Cheese Mites
About Cheese Mites
A man at lunch looks at his Stilton through a reading glass and finds the cheese moving. The view switches to a microscope: mites swarm across the frame like crabs. He leaves the table.
Cast & crew
More about Cheese Mites
Charles Urban produced it and F. Martin Duncan directed and photographed it, shooting the mites through a microscope. Duncan also plays the diner. It was the sensation of the first public programme of scientific films in Britain, at the Alhambra in Leicester Square in August 1903.
Themes
Background
In 1903, music-hall programmes were still the main way Londoners saw new films. Urban put laboratory footage on that bill.
In film history
Shown at the Alhambra in August 1903, it was the hit of the first public programme of scientific films in Britain.
Making
Duncan was a naturalist who worked with Urban on a series of micro-cinematograph subjects. This one was built as a joke at lunch so the magnification would have a story.
Look
F. Martin Duncan shot the mites through a microscope and also played the man who finds them in his Stilton.
Technique
The mite sequence is micro-cinematography, magnified for a music-hall audience rather than a laboratory.
Preservation
The BFI holds a complete copy, including Duncan's lunch scene. Before that find, only the microscope shot was known to survive.
Notes
- The microscope footage showed a general audience something that had been limited to people who owned microscopes.
- For years only the mite sequence was known. A complete copy, with Duncan in the opening lunch scene, later turned up under another title and went to the BFI.
- The extant picture runs 2 minutes 30 seconds.
- Urban sold the film as part of his Urbanora scientific programmes.
Scenes
- The diner raises his reading glass and the film cuts to mites crawling over the cheese.
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons