Researching Alfred Machin

Machin started his career as a press photographer for the magazine L'illustration. He was then recruited by the film production company Pathé which sent him in 1907 to Africa where he realised in particular a large number of short films on wild animals.

Machin was sent in 1909 by Pathé to The Netherlands to film scenes of Dutch life. In 1912, he was sent to Belgium where he took part in the creation of Pathé foreign subsidiary Belge Cinéma Film and directed a number of films including Belgium's first feature film Le Diamant noir (:fr) and the anti-war film Maudite soit la guerre.

During World War I, Machin took part in the foundation of the Photographic Service of the French Army while continuing working for Pathé which produced films for this service. He shot some scenes of the French trenches which were used by D.W. Griffith in Hearts of the World He only directed one horror film, The Manor House of Fear in 1927, which is thought to have been theatrically shown in the United States by Universal Pictures.

After the war, Machin created a Film studio in Nice, to which a small zoo was attached where he kept wild animals used in his productions. He died in 1929 as a result of an injury inflicted by a panther during the shooting of a film.

Machin directed 156 films, of which 32 are preserved.

In The Ascent of Man (a title he used long before Jacob Bronowski made his famous television series of the same name), he compares the ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer in particular, with reference to Benjamin Kidd. The book is notable for his theory that the ills of society, and in particular mental illness, are caused by the increasing demands of society on the human organism which is adapted for life in small, unpoliced, communities of equals, rather than the constraining power structures of modern societies which leave man anything but free. This line of thought would later be expressed by Boris Sigis and Wilfred Trotter, and by Sigmund Freud in Civilisation and its Discontents