Limelight Department
Encyclopedia
The Limelight Department was one of the world's first film studios, beginning in 1898, operated by The Salvation Army
The Salvation Army
The Salvation Army is a Protestant Christian church known for its thrift stores and charity work. It is an international movement that currently works in over a hundred countries....

 in Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...

, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

. The Limelight Department produced evangelistic material for use by the Salvation Army, including lantern slides as early as 1891, as well as private and government contracts. In its 19 years of operation, the Limelight Department produced about 300 films of various lengths, making it one of largest film producers of its time.

Beginnings

The Salvation Army Limelight Department unofficially started in 1891, when Adjutant Joseph Perry started a photographic studio in Ballarat, Victoria
Victoria (Australia)
Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....

, to supplement the income of the Salvation Army's Prison Gate Home. At the time, Perry was on compassionate leave from active ministry, as his wife Annie had died earlier that year, leaving Perry to raise their three children. In September 1891, Perry was temporarily reassigned to the Australasian Headquarters in Melbourne to assist Australasian commander, Commissioner Thomas Coombs, in putting together a presentation of General William Booth
William Booth
William Booth was a British Methodist preacher who founded The Salvation Army and became its first General...

's In Darkest England program. At this stage, Perry was using lantern slides
Magic lantern
The magic lantern or Laterna Magica is an early type of image projector developed in the 17th century.-Operation:The magic lantern has a concave mirror in front of a light source that gathers light and projects it through a slide with an image scanned onto it. The light rays cross an aperture , and...

 which projected hand coloured photographs onto a large screen. Coombs was impressed by the quality and effectiveness of presentation, making Perry's move to Melbourne permanent. The Limelight Department was officially established on 11 June 1892.
In 1896, when Commissioner Coombs was replaced as Australasian commander by General Booth’s youngest son, 'Commandant Herbert Booth
Herbert Booth
Herbert Henry Howard Booth was the third son of William and Catherine Booth. He oversaw the Limelight Department's development and he was the writer and director for Soldiers of the Cross....

. Booth immediately warmed to the innovation of the Limelight Department, giving Perry the freedom and the financial support to expand into the newly developing medium of film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

. Under Booth’s direction, Perry started work on Social Salvation in 1898, one of the first presentations of its type to integrate the traditional lantern slides with film segments. On 20 December 1899, the Limelight Department premiered a series on the Passion at the Collingwood
Collingwood, Victoria
Collingwood is an inner city suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 3 km north-east from Melbourne's central business district. Its Local Government Area is the City of Yarra...

 corps. The presentation contained thirteen, ninety second sections which portrayed the life of Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...

 from birth to death. The presentation was similar in style to that produced by the Lumiere Company earlier that year, however, as none of the original film remains, it can never be determined if the Limelight Department used Lumiere footage in the presentation.

Soldiers of the Cross

The major innovation of the Limelight Department would come in 1899 when Booth and Perry began work on Soldiers of the Cross, arguably the first feature length film ever produced (please see the last section for discussion on this point). The presentation contained fifteen, ninety second sections and two hundred lantern slides and ran for nearly two and a half hours. While some Lumiere footage was used in the opening passion sequence of the film, the majority of the footage was filmed in Melbourne, either in the attic of 69 Bourke Street, on the tennis court of the Murrumbeena Girls Home and in the pool at Richmond
Richmond, Victoria
Richmond is a suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 3 km south-east from Melbourne's central business district. Its Local Government Area is the City of Yarra...

 Baths. The presentation itself focused of the lives and deaths of early Christian martyrs and cost £550 to produce. The scenes were considered extremely violent for their time, including such images as the stoning of Stephen
Saint Stephen
Saint Stephen The Protomartyr , the protomartyr of Christianity, is venerated as a saint in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox Churches....

, the burning of Polycarp
Polycarp
Saint Polycarp was a 2nd century Christian bishop of Smyrna. According to the Martyrdom of Polycarp, he died a martyr, bound and burned at the stake, then stabbed when the fire failed to touch him...

 and unnamed Christians being tortured, beheaded, killed by gladiators, drowned and burned alive. The presentation included a cast of 150 Salvation Army officers who were stationed in Melbourne at the time. The many death scenes took their toll, with the cast suffering various injuries, including scorched hair and eyebrows from some of the fires used. The presentation premiered on 13 September 1901, at the Melbourne town hall to a crowd somewhere between three and four thousand. One reviewer spoke of how the death scenes caused several women to faint in the aisles.

