Police, robbers and Sheffield’s influence on cinema history

If I asked you to think of a crime and chase movie, you’d probably think of Steve McQueen speeding down a San Francisco freeway or John Wayne rounding up bandits on the American frontier. But what if I told you that the origin of such a mind-blowing tale lies closer to home, far from the glitz and glamor of Tinsel town? What if I told you that a film so influential in the development of world cinema – one that helped bring police chases, revenge and action-packed drama to our screens – was made in Sheffield? Good, Bold daylight Burglary survives as a riveting testimony to this fact.

Filmmaking: The 1903 Style

Celebrating its 121st birthday in July, Sheffield’s own four-minute thrill ride – filled to the brim with cops, robbers and hard-fought justice – might seem elementary to an audience accustomed to Jason Bourne or Dirty Harry. But in 1903, A daring daylight burglary helped turn the wheels of cinema history, influencing the transition of films from one, perhaps two, filmed “actualities”—short films shot from a fixed angle showing life as it happened, such as Louis Lumière’s film. Employees leaving the Lumière factory – in imaginary, open-ended narratives that flow from one scene to another, with logical connection.

Of course, fiction films existed at the time: Georges Méliès’s they Travel to Lune took awestruck moviegoers to the moon and back, 66 years before Neil Armstrong actually did. However, the few fiction pictures that were produced were mainly staged in the theater, shot in tableau style and seen, as Lewis Jacobs said. The Rise of American Film, through the eyes of the “gentlemen in the orchestra”. It is no wonder that films often accompanied vaudeville shows presented in a list of supporting acts or were exhibited by traveling showmen as a spectacle.

But what these showmen demonstrated, like those of the Sheffield Photo Company, was a pioneering enthusiasm to expand the world of cinema from the stage to greater expanses – to further explore the commercial and creative possibilities of this new medium exciting and to follow in more daring territory.

The road to a daring breakout

Founded in 1882 by Frank Mottershaw, the Sheffield Photo Company began life as a photography business when film had not yet taken shape. It wasn’t until the success of the traveling exhibition business at the turn of the century—when the family would travel the country with projection equipment, showing short films of current events—that the Mottershaws would form a sideline in movies.

However, there was one problem: the Mottershaws were photographers, not filmmakers. How would they succeed in this strange, burgeoning industry?

Mottershaw’s eldest son Frank Storm led the charge by mastering his craft, uprooting himself to London and spending a year with the great craftsmen of the day such as fellow pioneer RW Paul. Upon his return to Sheffield, Storm ran the film production company’s concerns, converting the new Hanover Street headquarters for all their filmmaking needs: film development rooms, an outdoor stage, the works.

In all, Storm would make 42 pictures for the company before abandoning production in 1908. But it was the young director’s first and most famous fiction film that would leave a lasting impression on the world: a heart stopper four minutes long caught him in the heat of a daylight burglary, shot at breakneck speed over half a dozen scenes.

The premise is simple: a thief climbs over a wall and enters through a window; a boy follows the thief and alerts a police station; two policemen chase the thief over the wall and onto the roof; thief throws an officer into serious injury, possibly death; an ambulance brings in the injured man, while two officers chase the thief across a river; eventually the thief tries to catch a country train before being apprehended by the police at the next station. So what’s the big deal?

Sheffield is making a movie

Shot over the course of three days, A daring daylight burglary it was a marvel of scale that traversed an entire city in less than four minutes. While this isn’t the first picture to be shot outdoors – even stage-based tableau films often used the outdoors – this takes advantage of Sheffield’s vast geography to deliver an exhilarating chase filled with cliffs, rivers and obstacles galore. In terms of drama, the stakes are high – the danger has never been greater!

But what’s particularly impressive here is that these locations are widely dispersed throughout the city, but the editing, itself a rare tool at the time, juxtaposes these sequences so perfectly that all this action-packed excitement takes place in a coherent world Own. . By filling in the connections between these individual locations, audiences witnessed the development of a new form of cinematic vocabulary, quite unlike anything the world had seen before.

The drama we see in this film is not too far removed from the hot action we are used to seeing on screen today. And it’s no wonder why: A daring daylight burglary – with its back-to-back scenes unfolding a tale of crime, revenge and, inevitably, justice – influenced the model of cinematic storytelling that has been expanded upon countless times over the decades. But it’s the film’s galloping pace that holds these themes together, achieving a constant, flowing urgency from one scene to the next.

Take the police station scene, for example: Mottershaw sets up his camera with a clever depth of field so that our hero sprints towards us and exits to the right, before climbing over the wall and away from the camera. It’s a compression of time and injection of rhythm that brings the action to the forefront of our attention, leaving only a few seconds between the policeman’s alert and his fight with a dangerous criminal. Real drama can take days to unfold, but this groundbreaking film proved it can be done in minutes.

Children and lasting influences

A daring daylight burglary it would prove its great value in the market as well as in creativity. The Mottershaws approached a major British distributor, the Charles Urban Trading Company, selling the picture for a sum that was double the cost of their considerable £25 budget. This positioned the company as one of the leading manufacturers in the country at the time. Despite over 500 copies being sold worldwide, the film was plagued by piracy, with film labs illegally “cheating” the original beyond control.

However, this piracy would only increase the image’s influence and cement its place in history. One Edwin S Porter, an emerging American talent, saw this little Yorkshire production and saw Cinema creating a longer and more ambitious interpretation of Mottershaw’s model to produce one of the most famous museums of all time, A big train robbery. And from there, well, the rest is history.

All things must pass: Sheffield Photo Company dissolved in 1982; silent cinema dissipated in color and sound. But when the cameras start rolling, A daring daylight burglary continue to live.

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