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Baby's Toilet (1905)
 

BFI

Main image of Baby's Toilet (1905)
 
35 mm, black & white, silent, 3 mins
 
Production CompanyHepworth Manufacturing Company

The various operations of washing, drying and powdering a baby, followed by weighing, dressing, and finally, feeding from a bottle. The baby is handled throughout by a nurse.

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Baby's Toilet was listed in the Hepworth Manufacturing Company's 1906 catalogue under two headings: 'Comic Films' (under the subheading of 'Babies') and 'Domestic Scenes'. The same year's iconic Hepworth title Rescued by Rover was also categorised as a Domestic Scene. The latter is regularly cited as a landmark in the development of fictional narrative. By contrast, Baby's Toilet borrows the emerging form of industrial non-fiction films, themselves responsible for developing the language of documentary (even if their documentary motivations are highly debatable).

As in, say, Hepworth's own A Day in the Hayfields (1904), separate shots are combined to depict a process, here domestic rather than industrial. A baby - Hepworth's daughter, Elizabeth - is bathed, dried, weighed, dressed, bounced and fed by a nurse. Hepworth's lecture notes of many years later imply that he was influenced by the Lumière Brothers' domestic footage of ten years before. A hundred years on from his own production, and long after Elizabeth Hepworth's own death, the affecting innocence of infancy remains a basic human theme. Baby's Toilet has lost none of its charm.

Patrick Russell

*This film can also be viewed via the BFI's YouTube channel.

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Video Clips
Complete film (3:00)
GALLERY / SCRIPTS / AUDIO
SEE ALSO
Rescued by Rover (1905)
Hepworth, Cecil (1874-1953)