Charles Urban Trailers
Armenia, Cradle of Humanity TrailerThe Four Seasons TrailerThe Battle of the Somme Trailer
Charles Urban is an American producer, director, cinematographer and editor born April 14, 1867 in Cincinnati, Ohio (United States), died August 29, 1942 in Brighton (United Kingdom).
Urban made many types of non-fiction films at the Charles Urban Trading Company, including travel films, war reports, exploration films, sports films, commercials and natural history films. Filmmakers who worked for him include Jack Avery, Joseph Rosenthal, Charles Rider Noble, Harold Mease Lomas, mountaineer Frank Ormiston-Smith, George Rogers, J. Gregory Mantle, and naturalist F. Percy Smith. Smith directed one of Urban's most successful films, The Balancing Bluebottle (1908), which featured a fly balancing objects such as a wine cork with its legs.
In 1906, George Albert Smith and Charles Urban created a new process in England, Kinémacolor, which recreated the impression of (partial) colors in cinema. Marketed at the beginning of 1911, the process was used in some 250 short films.
In Paris, in 1913, Charles Urban built the Théâtre Édouard VII, which was above all a cinema using Kinémacolor. He sold his room to Alphonse Franck the following year.
Urban remained in the United States after the war to re-establish himself as a producer of educational films through his umbrella company, Urban Motion Picture Industries Inc. He produced the Charles cinemagazine series Urban Movie Chats (launched in 1919) and Kineto Review (launched 1921), and made the feature documentaries The Four Seasons (1921) and Evolution (1923). He built a large studio in Irvington, New York, where he planned to introduce a new color film system called Kinekrom, based on the old Kinemacolor, and to distribute educational films on disc using the Spirograph. However, his business interests collapsed in 1924 and he returned to the UK in the late 1920s. He died in Brighton in 1942, aged 75.
Most Popular Charles Urban Trailers
Total trailers found: 33
01 January 1904
View of the Grand Canal in Venice from a boat believed to have been made in either 1901 or 1904 and as part of the series "Through Italy with the Bioscope" by George Albert Smith and Charles Urban.
01 February 1908
Documents one of the most important wrestling matches of the early 20th century between the legendary Estonian strongman Georg Hackenschmidt and the American Joe Rogers.
01 January 1911
British adaptation of Trilby filmed in Kinemacolor. Presumed lost.
11 November 1910
"Percy Smith (1880-1944) was world famous as a photographer of plant life. Probably the first British example of time-lapse photography as applied to the growth of plants.
09 April 1914
An intensely unhappy woman hatches a plot to switch the babies of a poor family and a rich family. But the nurse hired to pull off this transfer refuses to go through with it, leaving each baby with its proper family.
26 March 1900
This picture, taken from Thorneycroft's Yard, shows the two boats about twelve lenghts apart - a state of things owing to terrible weather in which the race was rowed.
02 January 1915
Documentary film about the military preparations of the United Kingdom in World War I. It includes scenes of military training of new recruits in Aldershot Garrison, Hampshire.
31 August 1911
Anarchists build a super aircraft and bomb a railway, a fort and St. Paul's.
01 January 1915
The film uses stop-frame animation to create maps on the screen, and showed the then-current military situation in the Dardanelles, using various maps to assist understanding.
01 January 1903
On september 28th, 1903, the Urban Mountaineering Expedition, headed by Frank Ormiston-Smith, left Zermatt to attempt the conquest of the Matterhorn.
01 January 1923
A film by Charles Urban
01 November 1910
Using a futuristic submarine, pirates kidnap a young couple, torpedo a passenger ship, travel under the sea to salvage bullion, then make their escape by taking to the air.
25 September 1903
A gentleman is here shown partaking of a little lunch of bread and cheese, and occasionally is seen to glance at his morning paper through a reading glass.
21 August 1916
A documentary and propaganda film which shows the British Army's preparations for, and the early stages of, the battle of the Somme.
09 August 1902
King Edward VII's coronation ceremony.
14 November 1911
An early British Kinemacolor short, in which delicate tones and shades of color are beautifully reproduced in examples of highly cultivated sweet pea flowers.
01 January 1909
This film footage of the Ziegler North Pole expedition was reissued in Britain by Charles Urban in 1909 when all things Polar were of almost obsessive interest to the British film-going public.
01 January 1910
A proto-"documentary" film depicting workers of a mine owned by the Wilgan Coal and Iron Company
01 January 1911
With a dual motion a cruise ship and a fishing boat pass one another on the Nile and butlers in turbans set up a wooden gangway.
30 September 1921
A nature documentary depicting the variety of changes undergone by plants and animals as the seasons of the year change.
02 January 1911
Documentary short released in 1911.
01 January 1906
In 1906, the Arlberg Railway, which connects the Austrian cities of Innsbruck and Bludenz, is the only east-west mountain railway in Austria.
09 March 1910
Kinemacolor
18 March 1908
Kinemacolor
14 June 1904
Documentary about a hunting party.
25 April 1904
The 280 different views comprising this series depict sights along a route over the most important thoroughfares of London, not merely showing street scenes with the principle edifices, monuments, bridges, etc.
01 August 1907
This fragment comprises just over half of the original film and features a parade of partially-submerged submarines and destroyers launching torpedoes into netting rigged alongside the Dreadnought.
02 March 1911
Kinemacolor
09 July 1912
Holidaymakers setting out from Glasgow, and travelling by train and steamer down the coast to Rothesay and Ettrick Bay.
02 March 1911
Kinemacolor
02 March 1910
A travelogue of the largest and most eastern of the great lakes of Northern Italy, enclosed by Alpine ridges on both sides, and dividing the Austrian Tyrol from the old Italian provinces of Venetia and Lombardy.
02 March 1911
Kinemacolor
02 February 1912
From With Our King and Queen Through India
