherto unknown interest and Smith took his new 'hobby' very seriously. He took up the post of private secretary to Edmund Gurney, the Society's Honorary Secretary, until the latter's death in 1888. In the years after Gurney's death, Smith would often serve under successive Honorary Secretaries F.W.H. Myers and F. Podmore and even wrote the paper, Experiments in Thought Transference for the Society's journal. In 1892, Smith bought St Ann's Well Garden in Hove, between Furze Road and Somerhill Road, and turned it into a popular and thriving tourist attraction. Four years later, on a trip to London, Smith saw a demonstration of the Lumière brothers pioneering film-making in Leicester Square and was smitten with this remarkable new technology. Shortly afterwards, Smith bought his first film camera and started making shorts in and around St Ann's Well Garden which would soon be transformed into his own studio. Smith was so enamoured of the new medium and its seemingly endless possibilities that he was massively prolific in his early years, turning out over 30 films in his first year of production, 1897, alone. His first shows were at twice daily screenings (at 3pm at 8pm) at the Brighton Aquarium of what he advertised as "The Rage of London. The Photographic Sensation of the day." Sadly, many of these pioneering works are now lost forever, but the few complete shorts and fragments that remain display an incredible talent and the work of a man who clearly learnt very quickly. Having already dabbled with the magic lantern, Smith knew a few tricks that he was able to transfer to the new medium. Like his better known contemporary, Frenchman George Méliès, Smith was an experimenter, revelling in the freedoms that film offered. He pioneered the use of cutting, close-ups, subjective point-of-view shots and much of the other film-making grammar that we now take so much for granted, including the first known use of double exposure techniques. Smith even corresponded with Méliès, the two great pioneers swapping notes on new techniques and ideas. St Ann's Well Garden soon played home to some of the most advanced and innovative film-making equipment of its day - in 1897 the pump house was turned into a laboratory and a couple of years later built a special glass-sided studio. He was also building up a stock company of regular collaborators - Alfred Darling was his resident engineer, building cameras, projectors, printers and other equipment to order while local comedian Tom Green was soon a regular performer in the Smith films, as was Smith's wife Laura Eugenia Bayley. Ever tinkering with not only the techniques of film-making but also the methodof its manufacture, Smith set himself up as a commercial film processor, opening his labs to fellow pioneers in the Brighton area. One of his best customers was the recently formed Warwick Trading Company, run by Charles Urban, and Smith was soon working closely with this other giant of the early years of British cinema, eventually becoming manager of its Brighton Studio and Film Works. Warwick began distributing Smith's films to a wider audience and did so until 1903 when Urban set up his own company, the Charles Urban Trading Company, which took over the role. But it wasn't just at home that Smith was making a splash – his back catalogue was picked up by the Vitagraph Company of New York in 1900 for distribution in the States. In 1903, Smith found a new avenue for his ever active and enquiring mind to explore. Urban bought the rights to a two colour additive process known as Kinemacolor that had been developed by inventor Edward Turner and his financier F. Marshall Lee . The pair had patented, in March 1899, a three colour system based, in part, on the mid-19th century discoveries of scientist James Clerk Maxwell who found that virtually all colours could be made up by mixing red, green and blue. Turner's system had drawn on Maxwell's principles, but the inventor had become bored by the slow progress that was being made. He turned to Urban for help, who called in Darling to design a special camera and projector. Progress was still slow – a few frames and one very short strip of film were processed, but the strip needed to be projected at 48 frames per second to avoid flicker and the resultant image was all but unwatchable. In early 1903, Turner died of a heart attack and Urban bought the patent rights, passing research and development on to Smith. Now fully committed to developing Kinemacolor, Smith all but gave up film-making for a while as he struggled with the problems of creating the first colour film. In 1905, Smith sold the lease on St Ann's Well and moved to a new
home at Southwick, Sussex where work on Kinemacolor continued apace.
He toiled on the process for three years until he found that he only
needed two colours, red and green, not the three that Turner had suggested,
to get a satisfactory colour image. Smith and Urban shot 50 feet of
film and the first colour motion picture was born. Smith toured the Kinemacolor demonstration show in Paris and New York and was awarded a Silver Medal by the Royal Society of Arts for his outstanding work while Urban reaped the commercial rewards, setting up the Natural Colour Kinemacolor Company. Things were looking very good indeed for the two men after their years of hard work. But in 1913, Smith and Urban were dealt a terrible blow. Another great early British film-maker, William Friese-Greene, had been developing his own additive colour film system, Biocolour, which worked by projecting alternately stained frames of red and green. Frustrated by the seemingly watertight patents taken out by Urban and Smith, Greene had been unable to make the films he wanted to. Friese-Greene took the company to court, claiming that Smith's patent was "insufficiently detailed," and it looked at first as though Smith might have won – the judge dismissed Friese-Greene's suit. But in March 1914, the ruling was overturned, an appeal judge suggesting that the patent claimed to produce "natural colours", but as it only used red and green filters it couldn't possibly produce a "natural" blue. On this technicality, Smith's patent was deemed invalid. The public soon started to tire of Kinemacolor and the process was left to die. With Urban forced to put the Natural Color Kinematograph Company into voluntary liquidation in April 1914, Smith retired from the film-making industry. He became a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and seemed happy enough to live in relative obscurity in Brighton pursuing his new interest. Smith was rediscovered by film historians in the late 1940s and his
position as the one of the most important men in British cinema history
was eventually acknowledged. He died in his beloved Brighton on 17 May
1959, leaving behind a fascinating history and a few surviving scraps
of film that show just how imaginative, passionate and pioneering this
extraordinary man truly was. GENRE FILMOGRAPHY 1897 Haunted Castle, The (producer, director) X-rays (director) 1898 Aladdin (producer, director) Cinderella
(director) Corsican Brothers, The (producer, director) Faust and Mephistopheles (producer, director) Mesmerist, The (director) Photographing a Ghost (producer, director) 1899 Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (producer, director) Santa Claus (producer, director) NON-GENRE FILMOGRAPHY 1897 Children Paddling at the Seaside (director) Comic Face (director) Comic Shaving (director) Gymnastics - Indian Club Performer (director) Hanging Out the Clothes (director) Maid in the Garden, The (director) Making Sausages (director) Nursing the Baby (director) Sign Writer, The (director) Tipsy-Topsy-Turvy (director) Weary Willie (director) 1898 Ally Sloper (director) Animated Clown Portrait (director) Lady Barber, The (director) Miller and the Sweep, The (producer, director) Policeman, the Cook and the Copper, The (director) Practical Joke, A (director) Runaway Knock, The (director) Waves and Spray (producer, director) 1899 Kiss in the Tunnel, The (producer, director, performer) Legacy, The (producer, director) 1900 As Seen Through a Telescope (producer, director) House That Jack Built, The (producer, director) Let Me Dream Again (producer, director) Letty Limelight in Her Lair (director) Grandma's Reading Glass (producer, director) 1901 Little Doctors, The (director) Inexhaustible Cab, The (director) 1902 Comedian and the Flypaper, The (director) Grandma Threading Her Needle (director) Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes (producer, director) 1903 Dorothy's Dream (producer, director) Mary Jane's Mishap (producer, director) Sick Kitten (producer, director) Two Old Sports (director) 1908 Visit to the Seaside, A (producer, director) 1909 Kinemacolor Puzzle (producer, director) Natural Colour Portraiture (script, director) REFERENCES The First Colour Motion Pictures by D.B. Thomas (London:
HMSO (1969)) The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney by Trevor H. Hall
(London: Duckworth (1964)) Visual Delights: Essays on the Popular and Projected Image
in the 19th Century by Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin (eds.)
(Trowbridge: Flicks Books (2000)) Last Updated: 29 June, 2009
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