X Rays

I've got you under my skin... early 'trick' film having fun with the new science of x-ray photography

Love is more than skin deep: a courting couple get intimate in front of an X-ray camera in this comic skit by the Hove-based film pioneer George Albert Smith. Smith uses a neat pair of jump cuts to show the couple before and after the radiography does its trick. Two members of the filmmaker's informal repertory company, Tom Green and Laura Bayley (aka Mrs GA Smith), play the lovers - and their skeletons!

The worldwide fascination with the new science of X-ray photography was at its peak by the time this film was released - probably almost exactly two years after the discovery of X-rays in November 1895 by German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen.