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Pursuant to my discussion of the Lumière Brothers' First Films, I was able to find an avi file of it online and am now temporarily hosting it here. (I think I'm on solid ground here, as the DVD this was from has long been OOP and all of these films should be public domain by now, but if anyone sees a problem with this, please let me know and I'll take the link down.)

Again, the whole thing (clocking in at just over an hour) is highly recommended, but I've catalogued a few lesser known highlights (noting the times at which they start) as follows:

18:24 Inauguration de l'exposition universelle (Moving Sidewalk at the Paris Exhibition)
24:36 Krémos: Sauts perilleux (Family of Acrobats)
29:38 Laveuses (Washerwomen on the River)
41:11 The Sphinx
55:13 a large boat rushes past a stationary crowd of people
56:33 Danse serpentine (Serpentine Dance)

In addition, the first section of the program takes you through all of the Lumières' most well-known films (Arrival of a Train, L'arroseur arrosé, Demolition of a Wall, and all three versions of La sortie des usines Lumière). Happy viewing!

Thank you! I'll try to watch these films soon, sounds like an intriguing collection.

There is a rip of the tremendous Japanese Lumiere 4-disc laserdisc set on KG. It's proving to be quite a treasure trove.

myrnaloyisdope wrote:There is a rip of the tremendous Japanese Lumiere 4-disc laserdisc set on KG. It's proving to be quite a treasure trove.

Quite a set. There's a DVD edition without hard-coded subs, too.

Saw some of the animated works of Wladyslaw Starewicz last weekend. The real standout of course is The Cameraman's Revenge, which ought to finish VERY high up in my personal poll - a wickedly funny tale of infidelity amongst the insects. Insects of course are his animated subject of choice and it's remarkable how in this film and others ('The Dragonfly and the Ant', 'The Insects' Christmas') Starewicz undertakes this animation. One would never have guessed these films are a century old. It's not inconceivable to imagine that without him, there'd be no Norstein, no Svankmajer either.

The BFI just released this first adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Suffers really bad damage, but is still a joy to watch, hitting all of the familiar beats in a way this early cinema can.

As per Swo's suggestion (and that friendly avi file), I watched that collection of the Lumières' first films last night, and must also say: it's really quite amazing. I never thought that their work was so varied and inventive, only knowing the well-known films that are on Kino's "The Movies Begin"-box before. Indeed Tavernier is a great guide through the disc, and it's obvious that he really loves those films. And almost all of them are far more interesting today than the famous films like "Arrival at the Station", "Leaving the Factory" or "L'arroseur".

I would also give special mention to "Moving Sidewalk", but as well to that New York version of the 'train arriving'-motif (is it #51 on that list, "New York: Pont de Brooklyn"?). The latter looks almost abstract in its arrangement of space, with the carriages creating a half-circle that blocks out the left side of the frame and the modern look of the station on the right side. But I also find the other street scenes quite astonishing: as Tavernier points out, the Lumières (or their cameramen) really had an eye for interesting compositions, diagonals etc. In this respect, some of the films might be more interesting than Mitchell & Kenyon films, but the latter may be more immediately touching because of the people populating them; the Lumières make the people far less into the 'stars' of their films.

Finally, that compilation is a fine reminder of how 'international' the 'daily filmic news' were only a few years after the medium was invented. The films made in Vietnam, Palestine, Turkey, Japan etc. might appeal to our exotistic tastes, but in a way they also capture a lost culture and in any case look exceedingly beautiful. But the same might even be said about the European street scenes; the people living at the time saw nothing special in their surroundings probably, but for a modern viewer the cityscapes look very 'sound' and pleasant compared to what we have today; places you'd like to live in. I wonder whether people will watch films from our times with the same feeling in 100 years; perhaps we are as oblivious to the beauties of the cities we live in as those people in the Lumière films probably were.

Thanks a lot for that, swo – a real treat, and a real eye-opener. And yes, Tavernier’s wry commentary was a nice bonus (‘this is the first advertisement for cat food’). The film taken from the rickshaw was astonishing, definitely the most dynamic and brilliant ‘phantom ride’ I’ve yet seen. But my favourite was the washerwomen: some of the Mitchell and Kenyon films (Blackpool Victoria Pier and Preston Egg Rolling especially) use a similar kind of framing, and in a way the friendly crowds smiling at the camera imbue those films with a bit more human interest. But the multi-layered framing of Laveuses is really miraculous, and incredibly eerie with the women toiling below, eyes on their work, and the small group of men standing to one side above, looking into the camera. I also had no idea the Lumière films could be this good.

