Alkali Ike’s Auto
R: Gilbert M. Anderson. B: Gilbert M. Anderson. D: Augustus Carney, Harry Todd, Margaret Joslin. P: Essanay Film Manufacturing Company. USA 1911

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“The movie as a whole is pretty typical of the pre-Keystone comedies of the time. We get no close-ups on anyone, relying on broad physical gestures and costume to tell us what we need to know about character and motivation. Editing is limited, usually just linking one sequence to the next rather than allowing for intercutting between scenes, and the slapstick action is mostly tame by comparison to a Keystone movie.”
Century Film Project

“Augustus Carney (1870-1920) was one of silent comedy’s first stars, whose heyday was essentially of the pre-Chaplin era. Originating in British music halls and American vaudeville, he found his way to Essanay Studios in 1910. After a couple of random starts he was partnered with Victor Postel as ‘Hank’ in the Hank and Lank series. These were popular, but it was the following year that he struck it really big as the character Alkali Ike on a series of western themed comedies set in the fictional town of Snakeville. He became such a star that crowds mobbed him wherever he met, and Alkali Ike dolls were popular with children.
When Essanay refused his demands for a salary increase in 1912, he went over to Universal, where he got more money and became known by the less catchy name of ‘Universal Ike’. Paired with director Harry Edwards (later famous for his work with Harry Langdon), Carney became tempermental and developed a reputation for being difficult to work with. He stormed out of Universal in 1914, assuming a star of his caliber would easily be hired elsewhere. He wasn’t. He struggled along in small parts for another year or two, and then closed the book.”
Travalanche

>>> Gilbert M. Anderson on this site: Broncho Billy – The American Shot

Zozor ruine la réputation de sa famille (He Ruins His Family’s Reputation)
R: Émile Cohl. B: George McManus (comic strip ‘The Newlyweds’). P: Eclair American. USA 1912
Print: La cinémathèque française

“And now our funny little friend, Snookums, has started real trouble for his poor Dada. A few of the neighbors and Dada were having a nice quiet little game when the door-bell rang and when Snookums’ beautiful mother went to the door, she found the minister. Well, the “gang” made a hurried attempt to hide things, and the chips, cards, etc., were stuffed under the couch, before the Reverend Sir was admitted. Dada and his friends then tried to keep the minister’s attention concentrated on other things, and planned to get rid of him before he suspected anything. But poor little Snookums was rather inquisitive about this hurried hiding of those nice little chips and so he secured the minister’s hat and proceeded to dig out the chips from under the couch and fill the hat with them. When the minister finally decided to go, to the great relief of everyone, the big scandal came out. When he lifted his high hat to place it on his head, there was a shower of little white, blue and red “chips” …”
Moving Picture World synopsis
IMDb

“Zozor ruine la réputation de sa famille (…) provides a glimpse into how some of Cohl‘s American animation sought to bridge his own disjointed fantasy with the more linear, narrative comic strip traditions of the United States market. (…) One of the most striking aspects in the film is the dominance of dialogue over motion. Many of the frames are nearly covered with words, as if a static frame from a McManus comic strip, while a animated motion comes in bits and pieces between the important statements. It is as if the blank space between comic strip panels were replaced by tiny, moving cartoons.”
Richard Neupert: French Animation History. John Wiley & Sons 2011

>>> Émile Cohl – the Pathé Period

Romeo e Giulietta
R: Ugo Falena. B: Augusto Genina, based on the play by William Shakespeare. D: Gustavo Serena, Francesca Bertini, Ferruccio Garavaglia. P: Film d’Arte Italiana / Pathé Frères. It 1912
Dutch titles

“Film d’Art and Film d’Arte Italiana were independent producers that had contracted for Pathé to serve as the ‘editeurs‘ whose duties included colouring the release prints. The aesthetic characteristics associated with these prints – the precise matching of colour and image shape and the restrained, muted hues – allowed Pathé to stress in its advertising the ‘realism’ of its stencilled films and thus compete with Kinemacolor and potentially other photochemical colour systems.”
Marta Braun, Charles Keil, Rob King e.a.: Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema. Indiana University Press 2012, p. 197

>>> more Shakespeare adaptions on this site: Film d’Arte Italiana

>>> Ugo Falena: Salomé, 1910

The Watermelon Patch
R: Wallace McCutcheon, Edwin S. Porter. P: Edison Manufacturing Company. USA 1905

