Exposición regional
R: Antonio Cuesta. P: Films Cuesta, Valencia. Sp 1909

Filmación documental de Cuesta sobre la Exposición Nacional Regional celebrada en Valencia en 1909.

Antonio Cuesta and José María Codina

“La realización de Codina con Cuesta era muy antigua, ya che fue el prima distribuidor de los filmes taurinos de éste. Se instaló en Barcelona en 1908 para organizar la red nacional que luego amplió al extranjero. Aci pues, buena parte del éxito international de las películas de Cuesta era debido a Codina. Codina, tenía experiencia como reliziador. Ya que en 1908 hizo de colaborador de Fructuoso Gelabert en ‘María Rosa’; sus primera películas fueron Amor que mata (1911) de dos rollos; Lucha de corazones (1912), cuatro rollos y filmada en un solo día en exteriores. Esa rigidez y capacidad de trabajo fue la causa de sua predicamento. Su calidad técnica era buena, no asi su nivel artístico que era más bien escaso; El lobo de la sierra (1912), fue la primera película que realisazó para la produccion de Cuesta. Un filme que incidía en el folletín del bandelorismo, pero que no aportaba ninguna novidad. Mejores fueron sus filmes sigiuentes en los que se ampliaba el documenta taurino con un argumento idóneo. Tales como los títulos: La barrera número trece, de cinco rollos y en la que se mezclaban tomas do corridas auténticas con un drama folletinesca; La lucha por la divisa, en la que la corrida era el número fuerte del final de una melodramática historia rural en la que el amor de una mujer lleva a dos jóvenes al drama de una corrida en la quel el triunfador quedaría con el amor de la moza.”
Félix Martialay: Esquemas para el estudio de la historia del cine. El sastre de los libros 2020, p. 205/06

Translation:
“The co-operation of Codina with Cuesta was very old, as he was the first distributor of Cuesta’s bullfighting films. He settled in Barcelona in 1908 to organize the national network, which he later expanded to include foreign countries. Thus, much of the international success of Cuesta’s films was due to Codina. He had experience as a filmmaker. In 1908, he collaborated with Fructuoso Gelabert on ‘Maria Rosa,’ and his first films were Amor que mata (1911) with two reels and Lucha de corazones (1912, see below) with four reels, which was filmed in a single day outdoors. His rigidity and work capacity were the cause of his popularity. His technical quality was good, but his artistic level was rather low. El lobo de la sierra (1912) was the first film he made for Cuesta’s production. It was a film that focused on the banditry genre but didn’t provide anything new. His following films were better, as they expanded on the bullfighting documentary with a suitable plot. Titles such as La barrera número trece with five reels, which mixed authentic bullfighting shots with a melodramatic drama; and  La lucha por la divisa in which the bullfight was the highlight of the end of a rural melodramatic story where a woman’s love leads two young men to the drama of a bullfight in which the winner would win the love of the girl.”

Lucha de corazones
R: José María Codina. K: Fructuoso Gelabert. D: Lorenza Adriá, José Claramunt. P: Barcelona Films. Sp 1912

>>> Early Spanish Cinema (1),  Early Spanish Cinema (2),  Early Spanish Cinema (3)

Rigadin n’aime pas le vendredi 13
R: Georges Monca. D: Charles Prince. P: Pathé Frères. Fr 1911

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Rigadin tzigane
R: Georges Monca. D: Charles Prince, Barally, Delmy, Gaston Dupray, Gabrielle Lange,  Maud Loti,  Andrée Marly, Germaine Reuver. P: Pathé Frères. Fr 1911

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Rigadin nègre malgré lui
R: Georges Monca. D: Charles Prince, Georges Tréville, Fernand Tauffenberger, Paul Landrin, Marie-Charlotte Descorval, Nancy Vallier, Gabrielle Lange. P: Pathé Frères. Fr 1912

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“Charles Prince Seigneur (27 April 1872 – 18 July 1933) was a French-born film actor and comedian, best known for his screen persona ‘Rigadin’ in numerous short slapstick comedies. He was also known as ‘Moritz’ in Germany, ‘Whiffles’ in England and the US, and ‘Tartufini’ in Italy. He was the second biggest film star in the world in the years leading up to World War I, just behind his rival Max Linder. Prince’s “Rigadin” character was similar to Linder’s ‘Max’ in that they were both upper-class dandys that were constantly getting into trouble with authority figures and love interests. Prince began his acting career on the stage and was hired by Pathé Frères in 1908. He made over 200 films as ‘Rigadin’ from 1909 until 1920. By 1920 his popularity had faded and he played supporting roles in a handful of films in the 1920s and 1930s. Two of his Rigadin shorts, Rigadin Directeur de Cinéma and Rigadin et le Chien de la Baronne, were preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2010.”
Wikipedia

>>> Rigadin (1)

Max a peur de l’eau
R: Max Linder. B: Max Linder. D: Max Linder, Lucy d’Orbel. P: Pathé Frères. Fr 1912

Max lance la mode
R: René Leprince, Max Linder. B: Max Linder. D: Max Linder, Stacia Napierkowska, Jane Renouardt. P: Pathé Frères. Fr 1912

“Actor, director, and screenwriter. Born Gabriel Maximilien Leuvielle in 1883, Max Linder, as he would be known onscreen, was attracted to theater from a young age. He began to seriously study theater at the age of seventeen and then went to Bordeaux to become an actor. In 1904, he moved to Paris where he became a star of the Parisian theater and of the café-concerts. Because of his connection to other theater and café-concert performers and managers turned cinema pioneers (Ferdinand Zecca, Gaston Velle, and Lucien Nonguet among them) Linder was hired on at Pathé in 1905. He was already something of a star at that time, since he was one of the more popular of the Parisian performers. (…)  However, it was in cinema that Linder would truly become a star, in many ways the first film star, with one of the first truly developed and recognizable characters in cinema, the eponymous Max, and by 1908, Linder was working so much at Pathé he was forced to give up the theater altogether.