EDIT: meant to say as well, I thought the one with the farm-workers raking hay, being directed diagonally across the frame, with the mountain looming over them in the opposite corner, was very beautiful.

Before watching this, I indulged in both Electric Edwardians and The Lost World of M&K, and also wanted to chime in here on these wonderful films. I agree that Morecambe Sea Front should probably be the one to vote for, the one where it all seems to come together. And as has been mentioned, there are quite a few ‘cinematic’ gems like the tram ride into Halifax, or the one zedz mentioned on the Cruikshank doc (not sure if you mean the one where the tram-line does a u-turn at the end of the street, but there were several good ones; here’s hoping for a ‘Mitchell and Kenyon on Trams’ set in the future).

But, much as I hate rugby or indeed sport of any kind, I think my favourite is Dewsbury v Manningham (1901), because of a couple of shots towards the end which sum up what really makes these films special. Mitchell and Kenyon have planted someone in the crowd of spectators and told him to pull faces, fling his hat in the air and cheer, in the hope that the crowd will follow his example. I guess they could only film for a minute or so at a time, and often missed the really exciting action in these matches. The poor man with the hat is a stalwart coarse actor, and the other spectators don’t quite respond as they’re meant to: one or two play along and cheer, grinning at the camera, but most of them just look bemused, indifferent, or vaguely pitying. Having tried his best, Cheering Hat-Flinging Man smiles bashfully and gives up. The attempt, and failure, to engineer a ‘staged’ shot gives way to something very genuine and funny. And it doesn't seem like an entirely unintentional effect.

As Toulmin quotes someone or other as saying, ‘other film-makers filmed the world; M&K bring the world to us’ (something like that). We tend to think of the documentarist as someone who has to keep an objective stance on what they see, not intrude on the world being recorded, and sustain the illusion that the camera isn’t there. Mostly, the figures in these early films are like ghosts who’ve wandered obliviously into your television, but in Mitchell and Kenyon’s films you almost feel as if you get to know the people you’re watching.

In The Lost World of M&K, Cruikshank tracks down the son of one of the children in the ‘Band of Hope’ procession (featured on Electric Edwardians). Seeing someone recognise their ancestor in an old film is quite moving in itself, but it was sort of incredible to then go back and watch the film on the other disc, and be able to name the little boy holding up one of the banners and smiling at the camera (it’s George Jelves, if I remember rightly) – and to have ‘met’ his son. The montage of waving crowds at the end of the BBC doc was also rather touching: from their point of view, they were just waving to themselves later on that day, watching the film, but now they’re waving to us, over a century later. I know it sounds sentimental, but sentimental value is, and was at the time, the essence of these films. It’s like a very (or at least relatively) pure and innocent version of the “you’re the star” mentality that dominates so much television today, and a testament, I suppose, to Mitchell and Kenyon’s skill for endearing themselves to complete strangers.

Great music from In the Nursery, too. If only more composers took this approach to scoring early films, rather than resorting to the strainedly upbeat, clamorous piano torture which seems to be the norm. Do films of workers leaving a factory, or waves crashing against a rock, really need to be accompanied by jaunty, melodramatic fanfares? The music on the Lumière disc fell into this trap sometimes, and often drowned out the commentary (as on The Movies Begin - or is this just my crappy speakers?). I especially loved ITN's creepy accompaniment for the visiting torpedo flotilla. They're very 'modern', and maybe they're not exactly reflecting the original intent and context of the films, but they show an appreciation of what makes them beautiful and valuable today, which I think is what counts.

Thanks Sloper. I really like your observation that the effect of the Mitchell & Kenyon films now is sort of an incredibly amplified version of its intended effect at the time, with the notion of 'posterity' stretched from a few hours to more than a century, and the notion of 'friends and family' similarly extended. I think you might have hit on one of the keys that make these films so particularly moving.

knives wrote:The BFI just released this first adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Suffers really bad damage, but is still a joy to watch, hitting all of the familiar beats in a way this early cinema can.

