*. I believe this is the oldest surviving film adaptation of King Lear that we have, and it gives a pretty good idea of what early filmmakers were up against. Lear is a messy play in terms of its action and characters. and in ten minutes it’s kind of hard to make a version that’s comprehensible. As it’s presented here, I don’t think anyone unfamiliar with the play would have the faintest idea what was going on, even with the aid of the title cards.
*. So best to stick with the big moments, which come down to three: the opening scene where the three daughters are called upon to profess their love, then Lear on the heath, and finally Lear dying over Cordelia. Also the image of Kent in the stocks is usually thrown in for visual effect, though in most cases he’s in and out of them in a trice.
*. The first and the last of the big scenes are handled in an adequate if perfunctory way. But the storm on the heath is actually pretty impressive, with lightning being produced by scratching the film itself. No, it’s obviously not a man out in a storm, but compared to how the scene was played in the 1910 Italian version it’s a tempest.
*. What this film in particular is often called out for is trying to do too much. The 1910 film that I mentioned did a radical pruning but here they seemed to want to get everything in. This results in chaos, with the action of Edgar turning into Poor Tom and then coming back to kill Edmund all rushed through at rapid speed. You even get to see Edgar hiding in the hollow tree, which is something he only describes having done in the play. In other words, there’s actually stuff here that you wouldn’t likely see in any stage production.
*. The costumes, sets and backdrops are nice. I like the hollow tree. I also like the cliffs of Dover and Stonehenge showing up. Poor Tom makes a wreath of hay in the hovel that looks a bit like a crown of thorns. And you can’t deny it’s lively enough throughout. Appreciation can’t go much beyond this, however, and any deep analysis is impossible.

*. You’d think that when trying to do Shakespeare in one reel (10-12 minutes) you’d have to spend a lot of time figuring out which scenes you were going to keep, because you’d know that most of the play would have to be cut.
*. This makes it all the more interesting that one of the big scenes in this film isn’t strictly in the play at all: Caesar’s rejection of the crown offered him by Antony, which is a part of the play that is only relayed to us indirectly by Casca. But for a movie it makes sense, as it gives us Caesar’s one big scene in front of a crowd.
*. After that we get the greatest hits. The assassination of Caesar. Antony giving his rousing speech over Caesar’s corpse. Brutus being visited by Caesar’s ghost at Philippi.

*. The violence doesn’t hold up that well. I think the way the murder of Caesar and the suicides of Brutus and Cassius are done would work on stage but they don’t translate as well to the screen. Though brief, they’re oversold and unconvincing, with swords seeming to pass straight through bodies. In fact, in each case they’re just doing the old (and never very persuasive) trick of “stabbing” the sword into the side of the body turned away from the audience/camera. I doubt that fooled anybody even in 1908.
*. It’s interesting how they maintain the horizontal levels established at Rome when the action moves to Philippi, with the scenes taking place half in a lower foreground and half on a raised berm in the background. Without the ability to move the camera this layering effect was one of the easiest ways to pack more movement and depth into the frame.
*. I’m fond of a lot of these early, silent Shakespeare shorts, but while this one looks really good (and it’s a well-preserved print) there was nothing about it that stood out as special. It’s a play that lends itself to this kind of production because it has a lot of large, political gestures. Beyond that, however, there’s not much going on.

*. The story of Bluebeard is an ancient folktale whose best known modern telling comes from the French author Charles Perrault at the end of the seventeenth century. I think Perrault’s version is the basis for this short film by Georges Méliès, but the film diverges from it in several key respects. I don’t think these make that big a difference though, as what we’re dealing with is a symbolic myth.
*. In the story’s most basic form Bluebeard is a monster, but the young bride is complicit in her near destruction. She doesn’t respect boundaries, and the bloody key even casts this in terms of a sexual transgression. In this film her curiosity is given a physical representation, taking the typical Mélièsian form of a gymnastic imp who creates puffs of smoke as he tumbles about. It’s interesting that he appears to come out of the pages of a giant book even if I don’t know exactly what that might mean.
*. A visual assist like the imp is the sort of thing that helps the viewer follow the story. As is the giant key. The hanging brides, however, are so visually striking that I found on a first viewing that I totally missed the chopping block and axe in the foreground of that shot, which is necesssary because it provides the pool of blood that stains the key.
*. If you don’t know these parts of the story beforehand I think it’s easy to get lost. Even knowing it you may be confused by the appearance of the angel, who somewhat takes over from the bride’s sister but also has the power to raise the dead brides at the end so that they can view the transfixed Bluebeard and be married off to seven lords.
*. I wonder if the notary slipping in the marriage contract scene was intentional. I don’t think it was because it doesn’t seem to be set up at all and there’s no real point to it. I think it was an accident that Méliès liked and decided to leave in.
*. That’s Méliès himself playing Bluebeard, and his real-life wife Jehanne D’Alcy playing his new bride. They must have had fun with that.
*. Well, it’s interesting, especially for the way it reinterprets part of the story and how it finds different ways to make key elements more visual. It also has one show-stopping moment with the reveal of the hanging brides, nicely done with the light coming up only after initially entering the locked room in darkness. That’s one of the great early moments in horror cinema, and we’re talking very early here. Bluebeard being pinned at the end is also a terrific finish. For a quick one-reeler that’s over a hundred years old I’d say that’s pretty good.

*. An idyllic picnic in the woods turns into an episode of Fear Factor as directed by Lucio Fulci. Bugs come spilling out of the sausage, eggs hatch into mice, and the cake is filled with worms. Then, when a storm chases the group to an inn, things start to get really weird.
*. This, however, is seeing the movie in hindsight. At the time the model for upsetting such a bourgeois picnic was Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a painting that shocked contemporaries. I think this is the tradition director Segundo de Chomón is working in, inspired by the revolution in painting that led up to surrealism, which was in turn a movement that had a natural affinity for film.
*. It’s said Segundo de Chomón should be better known, and this is true, as his work stacks up well alongside that of his peers. He’s quite inventive, and while most of his films are mere trickery you could say the same for Méliès et al. What’s more, I think there’s a point behind all the tricks, in that they’re used to evoke that world of dreams and nightmares that surrealism took as its native ground.
*. What I find interesting is the connection to later developments in the horror genre that I began by referencing. While the surrealists understood that the sleep of reason could bring forth monsters, we don’t often think of surrealism as horror. A razor blade cutting through an eyeball is shocking gore, even by today’s standards, but Un Chien Andalou isn’t a movie that fits into any subsequent horror conventions.
*. Panicky Picnic (or, more midly, Une Excursion Incohérente) presents itself as a lark, but we can clearly see the outlines of where horror movies would be going. The picnic brings to mind all kinds of rotten feasts. The inn might be our cabin in the woods. The spirits raised in the kitchen recall the labs of various shady wizards, going all the way back to the original film Frankenstein rising from an alchemist’s vat. The shadow play in the bedroom might lead us to think of Suspiria, to take just one later example.
*. That none of it is “real” is where the surrealism comes in. The main animation sequence plays out on a blanket that forms a screen between a sleeping couple. Is this the sleep of reason? And then the whole thing winds up falling into a well, that longstanding symbol of the unconscious. Perhaps there was something in that bad food they brought to the picnic that gave rise to these hallucinations. But I prefer to think that if you go down in these woods today you’re sure of a big surprise.

*. “Rarebit” isn’t a word. It’s a corruption of “rabbit” that is used, and only used, to describe a dish of melted cheese on toast called Welsh rarebit, which has no rabbit in it. I’ve never had it. It looks disgusting. But then I think fondue is disgusting too. And I like cheese!
*. That said, it’s the Fiend who makes it look disgusting here, cramming enough of it in his mouth to make himself sick. I suspect his delirium, however, is brought about by the bottles he’s kicking back. It’s a remarkable display of excess, complete with pasty eruptions.
*. The source material was a serial comic strip written by Winsor McKay (“Silas”) featuring various dreams and fantasies. The comics were adult in nature, and even quite dark at times, complementing the childhood adventures of Little Nemo (another McKay creation from the same period).
*. It’s probably best remembered today for the scene of the Fiend riding his bed over the city. That’s too bad, as I think this is the weakest effect in the film. My favourite part has the Fiend holding on to a lamppost as it swings like a pendulum while superimposed over a street that seems to be shot from the deck of a boat in rough seas. I can only imagine what contemporary audiences thought of this, as the movement alone is enough to make me feel queasy. I guess they must have liked it though, as Edison sold a lot of copies.
*. I’ve seen several different prints of this one, running from just over five minutes to just over seven (the latter, however, in a print where the film speed seemed to be wrong). In some versions there’s definitely been material cut from the opening dining scene.
*. We may feel a familiar tug watching it today, when comic book movies are our dominant narrative form and effects rule. This movie is a bit different, trying to slip a moral in about the consequences of overindulgence, but at the end of the day it’s just a magic carpet ride. In terms of the story’s structure it resembles A Trip to the Moon, with a fantastic voyage and then a crashing back to Earth. That was a familiar trope in early cinema. Some of the effects, however, have held up really well, like the model shot of the spinning bed or the lamppost sequence I mentioned, and Porter really was one of the most accomplished storytellers of his day.

