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For my money, the best of the early animation pioneers was Wladyslaw Starewicz. Born in Moscow to Polish parents, Starewicz was the director of the Museum of Natural History in Lithuania when he inadvertently embarked on a film career. Attempting to document on film a fight between two male stag beetles, Starewicz was frustrated by the insect's nocturnal nature—whenever the camera's lights were turned on for filming, the bugs invariably rolled over and went to sleep—but rather than give up, Starewicz made two models of the beetles with wax and wire, and staged the fight using stop-motion photography.
The result, Lucanus Cervus, was a sensation and Starewicz became a full-time director. In 1912 he made his best film, The Cameraman's Revenge, in which an adulterous insect is captured on film by her cuckolded husband then invited with her unwitting lover to the film's premiere at the local cinema:
Starewicz was decorated by the czar and won the Gold Medal at an international film festival in Milan in 1914, but fled Russia after the October Revolution in 1917. He continued to make films for the rest of his life, dying in 1965 while working on the film Like Dog and Cat.
PICTURE
winner: Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora a.k.a. The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman, a.k.a. The Cameraman's Revenge (prod. Aleksandr Khanzhonkov)
nominees: How A Mosquito Operates (prod. Winsor McCay); The Land Beyond The Sunset (prod. Edison Company); The Musketeers Of Pig Alley (prod. Biograph Company); Richard III (prod. J. Stuart Blackton and M.B. Dudley)
ACTOR
winner: Elmer Booth (The Musketeers of Pig Alley)
nominees: Martin Fuller (The Land Beyond The Sunset; Max Linder (The Pathé Frères Comedies)
ACTRESS
winner: Dorothy Bernard (The Girl And Her Trust)
nominees: Lillian Gish (The Unseen Enemy and The Musketeers Of Pig Alley); Mary Pickford (The New York Hat); Ynez Seabury (The Sunbeam)
DIRECTOR
winner: Wladyslaw Starewicz (Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora a.k.a. The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman, a.k.a. The Cameraman's Revenge)
nominees: D.W. Griffith (The Biograph Shorts); Harold M. Shaw (The Land Beyond The Sunset)
SCREENPLAY
winner: Dorothy G. Shore (The Land Beyond The Sunset)
nominees: D.W. Griffith and Anita Loos (The Musketeers Of Pig Alley); Wladyslaw Starewicz (Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora a.k.a. The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman, a.k.a. The Cameraman's Revenge)
SPECIAL AWARDS
G.W. "Billy" Bitzer (Cinematography) (The Musketeers Of Pig Alley)
As I've mentioned before, the first international film star was the French comic, Max Linder. He was also the first true film comedian—the first to develop a "language" of gesture and expression that not only overcame the limitations of silent film but took advantage of the relative intimacy of the medium.
Thanks to the close-up, a storytelling device unique to film, an actor no longer had to play to the back row of the theater—the camera brought the back row to him. Whether intuitively or by design, Linder realized the broad gestures and inane dialogue of music hall comedy were largely devices for indicating to an audience what to pay attention to as the actors set up a gag. On film, simply lifting an eyebrow would suffice.
While situational comedy had been around since the theater of ancient Greece, until film allowed for recognizable settings, and more importantly, recognizable characters with recognizable needs and desires, film comedy was limited to the most simplistic gags. With a reel of film growing longer—around ten minutes rather than the 45-seconds of the Lumière brothers' standard offering—it became possible for filmmakers to put fully-realized characters and situations on the screen, and so far as I can tell, Linder's "Max" was the first three-dimensional character in the history of movie comedy. You can imagine "Max" existing before the cameras started rolling, continuing to exist after they stopped, and in between, behaving on screen the way a real person would, albeit at the heightened levels required of farce comedy.
With the elbow room to portray an actual character, Linder could derive laughs from the juxtaposition of this character—the dapper aristocrat—and the chaos he created around it, a welcome breakthrough, believe me, if you've suffered through more than a hundred comedy shorts featuring mischievous boys and one-note gags.
