The Big Swallow

The Big Swallow (1901)

**** (out of 4)

The "story" here is pretty simple as a man is standing in front of the movie camera arguing with someone. He keeps walking towards the camera until he swallows the entire thing and even the man operating it. I'm sorry but I really, really loved this little film. At just a minute the entire thing is basically being sold on the "effect" of the man swallowing the camera and when this happen it's quite funny. I'm sure this was meant to compete with the work of Georges Melies and while I've seen many rips, this one here actually manages to capture the type of magic that the French master did with his films. The special effect of how the trick was done is quite obvious today but I can just imagine the laughter and sense of wonder that this thing must have caused back in 1901. At just a minute there's really no reason why someone who loves films shouldn't check this out.

A man swallows as he approaches, with the shot from an American field gradually becoming the detail of the mouth, towards the operator who swallows. A climax (graduality)of the fields of the framing.

The first film that shows a man devouring a camera from the camera's perspective. This takes some mundane, contrived event and makes it quite interesting. I'm sure early audiences must have found it quite fascinating and humorous.

While quite simple both in concept and in execution, this early short feature is rather amusing. The self-referential idea that it explores is interesting, both as one of the earlier examples of its kind, and also for the way that it is handled. Whereas so many present-day movies handle references to themselves and to other movies in such a labored and often pretentious manner, the idea here is carried off not only with some skill, but also with an appropriately light touch.

Unlike many of the characters in these earliest films, who are sometimes too indistinct to have any real presence on the screen, in this feature the actor playing the main character, whose responses to being filmed form the basis for the story, does a pretty good job of carrying the movie with his mannerisms and facial expressions. He has a slight hammy touch that works pretty well here, and it helps in making a very simple feature turn out rather well.

Sam Dalton objects strongly as the camera slowly dollies in on him. As it approaches his face, he opens his mouth wide and swallows it, chewing lustily!

There are none of the usual claims for a cinematic first here, nor should there be, since Melies had been doing this for a couple of years. Nonetheless, it's using a cinematic technique for a laugh, something that Williamson was adept at.

Director James Williamson was born in 1855 and came into film-making not through photography, but because he ran a chemist shop -- where he presumably developed film -- and expanded into selling photographic equipment, in Hove, quite near George A. Smith's St Ann's Well Pleasure Garden. Besides shooting and directing his own films, he patented a couple of devices useful for film production, founded a company to produce photographic equipment that was active at least until the Second World War, and lived until 1933.