Century Film Project

Celebrating the movies our ancestors loved

Tag: Pathe Freres

July 25, 2021

J’Accuse (1919)

Abel Gance took the world cinema scene by storm with this passionate and compelling portrait of the First World War. Although today overshadowed by the fame of his later work (such as “Napoleon”), in the context of this blog it stands out as a century-old example of cinematic innovation and boldness.

The move begins with a credit sequence, built of actuality footage (see below for production details), silhouettes of an officer with a whistle, and the words “J’ACCUSE” spelled out by uniformed men, standing on a field in formation. This is followed by typical introductions to the lead players with intertitles followed by brief close-ups of the actors, but remarkably it begins by showing us the director/screenwriter himself, something not even the egotistical D.W. Griffith had done. Interestingly, the actors frequently are introduced as being affiliated with one or another theater, no doubt legitimating them in the eyes of a more sophisticated audience.

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July 10, 2021

I Fetch the Bread (1907)

This is a short comedy from Pathé Freres that decidedly reminds me of the work I’ve seen that Alice Guy was doing at this time. It is based on a simple gag, taken to improbable, almost surreal, extremes.

I Fetch the Bread

We open on a shot of a bourgeois Paris apartment, with a table set in the center of the screen, a middle-aged couple and their maid is preparing dinner. The door at the back of the set is opened to allow another couple to enter, and after brief greetings are exchanged, people begin to settle in for the meal. Now the hostess goes to a cupboard at the back, and produces a tiny crust of bread – apparently she forgot to make sure there was bread for company! Everyone looks flustered until the man of the house agrees to go out and get some more. We next see him emerge from a bakery with a prodigious loaf of bread. He runs down the street, but stops at a wine bar for a quick nip. After finishing the bottle, he moves on to a restaurant for another drink. His escapades are intercut occasionally with shots of the hungry group at home, waiting for the bread to arrive. Eventually, the male guest agrees to take on the task and get some bread, but he, too, keeps stopping at local watering holes of various description. The editing structure now alternates between the two men and their adventures, with each growing drunker and more incapable as they proceed. Eventually, the two encounter one another, hopelessly inebriated, at an outdoor café. Inevitably, the bread is dropped and trod upon. The two men finally stumble back into the apartment, to be reproved and abused by their wives.

I fetch the Bread1

This movie follows a similar pattern to the chase movies that were common at the time, with a single camera setup for each scene which the actors move through in a predictable pattern, until the final crash comes at the end. In this case, most of the shots are taken from the fronts of businesses, each time set up so that we see little of the street or surrounding buildings, but can plainly see the front door and action immediately behind it. I was a bit surprised at the number of separate camera setups at first, but when compared to a chase like “How a French Nobleman Got A Wife” from this time period, it is not unusual. The editing is somewhat advanced, in that we do cut away from scenes to see simultaneous action and then return to complete the scene, rather than having each shot show the beginning, middle, and end of a scene, something that would be more common in typical chase movies. The joke is a bit strained – evidently it is not safe to send a man out unsupervised to run a simple errand, because he will be too distracted by alcohol – but the movie works because it fulfills the audience’s expectations, including our expectations that the naughty husbands will be punished.

Director: Unknown

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Unknown

Run Time: 5 Min, 11 secs

You can watch it for free: here (no music).

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September 5, 2020

The Dancing Pig (1907)

This very odd offering from Pathé apparently traces its origins to a popular music hall routine that has since earned a place in obscurity. It offers a glimpse into the world of entertainment popular audiences knew long before we were born.

A proscenium-style stage is established, with a small table to one side. In the center stands a very large, anthropomorphic pig – or more precisely, a person in a large pig costume, wearing a top hat and a vest. He bows to the audience a few times and a young girl flounces onto the stage, dancing around the pig and then sitting at the table, putting a box on the table and starting to pull items out, one by one, and set them on the table. The pig shows considerable interest, coming over to look over her shoulder, and she pushes him away. He returns with a handkerchief and kneels before her. She takes the handkerchief and throw it at him to signal refusal. This goes back and forth for a while until she suddenly pulls his vest off. The pig looks embarrassed, as if he is ashamed of being naked on stage, although of course the costume does not include any pig anatomy (and he didn’t have pants in the first place). She dances a jig of triumph and offers the pig one of two batons pulled from offstage, though the pig is busy knocking her box to the floor by grabbing the tablecloth in order to “cover up.” A stagehand removes the table as the pig finally consents to hold the baton. The girl and the pig do an odd little dance with their batons, more or less in time with one another. The dance ends with the girl holding the pig’s tail as they exit the stage. A final shot shows a close up of the pig mask, demonstrating its elaborate articulation, including a fully functional, and rather large, tongue.

I can honestly attest that this is the most impressive animal costume I’ve seen in a century film, and I’ve seen a few of them. In addition to sticking out its tongue, the pig can roll its eyes, pull back its lips in a smile, and wiggle its ears and nose. That’s almost on a level with the famous masks designed for “Planet of the Apes” sixty years later. It was obviously worth the effects budget from the point of view of this Vaudeville performer, whatever it made for the film maker. The question is why go to all that effort for such a bizarre and ultimately simplistic routine? The actual performance, as we see it, takes advantage of none of these abilities, we only see them in the close up, and I suspect that the performer wearing the mask couldn’t really do most of them without pulling his hands out of the arms of the pig, in order to manipulate wires in some other part of the costume, so I wonder how this even played on stage. At all events, the pig is undeniably creepy, at least to modern tastes, and has been described as “nightmare fuel” in at least one other blog. Definitely weird, and maybe only would work in France.

Director: Unknown

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Unknown

Run Time: 2 Min, 24 secs

You can watch it for free: here (no music) or here (with music).

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November 16, 2019

Montmartre’s Kids (1916)

This wartime propaganda film masquerades as a human interest documentary, but it’s easy to see that the action is contrived. It gives us a look at a Parisian neighborhood during World War I, and a sense of what motivated people’s sympathies at the time.

An opening intertitle assures us that the people of Paris are determined to fight on, and that the children of this besieged city are just as affected as are the adults. We then see a group of local kids kitted up to play soldier, with some even dressed as nuns to treat the wounded. One particularly adorable child has a toy cannon, but most are carrying broken buckets and other scrap as “ammunition.” Two kids, using a tin can and an old pipe as a radio, receive “orders” to “bother the concierge” at a particular address. This is duly passed down the line. The troops assemble (the kid with the cannon stumbles cutely several times), and they charge down the hill to the address, where they toss over their junkyard ammunition. This scene is cross-cut with the concierge, wielding a broom, on the other side of the wall being pelted with trash. The kids make a “strategic retreat” across a hill with a windmill, and the nuns treat the “wounded” in the final shots.

Monmartre is a hill in the north of Paris which was home to several famous artists, though here it looks like a poor neighborhood full of street urchins, reminiscent of Bout-de-Zan. The movie is intended to tug at the heart-strings of viewers, getting them to sympathize with France in its suffering under attack by the German Army. By showing kids, genuinely under threat of war, innocently playing at war themselves, the film makers urge right-thinking adults to show courage and stoicism in the face of the attack. From our point of view today, it’s great to see all these images of a Paris neighborhood from over 100 years ago. A lot of the shots of the area the kids play in makes it appear as an undeveloped lot, or perhaps a junkyard, but for them it serves as a city park. The edited sequence of the attack on the concierge, requiring two camera set-ups to show simultaneous action, demonstrates that this is not a spontaneous action the kids are taking, but rather a scripted storyline. Audiences in 1916 may or may not have been sophisticated enough to figure this out.

Director: Francisque Poulbot

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Unknown

Run Time: 3 Min, 50 secs

I have been unable to find this movie for free on the Internet, if you do, please comment.

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September 7, 2019

The Automatic Moving Company (1911)

This short film from Pathé demonstrates considerable skill in animation, as well as a touching imaginative approach that rivals Georges Méliès in the realm of the trick film. It still seems somewhat novel today, and must have been even more so at the time.

The movie begins with a brief glimpse of the only human actor in the whole story. We see a postman approach a door and push a letter through the mail slot. The camera then cuts to the interior of the building, where the letter floats across the room and onto a desk. A letter opener, moving by itself, opens the letter and an insert shot shows it to us. A client has written to the “Automatic Moving Company” to request a move, including a new address. A ledger book opens itself and a pen makes a notation. We now cut to a gate, from which a moving cart emerges, with no horses to pull it. It pulls in up to a door, and a series of furniture extracts itself and moves into the door. We follow the furniture up the stairs and into a bedroom, where the bed constructs itself and various pieces of furniture arrange themselves in appropriate positions in the room. Moving crates come in and pictures, linens, and clothing all emerge and tidily put themselves into place. This continues as we see a dining room put itself together, and a kitchen, including anew stove, sets itself up. When one plate falls to the ground and breaks, a broom and dustpan move into position and clean it up. One side table seems to tease a lamp, moving from one side of a table to another until it finally allows the lamp to climb on top and then takes up a position. At the end, one of the moving trunks hides under a table until a large trunk comes and pulls it out with a rope. They stop on the stairs and retreat, allowing the piano to come in, before departing the scene. We see all of the moving trunks load themselves back onto the back of the cart, the doors to the cart close, and it pulls away, the job now complete.

