Forgotten Silver

The latest edition of my column, THE FORGOTTEN, is up at The Auteurs’ Notebook. This particular one may be my favourite of all the articles I’ve written. But then, as has been well established by now, I do have peculiar taste.

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The subject is R.W. Paul, so this is amongst the earliest of early cinema I’ve written about. But I just acquired the collected works of Segundo de Chomon, so you can probably expect more fin-de-siecle ramblings soon.

This entry was posted on March 12, 2009 at 11:29 am and is filed under FILM with tags RW Paul, Segundo de Chomon, The Auteurs' Notebook, The Forgotten. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Forgotten Silver”

Simon Fraser Says:
March 12, 2009 at 12:18 pm

Silent Films, it’s like a whole medium that was invented then left abandoned by the side of the road.
Good article.
peter Says:
March 12, 2009 at 12:25 pm

I love the work of R.W.Paul and the way he bring to life the light of other days. One of my absolute favourites is the great short Blackfriars Bridge, from 1896. It might have been filmed yesterday:

Timeless. To think that Dickens had only been dead for a quarter of a century. I’ve almost finished reading the great Bleak House.
dcairns Says:
March 12, 2009 at 1:04 pm

I expect most of those horses are quite elderly now.

I now think I could have gone deeper, actually. In the age before lines had been drawn between drama and documentary, Paul perhaps saw no reason to control what was happening within his frame. So he stages the action in his chase films, but leaves the world to carry on all around.

Oh, should have said — leave comments over at The Auteurs’. My mistake!