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selected for their essentially English character and for the peculiar beauty of the countryside of this land. I don't think there was any specially patriotic consciousness about this at the time — it was probably a matter of personal taste. But much later on, when it became the practice of English studios to ape the methods and style and treatment of American films, in the vain hope of winning some of the success which had only too obviously passed to them, I did consciously rebel. It seemed to me then — and it does still seem to me — that the best hope and the most honourable course for every country is to be true to its own culture, to produce the pictures which are native and natural to it, and to try to tell of the things which are good and worthy about it and its civilisation. Certainly not to try to poach upon the natural preserves of other lands. Not only because that is rather dishonest but also, and chiefly, because it is certain to be unsuccessful.
Natural, open-air scenery could not, of course, meet all our needs and the first use of the new stage was in No. 132, The EggLaying Man, a trick film in which the head of the actor (me) fills the whole screen. It has often been stated that D. W. Griffith, the great American producer, who appeared, and had such astonishing skill, several years later, was the originator of, and the first to use, the 'close-up.' That is not so. One of the first pictures ever made, The Kiss, used it with great success. It was tremendously popular in its day and found its way into nearly every fair and circus in the country. The way the two huge faces nuzzled into one another was just a little nauseating in its intimacy, but it was mild in comparison with what we get in nearly every lovestory film nowadays.
Soon there followed The Eccentric Dancer, in which the device later known as 'slow-motion photography' was used, probably for the first time. I remember we had to hand-turn the camera at tremendous speed to get the effect, which was exceedingly comic until continual use dimmed its infinite variety. Two other novel effects come next to one another in the list, How it Feels to be RunOver, and a reversing film, in the second half of which the action is shown backwards and the bathers dive feet-first out of the water and on to the diving-board.
Then there are several more of these alleged 'comics' whose only interest now is that they seem to show gradual progress to better work, and then we come to more news pictures of the return of the C.I.V.s from South Africa, and to no less than nine
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