The Federation of Australia

Soldiers of the Cross fortified the Limelight Department as a major player in the early film industry. However, Soldiers of the Cross would be dwarfed when the Limelight Department was commissioned to film the Federation of Australia
Federation of Australia
The Federation of Australia was the process by which the six separate British self-governing colonies of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia formed one nation...

. It was the hope of the New South Wales government that the film would prove an imperishable record of the event, though very little of the footage still exists. Perry set up five cameras at various point of the procession route and had to use a fire carriage to move quickly from one camera to the next.

The height of operation

In order that Soldiers of the Cross could be seen by a wide audience, the Limelight Department created groups known as Biorama Companies. Teams of musicians, lecturers and projectionists would travel throughout Australia presenting the material that the Limelight Department had produced. Screenings were generally held in local halls, but it was not unheard of for the Biorama Companies to use the sides of buildings as screens so that passersby could see it. When Herbert left the Salvation Army (taking the original Soldiers of the Cross material with him), he was replaced by Commissioner Thomas McKie. McKie encouraged the expansion of the Limelight Department, the creation of additional Biorama Companies and even the reshooting of Soldiers of the Cross in 1909, titled Heroes of the Cross. In addition to the evangelical material produced for the Biorama Companies, the Limelight produced many films for private clients and the government. Some of the most notable of these were films showing the royal visit of the Duke
Duke
A duke or duchess is a member of the nobility, historically of highest rank below the monarch, and historically controlling a duchy...

 and Duchess of York
York
York is a walled city, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss in North Yorkshire, England. The city has a rich heritage and has provided the backdrop to major political events throughout much of its two millennia of existence...

 for the opening of the first sitting of the Parliament of Australia
Parliament of Australia
The Parliament of Australia, also known as the Commonwealth Parliament or Federal Parliament, is the legislative branch of the government of Australia. It is bicameral, largely modelled in the Westminster tradition, but with some influences from the United States Congress...

 (the session itself could not be filmed due to poor lighting), the visit of America's Great White Fleet
Great White Fleet
The Great White Fleet was the popular nickname for the United States Navy battle fleet that completed a circumnavigation of the globe from 16 December 1907 to 22 February 1909 by order of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. It consisted of 16 battleships divided into two squadrons, along with...

 and the Victoria's Second Boer War
Second Boer War
The Second Boer War was fought from 11 October 1899 until 31 May 1902 between the British Empire and the Afrikaans-speaking Dutch settlers of two independent Boer republics, the South African Republic and the Orange Free State...

 Contingent leaving South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

. Engaging in such private contracts was a way in which the Limelight Department raised capital to support its operation and the operation of other Salvation Army programs.

The end of the Limelight Department

In 1910, McKie was replaced as the Australasian commander by a more conservative Commissioner named James Hay. Hay felt that cinema was not something that the church should be involved in and he shut down the Limelight Department at the height of its operation. In his autobiography Aggressive Salvationism, Hay wrote ’the cinema, as conducted by The Salvation Army, had led to weakness and a lightness incompatible with true Salvationism and was completely ended by me.’

Is Soldiers of the Cross the world's first feature film?

For many years, a question mark has hung over the question of whether Soldiers of the Cross should be counted as the first feature film ever produced. The issues of concern are basically length of the footage, length of the presentation and the continuity of the storyline.

A feature film is generally defined as running for over sixty minutes with a constant storyline running throughout. Placed end to end, the film footage in Soldiers of the Cross equals twenty-two and a half minutes, falling short of the time requirements. Furthermore, the film did not have one long story, but rather a collection of short stories which also seems to disqualify it from contention. However, it has been argued that as the entire presentation, including films strips, lantern slides and live sections, runs for over two hours, Soldiers of the Cross should be considered a feature film.

In 1902, the year after Soldiers of the Cross was made, the Limelight Department produced Under Southern Skies, a film examining life in Australia from European Settlement to Federation. This film ran about one hundred minutes but as it is a documentary, not a dramatised story, it is not considered to be a feature film. Heroes of the Cross ran for about 75 minutes and contained a more defined story thread than its predecessor; however, it was produced in 1909, three years after The Story of the Kelly Gang
The Story of the Kelly Gang
The Story of the Kelly Gang is a 1906 Australian film that traces the life of the legendary bushranger Ned Kelly . It was written and directed by Charles Tait. The film ran for more than an hour, and was the longest narrative film yet seen in Australia, and the world. Its approximate reel length...

(1906) which is considered by most people to be the actual first feature film, including the Australian Film Commission
Australian Film Commission
The Australian Film Commission was an Australian government agency with a mandate to promote the creation and distribution of films in Australia as well as to preserve the country's film history. It also had a production arm responsible for production and commissioning of films for government...

.

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