Review: A Night at the Cinema in 1914

Following up on last year's triumphant revival of silent gem The Epic of Everest, the British Film Institute has set out to recreate the experience of attending an evening at the pictures 100 years ago. This delightful project reminds us that, only a little older than the century, the medium was still seeking out its purpose and identity.

The BFI offers us travelogues, comedies, serials and, eventually, a glossy American production. Audiences sat through anything, however awful. Readers old enough to remember Ireland in the days of one television channel will sympathise with their plight.

Fear not. There is no Mart and Market here. We see footage of Lord Kitchener in Egypt. We get to watch an episode of the legendary serial Perils of Pauline. A wonderful early animation – using tricks rarely repeated – offers us patriotic imperial commentary on outrages by (their word, not ours) the advancing hun.

Perhaps the greatest surprise comes with a snippet of sound cinema: a Precambrian pop video for a raunchy, outrageously inappropriate variety song called The Rampaging Rajah. Pianist Stephen Horne, the skilled accompanist, drops in musical quotes – The Eton Boating Song for a river sequence, The March of the Women for a Suffragette film – as elegant complements to scenes and themes.

Along the way, we note that cinematic grammar was still evolving. Music hall comic Fred Evans, in his broad short, has fun building crude sets and absurd costumes, but fails to utilise the sort of basic cuts that any 10-year-old would now employ when playing with their camera phone.

The contrast with an early Charlie Chaplin film from Keystone is remarkable. Arriving last in the programme, A Film Johnnie finds the Little Tramp (still carrying a thick walking stick rather than a flexible cane) creating all kinds of havoc in, of all places, a movie studio. It's a moving experience to watch this skilled, well-honed short and consider the pop-cultural wave that was about to make its way in from the west: celebrity, glamour, comedy, horror, escapism.

It was 1914. Such diversions would soon become very welcome.