Surprising a Picket

A reconstruction of a Boer War atrocity made by one of early cinema's greats.

Faced with the immense logistical issues of taking the new film technology to far away South Africa, the British pioneers sought ingenious ways round the problem. Here we have a Boer War reconstruction shot by R.W. Paul, one of seven he produced during 1899. Many years later he told the British Kinematograph Society that he had filmed on the golf links next to his Muswell Hill studio supervised by Sir Robert Ashe, a former officer with Cecil Rhodes's forces in the Transvaal.