The Child of Paris (1913)

Originally posted to Facebook on 3/7/2016

On Sunday we continued our chronological movie watching, and saw our first film from 1913: The Child of Paris. This was also what I would consider our first real feature film, though by some accounts the film we saw two weeks ago, Richard III, was a feature film because it had five reels. A Child of Paris, though, was a full two hours, more than twice as long as Richard III, and certainly a feature film by any definition.

This movie was directed by Léonce Perret, who also directed last week’s The Mystery of the Kador Cliffs. The two movies had a few cast members in common, and I believe a set was re-used as well. The plot involved a little girl whose father is called away to military service and later reported dead. Her mother then dies, and her uncle, with whom she’d been living, is called away to military service as well. She’s sent to a boarding school, where she is treated poorly, and from which she runs away. While we were watching, I mentioned the similarities to A Little Princess, and Ben mentioned Oliver Twist as an antecedent as well.

I can’t say this was the most engaging movie I’ve ever seen, but it held my interest. From a movie making perspective, there were a number of camera pans, including from one room to an adjacent room. Also, although there were no close-ups that I recall -- except of written letters -- there were some cuts from long shots to medium shots, which I don’t recall seeing before. Another interesting note was that the movie unselfconsciously depicts 1913 as a time when horse-carriages and cars seem to coexist. Cabs are hailed periodically, sometimes automobiles and sometimes horse-drawn carriages, and the characters take no real note of the difference.

Next week we watch our second film from 1913, Traffic in Souls. As always, the link to our list of planned films is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT