Slapstick, European-style - part 4

We conclude our survey of European pre-WWI film comedy for the Slapstick Blog-a-Thon with a look at the comedy troupe, Les Pouics.

Les who? The Pouics are little known as a name now, but they were France’s version of the Keystone Cops - their predecessors, in fact, since the group was formed in 1910, two years before the Keystone company was created. They were formed by the director Jean Durand, who joined the Gaumont company in 1910 as its director of comedy films. He quickly established a troupe of comedy performers with the necessary talents to help feed the conveyer-belt system of one-reel film production, as audiences worldwide demanded their weekly dose of comedy. Les Pouics, or Les Pouites (’bedbugs’), on occasion billed under this name, supplied a team of comedians with precise acrobatic and pantomimic skills, suitable for all occasions, and with more than a gift for chaos.

Onésime et le dromadaire (1914)

We know the names of several of Les Pouics. Most notable at the time was Ernest Bourbon, who starred in Gaumont comedies 1912-14 as Onésime, films whose penchant for arresting absurdity (camels in living rooms) endeared him to the Surrealists. A Pouic who would work with the Surrealists directly was Gaston Modot. Just another member of the comic team when he first worked for Durand in 1910, Modot appeared in many Onésime and Calino films, before enjoying a notable acting career over many years, working for Abel Gance, René Clair, Marcel Carné (Les Enfants du Paradis), Jean Renoir (La Règle du Jeu) and Luis Buñuel in L’Age D’Or. Other Pouics included Clément Migé, already well-known as Calino, Lucien Bataille, who played the comic character Zigoto (1911-1912), Jeanne-Marie Laurent and Paulos.

Les Pouics were recruited from circus and music hall backgrounds, and specialised in organised mayhem, a wholesale onslaught upon normality. Things existed only that they might be destroyed. Some indication of their working methods can be found in a rare interview with veterans of the troupe reproduced in Georges Sadoul’s Historie Général du Cinéma (1951):

Jean Durand: The set was built on a platform, three metres high, supported by complicated arrangement of beams. On top of that we would build a salon, with sofas, piano, furniture, the whole lot. At a whistle, the stagehands would release the beams. The whole lot would collapse into the room built underneath.

Gaston Modot: Under the floor there would be a ceiling. The fellows and the furniture would crash through it. It was rather like playing water polo. Everyone marked his man. You would say: ‘I’ll take the wardrobe and you the sideboard, and you the seat with the old lady on it’.

Durand: In the salon there would usually be a very proper gentleman who had his top hat on. He would always get the piano. Of course there would be a few newspapers in the hat as protection.

Modot: And those great three-tier scafolds, like we built in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. We’d say, you fall in the mortar, me in the lime and him in the bucket. A motorbike would come and hurl the scafold in the air. We would all fall wherever we had to. It was quite natural for professionals.

Ah, those were the days, when all an actor had to protect him from a falling piano was a top hat with some newspaper stuffed into it.

There was much about Les Pouics that makes one think of the comedy troupe of lasting fame, the Keystone Cops, who created chaos not quite so violent but with the same love of mishap and logical absurdity. But in the fate of the two troupes we see summed up the two histories of slapstick comedy in Europe and America. The European (specifically the French and Italian) comedy of the pre-World War One era, with its roots in the circus, music halls and café concert, delighted audiences around the world but always had an air of the Old World about it. It satirised modernity but was simultaneously at a remove from it. It employed trick effects, magic, and fantasy, a cinema of attractions. The American comic models that were to succeed them, as the war destroyed much of the European companies’ traditional business, were slicker, faster, technically far more accomplished, and imbued with an irresistible flavour of the New World.

So there is a lost world charm about the European comedies of Max, Cretinetti, Onésime, Calino, Kri Kri, Bout-de-Zan, Bébé, Rosalie, Robinet, Little Moritz and Rigadin. Much of the happy spirit, the undying charm of early cinema can be found in their spirited productions, churned out professionally week after week. So many now are lost, just as their reputations have faded, but there are more than enough surviving titles lurking in the archives that really deserve to be brought away from the sole attentions of the specialist and taken to a wider audience. We would all gain a better sense of early film history. And we’d laugh our socks off as well.

