Charles Urban Trading Company

A clerk, unable to stop playing the game of Diabolo, strays in and out of precarious situations while playing with the toy.

It might not take you long to cotton on to the trick of this film, but the results are still impressive. Though the various strings, wools and embroideries if this film are certainly animated in one sense, it is not through stop-motion animation. The time-consuming process of manipulating threads frame-by-frame is avoided by simply using reverse film techniques.

Animated film featuring the hand of Walter R. Booth drawing a coster and his donah who come to life and dance. The hand then crumples up the paper and dispenses it in the form of confetti. (BFI)

A statue of Hope revives and finds a home for a waif.

A cheeky female jester uses the smoke of her cigarette to make things appear and disappear. After showing her talents by playing with a chair or a dog, she lets clowns appear; one female, and two male. The male clowns fight each other over the girl who gets changed over and over again by the jester.

Punished for mistreating the family pets, a young boy uses his chemistry set to wreak revenge on his parents.

An inventor uses a wireless controlled flying torpedo to destroy enemy airships.

The devil hijacks a train trip in France. Made by magician turned filmmaker Walter Booth, who established the Charles Urban Trading Company to make films in his own London garden.

A magician's son plays tricks with his father's magic wand.

An actuality of the Brock's fireworks factory to celebrate its 40th anniversary organizes. The final shot has two flaming portraits of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, originally presented by Brock's at the coronation in 1902. The film is a cornucopia of colors, as it was originally a hand-painted film. The 2011 restoration has tried to revive the brilliance and the impact of colors through digital reproduction. The original film archival print is at the National Cinema Museum.

A 1905 film by the Charles Urban Trading Company.

On september 28th, 1903, the Urban Mountaineering Expedition, headed by Frank Ormiston-Smith, left Zermatt to attempt the conquest of the Matterhorn. On the 29th, the conquest was completed by the filming of the panorama from the actual summit of the mountain. The film consists of 20 scenes and illustrates the whole ascent from Zermatt through the Hornli Ridge. A copy of the film was found in Zermatt in 1953 and was was erroneously attributed to Frederick Burlingham and dated 1901. Since then, the film has been widely publicized as the first mountain film under the title of 'Cervino 1901', but this is incorrect.

In 1906, the Arlberg Railway, which connects the Austrian cities of Innsbruck and Bludenz, is the only east-west mountain railway in Austria. This 340-second "ghost railroad ride" shows the view from the back of a train, though I'm not sure if it's heading east or west. This kind of film, in vogue at the time, is an intermediate form of short reality, which often showed a train engaging in a bend, and a feature documentary. Its editing is live, linear and temporal, and the cuts are very apparent. Indeed, the choices of where to place the cuts seem to have avoided the less populated stretches. There are plenty of buildings to see, even when the train is not at the station.

With a dual motion a cruise ship and a fishing boat pass one another on the Nile and butlers in turbans set up a wooden gangway. Thanks to a rope and pulley system cows climb skywards then disappear into the hold of the sailing vessel. On the bank, black-haired women rock back and forth, bursting out laughing and showing the first signs of going into a state of trance. Never-before filmed gestures and faces of the people of the Nile succeed one another, uprooted to an unknown, magical world. The Banks of the Nile is one of the first experiments of film in colour that uses the Kinemacolor process.

Newsreel footage of an execution by beheading of Li-Tang, the Chinches chief of a band of Manchurian bandits. Shot during the Russo Japanese war by the Charles Urban Trading Company. Charles Urban was formerly a partner with the Warwick Trading company who shot many newsreels of the day.

A gentleman is here shown partaking of a little lunch of bread and cheese, and occasionally is seen to glance at his morning paper through a reading glass. He suddenly notices that the cheese is a little out of the ordinary, and examines it with his glass. To his horror, he finds it to be alive with mites, and, in disgust, leaves the table. Hundreds of mites resembling crabs are seen scurrying in all directions. A wonderful picture and a subject hitherto unthought of in animated photography. Notable for being the first science film made for the general public.

The 280 different views comprising this series depict sights along a route over the most important thoroughfares of London, not merely showing street scenes with the principle edifices, monuments, bridges, etc., but include “snapshots” of the various human types and their different occupations and pleasures to be found in all the districts touched upon in our “Bioscopic Ramble,” from fashionable West End London to the slums of Whitechapel etc.

A short documentary about China in the early 20th Century.

British documentary short released in 1905.

Documentary about building a engine.