This is noteworthy for being the first film to star Arthur Conan Doyle’s immensely popular sleuth, but it’s an “in name only” appearance by the Great Detective. In fact, he’s not named on screen, so maybe “in costume only” (a dressing gown and pipe) would be more accurate. The actual film is nothing to write home about, either: it’s a 30-second skit, built around showing off then-cutting-edge filmmaking tricks, i.e. using editing to allow a burglar to disappear and reappear out of thin air. No wonder Holmes is baffled.

It’s only really of interest as a curio to fans of early cinema or Sherlock Holmes on screen, even if the latter is only invoked as a hook to attract viewers. Although, I feel like the fact the first Sherlock Holmes film was basically a spoof is somehow significant…

Using the magic of cinema to take the title literally, in this short director Georges Méliès clones himself seven times over to create a musical septet (plus conductor).

Even having the idea to do this kind of visual stunt for the first time is obviously impressive — there’s no doubt that Méliès was an extraordinary innovator — but pulling it off with such technical competency… that could be tricky today, never mind in 1900, when you couldn’t check your footage lined up, nor just do another take if it didn’t, never mind the array of computer tricks (split screen, time ramping, reframing, etc) that could be deployed to make it work nowadays. Here, Méliès was doing multiple exposures on the same strip of film; the original negative — imagine if you messed up on the seventh go-round!

And even with all that, it’s not just an exercise in technique; not just a technical demonstration for those interested in the possibilities of motion pictures. You can set all that aside and still find an entertaining and amusing short — with a couple of extra gags thrown in at the end for good measure. Genius.

A few years later, and Méliès’s work is looking more extravagant — there are sets! Costumes! Props! Colour! Hand-coloured, of course, and the result is glorious. The colours are not only incredibly stable (you’d expect some flicker or judder on static elements from frame to frame, but nope), but they really add to the atmosphere. The sickly green demons and burning red & orange flames really leap off the screen, making the unreality of it that bit more tangible. This would be so much less effective in pure black-and-white. It’s less like a flickering clearly-fake old film, more like a nightmare. You can kinda see how people at the time might’ve believed stuff like this was real. I mean, how else do you explain those ghosts, hmm? (Okay, obviously they’re a double-exposure effect; but it holds up well. Certainly better than the cardboard-cut-out props.)

Intriguingly, there’s a 3D version of the film — a real, authentic one! To quote wholesale from Wikipedia: “In order to combat piracy, Méliès … began producing two negatives of each film he made: one for domestic markets, and one for foreign release. To produce the two separate negatives, Méliès built a special camera that used two lenses and two reels of film simultaneously. In the 2000s, researchers at the French film company Lobster Films noticed that Méliès’s two-lens system was in effect an unintentional, but fully functional, stereo film camera, and therefore that 3D versions of Méliès films could be made simply by combining the domestic and foreign prints of the film. Serge Bromberg, the founder of Lobster Films, presented 3D versions of The Infernal Cauldron and another 1903 Méliès film, The Oracle of Delphi, in January 2010 at the Cinémathèque Française. According to film critic Kristin Thompson, ‘the effect of 3D was delightful … the films as synchronized by Lobster looked exactly as if Méliès had designed them for 3D.'” They were screened again in 2011 and, at least as far as Wikipedia can explain, that was the end of it. To which I say: argh! I really want to see them! A 3D Blu-ray release would be lovely; but, as these screenings happened over a decade ago, I can’t say I’m holding out much hope…

Although fundamentally a remake (or ripoff, depending how you look at it) of the earlier British film Fire!, Life of an American Fireman has found a place in film history (it even merited coverage in Mark Cousins’s The Story of Film: An Odyssey) for two reasons: firstly, for pioneering the technique of cross-cutting, a major and significant development in film editing; secondly, for not actually having done that at all.

“Huh?”, you may well exclaim. Well, although for a long time the short was admired for its innovation, research by the Library of Congress eventually revealed that the film was re-edited sometime after its release (possibly in the 1930s or ’40s), and the original version actually played the action out twice, without the all-important cutting back and forth. Viewed in that original version, I’d argue to a modern audience it’s more confusing having the same sequence twice back to back — nowadays we expect intercutting of action, so it’s initially disorientating when the film cuts to outside the house and starts the same sequence of events over again. Perhaps more importantly, watching it twice over feels redundant: the second version adds no new information; and, being outside the house, thus distanced from the threat of encroaching fire, it’s less dramatic than the inside sequence. And that’s not to mention that the timeline doesn’t add up: the fireman is in and out of the window much more quickly during the inside version than the outside version.

