ABSTRACT
Film was the poetry of the Common Man and spoke directly to the heart and mind. Writing was tame and never more so than when used to describe the stuff of the cinema. Of those making reputations before and during the 1914 war the most renowned are Cecil Hepworth, R. W. Paul, W. G. Barker, George Pearson, Maurice Elvey and Florence Turner, an American who made a number of comedies, now almost forgotten, with Larry Trimble. Hepworth’s Rescued by Rover, one of his successes, was made for a few pounds and is noted as one of the first films to obtain its effects by editing. Hepworth had conventional ideas but he also had a real film sense. He had used tracking shots and close-ups at Walton studios, he had studied the American technique which in so many ways freed the camera, and he claimed, at least in this country, to have originated the dissolve.
