Spiders on a Web is a 1900

1900 in film

The year 1900 in film involved some significant events.-Events:* Reulos, Goudeau & Co. invent Mirographe, a 21 mm amateur format.* The Lumiere Brothers premiere their new Lumiere Wide format for the 1900 World Fair...

 British short

Short subject

A short film is any film not long enough to be considered a feature film. No consensus exists as to where that boundary is drawn: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all...

  silent

Silent film

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...

 documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

, directed by George Albert Smith

George Albert Smith (inventor)

George Albert Smith was a stage hypnotist, psychic, magic lantern lecturer, astronomer, inventor, and one of the pioneers of British cinema, who is best known for his controversial work with Edmund Gurney at the Society for Psychical Research, his short-films from 1897-1903 which pioneered film...

, featuring a single shot close-up of two spiders trapped in an enclosure (not on a web as indicated in the title). The film is, according to Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline, "less formally ambitious," than the director's, "groundbreaking multiple close-up study Grandma's Reading Glass

Grandma's Reading Glass

Grandma's Reading Glass is a 1900 British short silent drama film, directed by George Albert Smith, featuring a young Willy who borrows a huge magnifying glass to focus on various objects, which was shot to demonstrate the new technique of close-up...

 (1900), made the same year, but is nonetheless, "one of the earliest British examples of close-up natural history photography, predating Percy Smith

F. Percy Smith

Frank Percy Smith was a British naturalist and early nature documentary pioneer working for Charles Urban, where he pioneered the use of time lapse and micro cinematography.-Biography:...

's insect studies by a decade."