Most of this movie is in wide shot, allowing us to see the entire room, but a couple of insert shots give us a closer view of details, and this allows us to see that the moving objects are in fact miniatures, presumably moving about miniaturized sets on the scale of a doll house. Nevertheless, the illusion is mostly very convincing, and considering the amount of work that had to go into stop motion animation at the time, it was an impressive investment for a small film that was only expected a brief theatrical run before oblivion. Interestingly, the letter indicates that the client lives in “Kalamazoo, Mich,” although everything about the movie looks French, including the moving cart which clearly has French words on it, and appears to be from Nice. Possibly America was associated with modernity and high-technology, or possibly the name “Kalamazoo” sounded exotic to the film makers, and therefore magical. I particularly liked the way certain objects were invested with personality, like the playful side table and the reluctant moving trunk.

Director: Romeo Bosetti

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Unknown (mostly animated objects)

Run Time: 4 Min, 45 secs

You can watch it for free: here.

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September 1, 2019

An Excursion to the Moon (1908)

This movie is an unabashed remake of Georges Méliès beloved classic “A Trip to the Moon,” although with a shorter run time and a smaller cast and (evidently) budget. It nonetheless does preserve bits of Segundo de Chomón’s signature wit and gentle charm.

The movie consists of a series of discrete shots, each set up as a tableau within a proscenium-style stage area. The first shot shows a group of “scientists” or explorers, is a garden at night, the moon hanging overhead. One, who is kitted out in a classic wizard’s robe and cap, lectures at them and gestures to the moon. The others appear skeptical at his message. However, they follow him off stage after a bit of pantomime. The next shot shows the wizard/scientist’s observatory, with a large telescope in the background. The wizard shows his fellows the elaborate equations he has worked out on the chalkboard, then turns the chalkboard over to reveal a screen on which an animated image of a capsule flying between Earth and Moon appears. The others appear to congratulate him, and then follow him off this stage to the next scene.

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July 24, 2019

Kiriki, Japanese Acrobats (1907)

This short movie by Segundo de Chomón demonstrates his easy facility with the trick film. While much of his work is compared to (or even confused with) that of Georges Méliès, I can honestly say I’ve not seen another movie that looks like this one.

A group of actors walks out onto a bare stage with a black background with a bamboo frame around the sides and top. They are a mixed-age and –gender group, all wearing Japanese-style clothing and imitative hairstyles (the men and boys have shaved “bald wigs” on to represent a chonmage). An edit brings them to about the point of a mid-shot so you can get a look at them, then the camera cuts and they begin their act, climbing on top of one another, and sometimes using poles to hold each other up. The end result is usually a symmetrical pattern of human bodies in an apparently impossible position. How was it done?

I was able to spot the trick in his trick film right away, but I’m not sure how obvious it would have been to an audience in 1907. After the edit, we are not actually looking at people standing on a stage anymore, but rather at people lying on their backs with the camera positioned above them, and they pretend to be “climbing” each other when they are really rolling/crawling on the floor. One of the reasons for the simple stage decoration was that it made it easier to match the two shots so that the audience wouldn’t notice the difference. Camera angles were still a fairly new concept in 1907, and audiences were accustomed to static cameras using proscenium-style framing to establish a stage for all of the action to take place in, so this might have seemed quite impressive, even if it is a somewhat simplistic, plotless film for the Nickelodeon Era.

Director: Segundo de Chomón

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Unknown

Run Time: 2 Min, 30 secs

You can watch it for free: here.

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July 21, 2019

The Talion Punishment (1906)

This short fantasy film from Pathé shows the definite influence of Georges Méliès, but is especially interesting because of the innovative color process used. No doubt it was a thrill for audiences of the time.

