User Reviews

A man looks through a telescope... at a woman's ankles.

It's a naughty film for 1900, but what's really shocking is the use of cutting and close-up to tell a story. George Albert Smith is largely unremembered in the history of cinema, but he's one of those guys who figured out how to do something right and then everyone went about their business as if he had never existed, until some one actually checked the record. Mendeleyev springs to mind.

What Smith did was figure out the basics of modern film grammar, the elements of a close-up and cutting, working from 1898 through 1904, then went on to do other things in cooperation with his buddy Charles Urban.... and seems to have vanished from film history. After him, other film-makers went about making films in exactly the same old way as before. Melies had his own grammar, Edwin S. Porter and associate developed their own grammar at Edison, but everyone else assumed that the movie screen was just like the stage, and you wanted to be seated in the front row, center. Just take less time with the scene changes.

Unless, as I suspect, while D.W. Griffith was looking through old movies at the Biograph warehouse -- Biograph had been the American distributor for Smith's pictures -- he had chanced on them and realized that they matched some stage techniques of lighting alternate parts of the stage to show action that was happening simultaneously. And sixteen other things that most people had forgotten.

I'd like to think so.

(Note: This is the first of four films that I've decided to comment on because they're landmarks of early narrative development in film history. "Le Voyage dans la lune," "The Great Train Robbery" and "Rescued by Rover" are the others.)

George Albert Smith was the most important filmmaker of the so-called "Brighton School." His pioneering use of close-ups is one of his greatest contributions to the development of the art form. He also experimented with editing to make some of the earliest multi-shot films and with trick effects. In the same year as this short film, he made "Grandma's Reading Glass," which is an extravaganza of point-of-view (POV) close-ups. I prefer "As Seen through a Telescope," however, because the use of a POV close-up serves the plot; whereas, a thin story--a boy, like the director, fascinated with magnification--served the parading of POV close-ups in "Grandma's Reading Glass."

"As Seen through a Telescope" begins with an establishing shot. Why a man is outside during daylight looking up at the sky with his small telescope is anyone's guess. Anyhow, the old pervert then uses the telescope to peer over at a younger man tying a woman's shoe. The old man and us see the woman flirtingly pulling up her dress via a POV close-up shot. A mask over the camera lens creates the illusion that we're looking through a telescope.

The third shot returns to the original long shot, where the comicality is that the younger man pushes the voyeur off his seat as he and the woman pass by. Elementary enough, but the use of a POV close-up within something of a narrative is a landmark in film history.

Edwin S. Porter remade this as "The Gay Shoe Clerk" (1903). Besides the story, the main difference between it and "As Seen through a Telescope" is that Porter's close-up wasn't a POV shot, but a privileged camera position.

This comic short has a similar plot to Smith's previous 'Grandma's Reading Glass' - a male protagonist looks at the world through the eyes of an optical instrument. Where the visions of the first film, however, were appropriate to a young boy - curious, novel, fresh, surprising ways of looking at the world as if for the first time (e.g. like the first cinema goers), the development of an individual consciousness as it were - the point of view in this film is typical of an aged lecher, as he gawps at the incipient sexual tease performed by a man and a bicycled woman as he ties up her shoelace, slowly raising her long dress to reveal a titillating glimpse of stockinged leg.

The move here from the encyclopaedic to the sexual and voyeuristic may be symptomatic of the 'wrong' turning taken by cinema, bemoaned by the likes of Godard, away from a curious interest in the world to vulgar, voyeuristic, prurient peepshows. But Smith is no fool, and the clatter the scopophile receives from one of his 'victims' is given to us too - we are no better than this pervert.

The set-up cries out for voyeurism - a distanced shot of an environment offers us a brief glimpse of the couple in the background - the only way we can learn more is with the aid of this man's instrument, significantly more phallic that Grandma's female lens. There is no distortion here, as was the case with the first film, but clarification, a feeling of being close to the action, but apart from it: enjoyment without risk, the dream of every voyeur.

