James Williamson (film pioneer)
James A. Williamson ( born November 8, 1855 in Pathhead in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, † August 18 1933 in Richmond ) was a British film pioneer.
Life and work
James Williamson grew up in Edinburgh and received in London training as a chemist. From 1877 he lived in Eastry in Kent, where he married and until 1886 operated a drugstore. Then he moved to Hove in Brighton. In his local drugstore he acted with items for photographers and enthusiasts themselves for photography. In 1894 he began experimenting with the film, in 1896 he acquired a movie projector, he rebuilt a year later to a film camera, with which he began making his own films.
In 1898 he gave up his drugstore, and devoted himself exclusively to the movies. In 1900, he turned on a backyard in Hove a " actuality film " about the Boxer Rebellion in China, Attack on a China Mission Station, which already contained counter -sections and parallel actions. Williamson's Stop Thief strips and Fire! of 1901 are among the earliest examples of films in which with the help of the invisible section is a story told in several settings. Stop Thief is considered the first film that shows a chase. In Fire! Williamson described in complex scenes, the discovery and management of a residential fire. The film is considered as the inspiration for Edwin S. Porter's Life of an American Fireman, one of the first narrative films in the United States. As a leading member of the "School of Brighton " Williamson thus contributed to the development of narrative techniques in the young medium of film at.
In the autumn of 1902 James Williamson founded in Brighton Williamson Kinematographic Company and turned in up to 50 movies. The Little Match Seller (1902, dt The little girl with the matches ), a strip of 64 meters and 3.5 minutes is considered the first film adaptation of a story by Hans Christian Andersen. As of 1907, he drove his films, he used consistently to occupy with family members, themselves
1909 took Williamson, meanwhile, one of the leading film producers in Europe, at the first congress of Film Producers in Paris. In the same year he gave to the production of feature films. In the following years he worked on documentary films for science and moved its headquarters to London work. There he began with the development of special cameras for scientific and military use. James Williamson died in 1933 in Richmond, near London.