Despite all that, this does remain one of the earliest American narrative films, bringing together various innovations that had occurred in the early years of film — primarily, constructing a continuous narrative across multiple shots and scenes. It just wasn’t the first film to do, well, anything.

Imagine a crazy world where men did housework and looked after the children, while women lazed around drinking, smoking, and cajoling innocent young men into the bedroom. What larks! But such horrors might come to pass if we let those pesky women have their way.

Such once-implausible things are depicted in Alice Guy’s 1906 short. Consequently, this is the kind of film that might be described as “of it’s era” — although, said era probably extended another six or seven decades. I can’t cite any specific examples, but I feel like “wouldn’t it be hilarious if men behaved like women?” sketches were still being done in the ’60s and ’70s, if not even more recently. So, it’s less that it’s dated, more that it shows Guy was ahead of her time. I mean, the film dates from before women even had the vote, yet she has the chutzpah to imagine men taking on women’s roles and women enjoying leisure time. Scandalous!

Considering the short was made by a pioneering female filmmaker, we can but assume it’s all satirical; that its very point is “the consequences of feminism” would not, in fact, be the ridiculous role-reversal presented here. But, in that context, the ending is quite interesting: the men force the women out of the bar and raise a toast. Are we supposed to read that as the natural order being restored? More likely, it’s meant to signify these men achieving equality with women; that Guy’s point is, “if men were in women’s situation, they’d want to change it, too.”

Apparently this had fallen into obscurity for a century or so, when it was revived as an internet meme because of “its creepy atmosphere”. Certainly, stills from the final scene (a closeup of the pig’s head, with vicious teeth and an oscillating tongue) look weird and freaky; and I guess if you slapped an ominous horror-movie-esque score across the whole short then it would become freakish in its entirety. But it was originally a vaudeville act, and with the jaunty score that usually accompanies it, it remains just that: a couple of minutes of daftness.

As such, I can hardly recommend it. It’s a curio of a past era, and while there’s undoubtedly value in preserving such things for historical interest, that’s still all it is.

The first screen adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel is such a thorough retelling in just 12 minutes, it almost makes you wonder what takes other versions so long. But what it gains in brevity, it loses somewhat in filmmaking craft: every scene is shown only in a theatrical static wide shot. It’s not entirely without interest, though: one setting places a full-height mirror screen right to enlarge the set by showing us what’s behind the camera to the left, and it’s surprisingly effective, especially when it’s used for a bit of fun cinematic trickery.

The film’s big set piece is the creation of the Monster; not from stitched-together body parts, as is usually the case, but some kind of ‘magic potion’ that makes it emerge from a cauldron, growing and forming before our eyes. The effect was achieved by burning a puppet and then reversing the film, but, rather than presenting an unbroken take, instead the film cuts back and forth to Frankenstein observing and, frankly, skips over what I imagine were the most effective bits. For example, we see the vague outline of a human figure emerge, then cut to Frankenstein, then cut back to see it fully-formed. Would it not have been better to see the Monster’s features ‘melt’ into being amongst the flames? Oh well.

Frankenstein was thought lost for decades, until a single print was found in the ’70s. Imperfect it may be, but it remains a significant milestone in the history of horror cinema.

Included as a special feature on the Masters of Cinema Blu-ray of Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances, this little-seen* comedy short, directed by and starring Harry Sweet, “riffs on a number of elements from Seven Chances”, to quote MoC’s blurb. I’d say it’s less a riff on Seven Chances, more a brazen rip-off. It has moments of amusing physical comedy, but it lacks Keaton’s originality or heart. At least it’s brief, although that doesn’t mean it feels whole: rather than ending, per se, Sweet seems to run out of ideas and the film just stops.

Also, it has nothing to do with spinach.

* I couldn’t find a single photo or image from this short online. That there now are some on certain movie databases is because I uploaded screen grabs I took for this review (even editing some into a ‘poster’ for the sake of TMDB/Letterboxd). ^