As Seen Through a Telescope (1900)

Directed by

George Albert Smith

Genre

short film, comedy film, silent film

Country

United Kingdom

Runtime

1 min

Rating

5.4 of 10 from 46 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

An elderly man uses a telescope to spy on a woman's ankle. A younger man catches him and reacts with a slapstick scuffle.

playfullightheartedbrieffarcicalsimplecheekysilent-era

What happens

As Seen Through a Telescope (AKA: The Professor and His Field Glass) is a 1900 British short silent comedy film, directed by George Albert Smith, featuring an elderly gentleman getting a glimpse of a woman's ankle through a telescope. The three-shot comedy, according to Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline, "uses a similar technique to that which G.A. Smith pioneered in Grandma's Reading Glass (1900)," and, although "the editing is unsophisticated, the film does at least show a very early example of how to make use of point-of-view close-ups in the context of a coherent narrative (which is this film's main advance on Grandma's Reading Glass)." "Smith's experiments with editing," Brooke concludes, "were ahead of most contemporary film-makers, and in retrospect it can clearly be seen that he was laying the foundations of film grammar as we now understand it." (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

• Burlesque Attack on a Settler's Cabin (1900)
• The Electricity Cure (1900)
• Grandma Threading her Needle (1900)
• The Gunpowder Plot (1900)
• Walking the Greasy Pole, Further Efforts (1900)
• A Free Ride (1903)
• Clown and Policeman (1900)
• The Beggar's Deceit (1900)