The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film

My main trouble with this film was that most of the gags sound a lot funnier in principle (and, presumably, in the minds of their creators) than they seem to come out in practice: it's only eleven minutes long, but I found my attention-span seriously flagging well before the end.

It is essentially a silent film, featuring a very basic soundtrack and some sound effects; in fact in its style it reminds me of the very early silent comedies (circa 1900) which basically consisted of random slapstick scenes cut together. I saw this in company with Cecil Hepworth's "Saturday Shopping" (1903), and in fact in some ways it's not dissimilar. On the whole it's what you might expect from a film that consisted of fooling about for a couple of Sundays in a field that cost the grand sum of five pounds to hire...

It's a pity, because a lot of the gags, if described, sound very ingenious (man uses woman as camera to photograph husband; clay-pigeon-shooter shoots down discus and engages in duel with the enraged discus-hurler). But somehow the execution seems so random and amateurish that I really didn't find it very funny: and in the absence of laughter, nonsense becomes extremely tedious.