Movies 1905 - 1906

Originally posted to Facebook on 1/25/2016

This week we we watched films from 1905 and 1906. The films were:

The Black Imp
The Kleptomaniac
The Nihilist
The Night Before Christmas
Dream of a Rarebit Fiend
Aladdin and His Wonder Lamp
The 400 Tricks of the Devil
The Story of the Kelly Gang

The length of the films continue to grow, and for that reason we split the viewing into two nights, watching the 1905 films on Friday, and the 1906 ones on Sunday. The films took a cumulative 84 minutes this week, compared to 75 minutes last week. We are well and truly on the Méliès downslope at this point. Only two films this week were his, while three were from Edwin Porter, at Edison. The main plot of both Méliès films (The Black Imp and The 400 Tricks of the Devil) involved supernatural forces tormenting people using the evil power of camera tricks. (This has been the plot of a lot of the Méliès films we've seen, and Alli even commented, "He uses the devil a lot.") The Black Imp was the only film this week less than five minutes, and the only film that had just a single set. The 400 Tricks of the Devil was, by contrast, quite long at 17 minutes, and involved many sets, and many things disappearing and re-appearing, and a weird flying skeletal horse, and a lot of other confusing craziness. As has happened a couple of times, there was a recently created audio narration on the DVD which might have explained more of what was going on had we not muted it.

Of the other films, Aladdin and His Wonder Lamp was quite Méliès-like, with lots of camera tricks and painted sets. It also appeared to have the first moving camera proper that we've seen, though it was just a shift from a set on the left to a set immediately adjacent to it, and then a shift back. It also had a coherent and recognizable plot, particularly to anyone who's seen the 1992 version of Aladdin several hundred times. Of the Edison films, the strangest was Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, which involved a fantastical drunken dream of the title character. Based on Wikipedia it was based on a bizarre contemporary comic strip which every week showed the disturbing dreams of someone who had eaten too much rarebit. (I believe I have only had rarebit once, and can report no memorable dreams as a result. But I suppose eating it only once does not qualify me as a fiend.)

The last film we watched was The Story of the Kelly Gang, an Australian film for which I could only find an Australian DVD, so we had to watch it downstairs on a region-free DVD player. It was 18 minutes long, but was apparently only a portion of one of the first truly feature length films, the majority of which has now been lost. The 18-minute version we saw seemed to tell a coherent enough story, though, so I'm not sure where the other forty minutes would have fit.

Next week we move on to 1907 and 1908. The link, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT