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Now, we move on nine pretty busy years in terms of developments in the film industry to 1908 and a British Tempest, directed by Percy Stow. Some frames have been lost from the very beginning of the film,

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so we cut in on the action a little more abruptly than would have been the case in the film's early exhibition. Unlike the earlier King John scenes,

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what this Tempest ambitiously attempts to do is to narrate the whole story, and, in fact, also the prehistory of The Tempest in highly compressed form. So here, for example, we see them arriving on the island.

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The flats visible in shot here suggest the scenery usually associated with the stage. But, in fact, this film is not trying to record a previously acclaimed theatrical performance

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for posterity, but was conceived as an autonomous piece of cinema. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] And the cinematic origins of this film

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free it to break out of studio space, sometimes into location shooting, as here. This missing link-ish wild man Caliban is very much of his time, and looks

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pretty similar to the Caliban that Herbert Beerbohm Tree himself had played in a high profile stage production of The Tempest four years earlier. And again, of its time, this Prospero

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is an imperious colonial with right unequivocally on his side. The film doesn't waste time suggesting an initial love between Prospero and Caliban that's later polluted.

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Rather, we get an immediate enforced subjugation. The title cards in this production, sporting their Clarendon Film Company Logo, never quote from the play, but rather make it

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their job to clarify the plot. Here, introducing Ariel, played by a hoppity skippity little girl whose identity is, unfortunately, not known. [DRAMATIC MUSIC]

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Having the part played by a girl was fully in line with casting trends of the previous 50 years, a period which loved balletic, delicate feminine spirits, just as the age more generally fetishized fairies

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in artistic and theatrical representation. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] It's worth noting, perhaps, that we get a rare moment of gentle panning

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there, as the camera momentarily allows itself a little movement. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] The plot now moves on 10 years to Caliban's attempted rape of a fairy tale-esque, Miranda.

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A scene which seems at this point to be warming up within the standard grammar of a melodrama to some sort of sensationalist, titillating crisis, in which a sexual predator forces his attentions

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upon an innocent maiden. But, in fact, he seems more to be doing some clumsy wooing rather than unseemly grappling. And in any case, the arrival of Ariel

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rescues not only Miranda, but also, of course, the film itself for many potential impropriety. Possibly thought tonally inappropriate by Clarendon for the high cultural associations of a Shakespeare

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tale. By a simple process of stop-motion shooting, Ariel has transformed herself into a little monkey in order to exert her authority over an only marginally less simian

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Caliban. There's a sort of medium specific pride in being able to employ bits and pieces of trick photography of this sort, in order

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to give some energetic life to the inherited dramatic material. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] This film oscillates between enjoying its engagements with real scenery on location shoots

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and scuttling back more nervously into theatrical sets and stagey landscapes of this sort, as if torn by contradictory impulses. On the one hand, to assert a distinctness from theatre,

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and on the other, an allegiance to theatre. The Shakespearean subject of this film may have made the pull towards theatrical conventions felt the more keenly, as if the film feels the need

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to authenticate itself as a Shakespearean product, by flagging a connection with a theatrical heritage. Prospero's tempest raising, conjuring act here, for example, is thoroughly aligned to the stuff

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of the stage, complete with doves produced, as it were, out of a hat, as if reluctant to remove the nature of the allusions too far from those of the stage.

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[DRAMATIC MUSIC] But then the film explodes out of this self-limiting set of conventions straight into its most cinematically flamboyant sequence, which includes scratches

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on the print to suggest lightning and layered effects of superimposition created by rewinding the film in the camera and reshooting over the same strip of film.

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And the camera position here places us, as it were, inside Prospero's cell, which interestingly creates a sort of mini proscenium arch through which Prospero and Miranda, like playgoers

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themselves, can watch the unfolding action of the ship sinking. And now, the magically saved Ferdinand emerges from a real sea.

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Another natural landscape to add to the visual glories for which the film could be commended. By simple stop-motion shooting. His clothes are found to be miraculously dry.

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And he goes off to discover his fate in this most apparently benign of rural English landscapes. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] What's entirely missing from this compressed

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and decorative romp through the action of the play is any hint of the comic subplot involving Stephano and Trinculo. Alonso and his crowd will make a late, brief appearance in due course.

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But Stephano and Trinculo, it seems, did not make the cut in order to shoehorn the action into a one reel format. [DRAMATIC MUSIC]

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Here, Ariel reports back on having flamed amazement aboard the ship and is sent off to have some fun with Ferdinand. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] Coming up now is a lively sequence,

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which plays with perspectives in ways that are genuinely illuminating and uses stop-motion shooting much more purposefully than has been the case thus far in the film.

