ABSTRACT
In 1898, Britain’s pioneer filmmaker Robert Paul opened a studio in North London. But the films he had been producing for two years, since his debut in February 1896, were very much ‘slices of everyday life’, initially around Britain, and also thanks to various expeditions he organised, in Spain and Portugal, Egypt and Sweden. The listing of the seventy films he was offering in 1897 amounts to a panorama of everyday life and entertainment in the late Victorian world, comparable to the better-known (and largely preserved) Lumière catalogue. Although only a handful of Paul’s pre-studio films survive - and scarcely a tenth of the 800 he produced during a fifteen-year career - these provide a valuable insight into one of the important attractions offered by the new medium. The previous catalogues of lantern slides and stereographs may have provided models for the taxonomy of the visible world, but ‘animated photography’ could display activity, life in flux, people in their everyday context.
