Frederick S Armitage: one of cinema’s earliest experimental filmmakers
It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to experience the dawn of cinema. Photography had not long been invented before the introduction of moving pictures, and while many of the earliest films were short ‘actualities’ which objectively captured people or places, it didn’t take long for filmmakers to begin using the medium as a form of storytelling and artistic experimentation.
Some of the first-known narrative filmmakers include Georges Méliès and Alice Guy-Blache, whose short films showed early forms of cinematic creativity and took inspiration from theatre. They used early special effects techniques to expand their ideas, demonstrating that cinema had the power to become the dominant mode of entertainment. However, a name that took many decades to be acknowledged as a cinematic pioneer, despite his many contributions, is Frederick S Armitage, born in 1874.
His first recorded foray into cinema came in 1899, and very little is known about what he did before then and how he came to become a filmmaker. Perhaps that’s irrelevant – what matters is that as soon as Armitage got hold of a camera, his experimental impulses took over, and he created many short films (often between 30 seconds and a few minutes long) that demonstrated his interest in creating meaning by editing two different clips together, sometimes superimposing people over places.
Armitage was employed by American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, whom he made his films for, and for several years they were the most important studio in America. The type of films that he championed were designed to entertain audiences and amaze them with their trickery effects; at a time when filmmaking was so new, to watch clips of a skeleton superimposed over a ship, for example, must’ve been incredibly exciting and mindblowing.
It’s fascinating to look at these short clips in the present day, when three-hour-long movies are the norm and countless technically advanced special effects are utilised with ease. With films like Ameta, A Nymph of the Waves, Birth of the Pearl, and Neptune’s Daughters, Armitage presented viewers with very short slices of beauty, even if, today, they do little to provoke interest unless you’re intrigued by early filmmaking attempts.
But look at something like Birth of the Pearl, where a woman emerges from a giant shell in a skin-coloured suit, to make her appear nude, greeted by two women who stand on either side of the screen. In many ways, this feels like watching the birth of cinema, with the woman standing up, naked and unafraid, daring to present viewers with a form of visual art they’d never seen before. All these years later, we can still watch these moments of experimentation unfold before our eyes, and Armitage was keen on trying out many new techniques besides superimposing images, such as time-lapse.
A Nymph of the Waves, from 1900, is classed by many as the first experimental film, a genre of cinema that would soon progress to include all sorts of bold techniques, like quick-cut montages or fragmented narrative structures (if any at all). Armitage’s film is hardly comparable to the likes of Kenneth Anger or Stan Brakhage or Peter Tscherkassky, but it was one of the first instances of a filmmaker prioritising avant-garde imagery and technique over narrative, with the film simply superimposing a woman dancing over crashing waves.
This kind of imagery opened up people’s minds to the potentials of cinema as an abstract artform as much as a storytelling device, and while these films might not look like much today, the filmmaker paved the way for cinema to become a more creative medium. Armitage continued to direct many short films for several years before working at the Edison Manufacturing Company, eventually passing away in 1933.