Apparently you can watch this for free now at The Auteurs as well.

...and what's this? They also have Eugène Green's The Portuguese Nun?! Not germane to this list, but \:D/

Sloper wrote: Great music from In the Nursery, too. If only more composers took this approach to scoring early films, rather than resorting to the strainedly upbeat, clamorous piano torture which seems to be the norm. Do films of workers leaving a factory, or waves crashing against a rock, really need to be accompanied by jaunty, melodramatic fanfares? The music on the Lumière disc fell into this trap sometimes, and often drowned out the commentary (as on The Movies Begin - or is this just my crappy speakers?). I especially loved ITN's creepy accompaniment for the visiting torpedo flotilla. They're very 'modern', and maybe they're not exactly reflecting the original intent and context of the films, but they show an appreciation of what makes them beautiful and valuable today, which I think is what counts.

I've always praised ITN's soundtrack work here, but I would also say that their work on "Electric Edwardians" is particularly effective. In a way they are indeed very modern, but as they usually reference classical music from around 1900 in their music (also in their non-soundtrack work), they manage to 'span the times', so to speak, sounding as if what we hear is music from the time of the films brought forward into our century and thus they are creating a certain 'timeless' quality which works very well in keeping the music from being illustrative. I assume the somewhat 'transcendent' character of "Morecambe Bay" and some other films has a lot to do with the particular effect of the ITN music. They achieve the same effect with their music for Vertov's "Man with a camera", and in this respect I would be very keen to hear their soundtrack for Dreyer's "Jeanne" with the film (the muisc exists on CD, but I haven't heard it). I guess that film may be particularly suited to their special approach.

I apologize in advance for all of the puns I am about to make...

So for my next trick, I watched the whole Flicker Alley set dedicated to Georges Méliès this past week. I was determined to find one magic/trick film to stand for all others on my list, and I think I found it in The Famous Box Trick (Illusions fantasmagoriques). It's a quick but inventive take on the whole sawing-a-guy-in-half illusion, and one that could only be performed in the cinematic medium. Also, replace "saw" with "axe" and "guy" with "little boy" and you get an idea of the morbid sense of humor at play here.

As for the rest of the set, some of Méliès' tricks got to feel a little familiar over the course of some 170 films, but there was still enough magic dispersed throughout to make the viewing experience worthwhile. (Truth be told, this set probably works better as a kind of encyclopedia, to be referred to in bits and pieces when the urge arises.) In particular, it's worth sticking it out through some of the longer, later period pieces on the last disc for the visually striking voyage film The Conquest of the Pole, which I think captures a lot of the sense of playful/menacing adventure of his earlier films like A Trip to the Moon (also based on a Jules Verne novel).

I finished watching Louis Feuillade's Judex and was most impressed. It's certainly on par with Les Vampires, if not as ambitious. The rhythm of the film is so fluid and relaxed. The story unfolds so leisurely that even in the absence of action one gets drawn in, while the characters are drawn out so fully that they feel like friends and family. Oh, and Musidora my gosh, so impossibly sexy and alluring. Even more so than Irma Vep, her Diana Monti is so completely enrapturing and magnetic. Perhaps because her character seems more grounded in reality that Irma Vep, she is conniving, slinky and manipulative, but she is a real woman. As wonderful as the Vep characterization is, it's built out of artifice and a "super-villainess" kind of vision.

Highest recommendation, I would kill for Barabbas or any other Feuillade serials to be released.

A couple of Maurice Tourneur's French shorts from 1913 really impressed. Figures de cire (The Wax Figures) is an early horror film, depicting one man's descent into madness after spending the night in a wax museum. It's quite a tight one-reeler, marred a little by some clumsy staging, but the conclusion is genuinely quite shocking. Le friquet[/] is an outstanding two-reeler, that is so polished, beautifully edited and so rhythmic that it could have been made 15 years later and not look out of place. The story is of le friquet, an orphan taken in by a circus clown and taught to be a rider and trapeze artist. She leaves the circus and marries an aristocrat, only to be cheated on, before returning to the circus only to find her heart still belongs to her former love. It's a wonderful film, that really reveals Tourneur's mastery even as a beginner.