“Porter, like other filmmakers of the pre-1908 period, often portrayed outlaws who threaten society as members of fringe or outcast groups, with such characterization serving as motivation for their illegal activities. This is the case with the racial humor and black stereotyping in Porter and McCutcheon‘s The Watermelon Patch (October 1905). Their happy-go-lucky thieves (…) are comedic counterparts to the ruthless, scheming lovers of white women in The Clansman. The Watermelon Patch begins as an absurdist comedy: a number of ‘darkies’ steal  watermelons and flee, pursued by redneck farmers dressed in skeleton costumes. Losing their pursuers, the darkies reach their destination, where they dance andenjoy their  watermelon until the rednecks arrive. When the whites board up the exits and seal the chimney, the darkies are soon covered with soot, another racial ‘joke’. (In 1905 many Negro performers still went on stage in black face—as did white actors impersonating blacks. This joke played with the ‘childish’ belief that black skin is black because it is covered with soot.)

In the film’s last three shots, Porter alternated exterior and interior scenes using an editorial construction similar to the ending of Life of an American Fireman . After showing the rednecks sealing the chimney, Porter cut to the interior, where the ‘darkies’ hear the intruders, grow quiet, and slowly feel the ill-effects of the smoke. Realizing what is happening, they make their escape. The final shot, once again of the exterior, returns to the moment when the darkies begin to make their escape. It shows them coming out of the house and receiving the blows of the amused rednecks. What is fascinating, both cinematically and perhaps as an example of unconscious racism, is the contrast between the exterior scenes in which the handful of rednecks dwarf the tiny shack and the interior scenes in which the shack comfortably holds twenty ‘darkies’—reducing them to the size of pygmies.
The Watermelon Patch is as revealing of the state of American cinema in 1905 as it is of American racism.”
Charles Musser: Before the Nickelodeon. Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley / Los Angeles / Oxford 1991, p. 312 f.

>>> Life of an American Fireman on this site: Edwin S. Porter: Blockbuster for Edison

La maschera pietosa
D: Alfredo Bertone, Erna Hornak, Anna Lazzarini. P: Società Anonima Ambrosio Torino. It 1914
Print: Nederlands Film Museum / Jean Desmet collection
Dutch titles

“Marcel (Alfredo Bertone) is an artist who is neglecting his wife Julia (Anna Lazzarini) in favour of their younger neighbour Lucy (Erna Hornak) who lives with her elderly mother (Annetta Ripamonti). The carnival is coming to Turin and Marcel asks Lucy to accompany him which she does dressed as a Pierrot. There are superb scenes of the carnival. (…) Julia is distraught and all the more so when she sees the couple sneak out again for more fun. There’s a particularly effective shot of Marcel and Lucy high on a merry-go-round, the thronging masses of old Turin far below reminding you of how advanced pre-War Italian and Turinese cinema was. But tragedy is about to strike as Julia hears Lucy’s mother fall ill. Realising that she is near death she dresses herself as a Pierrot so that she can be Lucy tending to her mother’s final moments – she need not die alone. Lucy and Marcel return to find Julia at the bedside saying prayers having lit candles in tribute to the dead. In the midst of this selfless act Lucy returns Marcel to his wife and the couple leave in unity as the young woman cries for her loss…”
ithankyou

Doch kuptsa Bashkirova / Drama na Volge (Frgm.)
(The Merchant Bashkirov’s Daughter / A Drama on the Volga)
R: Nikolai Larin. B: Nikolai Larin. K: Ianis Dored. P: Grigorii Libken. RUS 1913
Engl. subtitles

“Produced by a small provincial film company in 1913, this movie was quickly purchased by the Pathé Frères Company, which maintained an office in Moscow. Supposedly based on a true story, the plot had been staged for the theatre in 1894 as ‘The Murderess: The Merchant Osipov’s Daughter’. A merchant family named Bashkirov objected to the film’s title, prompting it to be distributed as Drama on the Volga. The thematic intertwining of the conflicts between generation and gender keeps this movie fresh today as a window to the past. Costumes code the class structure: the patriarchal merchants in their caftans wear beards and part their long hair down the middle, in sharp contrast to the stylish Egorov. The mother is also particularly interesting, as she tries to help her daughter despite her inability to challenge her husband’s authority. The peasant-rapist contradicts any possible nostalgia for the provincial sublime, despite several evocative outdoor shots of the river. Nor does he inspire socialist sympathies, reminding viewers instead of the visceral and brutal anger that fuelled many from the underclasses. Politics aside, this film also fits into the growing popularity of cinematic violence. Natalia’s collapse into a hysterical fit in the last scene was at the time also becoming a familiar trope of feminine frustration. Director Larin did not move far professionally after this in Russian cinema; his last known film was The Father-in-Law Killer and Nastia, the Beauty (Svekor-dushegub i krasotka Nastia, 1916), based on a novel by Aleksei Pazukhin, one of the most prolific writers of serialized sensational novels published in the tabloid press. After emigrating in 1920, Larin continued as a filmmaker in Bulgaria and Germany.”
Louise McReynolds
worldcinemadirectory

