Biography

Alfred Collins (Walworth, 19 June 1866 – 20 December 1951 Clapham) was a British theatre actor who later became a silent film director and actor. His shorts include Rescued by Lifeboat (1906), The Lady Athlete; or, Jiu-Jitsu Downs the Footpads (1907), and The Dancing Girl (1908). Early films were produced with nitrate film and deteriorated in their storage tins, sometimes catching fire, so most of them are lost.

There survives approximately 45 films that have been found so far that Collins either acted in or produced, including fourteen rare Edwardian films screened in 2014 at an event called Gaumont Comes Home. This event was held on the original site of Collins's outdoor stage, of the Gaumont film studios, in Camberwell. The event included the film When Extremes Meet (1905), which is 150 feet long, with Collins dressed in Cockney costume. How Percy Won the Beauty Competition (1909) is a comic chase film set in the fields and nearby streets of his outdoor stage.

Between 1904 and 1908, Gaumont also produced a number of sound-disc films known as "Chronophones". One of these – It Was A Nice Quiet Morning (1907) – has survived and has now been synchronised with an original recording provided by local film collector Bob Geoghegan. This appears to be the only surviving British talking film made prior to World War I.

Early films were either copied or the ideas used by showmen or other film companies, so copyright was introduced. Some of these films only exist today because they were copyrighted between 1895 to1912 with the Library of Congress in Washington USA or with National Archives in Kew UK. The National Archives used a single photograph of a scene from the film to copyright and the Library of Congress the whole film was copied onto photographic paper to copyright and these are known as Paper Prints. In 1952 they started to convert back these Paper Prints to 16 mm film. Several of Collin's films were Paper Prints and restored, for example, The Pickpocket (1903) 300 feet long and The Costers Wedding (1904) 250 feet long.