This mini-series owes much to the researches of others, especially Richard Abel, Aldo Bernardini, Ivo Blom, David Robinson, and the catalogues of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival.

Slapstick, European-style - part 3

The third part of The Bioscope’s contribution to the Slapstick Blog-a-Thon continues to look at the less familiar side of silent film comedy, that which flourished in Europe (especially France and Italy) before the First World War. Today we round up our survey of the star performers of the period by name-checking some of the other comedians of the period, as a reference source, and as encouragement for anyone to find out more - certainly to see them if you can.

Little Moritz aime Rosalie (1911), from Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town

Pacifico Aquilanti - Italian comedian who played Coco (1909-?) for the Cines company, as a response to the success of André Deed’s Cretinetti at Itala.

Lucien Bataille - Gaumont comedian, whose Zigoto character (1911-1912) spoofed the popular detective films of the period; then became Casimir for Eclair (1913-1914).

Paul Bertho - French comedian who created two comic personas for Lux: Patouillard (known as Bill in Britain and the USA), and Gavroche (1912-1914).

Roméo Bosetti - early example of a named comedy series performer, he played the character Roméo for Gaumont (1907-1908), for whom he went on to be a prolific comedy director, before being lured away by Pathé.

Ernest Bourbon - French comedian, adept at combining elegance with acrobatics, who starred in the popular Onésime series (1912-1914) for Gaumont, occasionally being partnered with Calino.

Sarah Duhamel - a former child performer of wide girth who enjoyed much success as Rosalie (1911-1912) for Pathé, in which she was often partnered with Little Moritz. She subsequently played as Pétronille for Eclair (1913-1914).

Marcel Fabre - Spanish clown who worked in France for Eclair and Pathé before moving to Italy with the Ambrosio company and creating the Robinet character (1911-1914), in which he was regularly partnered by Nilde Baracchi as Robinette. His character was known as Tweedledum in Britain and the USA.

Tommy Footit - son of a famous nineteenth-century clown, George Footit (English, but found fame in France), who starred as Tommy for Eclair in 1911.

Raymond Frau - French comedian who established the comic character Kri Kri for the Italian company Cines (known as Bloomer in Britain). In 1916 he returned to France and created the Dandy character for Eclair.

Lea Giunchi - Italian comedienne who played comic foil to Tontolini (played by her brother-in-law, Ferdinando Guillaume) and Kri Kri, but also starred in the Lea series (1911-1914) for Cines. Her son, Eraldo Guillaume, was a child comedian for Cines, Cinessino.

Ferdinando Guillaume - Italian comedian from a circus family who appeared as Tontolini (Jenkins in Britain and USA) for Cines 1909-1911, then as Polidor for Pasquali. Directed many of his films. In later life appeared in a number of Fellini films.

Ernst Lubitsch - one of the great directorial talents in cinema history, Lubitsch began his film career as an actor and made comedies in the character of Meyer (1913-1914)

Clément Migé - French comedian who starred in an early Gaumont comic series, as Calino (1909-1913), a series which demonstrated notable comic invention and delight in chaos. For a short period a rival Calino series was produced by Pathé.

Léonce Perret - a performer and then an important director for Gaumont, he made some sophisticated comic films using the character name Léonce (1912-1914). His comic foil partner was often Suzanne Grandais. He moved to the USA as a director in 1917, returning to France in 1921 to continue a successful career than lasted until his death in 1935.

Moritz Schwartz - diminutive German comedian who played Little Moritz for Pathé (1911-1912), a highly popular series in its time. He was partnered romantically with Sarah Duhamel’s Rosalie for a number of films.

Alma Taylor and Chrissie White - English stars of the Hepworth company’s series of Tilly films (1910-1915), playing gleefully anarchic teenagers (Unity More played Tilly in the first film in the series), as well as many other shorts (dramatic and comic) before both went on to continued success as adults in British feature films.