*. Well of course it’s hard to follow. It depicts the same historical events as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin in just under four minutes. As I noted in my commentary on another Ferdinant Zecca film done for Pathé Frères, Histoire d’un crime, there are real difficulties in compressing a complex narrative into such a format.
*. Given this massive abbreviation I think it’s easy to mistake what is going on. The officer who takes over the ship, for example, isn’t reasserting imperial authority but joining the mutiny. And that’s not the Potemkin lobbing shells into Odessa in the final part of the movie but a warship loyal to the tsar (hence the destruction of the working-class home). These actions are not very clear (and the absence of any title cards doesn’t help).
*. In outline there are four major passages. A brief establishing shot nicely introduces the ship, and sets up the studio-sets that will follow. The mutiny takes place on deck, and but for some rather sad looking dummies flying through the air it’s easy to follow, especially if you know Eisenstein’s film. Then there is the display of the dead mutineer, which works well within the confines of what movies had to work with at the time, being a theatrical tableau.
*. The final section is the most memorable and is actually quite well done. We stand behind a naval officer who in turn stands behind a cannon that fires on the painted city, its shells sending forth eruptions of stage smoke. This master shot alternates with two scenes of violence in the city as seen through a telescope. We see the officer using the telescope, so these shots are nicely integrated with the rest of the passage, even if they are presented on the same plane as the rest of the action.
*. Finally, the sudden cut at the end makes me think they might have just run out of film.
*. The main point of interest, at least for me, is this last part. The man with the telescope, and the way we join with his point of view by looking through its spyhole at the victims of the bombardment, prefigures what’s been called the pornography of war. He exults in the carnage while remaining detached from it, safe offshore. It’s a precursor to the way we watch bombsight explosions from laser-guided missiles on television today.
*. It’s not really comparable to Battleship Potemkin, and not just because Eisenstein’s film is a work of genius made twenty years later with much greater resources behind it. Potemkin was also a movie with a passionately held idea behind it, one that informed the film at every level. Whatever its technical accomplishments, which are not negligible, this is still just a docudrama bound by the limitations of the form.

*. Directed by Ferdinand Zecca for Société Pathé Frères. A pretty simple and conventional tale of crime and punishment, made almost incomprehensible by the primitive state of the art.
*. A burglar kills another man and steals money from a safe. He is apprehended in a bar and put in jail, where he dreams about the train of events that brought him to this pass. He is taken from his cell and guillotined. Running time: a little over five minutes.
*. Apparently the film was based on a series of waxwork tableaux then showing in Paris, but even if you knew the story I think you’d have trouble following the events. Personally, I felt some confusion over where the first scene, the burglary, was taking place. A bank? The door says “CAISSE” on it, but if it is a bank why would the guard be sleeping, in a bed no less, by the safe?