The movie begins on a stage dressed as a forest, with colorful flowers and trees placed about the set. Two young women in shorts are holding butterfly nets and examining the trees for insects, and a male butterfly collector enters reading a book and carrying a net and other gear. He hands each of them some lunch from his basket, then goes on about chasing insects, exiting the stage. A couple of slightly-oversized butterflies swoop around, evidently on strings, settling on flowers, but when the girls try to catch them, they suddenly turn into fairy-women in costumes with wings and bare legs. The fairy women lead the girls off stage and two gigantic green crickets hop on stage, also apparently moved by invisible strings from over head. The girls return, but now the human women have been transformed into insect fairies as well – one is a bee, the other might be a dragonfly. They dance with the butterfly fairies, exiting when the male lepidopterist returns. He is holding a (normal-sized) butterfly in his hand triumphantly. He sets down his gear and takes out a magnifying glass, to examine his prize. The film cuts to a close-up, framed in a circle like that of the glass, on a fabric reproduction of a butterfly, beautifully colored. Several more of these follow, each one flapping its wings helplessly under the glass.

Now the two giant crickets return, and they turn into women in cricket costumes (bare legs again), and each seizes the man by an arm. The other insect women return and the dragonfly-girl accuses him, pointing at all of the gear strewn about the forest. They all form a conga line, with him in the front, and dance off stage. The scene now cuts to a stage dressed as a cave, a bust of Pan or Satan to one side, and a new insect fairy takes up a station behind a rock like a judge’s bench. The man is thrown to the floor and the fairy women all point to him in accusation. His gear is displayed and the judge fairy hands one of the cricket women a large pin. A large toadstool is brought out and the man is made to lie on his back on top of it. The cricket woman hammers the pin through his stomach and the camera angle changes to show him from above, penetrated by the pin and flapping his arms helplessly like the butterflies. The scene goes back to the stage view again and the judge fairy signals for mercy. The pin is removed, and the man is released, still holding his stomach from the pain. He snaps his butterfly net in two, signaling that he has learned his lesson. He and the two girls (now human again) are led away and the fairies cause the remaining gear to burst into flames, then create a colorful tableau for the camera.

The color process used here was stencil-color, which Pathé-Freres introduced a few years before. Instead of hand-coloring each frame (as Méliès did), they used a stencil for each frame to block out the colors and then effectively silk-screened the film strips at high speed. It still sounds like a lot of work, and isn’t perfect – I noticed that the giant pin changed color as it moved past the colored parts of the background, for example. Still, it does allow for better consistency than I’ve seen in most hand-painted films, and this example is quite lovely. The use of editing to show different camera angles is reasonably sophisticated for 1906. The real surprise of the film, however, is the graphic nature of the punishment the man endures. Although he survives, it struck me as pretty strong stuff for a movie no doubt targeting children, and it suggests that the filmmakers really did find butterfly collecting a bit sadistic and wanted to condemn it.

Director: Gaston Velle

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Fernand Rivers

Run Time: 4 Min, 13 secs

You can watch it for free: here.

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June 29, 2019

Max Plays at Drama (1913)

Another comedy short from Max Linder in which he aspires to something, only to fail spectacularly, and humorously, to achieve it. This time, the humor relies on editing, which is an interesting new feature.

We see Max in a small circle of friends (2 men, 3 women). He is holding forth or reciting for their amusement, and they all laugh and applaud appreciatively, but apparently Max was attempting to be serious. He tells them they should come see him in his new dramatic play, and writes them out an invitation. The scene now cuts to Max, in period dress, standing on a small stage. He gives a bow and begins to perform. The sequence is cross-cut between him and the audience, where his friends are seen prominently sitting in the first two rows. At first, his performance is drawing applause, but in the middle of a scene in which he is professing love over the telephone, a woman comes on stage and yells at him, flustering him so that the apparatus is caught in the curls of his long wig. This draws laughs rather than applause. The story develops such that the two women fight a duel over Max, which is handled in deliberately formalized manner with fencing foils. The one who yelled at Max is victorious, stabbing the other (presumably the recipient of the phone call) with her sword. Max now runs on stage, his wig still quite frazzled, and threatens her with his sword, which he cannot pull from its sheath. She runs off stage anyway, and Max kneels to lament the loss of his love. Unfortunately, his wig keeps falling over his face, drawing more laughter, so he takes it off to give his final soliloquy. As he does, the audience is shown to be looking increasingly concerned, even horrified, by the action on stage. Finally, in a reversal of “Romeo and Juliet,” Max pulls poison from his pocket and drinks it, giving his final words as he dramatically dies. As soon as he has fallen across the body of the dead woman, he leaps up and runs to the front of the stage to receive his applause, but when the cut comes we see the entire audience has fallen asleep. Max does not appear alarmed, and he quickly goes off stage and comes back with a fire hose, which he turns on, spraying the audience and letting them know what he thinks of their performance.

Most of this movie depends on the cross-cutting from stage to audience. Because it’s a silent film, we can’t gauge how good or bad Max’s performance is, so we need the reaction shots to understand how the story is progressing. This also adds a bit of suspense to the denouement, because the last we saw, everyone seemed to be rapt with attention, but at the very end we learn that Max has gone on too long and everyone fell asleep. I don’t recall another of Linder’s movies that relies so heavily on reactions and cutting, so that makes this one a special case. Otherwise, it’s fairly typical of the structure of many of the Linders I’ve reviewed in recent months – Max is sure at first that he will be able to do something, then learns to his chagrin that it isn’t as easy as it looks, and his reactions as the pressure mounts are increasingly desperate. Max’s natural charm makes watching him fail at something a surprisingly delightful experience.

Director: Lucien Nonguet

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Max Linder

Run Time: 6 Min, 11 secs

You can watch it for free: here.

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June 22, 2019

Max and His Dog (1912)

This short movie from Max Linder shows him in a close relationship with an animal, and less successfully with a human. It seems to have been a fairly cheap production, compared with some of the ones I’ve reviewed recently, but it has an interesting structure.

An intertitle tells us that Hanni (Jane Renouart) has two suitors, but can’t make up her mind, and a scene (the longest of the movie) establishes this by showing her standing between Max Linder and another man (Henri Bosc). Each one tries to woo her, but each time he seems to be making progress, the other interrupts. Finally, she hits upon the expedient of having the draw straws. Max wins, and another intertitle tells us that they are married, but soon she has second thoughts. We see Max discover her writing a love note, but she claims it is for him. His suspicions are aroused, however, so he calls in his dog, “Dick.” The dog seems to want to follow Max, but Max finally persuades it to stay on guard. When Henri comes in and goes into the bedroom with Jane, Dick springs into action. He goes over to the phone and pulls it off the hook with his teeth, then barks into the receiver. We see Max, at his office, pick up the phone and appear surprised, and Max and the dog are briefly intercut, then a shot of a rainy Paris street appears to stand in for Max’s hurried flight home. Max enters the bedroom and catches the illicit lovers sitting at the end of the bed, fully clothed, but obviously becoming intimate. It appears Max will fly into a rage, but he restrains himself and gives a pitying smile as he calls in the dog, who brings in a suitcase.* Hanni pulls out a hat from the suitcase and puts it on, sadly leaving her once happy home in shame. A final shot shows Max sharing coffee with Dick, his only true friend in the world.

For once, Max is not the big loser in one of his movies, although he is cuckolded and winds up losing the girl. Still, the end seems to imply a kind of affection and a self-sufficiency far beyond what he demonstrates in “Troubles of a Grasswidower.” On the other hand, seeing him get the upper hand in the situation really isn’t as funny as his usual failures. The movie consists of just a few camera set ups on small sets, and I almost wonder if it wasn’t an effort to save money so that some of the bigger location films could be made with the profits from other Linder work. They probably had a rapid schedule of putting these out and had to maintain that schedule to keep exhibitors happy. What stands out about it, though, is the close-ups on the dog using the telephone, and the interesting editing of the telephone sequence. On closer inspection, the “rainy Paris street” scene I described seems has something going on on either side of the screen – it is a Feuillade-style split screen with the dog and Max talking on the phone on either side. As such, it represents Pathé adopting a convention of “film grammar” from Gaumont, making for a specifically French cinematic trope. At any rate, this is the one part of the movie that deviates from extremely conventional Nickelodeon-era shooting and editing, and is what makes this movie worth checking out.

*= I consulted the book “Max Linder: Father of Film Comedy” by Snorre Smári Mathiesen for this review, and the marked sentence is paraphrased from his description of the film.

Director: René Leprince, Max Linder

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Max Linder, Jane Renouart, Henri Bosc

Run Time: 8 Min

You can watch it for free: here.

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