In a sense, this simple plot - voyeur attacked by the man he spies on - foreshadows one of the great masterpieces of cinema and the ultimate analysis of cinematic voyeurism and the invasion of privacy, 'Rear Window'. The man's instrument may be phallic, but it is onanistic and sterile, especially in comparison to the fertile sexual relations presumably to be enjoyed at a later date by the couple. The cinematic gaze is already being made negative, anti-social, hidden, something to be punished, something unhealthy, anti-family, solitary. The watcher must be watched, controlled, as the victim's punitive action suggests.

But it's not that simple. The framing circle of the close-up is linked to the circles of the wheels and pedals of the bicycle, maybe even the circle of life that this courtship intimates, just as Jeff's voyeurism is framed against his reluctance to settle down with his girlfriend. A surprisingly ambiguous, analytical piece of self-reflexive cinema.

This light-hearted short feature is fairly good both in concept and in execution. The story is simple but not trivial, and it has a rather detached perspective on events that provide some interesting insights into the perspectives of the film-makers. It is also reasonably resourceful in the way that it films the story.

Movies that dealt with voyeurism and similar themes are relatively common in the earliest years of cinema. Some of the early film-makers must have appreciated at once the implications of what they were doing, and the ironies that were often involved in making motion pictures that tell private stories to unknown audiences.

This one verges on becoming a morality play, but its dénouement is too buoyant to make it only that. It's also helped considerably by the on-screen performers, who act pretty naturally, without any really exaggerated gestures or theatrics. It comes across as though simply presenting the characters for what they are, rather than forcing judgments on the audience.

The technical side is also good. The "telescope" effect is believable, and as simple as the story is, the way that it is edited together works well. There are some physical defects in the print, but otherwise it all looks pretty good.

The guy in the top hat, sits on a little chair and looks at things through a telescope, circa 1900. He spots the ankle of a woman as she is assisted by a man. He does not move from the shot. This is an early, simple example of a camera technique. We see most of the film through the lens of the telescope.

I watched this film on a DVD that was rammed with short films from the period. I didn't watch all of them as the main problem with these type of things that their value is more in their historical novelty value rather than entertainment. So to watch them you do need to be put in the correct context so that you can keep this in mind and not watch it with modern eyes. With the Primitives & Pioneers DVD collection though you get nothing to help you out, literally the films are played one after the other (the main menu option is "play all") for several hours. With this it is hard to understand their relevance and as an educational tool it falls down as it leaves the viewer to fend for themselves, which I'm sure is fine for some viewers but certainly not the majority. What it means is that the DVD saves you searching the web for the films individually by putting them all in one place – but that's about it.

In Let Me Dream Again, George Smith showed us what a "dream sequence" looked like and in Grandma's Reading Glass he played with point of view presentation, which is again what he does here. We have the same effect used to let us see what a man is looking at down a telescope. Here though the material makes it worth a look in itself because it is quite amusing as the man gets his comeuppance for looking at the woman's lower leg (racy for the time I imagine). To me this is what makes it worth seeing more than the other film because the material is stronger even if the technical experimentation is the same.

This early Smith film is a later experiment of the POV shots and masking that he was experimenting with in his movies. Though made the same year as "Grandma's Reading Glass" this is actually technically better than that film, having an actual story to tell; in the other film, Smith was more just having fun filming POVs without really trying to incorporate any sort of plot. Thus, this can be seen as a more important short in that respect.

A man with a telescope is outside of a shop, looking around at different things with his instrument. He spots a scene happening on the other side of the road and uses his telescope to spy on a man tying a woman's shoe, and glimpses the woman's leg!!!!!!!!!! Whoa, don't look! Woman's showing her leg!!!! AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH! is the reaction it probably got at the time, though it seems pretty harmless now. Not especially great but important and still somewhat entertaining today.

As Seen Through a Telescope (1900)

*** (out of 4)

An old man is looking around with his telescope and notices a woman's ankle. He keeps looking at it and thinks he's gotten away until her husband walks up to him. AS SEEN THROUGH A TELESCOPE isn't a masterpiece but it's a fairly fun film that clocks in just under a minute. While there's nothing ground-breaking here there is one big laugh that makes the film worth sitting through. This comes from the same director of GRANDMA'S READING GLASSES but the effect here is put to much better use.