Such a frustrating disappointment

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

The great thing about this film is that these filmmakers, whether they had seen it or not, had the kind of movie that the Lumiere brothers happened to catch in mind - the Train coming in the Station that basically birthed cinema in 1895 - and they decided 'we can do a step further.' Now, it's not that the whole film is only the car coming at the camera, and we first see a horse and buggy go by the "person" sitting or standing in the road. It's a very basic feeling that the crux of this film does - terror - but it also is more primal, which is helplessness.The whole 1 minute is meant to express a feeling, and whether you really feel it or not (it IS 116 years ago now), it does have a visceral impact: it's hard to not believe the car is going to kill "you" in place of the camera, since we're the camera-eye. This is one of the major accomplishments of cinematic grammar: if you can get an audience to feel something by how the camera is in place and how the frame is set in just such a position (and in this case there's even some odd text that comes over black in the last few seconds), then you win at cinema.

I think self-reflexive films, or self-referential films, meta-film, or whatever you want to call them, offer some of the most interesting experiences available in the art form--giving insight into the complexities of their very nature. Three of the earliest films to explore this territory bare some striking similarities, but the filmmakers strike upon very different ways and techniques for their self-reference. In addition to this film, "How It Feels to Be Run Over", I'm also discussing "The Big Swallow" and "The Countryman and the Cinematograph". These motion pictures are, of course, similar in that they all are about the process of themselves, whether it be film-making or the cinema viewing experience. They are also very old, short and, perhaps, somewhat deficient to the expectations of some modern viewers. They were all intended as comedies. Additionally, the English made them all. They were made independently of each other by three of the major producers in Britain at the time--three of the most historically important founders of film language, really. They are Cecil Hepworth, who produced "How It Feels to Be Run Over", Robert W. Paul and James Williamson (only George Albert Smith is missing here). During this period, it was the nation leading the world in filmic innovation.There are earlier examples in film history of self-reflexivity if you look deep enough (which I've attempted), such as some Lumière and Edison films. In one Lumière short, for example, the cameraman records another cameraman filming a subject--making the filming of the subject the subject (see "Fête de Paris 1899: Concours d'automobiles fleuries"). In another, Louis Lumière, who was primarily involved in still photography throughout his life, poses for a picture. In an early Kinetograph experiment at the Edison Company, entitled "A Hand Shake" (1892), William K.L. Dickson comes from behind the camera and enters the frame to shake hands with assistant William Heise--basically congratulating themselves on film over the invention of film.Another previous motion picture, produced by the American Mutoscope Company, is rather similar to this film in particular. It was planned as an actuality film of the reaction of a fire department. Yet, in this onrush, one of the engines was forced to crash into the Biograph camera and film crew. The film, which survived, was released as "Atlantic City Fire Department" (1897). "How It Feels to Be Run Over" is, however, a staged fiction film, which perhaps was inspired by the Mutoscope production.In it, a horse carriage avoids the camera safely by moving to the right side of the road. Then, a wild automobile motorist driving down the right lane (which, of course, would be incorrect in Britain) smashes into the camera. The screen goes black and a quick flash of question marks and exclamation marks are followed by the words "Oh! Mother will be pleased", which appear on individual frames. That's it.Here, there are two aspects interesting from a historical standpoint aside from making noticed the camera within the film that is filming that very film. First, it's one of the first films to feature intertitles. They're not the kind of title cards one is accustomed to viewing in later silent films, though. They're quickly gone, appear on separate frames and in non-fancy white letters against black background. The words may have been written on the negative themselves; otherwise, they may have been filmed against some black background, and then edited in stop-motion fashion. The only filmmaker to experiment with title cards before this film that I know of was George Albert Smith, who introduced his 1898 film Santa Claus with the title of the film. In 1900, he also included an intertitle ("Reversed") during "The House that Jack Built". In those days, exhibitors would tell audiences the titles of films as well as describe their action, or they would use title cards in the magic lantern fashion. But, Hepworth, Smith, in France, Ferdinand Zecca and, in the US, Edwin S. Porter, among others, would assume more narrative responsibility for the producers with the introduction of intertitles.Second, Hepworth probably started the common thread in early films of parodying the dangers of the newfangled horseless carriage. In another film from 1900, "Explosion of a Motor Car", he took the trick film, which was invented inside a studio by Georges Méliès, outdoors. Apparently, Hepworth was actually an automobile enthusiast, which demonstrates these films were meant to be facetious. In the end, however, it's not so much the car in "How It Feels to Be Run Over" that disrupts, but rather it is the filmmaker, who fiendishly takes a position on the road, and the camera, which by assuming our point-of-view runs us over.

Some of these earliest features pack a good amount of creativity into a very short running time. There are probably as many signs of genuine imagination in less than a minute of this little film as you could find in two hours of most recent movies. The idea here is simple, but clever, and it is carried out with an unaffected liveliness that makes it work well.The camera is set up so that it looks down an open road as different conveyances approach, to create an anticipation of what might happen when they get closer. It works well, and it also features what must be one of the very earliest uses of title cards - which themselves are done in an amusing fashion. A lot of pioneering films are worthwhile more for their effort and their intentions than for their content or their entertainment value, but this one does pretty well in both departments.

Automobiles were still the source of a lot of humour when this film was made so it is no surprise the Hepworth's made a comedy film about the perils of encountering a horseless carriage. The camera is in the middle of the road as a horse and buggy come by. They pass by without calamity and you fully expect some hapless pedestrian to wander into the road just as another comes by. Well guess what? In this movie the camera, and hence the audience, plays the part of the pedestrian. An automobile comes around the corner, drives straight at the camera and . ..well . . .THAT is how it (almost) feels to be run over; the film is a lot more painless than the actual experience. Seeing this film I wonder if the Hepworth's were doing a conscious parody of the 1896 Lumiere film THE ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN AT LA CIOTAT in which the sight of a train coming right at the camera is said to have panicked many people seeing their first moving picture? Perhaps.