La dentellière
R: Léonce Perret. B: Léonce Perret. D: Suzanne Grandais, Émile Keppens, Maurice Vinot, René Navarre. P: Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont. Fr 1913
Engl. subtitles

“Based on the dutch paintings of lacemakers of the same time – the film depicts a poor woman’s strive for money to be able to marry her beloved; doing so by entering a local lacing competition.”
MUBI

“SCENES DE LA VIE NORMANDE”: Femmes Dentellières, Carte postale ancienne

“Perret‘s tableaux in this and other movies are magnificent. Each scene is a magnificent picture. Given the recent (2002) restoration of this picture, one can appreciate Perret’s composition, his framing techniques — he likes to shoot small groups of people in windows, one person per window pane, so they wind up looking like a gallery of pictures — and his attention to detail. The problem arises in the director’s decision in how long to focus on each shot. Even with elaborate framing, composition and detail — this is a movie about a lacemaker, after all — tastes vary. In terms of story-telling, of course, one should look at each scene just long enough to let its sense penetrate. In terms of looking at pretty pictures, the individual viewer makes up his or her own mind. In terms of a tableaux director’s movie, the director makes the decision — and Perret makes the decision to slow things down so you can look at every line of every piece of lace in every frame of the movie.”
IMDb (boblipton)

>>> Léonce Perret on this site

>>> Suzanne Grandais

>>> SOCIAL DRAMA

The Twins
R: Lois Weber, Phillips Smalley (?), Edwin S. Porter (?). B: Lois Weber (?), Phillips Smalley (?). D: Lois Weber, Phillips Smalley, Joe Engel, Miss Hohlfeld. P: Rex Motion Picture Company. USA 1911
Print: EYE (Desmet collection)

“Twins (sometimes called The Twins) is one of the oldest surviving prints from Lois Weber’s early work at Rex. Weber plays twin sisters separated at birth. One is adopted into a family of wealth and privilege where she is ‘pampered by money,’ as one contemporary observer put it. The other is adopted by a widowed seamstress and endures ‘a life of toil and want.’ Even as their parallel stories emphasize class inequity, the two women are aligned in their defiance of patriarchal authority, each initially unaware of the other. The wealthy sister rejects class privilege – and the pressure to marry her adoptive brother – in favor of a forbidden liaison with the family chauffeur. Her twin becomes the chief labor organizer at a shirtwaist factory owned by her wealthy sister’s father. When she attends a meeting to press for better working conditions, complications ensue.

‘We worked very, very hard,’ Weber later recalled of the time she spent at Rex. She and her husband Phillips Smalley joined the company in the autumn of 1910 shortly after it was founded by Edwin S. Porter, beginning work on the company’s first release, A Heroine of ’76. Initially credited only as actors, later accounts make it clear that the pair also co-directed most of their films from scripts penned by Weber, releasing one film per week at the height of their productivity. Weber’s storytelling skills are on display, even in an early film like Twins, as are her commitment to social justice and her interest in unconventional women who become agents of change in their own lives or the lives of others. Along with a deft use of cross-cutting to emphasize the twins’ ‘different stations in life,’ the film includes elegantly composed shots where action is staged across multiple planes in order to emphasize glances exchanged between characters but unseen by others. These are all hallmarks of films that Weber would direct over the course of her three-decade career. Twins provides a fascinating glimpse of their beginnings.”
Shelley Stamp

Mixed Identities
R: William Humphrey. B: Eliza G. Harral. D: Wally Van, Edna Nash, Alice Nash, Wally Van, Rose Tapley, Harry Lambart, William Humphrey. P: Vitagraph Company of America. USA 1913
Print: EYE (Desmet collection)
Dutch intertitles

“A mixed-identity comedy that seems to have been the stock-in-trade of identical twins Alice and Edna Nash, who worked exclusively for Vitagraph. Here they play stenographers whose flirtatious bosses are friends; each man invites his employee to a restaurant, where accusations lead to jollity when they’re unable to distinguish one twin from the other. According to contemporary press reports, even people at the studio were unable to tell the Nash sisters apart; the pair fell into obscurity following an appearance in Charles Dillingham’s 1920 stage extravaganza Good Times, in which they appeared with several other sister acts.
Little is known of writer Eliza Graham Harral (1872–1938), who is credited with a number of Vitagraph titles made in 1913. On the other hand, director and actor William Humphrey (1875–1942) was busy on both sides of the camera for decades, though after 1920 he appears to have given up directing and remained an actor until shortly before his death. Mixed Identities was released on a split reel with Gala Day Parade, Yokahama, Japan.”
Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi

>>> the “Thanhouser Twins”, Madeline and Marion Fairbanks, in Their One Love 

Les bottines du colonel
R: René Bussy (?). B: Monsieur Lamsoon. D: Monsieur Grégoire, Émile Tramont (?), Mademoiselle Maia, René Bussy. P: Éclair A.C.A.D. Fr 1910
Print: Eye (Desmet collection)

“This film, which appeared in France in early July, was one of the first batch of films produced for Éclair by A.C.A.D. (Association de Comédiens et d’Auteurs dramatiques) which had been founded in 1909 by businessman Auguste Agnel. The first A.C.A.D films appeared in April 1910. A.C.A.D. was later associated mainly with former stage actor and director Émile Chautard who had become its artistic director by at least November 1910 and probably directed all of its films (with assistance from actors like Charles Krauss and André Liabel and his young protégé, one Maurice Tourneur) from November 1910 until he left for the US (to run the Éclair subsidiary there (along with protégé) in 1915. But the first artistic director of A.C.A.D. was another stage actor and director, Armand Numès who probably made the majority of A.C.A.D. films before November (Cavalleria Rusticana which came out in October had originally been advertised as the first production). It is known, however, that yet another stage actor, director and playwright René Bussy also directed early films for A.C.A.D. and this little ‘vaudeville’ (by a certain Monsieur Lamsoon) may be one of his films. He plays the role of the colonel’s orderly or batman (‘ordonnance’ in French) in the film. All the cast are theatre actors. The part of Paul is played by Belgian-born actor Émile Tramont and any passing resemblance to Max Linder is, I think, entirely fortuitous. He appeared in at least four other A.C.A.D. productions 1910-1914.”
IMDb (kekseksa)

“The print credits the actors only by their surnames, together with the theatre troupes they belonged to at the time. Two of the performers appear to have been killed at the front during WWI: M. Grégoire of the Théâtre Cluny, who plays Colonel Ronchon, and Tramont (apparently not the actor Émile Tramont but a performer who only went by the one name), whose death on the battlefield in 1916 is confirmed by a belated obituary published in 1918 in Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique.”
(…)
“Visually speaking, it is interesting to note that the theme of neighbours seem to inspire a universally acknowledged cinematography: many of these films either have the camera pan up and down, or left and right, or the frame is split vertically (and sometimes horizontally) in order to show the neighbours simultaneously on both sides of a garden fence, balcony, apartments, or even different floors of a building (…) – such as Le acque miracolose (1914), where Gigetta Morano gets pregnant with the special ‘help’ of her upstairs neighbour, who also happens to be her doctor, and Cunégonde trop curieuse (1912), where her constant spying on her neighbours in the apartment building drives  everyone mad.”
Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi

Click at the picture

L’acqua miracolosa
R: Eleuterio Rodolfi. B: Arrigo Frusta. D: Eleuterio Rodolfi, Gigetta Morano, Umberto Scalpellini. P: Società Anonima Ambrosio. It 1914