To Demonstrate How Spiders Fly
Encyclopedia
To Demonstrate How Spiders Fly is a 1909
British short
silent
animated documentary film
, directed by F. Percy Smith
, featuring a close-up of an animated model spider throwing its silken thread to take to the air. The film features, "the first of several animated creatures to appear in Smith's films," and according to Jenny Hammerton of BFI Screenonline was made in the belief, "that he could cure people of their fear of spiders by showing them blown up images of their eight legged foes on the cinema screen."
1909 in film
The year 1909 in film involved some significant events.-Events:*Matsunosuke Onoe, who would become the first superstar of Japanese cinema, appears in his first film, Goban Tadanobu.*James Joyce opens the Volta, the first cinema in Dublin....
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...
animated 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 F. 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:...
, featuring a close-up of an animated model spider throwing its silken thread to take to the air. The film features, "the first of several animated creatures to appear in Smith's films," and according to Jenny Hammerton of BFI Screenonline was made in the belief, "that he could cure people of their fear of spiders by showing them blown up images of their eight legged foes on the cinema screen."