Ernesto Vaser - Italian performer promoted as the Ambrosio company’s answer to Cretinetti, under the name Fricot (1909-1912?).

And there were so many others, including some female comedians whose character role we know (Cunégonde, Léontine) but not the performers’ names, alas. Countries other than France and Italy produced similar comic series, but these two countries dominated the field - nationally and internationally - up to the First World War. A new kind of comedy was already emerging in America, and would dominate the field in the post-war era.

To find out more, the best place is Richard Abel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (2005), from where much of the information above was taken, especially the entry Comic Series written by David Robinson. Robinson also wrote two classic articles for Sight and Sound, ‘The Italian Comedy’ (Spring 1986) and ‘Rise and Fall of the Clowns’ (Summer 1987), which are wonderfully evocative. An excellent source of detailed information on the French comedians, focussing on extant prints, is Richard Abel’s The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896-1914 (1994).

Online, there’s a good article by film historian Ivo Blom on the Italian comedians, ‘All the Same or Strategies of Difference. Early Italian Comedy in International Perspective’. And this section from the 2002 Pordenone Silent Film Festival catalogue, for a season of ‘Funny Women’, has information on Sarah Duhamel, Lea Giunchi, Alma Taylor, Chrissie White, and Suzanne Grandais.

Maybe a little more tomorrow…

Slapstick, European-style - part 2

The Bioscope is taking part in the Slapstick Blog-a-Thon, a four-day festival of blogging on the subject of slapstick. The Bioscope’s contribution is to cover the story of the European comedians of the early cinema period whose work is less familiar to most now, but who enjoyed huge popularity in their day.

Today we look at a particular phenomenon of the period, child comedians. Here are three of the most popular of the period, all appearing in French films.

Clemént Mary (1905-1974) was the the most celebrated of the European child stars of the silent period. At the age of five he was employed by the French Gaumont studios to star in a series of comedies under the name of Bébé. Bébé was a cheeky, resourceful character who was invariably far smarter than the adult world around him. Indeed, the common gag in the Bébé films was to place the child in adult situations, evidenced in such titles as Bébé apache (1910), Bébé millionaire (1911) and Bébé candidat au mariage (1911). In the first of those, Bébé’s ability to capture the mannerisms of the Parisian apache, and to play these convincingly and with deft coming timing amid an adult cast is extraordinary. He also played occasional non-Bébé roles. In 1912, Louis Feuillade at Gaumont introduced a new child character into the films, Bout-de-Zan (see below), and won a court case against Mary’s father who had protested at the competition. The father won the right to keep using the Bébé name however, and they moved to Eclectic Films to continue the series until 1916. In adulthood, he changed his name to René Dary and enjoyed a successful career in film and television into the 1970s.

There’s information on Louis Feuillade, Bébé and Bout-de-Zan in the Pordenone catalogue for 2000

See some of his credits (only a small selection of the Bébé films is given) on the IMDB, under René Dary

René-Georges Poyen (1908-1968) was taken on by Gaumont in 1908 as a co-star and planned replacement for Bébé, and was given the character name of Bout-de-Zan. Greater comic emphasis was placed on Bout-de-Zan being an ‘adult’ figure, as he dressed like an adult, aped adult mannerisms, and was generally an earthier character than Bébé. He would also often giving knowing looks to the camera, making the audience complicit in his trickery. Bout-de-Zan films stand up as well today as those of Bébé, displaying a cleverness and an apparent delight in peformance which helps override concern one might have at the exploitation of such young children, making films week after week. Poyen also appeared in the Louis Feuillade serials Les Vampires (1915) and Judex (1916). The last Bout-de-Zan film was made in 1916, but Poyen carried on making films into the 1920s.

