Movies 1903 - 1904

Originally posted to Facebook on 1/16/2016

Friday night we watched films from 1903 and 1904.

Life of an American Fireman
The Great Train Robbery
Alice in Wonderland
Fairyland: A Kingdom of Fairies
An Interesting Story
The Mermaid
The Living Playing Cards
The Voyage Across the Impossible

I believe we have now reached peak Méliès, with five films last week, and four this week, but decreasing numbers in the weeks ahead. In a way this is too bad, because so far his films have been the most consistently entertaining and professional. But it also became clear that he had a certain stage-bound style, though of course the sets changed much more rapidly than on a stage, and he also deploys a certain repertoire of camera tricks. But, by contrast, the other four films we saw this week all have scenes shot outside, and in many cases scenes that are shot at an angle to the action. The Great Train Robbery even had shots from the top of a moving train. We also saw our first title cards in Alice in Wonderland, but they still do not appear to be very common. Most of the films this week, excepting only The Mermaid and The Living Playing Cards, had a connected multi-scene narrative, and the number of scenes per film is continuing to grow from previous weeks. Life of an American Fireman had an interesting pair of sequences, the first of which was a fireman rescuing a woman and a small child from the interior of a burning house, followed by a sequence showing the exact same set of actions from the outside -- including the fireman climbing up and down a ladder. (The firetrucks were all pulled by horses, by the way, which the kids found striking.) The Voyage Across the Impossible was a full twenty minutes, the longest film we've seen to date, and, looking ahead, the longest we'll see for several more weeks. It irritatingly had narration on the audio track, which we finally muted. (Ben was more irritated than me. "This is vandalism!" he said.) A Kingdom of Fairies was almost as long, at sixteen minutes. Overall, the total length of all eight films was 75 minutes this week, compared to 53 last week, and even less on previous weeks.

Next week we move on to 1905 and 1906. The link to our viewing plan is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT