The Big Swallow

 

In his article ‘In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film’ (1997), Tom Gunning has drawn attention to an early ‘genre’ of filmmaking known as ‘facial expression films’.

For Gunning, these films were the product of a long history of photographic studies in psychopathology, physiology and neurology (see, for example, expressions induced by electrodes; an experiment conducted by Duchenne de Boulogne, in the 1860s), and – as the name suggests – were largely focused on facial expressions, generated, often, by the mouth. ‘Eating, slobbering, kissing, guffawing’ (Gunning 1997). Such were the ‘visual pleasures’ offered up by facial expression films.

One such ‘facial expression’ film was James Williamson’s The Big Swallow, released in 1901. Like Fred Ott’s Sneeze, The Big Swallow is, essentially, a story crafted out of a bodily response: there sneezing, here swallowing. But the 15 years that separates the two films also seems to have generated a number of innovations: not only in relation to the question of scale (the protagonist of Edison’s film remains static, whereas in Williamson’s work he moves closer and closer to us, eventually engulfing the screen); but also in relation to the question of narrative structure.

The grotesque mouth that looms towards us as the film climaxes is, in this respect, the main innovation at play here, delivering a satisfying ‘pay-off’ that is also surprisingly modern, and surprisingly funny. Even through, once again we don't really get to ‘know’ the man who silently prattles on in the film, inviting the spectator ‘to stare into a mouth twisting open in inaudible speech’ (Steimatsky 2017: 53), before swallowing us whole.

Want to know more?

Watch the film here.

Read about it here.