The Image Entertainment DVD of Les Vampires includes a 1916 Bout-de-Zan short, Bout-de-Zan et l’embusqué

Willy Sanders (or Saunders) (1905-?) was a British music hall prodigy who first appeared on film aged four as a boxer, flooring an adult opponent, in The Man to Beat Jack Johnson (1910). His popularity was sufficient that he was brought over to France to star in the Little Willy series for Eclair, with seventy or so titles being produced 1911-16. Little Willy never had the same appeal as some of the great French child performers, but the series was reliable knockabout fare of the time, with such titles as Willy professeur de skating (1911), Willy diplomate (1913) and Petit Willy soigne la neurasthénie de son oncle (1911). Willy returned to boxing in 1913 for Willy contre le bombardier Wells, where our hero defeats ‘Bombardier’ Billy Wells, the great British boxing hero of the time. He seems not to have had a film career beyond 1916.

Read about Willy in Andrew Horrall’s Popular Culture in London c.1890-1918, which features him on the front cover

Read about The Man to Beat Jack Johnson on Screenonline

There will be more on the Europeans tomorrow…

Slapstick, European-style - part 1

Today, and for the next three days it is the Slapstick Blog-a-Thon, a bloggers’ festival of slapstick organised by Film of the Year. Numerous blogs are taking part, and Bioscopists are warmly encouraged to follow up the other blogs, add comments and so forth.

The Bioscope’s main contribution to the Blog-a-Thon is a survey of the great European comedians of the early cinema, whose names are sadly known only to the few these days, but whose fame once easily matched that of the Keystone stable and other American comics.

Here’s part one…

André Deed (1879-1935) was a French music hall comedian whose film career started with Georges Méliès in 1901, but took off when he joined Pathé Frères in 1906. He established a comic character, Boireau, appearing under that name in numerous shorts, and enjoyed a growing screen reputation throughout Europe. The success of the character inspired numerous imitators at other studios, and essentially created the star comedy genre. His film career blossomed further when he joined Itala in 1908 and established a new character, Cretinetti (known as Foolshead in Britain and Gribouille in France). Cretinetti was an engaging mixture of dim-wittedness and sharp-wittedness, readily stumbling into chaotic situations but triumphantly working his way out of them. He went back to Pathé in 1911 and resumed the character of Boireau. He made hundreds of comic shorts in his career, whose anarchic quality seems to ally them with Dada and Surrealism. He made some further Cretinetti films in Italy from 1915, before his career faded away in the 1920s.

Read this essay on early film, Cretinetti and the Modernists

There’s a new book on Deed, Jean A. Gili’s André Deed - Boireau, Cretinetti, Gribouille, Toribio, Foolshead, Lehman… (Le Mani-Cineteca di Bologna, 2005), in Italian

Max Linder (1883-1925) was arguably the greatest of all European silent film comedians, and in retrospect the most tragic. He was born Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle but took the stage name Max Linder, and began working in Pathé films, initially in minor roles, from 1905. Gradually he built up the character of Max, a sophisticated, elegant figure with top hat and cane, something akin to the flâneur of literary imagination, who could get caught up in foolery without ever losing his dignity. Max was a natural romantic, though his attempts to win the girl were frequently held up the booby-traps of everyday life. In contrast to the popular European comedians of the day, his style was more subtle, less pantomimic, and his comedy had a touch of grace about it that won his international admirers, none more so than Chaplin. His period of fame started around 1910 and he made hundreds of Max films up to 1914, becoming one of the most popular stars of the screen of that time. The war brought an end to his fame, and though he had a brief period in the USA at the Essanay studios in 1916, he was not a success, and his career gradually petered out. He made a few feature films (such as The Three-Must-Get-Theres in 1922), but he suffered badly from depression, and in 1925 he and his wife committed joint suicide.

