Born Today February 4: Laura Bayley

 1862-1938

 

 Laura Bayley was more than just an actress in the early silent era, she was a filmmaker in her own right, and deserves the recognition of a woman film pioneer.  Born Laura Eugenia Bayley in Ramsgate (located in east Kent, England), she and her three sisters Florence, Blanche and Eva (the eldest of them) became a popular burlesque act at the Brighton seaside aquarium, performing by 1887 with J. D. Hunter's Theater Co. that produced the summer burlesques there.  She appeared in on-again/off-again productions with her sisters through at least the mid-1890's. She had already married George Albert Smith in 1888, who was a known entertainer of "lower stage acts" like staged seances, magician's tricks and hypnosis acts...you know the kind that still exist, when a volunteer from the audience is requested?  Smith is today acknowledged as one of the United Kingdom's earliest film innovators--but he was by no means alone in this endeavor.  Bayley was every bit his partner. It was also a family affair as her sister Florence was married to Smith's theatrical partner. To be clear, the background that they both come from is similar to that of the earliest days of other comedic tricksters like Méliès, and as such they were very deeply involved in the theatrics of entertainment, more than the purely technical side of film-making or photographic sciences. The Smith's were operators of a pleasure garden in Brighton for summer tourists/bathers. In this capacity they got involved with projected animations, magic lantern showings, even exhibitions of Edison's phonograph. It is not surprising, then, that they eventually got into the film making business themselves. They were lease holders on the St. Ann's Well and Wild Gardens venue in Brighton (the above mentioned pleasure garden) and in 1897 they began to shoot and exhibit their own films there, in addition to the other forms of technological entertainments they provided. Smith, for his part, started out filming actualities just like a number of other early filmmakers did. It was most likely Bayley that came up with idea for short narrative and trick films for better entertainment value. She was reportedly a brilliant comic actor on stage and her performances in the films that survive are fun to the max. It is hard to calculate how many films that she (and even other members of her family) appeared, because, while we are VERY lucky to have any of them survive, very many of these little films are no longer with us.  The earliest surviving film in which she appears is The X-Ray Fiend aka The X-Rays (one of my favorites!!), a "trick film" dating from 1897 clearly, and heavily influenced, by Méliès, it uses a clever jump cut, along with what can only be called the earliest version of a "motion capture suit"--it is also cited as probably the earliest example of a "horror comedy" film. Bayley is one of two actors in the film, appearing with popular Victorian stage comic Tom Green. 

The Internet Movie Database is especially deficient in giving credit to her, even as a actress, never mind as a director. For example, the latest film for which her acting credits in the database list Mary Jane's Mishap in 1903, though there are production still of her in several films after this year. Film historians have identified her in far more than the measeley ten acting credits she gets in that particular online Db.  The best illustration of this is a still from Smith's Two Clowns shot sometime around 1907 in his patented Kinemacolor (I do not even believe the film is even listed in at IMDb). In fact, the British Film Institute (BFI) lists her as the most prolific actress in British films at the turn of the century. She is also not the only member of the family in these films; a number of others, including both of her sisters and her children have been identified in Smith films from the time, though only her older sister Eva, who was some ten years her senior, gets any kind of credit at present.  

 

Two Clowns (c1907)

It is also important to stress that Bayley also made her own films in addition to the films of her husband that she performed; the most well known of them as of this writing is Hey, Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle dating from 1902, but the film is certainly not her only effort. It is credibly supposed that at least a number of the literally hundreds of films attributed to her husband, where actually her work. She is identified as belonging to the Brighton School of filmmakers--of which her husband is the most famous "member," but at least one film historian identifies her as the first her as the world's very first female cinematographer. She is certainly very high in the running, with Alice Guy being the only other contender. That is historically very important. As if this was not enough, she also is known to have "helped" in camera constructions (more likely she was deeply familiar with the inner workings of these machines--probable that she was involved in some of their inventions).  She was deeply involved with the marketing of films made for a kind of home/portable projector Biokam (invented by Brighton "fellows" Alfred Darling and Alfred Wrench).  If anything, she was more proficient with this particular technology than was her husband.

A Biokam in the collection of the Science Museum Group-visit them here.

These kinds of film makers, the Smith's, Méliès,  or even an Alice Guy, were so important in the early days of the technology, not only for the many technical innovations that they came up with for entertainment purposes. They are also intrgral to the earliest development of narrative film at in it's infancy.  As filmmakers, they developed a number of editing techniques purely for the love of making an audience laugh and yell in amazement...it turns out that many of these same techniques were extremely important to later filmmakers in telling stories, conveying a location, or providing a cheaper way to film a difficult scene. They were most certainly indispensable in the making of the first feature length films.  Evidence of their immediate impact on the films of their time was a little film called (English translation) The Merry Skeleton directed by Louis Lumière; it's highly unlikely the Lumière's would have ever concieved of such a film without the work of Smith, Méliès....and Bayley (you can see Le squelette joyeux here).  As for Laura Bayley Smith, she passed away at home in Hove on the 25th of October in 1938 at the age of 76.  There is not information on her burial.

