Explosion of a Motor Car (1900)

Directed by

Cecil Hepworth

Genre

comedy film, silent film

Country

United Kingdom

Runtime

1 min

Rating

6.1 of 10 from 58 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A horse-drawn carriage passes a man on a bicycle. Then a motor car drives by and suddenly explodes. The driver and passenger are blown apart and their body parts rain down slowly from the sky.

comedicplayfulabsurdlightheartedgimmickywhimsicalbriefsurreal

What happens

Explosion of a Motor Car (AKA: The Delights of Automobiling) is a 1900 British silent comic trick film, directed by Cecil M. Hepworth, featuring an exploding automobile scattering the body parts of its driver and passenger. "One of the most memorable of early British trick films" according to Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline, "was one of the first films to play with the laws of physics for comic effect." It features one of the earliest known uses in a British film of the stop trick technique discovered by French filmmaker Georges Méliès in 1896, and also includes one of the earliest film uses of comedy delay – later to be widely used as a convention in animated films – where objects take much longer to fall to the ground than they would do in reality. It is included in the BFI DVD Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers and a clip is featured in Paul Merton's interactive guide to early British silent comedy How They Laughed on the BFI website. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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