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.
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