Year: 1900
Director: Cecil B. Hepworth
Country: UK
Language: N/A
The final shot of Edwin Porters' Great Train Robbery (1903) shocked many filmgoers at the time. It featured an outlaw cowboy staring into the camera and firing his gun into the lens. Considering motion pictures were at their infancy, it's understandable that some audience members, particularly the very old and the very young, would be startled by this image. Early filmmakers would this shock & awe over the fairly new invention of film to their advantage.
In How it Feels to Be Run Over a car veers off course and runs straight into the camera.
The film is appropriately titled. Literally, all it is, is the camera planted in the middle of a road, and we watch a car approach in the distance. The people in the car, all of whom look like they just came out of an F.Scott Fitzgerald novel, wave and scream for us to get out of the way. We (the stationary camera) don't and we cut to intertitles that say "Oh mother will be pleased". Quite bizarre.
Directed by Cecil M. Hepworth, How it Feels to Be Run Over is an appropriately suspenseful film as we see the car coming and are powerless to stop it. The audience gets tense waiting for the impact of the "hit" to happen. I can see many audiences at the time having to look away or brace themselves for the imaginary impact.
The editing trick, cutting away from the impact, is something that is still done today. Often it is better to cut away from the violence just before it happens and leave the audiences' imagination to its own devices rather than showing every gruesome detail. Hitchcock's Psycho shower scene is a great example of this trick being employed. How it Feels to Be Run Over is certainly a historically important novelty, even if it is without a comprehensive story.
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