Explosion of a Motor Car is a film directed by and starring    • Cecil Hepworth   in 1900. The director plays the role of a policeman.

Synopsis . (00:06) Two pedestrians are crossing the street, when we see a car approaching in the distance. (00:24) The passengers wave, but it is only a moment: the car explodes into a thousand pieces (00:28). A policeman (Cecil Hepworth) approaches the wreckage of the vehicle then something draws his gaze upwards. He pulls out a spyglass and starts scanning the sky (00:37), immediately ducking to avoid being hit by the shower of wreckage and passenger pieces falling to the ground.

In this grotesque comedy, Hepworth uses the trick by substitution devised by Méliès, placing it in a realistic rather than fantastic context. Hepworth directed several films
in what we now call the catastrophic genre, always using the stop-motion trick to make his explosions and to replace actors with dummies; as in this film and in    • How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900) Ce...   , films that have in common the fact that they are about car disasters, while the same black humour can be found in the comedy A Fatal Sneeze directed by Lewin Fitzhamon, but produced by Hepworth.

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