Not to mention he was just better at it than anybody else, until Charlie Chaplin came along in 1914 to raise the bar.
Because, as I mentioned before, Linder worked during a time when it was cheaper to buy a camera and steal an idea than to pay the rental fee on the original film, it's easy to compare and contrast the way different filmmakers handled the same comic idea—a laboratory experiment, if you will, in what is and isn't funny.
For example, one of the favorite props used to generate laughs in turn-of-the-century comedies was glue—apparently, a hundred years ago pots of the stuff just sat around waiting for people to fall in it. Alice Guy's La glu (The Glue) (1907) is typical of the era: a mischievous boy brushes glue on various surfaces—a staircase, a bicycle seat—much to the consternation of various adults. Basically a one-joke pony repeated over and over again to no great effect.
Linder, on the other hand, in the one-reeler Max ne se mariera pas (Max Is Stuck Up) (1910), built on the idea the way a classic comedian would. On his way to his fiancee's for dinner, Max stops at a bakery to conduct a little routine business and accidentally gets stuck to a sheet of flypaper. What begins as a minor inconvenience, shrugged off with bonhomie and good humor, becomes a minor annoyance, then becomes a potential source of embarrassment when he arrives for dinner only to find he's still stuck, and escalates into a full scale disaster as he and his future father-in-law wind up wrestling over a serving dish and destroying the entire set.
You've seen this sort of progression in a hundred comedies, from the Marx Brothers to Adam Sandler, but you didn't see it before Max Linder, not in a movie anyway.
And now because I love you, I present my favorite Max Linder short, Max victime du quinquina (Max Takes Tonics) (1911). He made it three years before Chaplin, but if I had told you Linder copied it move for move from the little Tramp, I dare say you'd believe me. The intertitles are in French (with a German translation!), but there are only a couple and the gist is easy enough to figure out—feeling rundown, Max visits a doctor who prescribes a tonic of red wine and quinine bitters. Soon roaring drunk, Max is mistaken for a big shot and helped "home" by a helpful policeman.
PICTURE
winner: Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, a.k.a. Little Nemo (prod. Winsor McCay)
nominees: L'inferno (prod. Milano Film); The Lonedale Operator (prod. D.W. Griffith); Manhattan Trade School For Girls (prod. unknown); Max Victime du Quinquina a.k.a. Max Takes Tonics (prod. Pathé Frères)
ACTOR
winner: Max Linder (Max victime du quinquina a.k.a. Max Takes Tonics)
ACTRESS
winner: Dorothy West (Swords And Hearts)
nominees: Linda Arvidson (Enoch Arden Parts 1 & 2)
DIRECTOR
winner: Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro (L'inferno)
nominees: D.W. Griffith (The Biograph Shorts); Max Linder (Max victime du quinquina a.k.a. Max Takes Tonics); Winsor McCay and J. Stuart Blackton (Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, a.k.a. Little Nemo)
SPECIAL AWARDS
Francesco Bertolini and Sandro Properzi (L'inferno) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Emilio Roncarolo (L'inferno) (Cinematography)
Internationally, the best known actress of the era was Asta Nielsen. Though born in Denmark, Nielsen made most of her films in Germany where she was known simply as "Die Asta" (The Asta). Film critic Lotte Eisner called her acting "intensely modern" and the "ideal" of European intellectuals in the 1910s and 1920s. It was also, for its time, intensely erotic, and thanks to the heavy hand of American censors, largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic.
Nevertheless, her "exceptionally unmannered" style of acting (David Thomson) influenced the generation of performers who followed her. Her best known films now are Afgrunden (a.k.a. The Woman Always Pays), Hamlet and Joyless Street, in which she co-starred with a young Swedish actress making one of her first films.
"The woman who taught me everything I know," Greta Garbo said later, "was Asta Nielsen."
