Le fils du pêcheur
R: Camille de Morlhon. P: Pathé Frères. Fr 1910

“Given the late date of this movie, it’s interesting to see the basic shots of early actualities edited and reshaped into a narrative.”
IMDb (boblipton)

La petite rosse
R: Camille de Morlhon. B: Camille de Morlhon. D: Max Linder, Arlette d’Umès. P: Pathé Frères. Fr 1909

“Early in 1909 (…) Linder found himself the beneficiary of two propititious events. At the end of 1908, a new Italian company, Itala Film, had lured Deed away from Pathé, thus depriving the studio of its premier comic series. Shortly thereafter, Gasnier returned from Italy with plans to star Linder in a series of his own. Having lost both Gréhan and Deed, Pathé was understandably receptive to the idea. In the films that followed, Linder, though still playing different characters from film to film, found a pattern for comic business in which, as Robinson has observed, the humor sprang from the clash between his character’s affected self-confidence and his social and romantic ineptitude. In La Petite rosse, for example, Max’s foppish young man is courting an athletic woman who sets him a test before she will agree to marry him: he must learn to juggle three balls. After eight days of clumsy practice, he resorts to cheating by hiring a professional juggler to perform the feat for him. He arranges to demonstrate his newly acquired skill from behind a screen, but both audience and girl quickly figure out that the juggler’s arms extending from the side of the screen don’t belong to Max.”
cinemathequefroncaise

Une excursion incohérente
R: Segundo de Chomón / Camille de Morlhon. B: Camille de Morlhon. P: Pathé Frères. Fr 1909

“This late version of Melies‘ The Haunted Inn was the product of Segundo de Chomon and Camille de Morlhon – with, I suspect, the stop-motion animation of Emile Cohl.”
IMDb (boblipton)

“An aristocratic couple go on a trip. They stop to eat, but insects and other animals emerge from their picnic. It starts to rain and they take shelter in a house that turns out to be haunted and where all kinds of monsters lurk to terrorise the pair. A film made during Chomón’s time at Pathé (1905-1910) with sequences that demonstrate his use and mastery of the stop-motion or frame-by-frame filming technique in the animation of the objects, which is employed to work in parallel to the narrative.”
European Film Gateway

“At the time the model for upsetting such a bourgeois picnic was Manet’s ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’, a painting that shocked contemporaries. I think this is the tradition director Segundo de Chomón is working in, inspired by the revolution in painting that led up to surrealism, which was in turn a movement that had a natural affinity for film. (…) While the surrealists understood that the sleep of reason could bring forth monsters, we don’t often think of surrealism as horror. A razor blade cutting through an eyeball is shocking gore, even by today’s standards, but Un Chien Andalou isn’t a movie that fits into any subsequent horror conventions.
Panicky Picnic (or, more midly, Une Excursion Incohérente) presents itself as a lark, but we can clearly see the outlines of where horror movies would be going. The picnic brings to mind all kinds of rotten feasts. The inn might be our cabin in the woods. The spirits raised in the kitchen recall the labs of various shady wizards, going all the way back to the original film Frankenstein rising from an alchemist’s vat. The shadow play in the bedroom might lead us to think of Suspiria, to take just one later example.”
Alex Good
Alex on Film

Edouard Manet: Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863

>>> Biography Camille de Morlhon (1869-1952) (French)

Zapatas Bande (Fragment)
R: Urban Gad. B: Urban Gad. K: Axel Graatkjaer, Guido Seeber, Karl Freund. D: Asta Nielsen, Fred Immler, Senta Eichstaedt, Adele Reuter-Eichberg, Mary Scheller, Hans Lanser-Rudolf, Carl Dibbern, Max Agerty, Ernst Körner, Erich Harden. P: Projektions Aktiengesellschaft Union-Film (PAGU). D 1914
Dutch intertitles

Print of the complete film is temporarily not available

“Nielsen was recruited to work in the German film industry, where she soon became one of the most successful and aggressively marketed film stars of the period. (…) In an era when actors and actresses were rarely credited on-screen for their roles, Nielsen’s global fame and the commercial success of her films gave her the necessary leverage to demand an active role in the production of her own films. In the summer of 1911, Austrian film distributor Christoph Mülleneisen orchestrated an agreement among several German film production companies, including Paul Davidson’s Projektions-AG Union (PAGU) and Carl Schleussner’s Deutsche Bioscop, to establish a new monopoly distribution company, Internationale Film-Vertriebs-GmbH, based in Vienna and headed by Davidson, which would distribute thirty-two Asta-Nielsen films over the next four years. Historian Andreas Hansert documents that Nielsen agreed, in exchange for an annual salary of 80,000 German marks, 33.3% of the revenues generated by her films, full artistic freedom in choosing her screenplays, costumes, and supporting actors, and, perhaps most importantly, the right to be directed exclusively by her soon-to-be husband Gad. As a result of these favourable contractual terms, Nielsen was able to be intimately involved in the creation of both her films and her public persona, unlike many Hollywood stars whose image was dictated by the studios.”
Julie Allen
Women Film Pioneers Project

Asta Nielsen on this site:

>>> Afgrunden,  Den sorte Drøm,  Balletdanserinden,  Die Filmprimadonna,  Die Verräterin,  Das Mädchen ohne Vaterland

The Country Doctor
R: David Wark Griffith (uncredited). K: G.W. Bitzer. D: Frank Powell, Florence Lawrence, Rose King, Kate Bruce, Gladys Egan, Mary Pickford. P: Biograph. USA 1909

“The Country Doctor begins with its most beautiful moment, as Billy Bitzer‘s camera, under D.W. Griffith‘s direction, slowly pans over a rolling bucolic plain, eventually pausing in front of the home of Dr. Harcourt (Frank Powell), sauntering outside with his wife (Biograph star Florence Lawrence) and their child Edith (Gladys Egan). The play of natural light in this scene is gorgeous, even if the shots seem more protracted than necessary, and their beauty doesn’t necessarily evoke a deeper idiom or a set of relationships like the rustic opening of Corner in Wheat does.”
Nick Davis
nicksflickpicks

“Billy Bitzer’s camera drinks in the Connecticut scenery and you can practically smell the warm summer air.”
Movies Silently

“In Griffith’s The Country Doctor, a long pan shot starts and ends the film. The first pan over Stillwater ends on a family leaving their home. The final pan begins on the same house and ends on a view of the river. In the closing pan shot, no human characters are seen, making it difficult for the viewer’s grief to have an anchor in the form of a character that registers the missing child. [The critic C. Scott] Combs greatly admires the director’s style, stating, ‘Griffith suggests death changes the diegetic world.'”
Senses of Cinema