If you're watching an action movie, there's likely a car chase scene. Today it's an almost essential element of action movies and their derivatives, and to pay tribute to it, we travel to the past to show you the first car chase scene in cinema with Runaway Match (1903).
When we think of the best car chases in cinema, many come to mind: from the classic police chase with Mini Coopers through the streets of Turin in The Italian Job, to a young John Connor escaping the clutches of the T-1000 through the canals of Los Angeles, to the most popcorn and modern ones seen in each installment of The Fast and the Furious. Now, if we think about which was the first film to start this type of scene, we'll surely hear the chirping of several crickets in our minds.
To do that, we need to take a brief trip through time, more precisely to the beginning of the last century. Runaway Match (also known as Marriage by Motor) is a silent film from 1903 directed by Alf Collins, being the first film to feature the first car chase scene in cinema. With a duration of less than five minutes, the story begins with a couple eloping in a car to get married. The bride's father chases them, but his limousine breaks down during the trip.
In creating this chase scene, Collins used for the first time on the big screen a technique called POV (point of view) in motion. Basically, Collins projected a series of images per second, which creates in our brain the illusion of movement in the limousine scene while the couple's car moves away (the camera actually being in motion).
This first-person visual narration allows a more natural approach because it's basically our way of seeing the world. This resource is widely used in horror movies like The Blair Witch Project and REC, but it has also been applied to other genres, as is the case of Hardcore Henry, being the first film shot entirely in POV.
Source: Boing Boing