*. Then there is the matter of the inset dream visions (which were not original to this film, as pointed out by Kino’s helpful introduction). What is going on? From what I’ve been able to gather from other sources what we’re seeing is a man losing his respectable life (job, family) through drink. But that’s not clear from the brief tavern vignettes we see. Would contemporary audiences have understood better? On what evidence? What visual cues or clues am I missing?
*. The thing is, telling even a simple story like this is hard to do given the limitations in editing and camera placement at the time. For example, we’re too far away from the burglar to be able to identify his face so it’s hard to maintain any sense of continuity in his character. It’s just not clear if we’re seeing the same guy.
*. There was nothing new about the concept of a flashback — they’d been with us since Homer — but translating a flashback to the screen hadn’t been figured out yet. The dream inset was a clever idea, but it doesn’t really work (and hasn’t been used much since except in a humorous way). Just a couple of years later Porter’s Great Train Robbery would be a far more successful story of a crime that made no use of flashbacks, instead using editing to tell a single well-paced action narrative. That’s why you know the name Edwin S. Porter today and have probably never heard of Ferdinand Zecca.

*. The perspective painting through the arch to the guillotine in the distance is quite convcincing until the priest raises his cross in front of it and you can clearly see the shadow being cast on a surface that should not be there. A shame, as the subsequent beheading is effective. Cutting heads off of dummies is something that film learned to do well right from the beginning, through the use of the stop trick.
*. Crime stories are perfect entertainments: sensational and exploitative, yet moral and didactic. A final judgement on the wages of sin is what we want to see, even if we can’t always credit it.

*. This is either a sequel to or a remake of A Trip to the Moon. Or perhaps we can just call it more of the same. As David Thomson critically observes, Méliès never developed as a filmmaker. In some of these later films there’s more colour (at least for the prints that got this special treatment) and more elaborate sets, but nothing else has changed.
*. That’s Méliès himself, again, as the lead magician: Professor Crazyloff. Does the good professor want to explore strange new worlds and civilizations? Further the bounds of knowledge? Well, not primarily. As with all of Méliès’s impresarios he mainly just wants to put on a show, in this case a tour of space.
*. There are plenty of dangers. No Selenites this time, but a fire on board the submarine that has to be put out, and an attempt to survive the heat of the sun by climbing inside an ice box. This latter incident made me smile. But it’s really just another version of the old magic cabinet trick: open the cabinet once to reveal what’s inside, close the door, then open it again and voila!
*. There was more to Méliès then just these féeries (French theatre known for its fantastic plots and elaborate scenery and stage effects), but they’re what he’s remembered for today. He was good at them, and he was good at them because they were where his heart was at. Even a trip to the North Pole would turn into a fantastic voyage to another world.
*. He seemed to believe that dealing with fantastic subjects was a more legitimate and sophisticated form of art than the usual vaudeville farce and brief melodramas. Perhaps it was. This gives you some idea of how low an entertainment form early cinema was. Appolinaire told him that they were both trying to lend enchantment to vulgar material.

*. As time went by he polished his effects of design and perspective, creating an increasingly lush and painterly visual space. In this regard The Impossible Voyage has to be considered one of his finest works. The various sets (the workshop, the train crash, the submarine) are among his most detailed and inventive, and the train being swallowed by the sun, while imaginatively of a piece with earlier films, takes the concept a step beyond the hungry planet in The Astronomer’s Dream and even the iconic image of the moon being poked in the eye in A Trip to the Moon.
*. But there was nowhere left to go after this. Very few artists, and perhaps even fewer filmmakers, who work in a form so dependent on technology are given much more than a decade to produce all of their best and most important work. That’s roughly what Méliès enjoyed. And after the devastation of the First World War France was a different place anyway.

