Little by little, week by week, we’ve been adding new topics and new content to our education programme, with 12 topics now offered.  One of the new topics has taken me joyously back to an optional course I took while an undergraduate in modern languages and linguistics: the birth of cinema.

So I’ve been having tremendous fun putting together a curriculum that traces the history of the moving picture, both technology and artistry, from the early experimental work of Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Edison through to the early Talkies at the end of the 1920s.  All the big names are there; but this has been an opportunity for me to also include some of the lesser known film-makers.

The clip below is by Robert W. Paul (1869-1943), scientific instrument maker and film pioneer, who in 1895 invented the first movie camera to be made in England, which would also be the first camera used by French film-maker Georges Méliès.