Women's Film Pioneer Project (Columbia University)

Wikipedia

BFI 

Born Today January 4: George Albert Smith

1864-1959

George Albert Smith, giant of early cinema, was born on this day in the Cripplegate area of London, England. Early on during his lifetime, Smith was largely a stage performer of various sorts, including hypnotism performances and public psychic readings. He first got into early pre-cinematic exhibitions through lecturing on magic lanterns.  Smith was born into a family that had artistic endeavors in it's background--his father, who died when was relatively young, was both a writer and visual artist. Smith was a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and also was, rather controversially, a member of the Society of Physical Research (it is controversial because the grounds on which he was granted admittance were based on a stage act that was later proven to be a performance sham).  Still, Smith's contribution to early cinema is extremely important!  Amongst his many achievements is one of the earliest successful colour film processes to be used commercially (Kinemacolor was the very first successful colour film process to be invented--though others, not widely used, predate it).  Like his extremely well known counterparts in France, Georges Méliès and Alice Guy, he also advanced the notion of narrative film-making at it's earliest dates.  In 1892, after departing the Society of Physical Research, he next moved on the public exhibitions of various sorts, after having secured a lease on St. Ann's Well Gardens in Hove. He turned the gardens into what can only be called an amusement park, not only staging exhibitions of hot air ballooning and parachute jumping, but also mocking up all sorts of weird amusements, including what he tried to pass off as a hermit living in a cave located on the property. It was at this time that he started giving public screenings of magic lanterns. This led to him furthering his career in the field of projections, by his being allowed to lecture on and demonstrate magic lanterns at the Brighton Aquarium; his success in at this gave him an intimate background for his later skills in film editing. And, it wasn't long before he discovered motion pictures. In 1896 he saw his first program of Lumière films and caught the film making bug. He and a business partner not only acquired their own film making apparatus, but they also went into the repair side of film making, becoming one of the first outfits to set up shop repairing film manufacturing equipments.  By 1897, he was shooting his own films. As near as anyone can tell, the ultra short documentary Yachting was his first film, though The Miller and Chimney Sweep is often cited as such (and it may actually be his first--historical records of the exact dates of his earliest films are not intact as far as my research thus far indicates). Despite that many of his earliest motion picture efforts can be counted as "documentary" in nature; many more--from the very start--involved narratives or stories--most of them comedic in nature.  That is certainly the case with The Miller and Chimney Sweep (other examples are The Maid in the Garden, Weary Willie and Comic Shaving).  In this regard, many have credited Smith's wife, Laura Bayley, who was a seasoned actress in burlesque and pantomimes--AND who very likely directed some of the films that Smith is given credit for.  Owed to his love of the French cinema pioneers in general and of Méliès in particular, Smith unintentionally contributed to the earliest films that can be categorized as "horror." The most famous of these are: The X-Ray Fiend (1897)-which features his wife Laura, The Haunted Castle (1897) and Photographing a Ghost (1898). Of just this short list, two things are remarkable; the first is that The X-Ray Fiend was thought completely lost at one point--having a film from the 19th century found in condition as to allow it to be restored is astonishing!  The second, is that The Haunted Castle is in fact a remake of an 1896 Méliès film, that makes it the very first "horror remake" in film history--and,it is quite possible that it is the very first film remake period.  In all, Smith is credited with directing over 300 short film titles between the years of 1897 and 1912 (as mentioned above, some of these may have actually been directed by his wife). They are FAR too numerous to give a detailed run down of them in this short birthday bio; please follow the links given below to explore more! 👇 Aside from the shear number of films that Smith actually made, along with his inventing so many firsts in the realm of shooting and editing film, and his contribution to the rise of narratives within film, by far the most important contribution that he made within his own career was that of the invention of...or rather the perfection of...Kinemacolor.  Most of the successful implementation of the invention had actually been the work of very important, but relatively unknown, inventor and cinematographer Edward Raymond Turner. The process--first dubbed the "Lee-Turner Process"--was already well under development when Smith was brought on board to finish it by influential American ex-pat film producer and distributor Charles Urban.  The main perfection of the process came when Smith decided to leave off Turner's 3-color approach in favor of a 2-color formula based on red and green. The result was the world's very first stable and usable motion picture color process. The very first film shot and later publicly screened using Kinemacolor was A Visit To The Seaside--shot in 1908 and first projected in 1909 (Smith shot at least two earlier films as test products before Seaside--the first of which was Tartans of Scottish Clans dating from 1906) [A portion of A Visit can be seen below--the original film was some 8 minutes in length.]  The process was became the industry standard and was pretty widely used for some six years.  Ironically, it was his decision to go with a two-color filter system in the color process that ended his career. At the time that Kinemacolor was perfected around 1905, there were a number of other inventors in England that were working on a colour film precess. One of them, William Friese-Green, had a credible claim to an earlier process that was almost identical--he filed a patent lawsuit against Smith and his studios in England, which he won. This put Smith and both his studios, one in Hove and one in Nice, France, out of business. Smith did not attempt to return to the film business after this, though he lived for another 45 years.  He resided most of that time in obscurity, until British film enthusiasts rediscovered his work after World War II.  In 1955, he was made a Fellow of the British Film Institute.  Smith died at the age of 95 (!) on the 17th of May in Brighton.  As of this writing, I can find no information on his burial.

Wikipedia

IMDb

A Halloween You Tube Mystery

There is some controversy over whether tinted film above is actually British film maker George Albert Smith's 1897 remake of the 1896 black and white Melies film below or not.  The main confusion seems to come in with the title card on the above remastered film showing Melies film studio stamp, but this could be have been added later by some mistake or other.  They don't look the same to me!  Either way they represent two of the very earliest horror films every made.  Happy Spooks!!

Melies

Smith

Silent Horror Image Of The Day

There is some controversy over where this tinted print comes from.  It is either a tinted Melies which was released in 1896, or it is from one of the very first British film "directors" George Albert Smith's The Haunted Castle, which dates from 1897.  If it is the later,  I guess that makes this one of the first, if not the very first, remakes in film history.