“Merchant Bashkirov’s Daughter offers a remarkable insight into the sociology of the early Russian cinema industry. For Libken based his first production closely on an actual murder scandal — apparently with the intention of blackmailing the Bashkirov family! Whether they paid up or threatened legal action, the result was a solemn announcement in the trade press that the film would be released under the less specific title, Drama on the Volga, ‘because the heroine’s surname is identical to that of some well-known merchants in a certain town on the Volga — by sheer coincidence of course.'”
Milestone Films
Early Russian Cinema, Volume 4: Provincial Variations

The Aerial Submarine
R: Walter R. Booth. P: Kineto Films. UK 1910
Print: BFI

“Walter R. Booth, born in Worcester on 12 July 1869, was a porcelain painter and an amateur magician, who joined the magic company at the Egyptian Hall in London in the 1890s. Booth became a producer of trick films for Robert Paul in 1899. In 1906, Booth moved to the Charles Urban Trading Company. He established his own studio in his garden at Isleworth, London, with Harold Bastick as his cameraman. Notable among the films produced there were the first British animated film, The Hand of the Artist (1906), The Sorcerer’s Scissors (1907) and When the Devil Drives (1907). His invasion fantasies, such as The Airship Destroyer (1909) and The Aerial Submarine (1910), are entertaining proto-science fiction fables in the Jules Verne mould.”
Cinematograph Magic

The Automatic Motorist
R: Walter R. Booth. P: Kineto Films. UK 1911
Print: BFI

“A bride, a motorcar, a robot chauffeur and a policeman – what could possibly go wrong? Fantasy and ‘trick’ film pioneer W.R. Booth uses cut-out animation and models to create a truly out-of-this-world sci-fi adventure. The mad-cap plot sees a newlywed couple transported from a country lane to outer-space (via St Paul’s Cathedral), where the policeman encounters some pretty feisty Saturnians…
W.R. Booth was a stage magician turned filmmaker, whose hand-drawing techniques pointed the way towards animated cartoons. His taste for fantastical imagery and Jules Verne-style journeys echoes the work of fellow illusionist Georges Méliès: the grinning moon in The Automatic Motorist is a definite nod to Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902).”
Player BFI

>>> The Airship Destroyer on this site: 1909: The Aerial Warfare To Come

>>> The Obsessions of Walter Booth

The Home Electrical
P: General Electric Company / Photographic Section. USA 1915
Print: Library of Congress / Prelinger Archive and Museum of Innovation and Science

“The Museum of Innovation and Science in New York has a pretty vast online archive of historical industrial films. Many of these films were made by GE to introduce their customers to their new products. This one is almost 100 years old was used to introduce the concept of having electrical appliances in the home – an idea that was very cutting edge at the time. Electrical appliances, while modern marvels, were sort of scary to folks back then. So GE makes a point of showing how safe these machines were.”
W.L. May Company Blog

“During 1889, Thomas Edison had business interests in many electricity-related companies: Edison Lamp Company, a lamp manufacturer in East Newark, New Jersey; Edison Machine Works, a manufacturer of dynamos and large electric motors in Schenectady, New York; Bergmann & Company, a manufacturer of electric lighting fixtures, sockets, and other electric lighting devices; and Edison Electric Light Company, the patent-holding company and the financial arm backed by J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt family for Edison’s lighting experiments. In 1889, Drexel, Morgan & Co., a company founded by J.P. Morgan and Anthony J. Drexel, financed Edison’s research and helped merge those companies under one corporation to form Edison General Electric Company which was incorporated in New York on April 24, 1889. The new company also acquired Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Company in the same year.
At about the same time, Charles Coffin, leading the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, acquired a number of competitors and gained access to their key patents. General Electric was formed through the 1892 merger of Edison General Electric Company of Schenectady, New York, and Thomson-Houston Electric Company of Lynn, Massachusetts, with the support of Drexel, Morgan & Co.”
Wikipedia