I've been hunting for early animation I haven't seen before and am open to suggestions and links.

From what I am well familiar with, I will probably vote for one of the 1911-1914 Winsor McCay films, but although their greatness can't really be disputed I've been watching these every few years since the VHS era and feel like I've burnt out a lot of my personal enjoyment of them. In roughly the same time span, I've never gotten the least bit tired of Starewicz's best work. The Cameraman's Revenge will surely place highly on my list, and I wish I had a more complete release than the Image DVD.

Going back to pre-McCay animated work, the single most significant forerunner is probably Emile Cohl, or at the least my favorite. The drawing style perfectly accentuates the inventive strangeness of the films. They're crude only in the best sense, which places them within the realm of visionary art. They're intuitive and raw, making no concessions whatsoever to norms of "tasteful drawing" or even coherence. Here are his Fantasmagorie and Hasher's Delirium. I really need to get that second Gaumont set.

As for the beginnings of the post-McCay era of animation, think the single creator who took the baton was Max Fleischer, and I hope he won't go entirely overlooked in this period. Here is one of the rotoscoped "Out of the Inkwell" films, The Tantalizing Fly (a bit blurry unfortunately). Is any more of his 1919 work online?

I've been working through the The Movies Begin boxset from Kino, and there's lots of great stuff. I'm particularly impressed with the early British films.

James Williamson's The Big Swallow (1900) was most impressive, a great idea superbly executed. An early experiment in self-reflexivity, as a reluctant film subject decides to swallow the camera. The camera moves closer and closer to the man's mouth before finally being swallowed up. The final shot of the cameraman's feet dangling is just a great topper. Fire (1901) also struck as being very polished with strong continuity between shots. It strikes me as being much more representative of modern film construction than the Porter film. The editing joins the action rather than repeating it.

I'd seen some of Cecil Hepworth's work before, but it was nice to seen in a good transfer. Rescued by Rover (1905) is tightly edited and very enjoyable. There's some great framing, particularly one shot that features a curved street, that Rover runs down before disappearing off screen. The use of perspective is quite effective as it adds drama the shot as we follow Rover from the left of the screen to the right, gradually decreasing in size till he's gone. I was really struck by That Fatal Sneeze (1907) as well, a very funny film that effectively incorporates elaborate set pieces (that are destroyed when the lead sneezes) for laughs. The chase sequence is also really well done, as each successive sneeze earns the ire of more and more people, leading to a mob of folk chasing him. The tempo and the build reminded me of the chase sequences later slapstick films like Cops or For Heaven's Sake.

The two British "documentaries" on the set were probably the biggest surprise. Cricks and Martin's A Visit to Peek Frean & Co.’s Biscuit Works (1906) was completely engaging as a procedural documentary, depicting the making of biscuits, giving ample time to each facet of production. Fascinating stuff, and of course the use of indoor arc-lighting is noteworthy as well. The depiction of technology, and the massive workforce needed for mass-production prior to further mechination is compelling, it feels like a different world in some respects, then of course the closing sequence of horse-drawn carriages (and one auto) taking the biscuits for sale, reveals how much different life was in 1906.

Kineto Films' A Day in the Life of a Coalminer (1910) was similarly impressive, although the obviously staged opening and closing sequences detract somewhat, but are fascinating in their own right. There is one absolutely beautiful shot of a woman and a young boy cover covered in soot, that is transcendent. Shades of Dorothea Lange.

Gregory wrote:Going back to pre-McCay animated work, the single most significant forerunner is probably Emile Cohl, or at the least my favorite. The drawing style perfectly accentuates the inventive strangeness of the films. They're crude only in the best sense, which places them within the realm of visionary art. They're intuitive and raw, making no concessions whatsoever to norms of "tasteful drawing" or even coherence. Here are his Fantasmagorie and Hasher's Delirium. I really need to get that second Gaumont set.

From Cohl there's also this fantastic stop motion film which surely will be on my final list. The video quality on that is unfortunately quite awful.

And while we are talking about early stop motion films, here's another great one from Segundo de Chomón.

