Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900)

In early cinema, the first forms of representation of the gaze appeared around 1900: this is the case of the film Grandma's Reading Glass, made in Great Britain by George Albert Smith in September 1900. In this and other similar films, however, the first instances of representation of the gaze did not immediately take on the appearance and functions that a point-of-view shot has today: they were not useful to the story, they did not involve stylistic implications and they had nothing to do with the subjectivity of the characters (which, at the time, was expressed through oneiric or mental images). They did not even represent the exact point of view of the looking character, since they did not refer to the gaze of characters placed in a structured diegetic space. Rather than the gaze of the characters, in early cinema, what we call today point-of-view shot represented instead the gaze of the spectator, of which the characters were the vicars on the screen.