The Derby is an 1895 British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 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...

 black-and-white

Black-and-white

Black-and-white, often abbreviated B/W or B&W, is a term referring to a number of monochrome forms in visual arts.Black-and-white as a description is also something of a misnomer, for in addition to black and white, most of these media included varying shades of gray...

 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...

, produced and directed by Birt Acres

Birt Acres

Birt Acres was a photographer and film pioneer.Born in Richmond, Virginia to English parents, he invented the first British 35 mm moving picture camera, the first daylight loading home movie camera and projector, Birtac, was the first travelling newsreel reporter in international film history and...

 for exhibition on Robert W. Paul

Robert W. Paul

Robert W. Paul was a British electrician, scientific instrument maker and early pioneer of British film.-Early career:...

's peep show Kinetoscopes, featuring the end of the May 29 1895 Epsom Derby viewed from a raised position close to the finishing line with the main stand in the distance. A photograph of Acres filming the movie has survived, which shows that the camera used in the production was relatively portable despite what might have been expected from the equipment of the time. The film was long considered lost but footage discovered in the Ray Henville collection in 1995 has been identified by the BFI as being from this film.

Synopsis

A stationary camera looks diagonally across a racetrack toward the infield showing the horses as they pass. Once the horses have passed the camera it is clear that the race has come to an end and there is a close finish between three horses. Once the race is over police officers run onto the field. The camera also displays various members of the audience moving around.

Current status

Given its age, this short film is available to freely download from the Internet. It has also featured in a number of film collections including The Movies Begin - A Treasury of Early Cinema, 1894-1913 . . The surviving print for this film has Paul-type perforations, but is believed to be a reprint from 1896 when both Acres and Paul (working separately) were exhibiting the film. This copy however was filmed at a far slower speed than the 40 frame/s which would be typical of the time from an 1895 Kinetoscope

Kinetoscope

The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device. Though not a movie projector—it was designed for films to be viewed individually through the window of a cabinet housing its components—the Kinetoscope introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic...

film. This is said to cast doubt on the identity of the NFTVA print.

External links

• The Derby at the BFI Film & TV Database
• The Derby at Silent Era