Nielsen's version of Hamlet, produced by a film company she formed specifically for that purpose, is unusual in that not only does she play the title role, but she plays Hamlet as a woman disguised as a man. She abandoned movies with the advent of sound and returned to the stage in 1927. She died in 1972 at the age of 90.
PICTURE
winner: Frankenstein (prod. Edison Manufacturing Company)
nominees: Afgrunden a.k.a. The Abyss a.k.a. The Woman Always Pays (prod. Hjalmar Davidsen); The D.W. Griffith Biograph Shorts (prod. The Biograph Company); Jeffries-Johnson World's Championship Boxing Contest (prod. J. Stuart Blackton); The Max Linder Short Comedies (prod. Pathé Frères); Mobiliaire Fidele a.k.a. The Automatic Moving Company (prod. Émile Cohl)
ACTOR
winner: Charles Ogle (Frankenstein)
nominees: Max Linder (The Max Linder Short Comedies); Marc McDermott (A Christmas Carol)
ACTRESS
winner: Asta Nielsen (Afgrunden a.k.a. The Abyss a.k.a. The Woman Always Pays)
nominees: Vittoria Lepanto (Salomé); Florence Turner (Twelfth Night)
DIRECTOR
winner: J. Searle Dawley, Charles Kent and Ashley Miller (A Christmas Carol)
nominees: Émile Cohl (Mobiliaire Fidele a.k.a. The Automatic Moving Company); J. Searle Dawley (Frankenstein); Urban Gad (Afgrunden a.k.a. The Abyss a.k.a. The Woman Always Pays); D.W. Griffith (The D.W. Griffth Biograph Shorts)
I've written about D.W. Griffith quite a bit—most wordily here, here, here and here.
Like every other director of that era, Griffith wrestled with the problem of narrative—how to tell a story in a silent medium—but whereas other directors simply parroted the techniques that worked on stage and wound up with actors in togas milling around in front of painted backdrops, Griffith seemed to understand from the outset that film presented its own unique set of problems and opportunities. By composing his actors within the frame, by relying on revealing actions rather than words and, especially, by juxtaposing images and events through editing, Griffith was able to create within his audience an emotional involvement in his stories.
A trio of short films from 1909 illustrate Griffith's gift at composing the frame, staging action, and creating suspense with pacing and editing.
One of five Griffith films preserved in the National Film Registry, A Corner In Wheat is overpraised (to my mind) for being the first "message picture," but its use of composition is masterful. Lone figures confined to the corner of the screen, overwhelmed by empty vistas, conveying through image alone the desperation the characters feel, could have come straight from an Edward Hopper painting—except that A Corner In Wheat pre-dates Hopper's style by some fifteen years.
The Country Doctor opens with a panning shot, which if you'd just watched 100+ movies from the years that preceded it, believe me, jumps off the screen with its technical sophistication. Starting with a long shot of a valley, then panning to a house on a hill to focus on a family already emerging to walk forward until they stand in medium shot, Griffith establishes with a single uninterrupted camera movement both the story's setting and the identity and socio-economic status of its characters, the sort of camera shot we take for granted now but which pretty much didn't exist before him.
That only a year into his career as a director, he concluded the tragic story with a mirror of that opening shot, panning from the now-empty house as the film ends to that same long shot of the valley, underscores just how quickly he raced ahead of his competitors in using film to convey emotion.
Griffith didn't invent intercutting (a.k.a. cross-cutting)—the use of editing to alternate between two locations, usually to show simultaneous action—but he took it farther than anyone before him, using it not just to, say, show a key prop or establish a location, but to create a narrative flow and a sense of anticipation that was sorely lacking in early movies. In the thriller The Lonely Villa thieves break into a secluded country home and terrorize a woman and her children while her husband and the police race to their rescue. Griffith cuts back and forth between three points of view to create genuine suspense—will the would-be rescuers arrive in time to save the day?—an editing technique still used to this day.
Griffith continued to develop new approaches to film storytelling throughout his career at Biograph—parallel storylines, follow focus, the iris shot—culminating in what is now know as "classical Hollywood continuity," the practice of cutting within a scene to make clear to the viewer at all times where the characters are in relationship to each other and to their surroundings, both in terms of the physical space and the chronology of the film story. You see a little bit of Griffith every time you go to a movie or turn on a television, and directors as diverse as Charlie Chaplin, John Ford, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock publibally acknowledged his influence on their work.
By ignoring this era of film history, critics have wound up overstating the significance of The Birth Of A Nation as a revolution in film technique. Every technique Griffith supposedly invented in The Birth of a Nation, he had already developed and mastered during his years at Biograph Studios. Likewise, because that film's racism wound up overshadowing his entire career, casual film fans have undervalued Griffith's impact as an artist and innovator.
PICTURE
winner: The D.W. Griffith Biograph Shorts (prod. The Biograph Company)
nominees: Le locataire diabolique a.k.a. The Devilish Tenant (prod. Georges Méliès); Moscou sous la neige a.k.a. Moscow Clad in Snow (prod. Pathé Frères); Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy (prod. J. Stuart Blackton)
DIRECTOR
winner: D.W. Griffith (The D.W. Griffith Biograph Shorts)
nominees: J. Stuart Blackton (Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy); Joseph-Louis Mundwiller (Moscou sous la neige a.k.a. Moscow Clad in Snow)
I ran this video a couple of years ago after it showed up on "Open The Pod Bay Doors, Hal," the website of the late great Mark Bourne. If you've never seen Lloyd's work, perhaps this will whet your appetite. He really was the third great comic of the silent era, the equal of Chaplin and Keaton.
For the curious, the video was edited by MsBluecat and features Moby's version of the traditional folk song "Run On" (also known as "God's Gonna Cut You Down").
Émile Cohl was a well-known caricaturist working in Paris who got into the motion picture business when he spotted a movie poster design obviously stolen from one of his drawings. To placate Cohl, the management of the Gaumont Film Company (the oldest studio in the world) offered him a job on the spot, mostly turning out short animation sequences for insertion into live-action films.
In 1908, Cohl drew and directed a two-minute film, Fantasmagorie, one of the best of the early animated films. In the film history Animation: The Whole Story, Howard Beckerman called Fantasmagorie "a key juncture between the aping of stage trickery and the exploration of animation as a medium in its own right."
Actually, the leap from "stage trickery" to "a medium in its own right" might sum up this entire period in film history ...
PICTURE
winner: Fantasmagorie (prod. Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont)
nominees: The Tempest (prod. Clarendon); The Thieving Hand (prod. J. Stuart Blackton)
DIRECTOR
winner: Émile Cohl (Fantasmagorie)
nomiees: J. Stuart Blackton (The Thieving Hand); D.W. Griffith (various Biograph shorts); Percy Stow (The Tempest)
Known as the "Spanish Méliès," Segundo de Chomón specialized in surreal optical effects films. Working in France for Pathé, Chomón successfully combined miniatures and live-action, pioneered hand-tinted film and invented the "film dolly" which allowed complex tracking shots. As a director, he was known for his trick photography—for example, building one short (The Electric Hotel) around a suitcase that unpacked itself, and another (Les Kiriki) around a troupe of Japanese acrobats who perform impossible stunts. Later he provided the special effects work in important feature-length films such as Cabiria (1914) and Abel Gance's Napoleon.
PICTURE
winner: Le spectre rouge (prod. Pathé Frères)
nominees: Ben Hur (prod. Kalem Company); Le tunnel sous la manche ou Le cauchemar franco-anglais a.k.a. Tunneling the English Channel (prod. Georges Méliès)
DIRECTOR
winner: Segundo de Chomón and Ferdinand Zecca (Le spectre rouge)
nominees: Alice Guy (L'enfant de la barricade); Georges Méliès (Le tunnel sous la manche ou Le cauchemar franco-anglais a.k.a. Tunneling the English Channel)
What qualifies as the first feature-length film depends on what you think of as a feature film. In 1903, French movie-makers Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca directed a series of interrelated short films covering events in the life of Christ, from the annunciation through the resurrection and ascension. At a time when individual theater owners had more control over the product shown on the screen than the studio that produced it, La vie et la passion de Jésus Christ was sometimes exhibited edited together into a single 44-minute film.
And then there was Alice Guy Blaché (I wrote about her yesterday) who covered the same subject in a single, 33-minute film, La vie du Christ.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences now defines a "feature" as a film over forty minutes in duration. By those terms, most film historians cite Australia's The Story of the Kelly Gang as the first feature-length film. Released in 1906, The Kelly Gang clocked in at a then-astounding 70 minutes. Written and directed by Charles Tait, the film tells the story of Ned Kelly, an Irish-Australian bushranger who battled British authority and was eventually hanged for his trouble. The film was thought lost until one reel turned up in a Melbourne garbage dump; in 2006, additional footage was discovered in the UK, bringing the restored total to 17 minutes. What's left plays like an extended-length version of The Great Train Robbery—no knock, I assure you.
PICTURE
winner: The Story of the Kelly Gang (prod. W.A. Gibson, Millard Johnson, John Tait and Nevin Tait)
nominees: Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (prod. The Edison Manufacturing Company); Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (prod. J. Stuart Blackton); San Francisco Earthquake & Fire: April 18, 1906 (prod. unknown); Short Films of Georges Méliès (prod. Georges Méliès); Le théâtre de Bob (prod. Pathé Frères); La vie du Christ a.k.a. The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ (prod. Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont)
Must-See: Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, The Story of the Kelly Gang
DIRECTOR
winner: Charles Tait (The Story of the Kelly Gang)
nominees: Segundo de Chomón (Le théâtre de Bob); Alice Guy (La vie du Christ a.k.a. The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ ); Wallace McCutcheon and Edwin S. Porter (Dream of a Rarebit Fiend); Georges Méliès (Short Films of Georges Méliès)
I think for most people, the history of the sound era in movies begins on October 6, 1927, with the premiere of The Jazz Singer—and certainly that's when sound captured the fancy of the paying public and changed the nature of film (and the film industry) forever.
But the fact is, inventors began trying to combine sound with moving pictures almost from the beginning. William K.L. Dickson, for example, working in Thomas Edison's laboratories, made a short sound film as early as 1894, and shortly thereafter, Edison produced and marketed what he called the kinetophone, one of his peepshows in a box with a set of headphones connected to a rubber tube. (It was a commercial flop—the $400 asking price was too steep an investment to make back one nickel at a time, and anyway, audiences preferred to see their movies in a theater.)
The problems with combining sound and film proved to be legion. Sound could be recorded on the film itself (as it is now), but developing an amplifier so that a theater audience could hear the result took decades to iron out. And the alternate method of recording the sound on vinyl came with its own problems—once the record was scratched or the film broken, synching up the sound to the image was virtually hopeless.
Still, filmmakers persisted.
Among those who worked on the problem was Alice Guy, who is generally credited with being the first woman director in movie history.
You remember Alice Guy (pronounced a-LEES ghee), don't you? She began her film career as a secretary at Gaumont studios in Paris, began writing screenplays because she had access to a typewriter, and began directing movies because she had access to a camera. Her early work was, frankly, derivative, although the same could be said of every early director—homage, plagiarism and outright copyright infringement was the order of the day in the 19th century—but she quickly developed a style of her own, with La vie du Christ, a 1906 feature film about the birth, life and death of Christ, being her best work.
Between 1902 and 1906, Guy conducted her own experiments with synchronized sound films using Gaumont's "chronophone" technology, directing over a hundred short sound films starring popular singers of the day.
The films were popular with Parisian audiences, but the technology wasn't well-suited to recording spoken dialogue. It would take another twenty years for such men as Lee De Forest to resolve the remaining issues and turn sound films into a commercially-viable medium.
In 1907, Guy married Herbert Blaché, moved to America and eventually founded her own studio, Solax, in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Successful at first, the company eventually foundered as the bulk of the film industry fled to the west coast to escape censorship and the interference of east coast investors.
"My youth, my lack of experience, my sex all conspired against me," she later said.
In 1953, France awarded her the Legion of Honour. She died in 1968 at the age of 94.
(If you're interested in seeing more of Alice Guy's films, Chris Giddens of The Giddy is spending the month of April looking back at her work.)
Oh, and as for my choice for best picture, Rescued by Rover was film's first "animal as hero" movie, with, in this case, a dog saving a kidnapped infant. The story set the pattern for similar movies starring Rin Tin Tin and Lassie—"What's that girl? Timmy fell down the well?"—and popularized the name "Rover" for dogs.
PICTURE
winner: Rescued by Rover (prod. Cecil M. Hepworth)
nominees: Le diable noir a.k.a. The Black Imp (prod. Georges Méliès); The Night Before Christmas (prod. Edison Manufacturing Company); Panorama from Times Building, New York (prod. American Mutoscope & Biograph)
DIRECTOR
winner: Alice Guy (various synchronized sound experiments)
nominees: Lewin Fitzhamon and Cecil M. Hepworth (Rescued by Rover); Georges Méliès (various short films); Edwin S. Porter (The Night Before Christmas)
An Impossible Voyage was Georges Méliès's most ambitious film to date, the story of a trip through the Alps to the sun and finally under the ocean, using every imaginable mode of transportation—trains, automobiles, dirigibles, submarines—serving as much as a spoof of the Industrial Revolution as a flight of an armchair traveler's fancy. Indeed, some of the early scenes of the inventor in his workshop could have fit right into Chaplin's Modern Times.
At 24 minutes, it was twice as long as A Trip to the Moon and was one of the longest films to date.
As with all of Méliès's work, the imagery is fantastic—fantastic in the sense of being marked by extravagant fantasy, which is not a criticism. The hosts of Film: Ab Initio ranked it the second best film of the decade, better even than A Trip to the Moon. I can't say I agree—nothing in An Impossible Voyage equals let alone surpasses the image of a rocket hitting the moon in the eye—but it is one of Méliès's best.
Still, in it, you can see the limitations in Méliès's work that would eventually doom his career. He stubbornly eschews the three-dimensional possibilities of cinema, filming from a fixed point that takes in the entire stage at once, as if he were a spectator in the third row of the local vaudeville theater. More problematic is that Méliès never realized that his stories might be more effective if he created characters who were interesting in and of themselves. People would remain the least interesting props in his films to the very end.
That said, in 1904 Méliès was still far and away the most interesting director working and would continue to dominate the scene until D.W. Griffith's arrival at the Biograph Studios in 1908.
PICTURE
winner: Le voyage à travers l'impossible a.k.a. An Impossible Voyage (prod. Georges Méliès)
nominees: Westinghouse Works (prod. American Mutoscope and Biograph)
DIRECTOR
winner: Georges Méliès (Le voyage à travers l'impossible a.k.a. An Impossible Voyage)
For my money, the best of the early animation pioneers was Wladyslaw Starewicz. Born in Moscow to Polish parents, Starewicz was the director of the Museum of Natural History in Lithuania when he inadvertently embarked on a film career. Attempting to document on film a fight between two male stag beetles, Starewicz was frustrated by the insect's nocturnal nature—whenever the camera's lights were turned on for filming, the bugs invariably rolled over and went to sleep—but rather than give up, Starewicz made two models of the beetles with wax and wire, and staged the fight using stop-motion photography.
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