*. Film restoration. It can be a marvelous thing. If you’re young enough you may have only experienced this movie in the fantastic restored hand-coloured version that premiered in 2011 to much deserved fanfare (the print had only been discovered in 1993). You can view it for free, in high definition, on the Internet.
*. That is not, however, how most people saw it in 1902. I’m not even sure if anyone saw it that way, or at least quite the same way, in 1902 (the colouring was a laborious process that took quite a while). The majority of prints in circulation were in black and white.
*. This is the thing about restorations: they’re often not restoring the film to anything like an actually existing earlier version, but rather transforming it into something new and improved. It’s like what George Lucas did to Star Wars, going back to digitally re-insert the Jabba the Hutt from The Return of the Jedi into a film where he was originally just played by a normal actor. Lucas didn’t have the money to do Jabba the way he wanted to do him in the first film, but later he could make the change through the magic of technology. But that’s not the movie anyone saw in the ’70s.
*. Or think of all the “director’s cuts” that you’ve probably seen. Do they improve on the “theatrical release”? In many if not most cases I would say they don’t, but my point is that they’re different movies. They “restore” material that was cut at some point in the process, but they aren’t really restorations.
*. So, to try and get back on topic, my point is just that when we talk about the HD version of A Trip to the Moon complete with all the bells and whistles, I think we have to recognize that it’s not a definitive version but more like an anomaly.
*. This is sometimes described as the first science fiction movie. It depends on how rigid your classification schemes are. Most hardcore (if not “hard”) SF fans I know would balk at calling it science fiction. It’s more fantastic than anything in Wells or even Verne.
*. The scientists are introduced as a bunch of wizards. Along with their robes embroidered with astronomical signs and pointed hats, those telescopes and umbrellas they carry may as well be wands. The French academy prefigures Hogwarts.
*. It’s a circus show, with Méliès himself as the head wizard/ringmaster Professor Barbenfouillis. The Selenites, or moon men, jump and do somersaults for no reason at all. It’s just part of the show. Frantic action and visual clutter would be Méliès’s way of getting around the limitations of a static camera.
*. How static? That famous moon shot isn’t a dolly in to the face of the moon — which, and this is the important point, would have been easier— but rather was achieved by bringing the moon toward the camera. When you’re that rigid you have to keep getting more elaborate with the tableaux.
*. And they’re certainly elaborate here (though they would become even more so in the sequel, An Impossible Voyage). The layered sets create an effect much like animation. Terry Gilliam must have been a fan.
*. With such a static frame, composition becomes very important, and it’s very well handled here. Note how in the opening scene there are a whole series of diagonals leading up to the moon, at the top center. It’s the same basic structure as in the opening shot of The Astronomer’s Dream (1898), but much more developed. The diagram on the chalkboard flows into the statue of a telescope affixed to the pillar, which flows into a giant telescope which ends with the moon itself. There are three different components to the one diagonal but they form a composite that ends at the same focal point.
*. The impression of animation is enhanced by the colouring, which gives the frame the appearance of a psychadelic paisley. Add in a journey to the land of mushrooms and we have a hallucinogenic trip worthy of 2001.
*. It’s not fair to write Méliès off as a mere magician with a camera. But he was an impresario still putting on what was in the end a very elaborate, very fanciful stage show. There were definite limits to what he could do — even, I think, to what he wanted to do — but what he did remains impressive in its own right to this day.

*. The documentaries of yesteryear (or in this case “actuality films,” if you insist on the difference), are like a form of fantasy, a magic mirror in this case revealing a time of horse-drawn carriages and sleds, not to mention giant bells and cannon that seem left over from a race of giants. We can recognize the people we see, but it’s a way we’ll never be again.
*. In fact, I find documentaries even more fantastic than the escapists fare of the era, like A Trip to the Moon or The Great Train Robbery. A Trip to the Moon is all effects, and effects are always with us. But real streets without cars!
*. I can’t help thinking that if Moscow got any more snow then those streets would be impassable, even with sleds. Then again, a Moscow not clad in snow would be a hellishly muddy mess. Imagine that street in the spring!
*. What makes me find all of this so beautiful? Is it just because it’s a vanished world? I know I feel the same way looking at the streets of 1950s San Francisco in Vertigo, but that’s only natural. I think everyone responds that way to Vertigo (or San Francisco). But these early documentaries almost always have the same effect. And I don’t think I’m romanticizing the past. Snow clad Moscow isn’t some ideal or exotic place. But as I get older, and science fiction gets more and more dystopic, “the past” starts to look like Eden, civilization’s paradise lost.
*. The camera work is very simple, really just a series of pans, but given the limitations of a stationary camera the shots are well chosen. I especially like that opening pan, with the birds sailing about in the middle distance. There’s a tremendous sense of space.
*. It’s very much a city movie, about people going places: walking, riding, sledding, or on skis. Everyone seems so busy.
*. Some of the people seem to know what’s going on, but we also see people looking at the camera with innocence; that is, not seeing themselves as subjects being filmed, not performing, but just wondering what’s the game. That’s another Edenic attribute of the past, a time before the narcissism of the subject, when we all started looking at ourselves.