User Reviews

This is a pretty clever little film made during the very early days of motion pictures. A guy is being filmed and he doesn't seem to like it. So, as the camera approaches, he opens his mouth and seems to swallow the camera,...followed by the entire camera crew as well! The film certainly deserves credit for being different and amusing! While the special effect isn't exactly perfect by today's standards, for the time it was pretty amazing stuff. And, unlike many of the films of the era, this one is still pretty entertaining if viewed today. This film would probably be of most interest to kids and film historians. Adults, however, probably will think it's all pretty silly--and that's exactly why I like it.

This early film by James Williamson's Kinematograph sees a man enraged by photographer who is setting up to take his picture. The yelling man gets closer and closer until all we see his gaping mouth, into which the hapless photographer falls, camera, tripod, and all. The film-maker's camera then pans back and we see the man, no longer angry, chewing in a very satisfied way. I imagine in 1901 the twist ending was quite surprising. Comical in an archaic, anarchic way.

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.

Like Hepworth's film "How It Feels to Be Run Over", made the previous year, James Williamson's "The Big Swallow" is self-referential in its parody of film-making. (The third early self-reflexive film I discuss, "The Countryman and the Cinematograph", reverses this and parodies cinema viewing.) Both are about the camera and the cameraman (and, in a way, through their point of view, the spectator) coming to a violent collision with their filmed subject. That Williamson's film seems more likely to involve a still photographer rather than a cinematographer doesn't matter. In Hepworth's film, a motorist drives his automobile into the camera. In this film, the person being photographed swallows the camera and cameraman. Another notable difference between these two scenes is that Hepworth's film ends with the collision, as the screen goes blank and only intertitles end the film. In Williamson's film, the film (or point of view) we are watching (or were watching) is shown from another perspective, which shows the swallowing and the satisfied munching afterwards by the subject. It would seem more logical if the film ended as a single shot film with the subject's mouth taking up the entire frame, and thus blackening the entire frame in the way of Hepworth's film. Yet, it would be less clear in that way and would lack the added self-reflexive moment of showing the film we're watching being shot. This is likely the first movie to show, in a sense, itself being filmed--a self-referential device later used, for example, in François Truffaut's "Day for Night" (La Nuit américaine) (1973).

A similarity between "The Big Swallow" and R.W. Paul's film "The Countryman and the Cinematograph" is that they were both part of the early cinema genre of trick films. Although their special effects seem of rather secondary interest now, they were still novel for 1901. Positioned within the trick film also adds further layers of self-reference to these films because the special effects (the swallowing shot here and the superimposed films within Paul's film) show the films' main self-reflexive devices. Additionally, cinema itself is a kind of trick. On a note of technique, Williamson's refocusing of the image as the subject approaches the camera was very rare for 1901.

"The Big Swallow" was also part of the facial expression genre, which tended to be one-scene films framed in a close-up of a person's face. There were quite a few of these films, but none that I know of were nearly as interesting as this. Most of them were merely curios of the newfound close-up.

Furthermore, the scene being photographed within "The Big Swallow" reminds me of actualitiés, which was still the most popular motion picture genre in 1901. "The Big Swallow" seems to parody this type of documentary. In it, a man is merely reading something until disturbed by a cameraman photographing him--recording the image of the man that we see, which is the film proper. Michael Brooke, for the BFI website, however, suggests that "The Big Swallow" was inspired by Williamson's experience with "savvy" passers-by while filming his actuality films.

"The Big Swallow" is the beginning of a thread of films that goes through "Kid Auto Races at Venice" (1914) to "The Truman Show" (1998).

A delightful experiment in self-reflexivity from the days of early cinema, when enquiry about this new form was still encouraged before the standardisation of production and genre. A man finds he's being filmed; angered at this intrusion of his privacy, he approaches the camera and its operator, and eats them both!

The slow, looming mouth is a parody avant la lettre of horror films, an ordinary person turned into a monster, a giant by the cinema, in the same way ordinary people suddenly became huge when projected on a screen. Here we see that film doesn't just record things, it can enlarge, focus in close-up, distort, simply by magnifying a familiar feature. Maybe this is what the Indians meant in decrying soul-destroying photography; here, this ordinary man's soul becomes, punningly, negative.

Of course, the conceit isn't fully worked out - while it's lovely seeing the munching satisfaction of the avenging diner, especially as the shrunken cameraman was slurped up like so much spaghetti, it would be impossible for a camera in a man's belly to film the man from outside. There is always a second camera, filming silently on. This is the concerted power of cinema - you can do what you like, even eat its minions, but it'll still be there, like a Gothic doppelganger, immovable, watching your every move.

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.

Certainly the most memorable motion picture of 1901? (I say this having not seen all of Melies' output so I may be talking out of my butt there). Here's what happens in one minute: a man is photographed from afar and looks shy: he doesn't want to be on camera, or to come any closer. But he's told over and over to come, so finally he does. In what I should think is one of the first (if not just the first) extreme close-ups in cinema's young history, the man comes close, and his lips fill the frame... until his mouth opens and SWALLOWS THE CAMERAMAN AND HIS CAMERA!

This is an unexpectedly funny and strange movie that starts as one thing and becomes something else. It exists in part to show off how this technique works - you don't have to be the Lumiere and film one thing from a static shot - you can have a subject come closer and closer to the camera, adjust the focus, and then be eaten alive! But seriously, this is also a short that has a beginning, middle and end - hell, it even has a pay-off. It's a wonderful little short that should be shown in film schools if nothing else as example of how do this *this* and make it cinematic for a joke.

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.

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.

This film in the early stages in film history, is of course one that is to be immensely appreciated for its cultural and artistic influence on the art form we all love.

The director experiments beautifully with the camera and uses very interesting, influental and beautiful cinematic techniques that would inspire generations.

It is an overall very interesting and appreciated piece - it can, of course not truly be considered a feature or a drama, given that it is more of an experiment, with no real plot, but for any lover of film, this is of course a given recommendation, and an ever great delving into cinematic history!

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.

A man sees he is being filmed and starts to remonstrate with the camera crew about it. Finally losing his temper the man closes in the camera and, well, eats it. This sounds simple and it is but I had assumed that the film would merely end on the darkness of the man's mouth as the punchline. Instead the delivery is cleverer than that and we step back to see the camera and the cameraman falling into the "mouth" before we then cut back to the man walking backwards chewing. It is a clever combination of camera shots to create the gag and invention work from Williams. Not brilliant but quite clever when you look at it in context.

FILM HISTORY page three, chapter one.

James Williamson's writings as early as 1901 had already explained the type of function that the movie must have in its future development, and that it was of a certain dialectical significance.

If the film had simply swallowed the image, rather than chewing on it away from the camera at the end, then the work would have been limited to a kind of cinematic entertainment, after all, such a simple idea would only have preserved a certain distance from the self-reflexive nature of cinema as an art in its own right, but the backward passage at the end very accurately brings the viewer back to the dimension of a cinematographic non-reality experience, and not only does the viewer who was startled by the strange style of the first half of the film, but also the viewer who was shocked by the strange style of the first half of the film. It's not only a relief for those who were startled by its strange style in the first half of the film, but it also makes the viewer start to think that it's just a movie. This is the self-reflexivity of the image, shown with subtlety early on.

It is a fresh exploration of the boundaries of cinematic art by mankind.

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.