There is one absolutely revolutionary moment in British Victorian film – a Great Leap Forward – when a policeman, too busy alerting the fire brigade to a burning house to realise he is making film history, runs out of one scene and into another. James Williamson, the filmmaker of Fire! (1901) who pulls off this advance in the control of cinematic time, had a clarity of vision about the conceptual workings of storytelling and an awareness of how the viewer would understand a film story that was, as his biographer Martin Sopocy put it, unparalleled in the pioneer period.
It has been assumed by some historians that this was more or less accidental in an era sometimes patronisingly referred to as primitive. I think Williamson knew exactly what he was doing – he had already demonstrated a method for increasing tension by cross-cutting in his second version of Attack on a China Mission (1900) and The Big Swallow (1901) shows a confident and playful awareness of the self-reflexivity of film as experienced by the viewer. Likewise Stop Thief! (1901), despite one lapse in the direction of travel, is a chase film like so many that came after.
This programme of his films demonstrates this narrative vision from 120 years ago, together with films from Robert Paul and George Albert Smith who were in this same year making advances in the use of closeups, point-of-view vignettes and the concept of the frame. Paul also played with the multi-part adaptation that had begun with stories told in tableaux such as Biograph’s Rip Van Winkle (1896), Méliès’ Cinderella (1899) and Barbe bleue (1901) and Paul’s Scrooge and The Magic Sword (both 1901), several of which would go on, in 1902, to form the basis for longer narratives when they were reissued as joined-up films.

Bryony Dixon