French Innovation at Cinema’s Dawn
By DAVE KEHR
ALICE GUY was 22 in March 1895 when she took a job in Paris as a secretary to Léon Gaumont, an executive of the Comptoir Général de Photographie, specializing in photographic equipment. A few months later Gaumont bought the company, renamed it after himself, and began developing a product called the Chronophotographe.
The device was modeled on one developed by the Lumiére brothers of Lyon that allowed the filming of “vues animées”: photographs that seemed to move. Gaumont conducted some experiments with this novelty device, shooting a train arriving at a station, soldiers performing precision drills, workers leaving a factory — all subjects that the Lumiéres had covered before him.
“It seemed to me,” Alice Guy wrote many years later, “that one could do something else.” And so she persuaded her boss to let her make a few little films, on the condition that her activities didn’t interfere with her secretarial duties. Her first effort, a brief fantasy called “The Cabbage Patch Fairy,” became an early hit on the exhibition circuit (fairgrounds and vaudeville theaters) that was beginning to take shape. Before long Mademoiselle Alice, as she was called, became the first production chief at one of the world’s first movie studios.
There are no known copies of the 1895 version of “The Cabbage Patch Fairy,” but Guy’s 1900 remake (probably necessary because the original negative had worn out) is part of “Gaumont Treasures 1897-1913,” a fascinating three-disc set from Kino International.
This set is an abridged version, with English subtitles, of “Le Cinéma Premier,” a seven-disc collection issued in 2008 in France by Gaumont. (Still very much in business, Gaumont is probably the oldest continuing film production company in existence.) Serious students of early cinema probably already own the French original (which includes, for starters, all 65 of the surviving films Guy made in France), but the Kino set offers a satisfying, well-chosen sample for more casual visitors to this astoundingly rich, fast-moving period in film history.
The first disc in the Kino collection follows Guy’s career from 1897 to 1907, when she left for America to continue making films, founding her own studio in Fort Lee, N.J. The other discs are devoted to her successors as Gaumont’s head of production, Louis Feuillade (represented by 13 films made from 1907 to 1913) and Léonce Perret (represented by only two films, one of them, “The Child of Paris” from 1913, being Gaumont’s first feature-length production).
This was an era in which innovation was the norm and formal discoveries were being made almost daily, as documented in Richard Abel’s definitive history, “The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914” (University of California Press, 1994). Too much was going on in too many places to credit specific filmmakers with specific developments, but, intriguingly, each director’s disc in the Kino set corresponds with a broad period of development.
During Guy’s heyday moving pictures were still a novelty and exploited as such: an attraction alongside the dancing girls, jugglers and two-headed calves at fairgrounds and dime museums. (Film scholars have adopted the term “cinema of attractions” to describe pre-narrative moviemaking.) Guy’s early films, most only a few minutes in length and filmed in a single shot, display pretty girls (“Bathing in a Stream,” 1897), camera trickery (running the film in reverse makes the traffic go backward in the 1900 “Avenue de l’Opera”), grotesque slapstick (“Turn of the Century Surgery,” 1900) and music hall acts (“Miss Dundee and Her Performing Dogs,” 1902), including many recorded with an early synchronized sound technique (half a dozen on this disc).
These single-shot films soon gave way to more complex constructions, which at first took the form of a series of disconnected images composed as painterly tableaus (like Guy’s ambitious, 33-minute movie from 1906, “The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ”). Initially these films relied on a spoken narration to tie things together. By 1907, though, the cinema had discovered its own ways of telling a story, and filmmakers like Edwin S. Porter in America and Louis Feuillade in France were fluently developing narratives across multiple shots and multiple sequences.
Though the prolific Feuillade turned out his share of trick films, chase comedies and historical tableaus (like the visually stunning, dramatically inert 1913 movie “The Agony of Byzance”), his richest, most supple work from this period is found in social dramas like “The Trust” (1911) and “The Obsession” (1912), both part of a series proudly titled “Life as It Is.” Models of mimetic realism by the standards of the time, these films stand as the materialist background against which Feuillade constructed the haunting, fantastic imagery of his later serials, including “Fantômas” (1913-14) and “Les Vampires” (1915).
The Kino set’s most regretful omission is the selection of short films directed by and starring Léonce Perret, an amiably rotund performer who frequently appeared in domestic comedies with his wife, the actress Valentine Petit. Even in his one-reel comedies, Perret, who became Gaumont’s production chief in 1915 when Feuillade went to war, seemed to be pressing for more psychologically rounded characterizations and (though he himself could overact shamelessly) a more relaxed, naturalistic kind of performance than could be found in many French films of the time.
The Kino set includes the psychological drama “The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador,” notable for its use of a film-within-the-film, in which a re-creation of a crime is used to dislodge a witness’s repressed memories. But the centerpiece is “The Child of Paris,” a magnificent movie that finds Perret striding effortlessly into the new feature-length format. With a running time of more than two hours the film smoothly integrates action, suspense, comedy and melodrama into a Dickensian tale of a daughter of the bourgeoisie (the somber, imperturbable Suzanne Privat) who falls into the hands of scoundrels.
As extreme as the plotting may be, “The Child of Paris” achieves an openness and airiness (most strikingly, when the action moves to Nice from Paris) that anticipates the expansive humanism of Renoir and Truffaut. Perret did not invent the feature form (which began to appear in 1912), but it could be said that the feature form invented him, giving his talent the time and space it needed to prosper. (Kino International, $79.95, not rated)
Thanks, Dennis...I ordered The Toe Tactic....so we'll see how it works. Although I am getting a tad sick of Yo La Tengo.