Thanks, SoyCuba. The Cohl film is striking in one way because there were so few films from this period that had no people (or human figures) in them. Some of the phantom ride films provide another example, as well as the Lumières' Oil Gush Fire in Bibiheybat, which I'll be voting for.

To get back to early animation, though, these early stop motion films raise a question that keeps coming up in my mind as I try to decide on examples of this or that for my list: Does it matter whether a film was apparently the first to do x? Here I don't exactly agree with what domino harvey argued earlier in the thread (citing his professor) that it's a futile exercise to name firsts because there is something like an infinite regression of earlier examples that can be discovered. On the contrary, with early animation and the Lumières' work in certain ways, one can point to it as the earliest example of this or that (of course with the help of film scholars who are aware of films that are not available to us to watch and vote for). In some such cases, it would take an extremely unlikely discovery completely out of the blue to change our views of when and how techniques emerged. However, there is always the unstated proviso that some unsung person might have done pioneering work that did not survive long enough even to be seen by any film historians.

Rather than that, the reason I'm inclined to say that "firsts" don't always matter is that in many cases I think later examples were done independently of earlier ones. Taking pixilation for example, Automatic Moving Company could easily have been made in 1912 with no knowledge of Segundo de Chomón's Electric Hotel. In other words a lot of innovators were surely working in parallel without seeing each other's work. Nonetheless, I can't stop thinking about whether or not something seems to have been a first, or at least the first to pull something off really well.

The Automatic Moving Company is wrongly attributed to Emile Cohl. It was made by Romeo Bossetti for Pathé. 1912 is the good date, though.

Saturnome wrote:The Automatic Moving Company is wrongly attributed to Emile Cohl. It was made by Romeo Bossetti for Pathé. 1912 is the good date, though.

Really? Someone should correct it on IMDb then. The date is also 1910 there.

swo17 wrote: As for the rest of the set, some of Méliès' tricks got to feel a little familiar over the course of some 170 films, but there was still enough magic dispersed throughout to make the viewing experience worthwhile. (Truth be told, this set probably works better as a kind of encyclopedia, to be referred to in bits and pieces when the urge arises.) In particular, it's worth sticking it out through some of the longer, later period pieces on the last disc for the visually striking voyage film The Conquest of the Pole, which I think captures a lot of the sense of playful/menacing adventure of his earlier films like A Trip to the Moon (also based on a Jules Verne novel).

Watching the whole set in a row is hell, you begin to hate all these tricks being repeated ad nauseam and the later conventional narrative films at the end of the set where Melies can't manage to tell his stories in a comprehensible for the viewers are an additional punishment. I'd like nevertheless to drop a recommendation for a second film beyond the obvious Voyage dans la Lune and that's La Royaume des Fees an inventive, magical and tightly paced adventure story/fairy tale. I thought Voyage a travers l'impossible and A la Conquete du Pole were trying to hard to copy their famous predecessor and are slightly too long. The Ice Giant in the second one is good, but all the sequences like the flight through the skies and stars last seemingly forever.

myrnaloyisdope wrote:I finished watching Louis Feuillade's Judex and was most impressed. It's certainly on par with Les Vampires, if not as ambitious. The rhythm of the film is so fluid and relaxed. The story unfolds so leisurely that even in the absence of action one gets drawn in, while the characters are drawn out so fully that they feel like friends and family. Oh, and Musidora my gosh, so impossibly sexy and alluring. Even more so than Irma Vep, her Diana Monti is so completely enrapturing and magnetic. Perhaps because her character seems more grounded in reality that Irma Vep, she is conniving, slinky and manipulative, but she is a real woman. As wonderful as the Vep characterization is, it's built out of artifice and a "super-villainess" kind of vision.
Highest recommendation, I would kill for Barabbas or any other Feuillade serials to be released.

Just out of sheer interest, is here anybody else bored to tears by Feuillade's serials? I mean I love Chaplin, Stiller and Sjöström, I greatly appreciate Bauer and Tourneur and respect very much Christensen and Griffith, but these hour long trashy stories go on my nerves. If I want to see some pulp, I watch Indiana Jones and not some 10s serials with no sense of story development or any suspense at all. Feuillade's staging seems to me bloody ordinary compared to the directors mentioned before and the attempts to elevate this stuff via "surrealistic tendencies disrupting bourgeois normalcy" ... well that's something you could tell about many trash films.

myrnaloyisdope wrote:I've been working through the The Movies Begin boxset from Kino, and there's lots of great stuff. I'm particularly impressed with the early British films.

