Me And My Two Friends (1898) is the best four seconds of film ever filmed. It is 122 years old.
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Notes
1. I watched this on the BFI Player
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Film Information
Title: Me And My Two Friends
Director: William Kennedy Laurie Dickson
Year: 1898
Duration: 4 seconds
Watch: BFI Player
The Allotment Holder’s Enemies (1918) is a short film made to advertise The Smallholder, a magazine for allotment owners, providing exciting instruction on how to rid your garden of pests. It was made by Charles Urban, some of whose films I’ve looked at here before.
Alongside slightly strident title cards like the one above, The Allotment Holder’s Enemies contains five minutes of surprisingly lovely and vivid footage of various kinds of fairly benign British garden wildlife, all of which are probably far less benign if they’re about to eat the last cabbage in the country. But it’s still quite amusing to see such ferocious disgust at, well, sparrows.
Poor sparrows.
(Incidentally, that reminds me of this beautiful old bestiary description of bees, which is, and shall always be, one of my very favourite things.)
Anyway, these most destructive birds are then presented to the viewer with some footage (see image immediately below) that doesn’t exactly do much to illustrate the dire biblical plague that obviously at the time they represented.
Just terrifying.
So to calm you down, here are some lovely pictures of snails, caterpillars, grubs.
Although even caterpillars can be quite ferocious.
“Especially to ladies.”
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Notes
1. I watched this on the BFI Player
2. And gleaned, as usual, most of my information from there.
3. A sequel/companion to this, The Allotment Holder’s Friends, was made at the same time.
4. But unfortunately, except for mention of its title in various online catalogues, can find no evidence of its existence.
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Film Information
Title: The Allotment Holder’s Enemies
Director: Charles Urban
Year: 1918
Duration: 5 minutes
Watch: BFI Player
Views Of Tokyo (1913-1915) is two minutes of footage from 1910s Tokyo, as the name suggests, with lots of lovely shots of people being intensely interested in the camera, as they walk past, or more often just stop and stand there and stare and stare.
Although my favourite part isn’t the people but the wonderful automata about 40 seconds in, which we see for a few seconds, but which I wish I could watch for hours (or a few minutes, at least), just disappear into it for a while and think of nothing else but it’s movements.
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Notes
1. I watched this on youtube
2. But with the sound off, so I didn’t listen to the added sounds.
3. I also found a colourised, upscaled version, which is here if you’re interested.
4. And which is twice as long.
5. It’s just a shame colourisation is so distracting.
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Film Information
Title: Views Of Tokyo (1913-1915)
Years: 1913; 1915
Duration: 2 minutes
Watch: youtube (black and white); youtube (colour)