Media and Film  

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At the turn of the 20th century Brighton and Hove played a vital role in the creation of the moving picture industry and could lay credible claim to the title ‘Little Hollywood by the Sea’.

Following its formative development as a centre for fashion and style under the reign of George IV, the Victorian era helped transform Brighton and Hove into thriving seaside resorts. Millions of holidaymakers flocked to take advantage of the attractions and amusements. With pleasure piers and sideshow stalls, vaudeville houses and pioneering engineering endeavours (the Volk’s Electric Railway; the world's first great aquarium), it was a fertile ground for the development of new technologies in mass entertainment.

The pioneers

The ‘Brighton School’ of filmmakers were among the world's first true movie pioneers. Men like George Albert Smith (1864-1959), James Williamson (1855-1933), Esmé Collings (1859–1936), Alfred Darling (1862-1931) and Charles Urban (1867-1942) were making, producing, distributing and marketing major films as early as 1897. Together they helped make Brighton and Hove one of the most important filmmaking locations in Britain.

Smith, a stage hypnotist and magic lantern showman, built one of the first British film studios, in St Ann's Well Gardens, Hove, where he invented the first commercially successful colour film technique ‘Kinemacolour’. Collings, a successful Brighton photographer, shot some of the first ever films in Hove and, from 1896 to 1897, made no less than 19 major pictures. Williamson, a pharmacist by trade, became one of the most inventive and accomplished filmmakers of his generation. He pioneered sophisticated filmmaking techniques, many of which are still in use today. Darling, a talented engineer, built a successful business developing and selling cameras and equipment for local and international filmmakers. Finally Urban, a dynamic American entrepreneur, became a major player in the production and distribution of new films. With the Warwick Trading Company, he helped kick-start the careers of, among others, James Williamson, George Albert Smith and Alfred Darling.

The collection

Today the early history of filmmaking in Britain is explored through Hove Museum & Art Gallery's unique collection of original films, equipment and associated ephemera dating from the 1890s. Much of the collection was originally held at the Museum of Cinematography in St Ives, and was assembled by celebrated collectors the Barnes Brothers as far back as the early 1930s. It was purchased for Brighton & Hove Museums in 1997 thanks to a major grant from the Headley Trust. Though part of the overall collection is currently held at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, Brighton & Hove now boasts one of the most significant collections in Britain.

The galleries

The collection comes to life in a series of interactive film galleries at Hove Museum. These galleries take the visitor on a journey from the earliest attempts to create moving images – optical toys, magic lanterns and shadow puppets dating back to the 1700s – to the first flourishing of cinema in the 1920s and 1930s. Cameras and apparatus, developed and used by the pioneers, are on display. These feature Darling's experimental 42mm cine-camera from 1896, a Warwick Bioscope 35mm film projector of 1900 developed by Urban’s Warwick Trading Company, and George Albert Smith's Kinemacolor 35mm cine-camera of 1910.

Many of their groundbreaking films can also be seen in an intimate eight-seater mini cinema, including Esmé Collings’s Train Arriving at Dyke Station (1896) Smith's The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) and Williamson's Stop Thief! (1901).

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