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As Ariel appears and disappears tantalisingly in different parts of the field, Stow ensures that the audience is able to appreciate Ferdinand's bemusement by implicitly aligning our perspective with Ferdinand's.

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So Ariel is alternately present and not present on the screen exactly, as she clearly is and is not for Ferdinand. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] In the next shot, however, Miranda's

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forthcoming perspective on Ferdinand is anticipated in the way in which we now see the field. For Miranda, Ariel is consistently invisible. And so Stow's canny adjustment of perspective

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becomes a sympathetic joke at Ferdinand's expense. With Ariel invisible, his lunging actions now seem utterly inexplicable, and even idiotic. Miranda's willing collapse into his arms

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at the first opportunity, therefore, seems the more magical, the more mysterious, and the more entertaining, bearing in mind, how foolish he had seemed at first sight.

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Prospero's standard pantomimic gesture gives us the, it goes on, I see as my soul prompts it moment. And then he feigns anger at the intruder to his island kingdom. Prospero's patriarchal rule over Miranda, as over Caliban,

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is unequivocal, and in this production, unconflicted. And this is symptomatic of the period more generally, before a post-colonial angst had started to inflect readings of the play, and of Prospero,

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in particular. This title card doesn't just announce what is going to happen in the ensuing scene, but also, more unusually, the motivation for it

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to humble Prince Ferdinand. Shakespeare's Tempest allows for a more complex set of possibilities about why Ferdinand is set to log shifting.

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Prospero says, it's less to light winning make the prize light, but the play dangles other possibilities in front of us, too. Maybe it's to align Ferdinand with Caliban

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in dramatic function, or to establish Prospero as a conventional fairy tale father-in-law, testing the strength of the potential son-in-law, or to make Ferdinand engage with the fabric of the island

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before returning to the more sophisticated Naples. Or does Prospero feel displaced by Ferdinand, and so simply want to punish him under the guise of testing his resolve for being the pretender to his daughter's

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affections? The apparent objectivity of the film's preemptive pronouncement about motivation to humble Prince Ferdinand effectively renders all such speculations redundant.

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And that, of course, is always the danger about intertitles that they might do more than simply clarify the plot. but in the process, closed down interpretive [DRAMATIC MUSIC]

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When Prospero now breaks in on their canoodling, a repeat pantomimic gesture this time gives us the fair encounter of two most rare affections moment. And Ferdinand seems willing to accept his change in fortunes

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immediately. Whereas Miranda, with a fraction more subtlety, allows herself a momentary puzzled look to camera at her father's apparent sudden change of heart.

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Meanwhile, the shipwrecked courtiers are finally introduced, although puzzlingly announced by the intertitle as Antonio's party. This film clearly tells a story.

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But I would think it's a story that would be pretty baffling to anyone unfamiliar with the Shakespeare play. So the courtiers awaken to an Ariel,

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who magically lays on a tempting picnic for them, as a charmingly innocent nod to the tonally more complex banquet of the play. There is, of course, no trace of a harpy of accusation

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to disrupt the rural English prettiness that helps to sell this attractively sunlit film. And when Ariel makes the picnic disappear, it comes across more as a piece of conjuring pzazz

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than as anything unduly tormenting for its audience. The film is sold on its cultural kudos, on its edifying and educational value as a Shakespeare tale, and as a pleasing confection for the eye.

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Anything that might cloud or complicate that vision is kept decisively out of the frame. Here, we get a whole series of reunions between characters whom we might well not have known were related to each other,

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if we didn't know the Shakespeare play. The frame organisation is rather cluttered, and the choreography of character movement a bit confused.

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So the potential impact of Ariel's release far right of the frame is lost rather. It's a scene which seems to be crying out for a change of shot and an adjusted camera placement

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to exclude some of the other distracting busyness that takes away from Ariel's release. Other films of a similar date were able to be more nimble in experimenting with varied focal lengths than this one is

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willing to be, but the retained theatrical style, breadth of attention, and also the theatrical style of the blocking of the character's movements, once again roots this film in relationship to a medium,

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theatre, whose associations it partly wishes to court. In this final scene, in which the characters board their boat bound for Naples, the character worth watching is Caliban. In the surviving print, the scene

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ends a fraction prematurely, but it is possible to see that it's a pale and somewhat rushed imitation of Tree's Final Tableau from his 1904 stage production.

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In that production, a pathos laden Caliban had been left on his lonely rock to mourn the loss of the Europeans, and had held up his hands in mute despair at the sight of the departing ship.

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Stow's Caliban also pleads to be taken too, and is also unsympathetically cast aside by Prospero. The regret at losing the courtiers from his island world remembers the Tree production, both

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in the specific choreography of its action and in the imperialist value system implied by such action.