James Williamson's The Big Swallow (1900) was most impressive, a great idea superbly executed. An early experiment in self-reflexivity, as a reluctant film subject decides to swallow the camera. The camera moves closer and closer to the man's mouth before finally being swallowed up. The final shot of the cameraman's feet dangling is just a great topper. Fire (1901) also struck as being very polished with strong continuity between shots. It strikes me as being much more representative of modern film construction than the Porter film. The editing joins the action rather than repeating it.

One supporter for my point of view . But yes somehow these British films are still underrated and this early Cinema program could use a reworking, Attack on a China Mission still misses the crucial reverse cuts which were found in between since this program was put together. It's a bit silly first to hear about Come along do! being lauded as first multi-shot film, but unfortunately the second shot lost and then the whole stuff again with China Mission.
after the R.W. Paul set I'd hope for more of these early British films because Williamson, Smith and paul really made together with melies the decisive steps in the development of film grammar.

Gregory wrote: To get back to early animation, though, these early stop motion films raise a question that keeps coming up in my mind as I try to decide on examples of this or that for my list: Does it matter whether a film was apparently the first to do x? Here I don't exactly agree with what domino harvey argued earlier in the thread (citing his professor) that it's a futile exercise to name firsts because there is something like an infinite regression of earlier examples that can be discovered. On the contrary, with early animation and the Lumières' work in certain ways, one can point to it as the earliest example of this or that (of course with the help of film scholars who are aware of films that are not available to us to watch and vote for). In some such cases, it would take an extremely unlikely discovery completely out of the blue to change our views of when and how techniques emerged. However, there is always the unstated proviso that some unsung person might have done pioneering work that did not survive long enough even to be seen by any film historians.

Rather than that, the reason I'm inclined to say that "firsts" don't always matter is that in many cases I think later examples were done independently of earlier ones. Taking pixilation for example, Automatic Moving Company could easily have been made in 1912 with no knowledge of Segundo de Chomón's Electric Hotel. In other words a lot of innovators were surely working in parallel without seeing each other's work. Nonetheless, I can't stop thinking about whether or not something seems to have been a first, or at least the first to pull something off really well.

The problem is naturally that all these people were stealing from each other in the most ruthless way imaginable and that zillions of these early films are lost so that we may trash a copyist and laud a film which is already a cheap copy. But I think it's perfectly fair to emphasize the first examples (as is probably and hopefully done by the experts who chose these films) and still appreciate it if anybody makes an especially well done version like a good covering of a pop song.
I'd like to know to which degree this selections are done as objectively as possible and to which degree aspects like print accessibility or personal preference played a role. The example of Griffith overshadowing the whole 19085-1912/13 film history is a bad example which power film archivists and experts can have to shape and deform film history.

Well, I think terms like "plagiarizing" and "stealing" are way too over-the-top, unless the filmmaker was going around saying "I created this technique; no one has done this before" and yet we know they had knowledge of someone using it before them. To take an earlier example in which you charged "plagiarism," are there similarities between Williamson and Porter's films on firefighters? Sure. Was the latter a complete rip-off of the earlier film? I'm not sure I'd say so. One can draw extremely close connections between artists working around the same time in just about any medium; one could even argue that artists have always borrowed and even "swiped" bits and pieces from each other. There are clear enough standards for plagiarism with print media, but what exactly are the criteria for film, and how are filmmakers to cite or acknowledge their sources and inspirations?
Anyway, with distribution still in its infancy during this period, I stand by my claim that a lot of this was people rapidly pushing innovations along without seeing each other's work.

SoyCuba :
Romeo Bossetti in fact made The Automatic Moving Company (French title: Le Garde-Meuble) in 1912 using the same idea that Emile Cohl had two years before in Le Mobilier Fidèle, and was his second attempt at this moving furniture concept.

So IMDb isn't wrong, Cohl made a film called Le Mobilier Fidèle in 1910, but it isn't the one everyone thinks it is. I think it does survives however.
Edit: I think that the info around the film on IMDb is wrong though. It says that the film was released in the US in a split-reel with some documentary from 1912. It is probably the source of the surviving copy (of The Automatic Moving Company, which explains why the english title is widely known, and probably the confusion for some decades. The documentary, although French, seems to be known only under it's english title!), and it would make more sense for two 1912 films to be released together.

Were most films widely seen back then? Maybe, except some popular films, one version would be shown in some region, and another version in another region. I don't know.

Also complicating things in those very early years is the narrow distinction in some cases between a film and a genre. From today's perspective, 'phantom ride' films, or 'pixillated furniture' films, or 'arriving train' films, or 'haunted hotel room' films (a la Melies) might all seem like more or less successful 'cover versions' of some extant or elusive original, but at least some of what I've read suggests they were seen more as 'genres' (e.g. come and see the latest 'phantom ride' film!) As Lubitsch points out, the mutual borrowing (and indeed the Mutual borrowing) was profligate - and, I'd argue, ultimately extremely valuable for the development of the medium. While filmmakers of the time were no doubt concerned about the 'stealing' of their intellectual property, they were probably much more concerned about outright piracy (hence the trademarking of backgrounds and the lodging of paper prints) and securing the patents to the technology.

Addressing this subject reminds me that an interesting viewing adjunct to this phase of the lists project would be Wim Wenders' Trick of the Light, about early cinema pioneers the Brothers Skladanowsky. I don't think any of their films survive, but they're recreated for this dramatised documentary. It's probably one of Wenders' best films of the last twenty years.

They do survive, zedz, at least the six-odd that were part of the Wintergartenprogramm.
The Wenders' film (which I agree is excellent) ends with a loop of one of them (the authentic thing, I believe), and it's marvelous. A search at youtube reveals three more, though the quality is bad (camera recording TV broadcast).

If anyone knows how to get these films, please speak up. (Why they weren't included as extras on the DVD is beyond me.)

lubitsch wrote: Just out of sheer interest, is here anybody else bored to tears by Feuillade's serials? I mean I love Chaplin, Stiller and Sjöström, I greatly appreciate Bauer and Tourneur and respect very much Christensen and Griffith, but these hour long trashy stories go on my nerves. If I want to see some pulp, I watch Indiana Jones and not some 10s serials with no sense of story development or any suspense at all.

I think the attraction that Feuillade has for many here does not lie in the story or the perceived (or not) suspense , nor does it lie in the staging, though I can't see what should be wrong with the way Feuillade handles things. No, the attraction lies first and foremost in the 'style': the coolness of the villains, the super-sexy ladies and the sheer over-the-topness of the stories, and the inventiveness with which Fantomas or the Vampires group lay out their plots and machinations. This all coalesces to an almost unique experience, even though its pulp (as opposed to 'trash'). I admit that I also found "Judex" slowgoing, but the reason is that it's certainly less interesting to have a positive super-hero as the main character than cheeringly following Fantomas' latest evil tricks. Perhaps it has also to do with the fact that I watched Franju's condensed version of the same story first, which is one of the very few examples of a re-make being much superior to the original I can think of. But on the other hand, Franju's cinema would be unthinkable without Feuillade (and without Méliès, see his nice little 1952 documentary "The Grand Méliès), and I think one shouldn't underestimate the influence Feuillade had on later filmmakers in general. Randolf's "Bettler vom Kölner Dom" for instance seems to me like a direct descendant from Feuillade, and don't forget films like Lang's "Die Spinnen" either.

lubitsch wrote: Feuillade's staging seems to me bloody ordinary compared to the directors mentioned before and the attempts to elevate this stuff via "surrealistic tendencies disrupting bourgeois normalcy" ... well that's something you could tell about many trash films.

And it wouldn't be wrong, of course. Again, it's a question of the final effect on the viewer. Again taking Franju as an example: "Yeux sans visage" in terms of plot is certainly the equal of any American C-Film horror of the 50s; but the result is one of the most strikingly beautiful and poetic films ever made by anyone. And it's indeed a highly disturbing film, too. Pulp can speak a lot about society, precisely because it's on the rims of what is accepted as 'valuable art' at any given time; and while Feuillade's works operate in a different way than 'high art', they are pitch-perfect in their own universe.