Alice in Wonderland (1915)

Originally posted to Facebook on 6/3/2016

Alice in Wonderland was the third film we’ve watched from 1915, and the second adaptation of Carroll's book. Unlike the films we’ve been watching recently, this one seems to fall outside of the canonical through-line that you might encounter when reading about the history of film. Neither the director (W.W. Young) nor the star (Viola Savoy) appear to have done anything significant in the movies before or after. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an unusual story as to how and why this film was made, but if so it was beyond my researching capabilities (i.e. ten minutes of googling.) It has little or no camera movement, and surprisingly few special effects, especially for a film as suited to them as an Alice adaptation. The main visual interest lies in the costumes, which are extensive and obviously modeled on the famous Tenniel illustrations. I felt particularly sorry for the actors in the lobster costumes who had to crawl out of the ocean, possibly over multiple takes. If we had watched this film as part of our chronology from a few years earlier -- 1910 or 1911, say -- it would have stood out as being fairly innovative, for its long-form story; and for its large quantity of scenes, sets, shots, and title cards; and of course for the costumes mentioned earlier. But after Cabiria, and Regeneration, and some of the other films we’ve seen recently, it instead strikes me as a little old-fashioned. I think that’s partially influenced by our choice of films, but I think it’s also a reflection of how much films changed between 1910 and 1915. It is a fairly short film, at under an hour, and there are occasional jumps in the plot that would lead me to believe that we were seeing a somewhat incomplete version. It does a pretty good job of coherently telling the story of Alice in Wonderland -- hewing very close to the book, to a fault sometimes. (For instance I don’t think there’s any reason to memorialize a joke from the book hinging on tortoise sounding a little like “taught us.”) We watched this shortly before watching the 2010 Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland (and plan to see the sequel this weekend) and it was interesting to see all of the little parallels.

Next week we’ll watch our fourth and final film from 1915, ominously titled The Italian. When I informed the kids of the title Ben said, “I can’t wait to see how racist this one is.” I have some of the same trepidation, but it’s in the National Film registry, and the synopsis doesn’t sound too awful. I guess we’ll find out. The viewing list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Movies 1903 - 1904

Originally posted to Facebook on 1/16/2016

Friday night we watched films from 1903 and 1904.

Life of an American Fireman
The Great Train Robbery
Alice in Wonderland
Fairyland: A Kingdom of Fairies
An Interesting Story
The Mermaid
The Living Playing Cards
The Voyage Across the Impossible

I believe we have now reached peak Méliès, with five films last week, and four this week, but decreasing numbers in the weeks ahead. In a way this is too bad, because so far his films have been the most consistently entertaining and professional. But it also became clear that he had a certain stage-bound style, though of course the sets changed much more rapidly than on a stage, and he also deploys a certain repertoire of camera tricks. But, by contrast, the other four films we saw this week all have scenes shot outside, and in many cases scenes that are shot at an angle to the action. The Great Train Robbery even had shots from the top of a moving train. We also saw our first title cards in Alice in Wonderland, but they still do not appear to be very common. Most of the films this week, excepting only The Mermaid and The Living Playing Cards, had a connected multi-scene narrative, and the number of scenes per film is continuing to grow from previous weeks. Life of an American Fireman had an interesting pair of sequences, the first of which was a fireman rescuing a woman and a small child from the interior of a burning house, followed by a sequence showing the exact same set of actions from the outside -- including the fireman climbing up and down a ladder. (The firetrucks were all pulled by horses, by the way, which the kids found striking.) The Voyage Across the Impossible was a full twenty minutes, the longest film we've seen to date, and, looking ahead, the longest we'll see for several more weeks. It irritatingly had narration on the audio track, which we finally muted. (Ben was more irritated than me. "This is vandalism!" he said.) A Kingdom of Fairies was almost as long, at sixteen minutes. Overall, the total length of all eight films was 75 minutes this week, compared to 53 last week, and even less on previous weeks.

Next week we move on to 1905 and 1906. The link to our viewing plan is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT