Watch An Interesting Story

Annoyed by the modern phenomenon of pedestrians staring at their cellphones, oblivious to everything around them? Well, that's nothing new. In the thoroughly analog world of the previous century, there was a close equivalent (according to this comic short). Our protagonist is a fussy mustachioed fellow so engrossed in the book he's reading that he absent-mindedly makes a mess everywhere he goes, from the breakfast table to grotesquely funny collision with a steamroller. Scotsman James Williamson was the owner of a photography shop that turned to developing film, eventually prompting him to move into production himself. He was one of the U.K.'s most prolific filmmakers from the medium's earliest days until the dawn of the 1910s. - Dennis Harvey