An Exciting Pillow Fight | 1900 | Documentary, Short

Title: An Exciting Pillow Fight | 1900 | Documentary, Short Runtime: 1 minute. Format: Silent, black-and-white. Country: United Kingdom. Language: Silent. Genres: Documentary, Short. --- Chapters: 00:00:00 Boarding scene 00:00:15 Contest begins 00:00:30 Mid-fight scuffle 00:00:45 Winner declared --- Summary: A brief actuality showing sailors aboard ship engaged in a playful pillow-fight contest, likely staged as shipboard amusement. The camera records the bout in a single shot as onlookers crowd around to watch the friendly competition. The film exemplifies turn-of-the-century British “actuality” subjects that captured everyday diversions and public amusements, offering a light comic vignette rather than a narrative story. --- Background: The title survives in curated collections of early British cinema and appears on the BFI release R. W. Paul: The Collected Films 1895–1908, which gathers short actuality and trick films from the pioneer’s circle. Its inclusion situates the piece within the milieu of Robert W. Paul’s production era, when compact single-shot views of topical scenes and amusements were standard. --- Trivia: This film is included on the BFI DVD R. W. Paul: The Collected Films 1895–1908. Surviving timings reported for the piece are under one minute, consistent with many 1900 actuality subjects. Pillow-fight scenes were a popular early-cinema motif; comparable shorts include Edison’s Pillow Fight and Lubin’s New Pillow Fight . Paul’s contemporaneous output featured other shipboard or military-adjacent views, and titles from 1900 such as Tetherball, or Do-Do and Army Life: Mounted Infantry appear alongside this film in the same BFI compilation. --- Public Domain / Rights: Copyright Status: Public Domain. Renewal: No. --- Hashtags: AnExcitingPillowFight PublicDomain SilentFilm BritishCinema 1900 ShortFilm This video was sourced from Internet Archive. Originally uploaded by Robert W Paul. https://archive.org/details/silent-an-exciting-pillow-fight