Snapshot world première at FrightFest, 31st August 2026
Joseph Archer’s Snapshot both does and does not present itself as a classic found footage film. Text at the beginning reveals that its reels were donated to the British Film Archives by the will of ‘Mary Tamworth’ in 2026, and appear to have been ‘cut, reordered and manipulated.’ Yet what makes these pseudo-documentary records of murder and ghosts different is their paradoxical placement at the very beginnings of moviemaking. For the putative date of the footage – 1888 – makes these “amongst the earliest know moving images” (with accompanying wax sound cylinders), even if they purport to be coming to light only today. And as this is a sophisticated fiction, the manipulation of these reels is in large part Archer’s.
Now it is true that as early as 1887, Thomas Edison’s research team was already experimenting with microscopic pin-point photographs, placed on a cylindrical shell, to be synchronised with phonograph cylinders, but these early, broadly unsuccessful efforts never went beyond the prototype stage. It was not until 1889 at the earliest – at least one year after Snapshot is set – that pin-point photographs on cylinders started to be replaced with celluloid film strips (the ‘reels’ mentioned, anachronistically, in the text prologue) for the Kinetoscope, and it was not until 1893 that the Kinetophone is first mentioned, devised for recording simultaneous sound on a cylinder phonograph, although the soundtrack was never played back in sync and was soon abandoned. All of which is to say that there is practically no way that Tamworth (voiced by Tom Stourton) could in reality have got his hands on a ‘moving image machine’ (with synchronised sound) in 1888 England, let alone one that was as compact and portable, or that shot footage as clean and stable, as this. The very medium and format of Snapshot are an overt part of its fiction – albeit a fiction that is always skirting historical actualities, via a format that, while not possible, is near possible, and part of the promised manipulation. Like Richard Raaphorst’s World War II-set Frankenstein’s Army (2013), this is proto-found footage – except Archer’s film claims to be shot some half a century earlier than Raaphorst’s, at the dawn of cinema itself.
The timing of 1888 is crucial, for the events of Snapshot unfold in London’s Whitechapel district as the serial killer dubbed Jack the Ripper is carving up women of the night there. Much of Tamworth’s footage resembles – just as anachronistically – a true-crime investigation, with local men, journalists, police and vigilantes appearing on camera as talking heads and speculating, often fancifully, about who the Ripper might be – whether a doctor, or a noble, or a member of the press (who are, after all, in cutthroat competition “for the most thrilling stories”), or just an ‘ordinary’ resident of the Whitechapel demi-monde. Yet Tamworth is particularly focused on Whitechapel’s women, whether on the sex workers themselves, or on the ‘All-Ladies Ghost-Hunting Society’ – suffragettes avant la lettre who half-believe that the Ripper is a dark ghost (of patriarchal evil) rather than a mere man operating on his own, and who are happy for Tamworth to help them capture it on film.
Yet Tamworth mostly has his lens and eye on Minnie Penworth (played by the film’s writer, Cathy Wippell), filming her, and keeping her company, with an obsessiveness that transgresses mere professional interest. Minnie is a young woman from high society who is in love with her former maid turned prostitute Fanny (Hazel Rogers), and who spends most of her time drifting from the Ghost-Hunting Society to Whitechapel’s bars and brothels, all in a bid to flee the suffocating expectations of her well-heeled family and to be with her beloved ‘wife’. An unusual woman who transcends the norms of class and sexuality, Minnie fascinates Tamworth, who himself passes with similar ease through society’s different strata, with his box camera as passport. Between this male gaze and female object, we are glimpsing not only the unequal dynamics of the sexes, but also a cross-section of Victorian society in snapshot (and in contradiction), all filtered through a pinhole camera whose circular frame positions us as peepers at the keyhole, and brings into focus our own errant desires, as viewers and voyeurs (still) hungry for penny-dreadful scandal, whether true or trumped-up.
There are, from early on, strong hints of who the Ripper, hidden in plain sight, really is, and these are only confirmed by what follows. Yet perhaps more important here is the way that we are all implicated in an unravelling spectacle that we are told right from the opening text is a product of manipulation and misinformation. For this is a film where the medium itself (as well as the odd spiritualist) is the message-bearing vessel for an image-fixated future of fluid, fabricated reality that we all now inhabit – and once Snapshot has our eyes and our attention, we are very much a part of its picture.
strap: Ripp(er)ed from the headlines: Joseph Archer’s penny-dreadful ur-found footage documents iniquity and inequality through the keyhole and via the male gaze
© Anton Bitel