The character of Max was not an immediate creation at Pathé. Linder’s first films, mostly under the direction of Louis J. Gasnier, featured him in various comic roles, although the elements of Max, the look of the refined gentleman, the comedy that derives from a combination of bad luck and hedonism, are there. Linder’s first credited role in La Première sortie d’un collégien (1905) already contained some of these elements, which were no doubt holdovers from his live performances in the café-concerts. These comedic traits or signatures become progressively more evident in the early films such as Le Pendu (1906) and Idée d’Apache (1906). The character Max, a dandy in a top hat and a bit of a cad, made his debut in the 1907 film Les Débuts d’un patineur. (…)

While Linder’s Max was undoubtedly the best known and one of the most influential of the comic characters of the silent-film era, he was not the first. André Deed‘s Boirieau and Roméo Bosetti’s Roméo had both already appeared in film before Linder arrived on the scene, as it were. However, both Boireau and Roméo remain fairly two-dimensional. Both are representative of  ‘the fool’ type character typically found in common burlesque, and both lack the distinctive character traits that made Max so memorable. Moreover, there is a move toward subtlety and sophistication of performance in Linder’s comic performances, a differentiation between what is needed onstage and what onscreen. It is this comic subtlety, no doubt, that would influence later screen comics, such as Charlie Chaplin, and it is completely absent from the performances of either Deed or Bosetti.”
Historical Dictionary of French Cinema. Dayna Oscherwitz & Mary Ellen Higgins. 2007

>>> 30 and more MAX LINDER films on this website

Tra le pinete di Rodi
R: Unknown. P: Savoia film. It 1912
Print: EYE

“Short Italian propaganda film about Rhodes. Idyllic shots of a couple in love in the woods and by the sea are followed by images of Italian naval ships that ‘cross the waters around their new occupation’. Finally, there is a staged shot of a cannon firing a shot, with the Italian tricolor and the coat of arms of the company Savoia appearing over the statue. The island of Rhodes, which had been part of the Ottoman Empire since 1522, was conquered by the Italians in 1912.”
EYE

“‘Tripoli, beautiful land of love…’ is how the refrain of A Tripoli! begins, a song of propaganda written by the journalist Giovanni Corvino of ‘La Stampa’ in the wake of the 1911 Italo-Turkish war. The Italian government’s decision to send a military envoy and take over the Turkish territory of Tripolitania was met with general, overall enthusiasm. The conviction that the colonial conquest would legitimate Italy as a world power, the idea that territories abroad could absorb growing emigration, the illusion that control of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica would become the passport to a greater influence over the trade routes of the Mediterranean were a few of the debatable geo-political reasons propelling nearly all the political parties and movements to demand (nationalists first of all) or at least support the reckless enterprise.(…) 1911 was the ideal year for a media campaign of this kind: the lavish commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Unification of Italy and the nationalist celebrations of the Risorgimento battles were the perfect stage for promoting a new military enterprise. The special rhetorical emphasis placed on the Risorgimento by newspapers and consumer publications was reused to support the African expedition, and film would play an important part in the manipulation of the collective Italian imagination. Between 1911 and 1912 all the important Italian production studios undertook to validate the reasons for the military intervention by producing various types of films that all more or less explicitly supported the war underway. (…)

Moreover, the Italian film industry did not fail to emphasize the cruelty of the Ottomans, making films about historical events that demonstrated the eternal conflict between the Christian West and the Turkish Empire: films like I cavalieri di Rodi (Ambrosio 1912), Hussein il pirata (Vesuvio Films, 1912), Gulnara (Una storia dell’indipendenza greca 1820-1830) (Ambrosio 1911). When later on in the conflict several Arab tribes of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica began to support the Turkish army, the idea of justifying the war as an inevitable epilogue of an ancestral clash of civilizations solidified even further. (…) If fictional war films were decisive for building popular consent for the war, documentary films made in the war zone by a few Italian production companies would become increasingly important in this direction. In October 1911 Cines began the production of a series of documentaries, 150 m. each, which were distributed weekly to theaters in order to informer moviegoers about the latest events of the military campaign. Reassuring images scientifically studied to tranquilize the soldiers’ families back home. In addition to the infinite correspondence filmed by Cines (over 80 films) between 1911 and 1912, dozens of documentaries about war events were also made by Ambrosio of Turin, by Itala Film, by Giovanni Pettine’s company and Luca Comerio of Milan, one of the most active cameraman in the war zone.”
Giovanni Lasi
Il Cinema Ritrovato

>>> Italy’s Colonial Wars – 1

>>> Italy’s Colonial Wars – 2

>>> Italia: Il Risorgimento

Die Suffragette
R: Urban Gad. B: Urban Gad. K: Karl Freund, Emil Schünemann, Guido Seeber. D: Asta Nielsen, Max Landa, Charly Berger, Fred Immler, Mary Scheller. P: Projektions-AG Union (PAGU). D 1913
Print: Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen, Berlin