Yesterday Ben, Alli, and I watched our second week of chronological movies. This week we finished up the 19th century, watching eight movies from 1899 and 1900. They were:
A Kiss in the Tunnel
King John
The Devil in the Convent
Cinderella
Sherlock Holmes Baffled
Cyrano de Bergerac
The One-Man Band
Joan of Arc
The shortest was Sherlock Holmes Baffled, at less than a minute, and the longest was Joan of Arc, at more than ten minutes. It seemed like the kids' favorite was Cinderella. One of them said it was the closest thing to a real movie we'd seen, by which I think they meant it had a recognizable plot with a beginning, middle, and end. I think that was aided by the fact that they already knew the story, and so were able to follow what was happening fairly easily. Joan of Arc also had a recognizable plot, but I don't think they knew her story as well, and so it was a little harder for them to connect the dots. Another problem with Joan of Arc was that the DVD it was on had a recent audio track (that I couldn't figure out how to disable) which narrated the action, and commented on its production. Both of those two films (and A Kiss in the Tunnel as well) had multiple scenes, which I don't believe was true of any of the films from last week. Of course, each of the scenes in the Méliès films was still completely static, shot from the front as though it were a scene from a play. A Kiss in the Tunnel had a moving camera -- the only film we've seen so far for which that is true. However the camera was not moving with any directed intent -- it was just attached to the front of a train, and showed the train entering a tunnel in one scene and leaving the tunnel in another.
Of the other films, Cyrano de Bergerac was noteworthy because it was a film with full, synchronized sound, including actors talking to one another (albeit in French). This was the first film of this sort we've seen, and maybe the last until we reach the late 1920s. The sound had been recorded at the same time as the action, but since, as I understand it, they didn't have a reliable way to sync the sound to the projected film, they were unable to present the films commercially. Today, of course, we have the technology to re-align the sound and the film, which is why we can watch it the same way we watch sound films recorded decades later.
Next week we'll tackle 1901 and 1902, including maybe the most iconic film of this early period, A Trip to the Moon. I've updated the movie viewing plan to include films through 1911. The link is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT
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