There’s a DVD, Laugh with Max Linder, available from Image Entertainment

Find out more about Max Linder on Wikipedia

Fred Evans (1889-1951) was second only in popularity to Chaplin in Britain at the height of his career. He was the nephew of a well-known music hall comedian, Will Evans, and trod the boards himself before entering films in 1910 for Cricks and Martin, with the character Charley Smiler. The films were crudely-constructed affairs, but two years later Evans came up with the character of Pimple, a white-faced clown, perpetually accident-prone. Hundreds and hundreds of Pimple films were made, most of them routine knockabouts, but he also developed a taste of parodies, and in films like Pimple’s Battle of Waterloo (1913) he displays a proto-Pythonesque humour of the absurd while sending up the British epic film The Battle of Waterloo. In many of them he collaborated with his brother Joe. His comedy is sometimes held up by a weakness for punning intertitles, and few of his surviving films raise much a laugh nowadays, but at his best his comic inventiveness does indeed point the way to Python, The Young Ones, The Fast Show and a long British tradition of the gleefully absurd. He continued to make many films through the war years, and ended his film career as an extra in the 1930s.

Find out more about Pimple on Screenonline

There’s an excellent essay on Fred and Joe Evans by Michael Hammond in the book Pimple, Pranks & Pratfalls: British Film Comedy Before 1920 (2000)

Charles Prince (1872-1933) appeared in Pathé films as Rigadin, whose character was generally that of a bashful lover. He already enjoyed some fame as a theatre performer before joining Pathé in 1908, and he went on to appear in over 200 Rigadin films up to 1920, writing the senarios for many of them. In Britain and America he was known as Whiffles. Rigadin’s most interesting films were those that took on contemporay themes, such as Rigadin Peintre Cubiste (1912), where he mocked modern art by appearing as an angular figure, and Rigadin aux Balkans (1912) where he plays a war cameraman who gleefully fakes scenes for the camera in France rather than travel to the Balkan War. He ended his film career playing small roles throughout the 1920s and 30s.

More European comedians tomorrow… and don’t forget to read all the other Slapstick Blog-a-Thon posts.

(Acknowledgments to the Encyclopedia of Early Cinema for some facts and figures).

Slapstick Blog-a-Thon

The Film of the Year blog has announced a Slapstick Blog-a-Thon for 7-10 September. A blog-a-thon, as I understand it, is where one blogger starts off a topic and as many bloggers who want to chime in on the same theme. And here the theme is slapstick - but let Film of the Year’s Thom Ryan explain what’s going on:

Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton! Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Mabel Normand! Hal Roach and Mack Sennett! Laurel and Hardy and The Three Stooges! Daffy and Donald! Slip-and-fall and the ol’ pie-in-the-face! The Cook (1918), The General (1927), The Gold Rush (1925), Safety Last (1923)… Possibly no other genre gives us more reasons to bust a gut or split our sides with laughter than slipping, tripping, and gripping slapstick. Recent discussions convinced me that there’s a huge pile of slap-films that I need to see. Then I thought, why keep ‘em all to myself? So, I’m inviting the entire blogosphere to join together September 7-10 and let the world know why slapstick is so flippin’ funny!

Here’s how it works:

1) Leave a comment or e-mail me if you’d like to join the blog-a-thon.

2) On September 7-10 post something slapstick related on your blog. Then leave a comment here or e-mail me that you’ve posted and I’ll link to all of the posts from here.

3) Read each other’s posts, share comments, and have fun!

Film of the Year is well worth checking out for itself. It’s a week-by-week chronological survey through the history of cinema 1895-2009, with one film chosen to represent each year. The assessments are engaging, discursive and knowledgeable, and it’s just a really good idea for a blog (it’ll take him two years to complete, hence the 2009 end date).

Anyway, find out more about the Slapstick Blog-a-Thon from Film of the Year, which supplies these suggestions for possible themes:

Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Charley Chase, Dangerous Stunts, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Harold Lloyd, How/Why does it make us laugh?, Max Davidson, The Three Stooges, Slapstick awards, Joe E. Brown, Fay Tincher, W.C. Fields, History and slapstick, Leo McCarey, The art of pie throwing, Jerry Lewis, John Bunny, Our Gang, Origin of the word, Monty Banks, Seltzer bottles, Mel Brooks, Max Linder, Slapstick and violence, Snub Pollard, Slapstick style, Harry Langdon, Ben Turpin, Avant-garde slapstick, André Deed, Things fall apart, Hal Roach, Mack Sennett, The Keystone Company, Make your own slapstick short, The Keystone Kops, Slapstick Animation, Stan Laurel, slapstick and dance, Oliver Hardy, Abbott and Costello, The Marx Brothers…

The Bioscope will be contributing something.

Slapstick

Things may be a little quieter from The Bioscope for the next few days, as I’ve broken a bone in my thumb, and typing has become rather slow process.

So, to mark my falling over and crashing into a glass-fronted picture, from which I have learned that pratfalls hurt in real life, here’s a short item on slapstick.

First of all, a slapstick was a jointed piece of wood used in harlequinades and minstrel acts to make a slapping noise. If you are in a UK educational institution or library, you can see one in use in an 1899 film of seaside entertainers E. Williams and his Merry Men at Rhyl, filmed by Arthur Cheetham and available from Screenonline.

For slapstick comedians themselves, start off with David B. Pearson’s excellent Silent-Movies.org site, which incorporates several web sites on silent comedy stars, one of which is Slapstick. This has MP4 movie files of Charlies Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Mabel Normand, Harry Langdon, and Max Linder. They are clips, not complete films, but they capture the artistry of falling with style perfectly.

Or look further at the individuals by visiting www.busterkeaton.com, Arbucklemania, Harold Lloyd, Madcap Mabel, The Harry Langdon Society or Chaplin.

On the latter, check out the Chapliniana web site, about the festival of all things Chaplin which is currently running in Bologna. The site looks great, but is only in Italian. Or check out the very helpful Charlie Chaplin UK DVD and Video Guide.

Or, if you are in the US, check out Kino range of slapstick DVDs including the encyclopedic Slaptick Symposium DVD collection - 1264 minutes of Oliver Hardy, Stan Laurel, Charley Chase and Harold Lloyd.

And, of course, between 19-22 July, at Arlington, Virginia, there’s the Slapsticon festival, with Laurel and Hardy, Harry Langdon, Harold Lloyd Larry Semon, Mabel Normand, Leon Errol, Ford Sterling, Fatty Arbuckle, Billy Bevan, Monty Banks, Max Davidson, Charley Chase, Lupino Lane, Ben Turpin, Wallace Beery…

And, thinking laterally about these things, here’s some recipes for making custard pie.

Why not read Simon Louvish’s, Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett, about the cinema’s prime producer of comic mayhem.

Finally, plenty of people visit this site loking for dates of Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns shows this autumn, and the main post on this is updated as I find new tour dates. Merton’s book, Silent Comedy, will be published in October.

Anyone spot the self-referential gag in the picture?

Slapsticon

The programme has been announced for Slapsticon, the annual festival of silent and early sound film comedy, to be held at Arlington, Virginia, July 19-22.

Comedians featured include Laurel and Hardy (Way Out West), Harry Langdon (Luck of the Foolish), Harold Lloyd (A Jazzed Honeymoon), Larry Semon (Spuds), Mabel Normand (Hello Mabel), Leon Errol, Ford Sterling, Fatty Arbuckle, Billy Bevan, Monty Banks, Max Davidson, Charley Chase, Lupino Lane, Ben Turpin, Wallace Beery, and many more (Poodles Hanneford, anyone?). Pick of the bunch, on title alone, must be Mr and Mrs Sidney Drew in A Case of Eugenics (1915)… Britain’s own Pimple and Will Hay (Oh Mr Porter) also put in an appearance.

There’s travel, accommodation and registration information on the site.

Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns

Television comedian and silent cinema champion Paul Merton will be hosting a special programme of silent film comedians, including Chaplin, Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle and Charley Chase, with music by Neil Brand, at Plymouth Pavilions on 27 November 2007 - some time off, but tickets are on sale now. Merton has written a book, Silent Comedy, which will be published in October 2007. Look out for plenty of publicity and events around that time.

Update: See later post, Paul Merton on tour, for a list of his November-December tour dates, with links to the theatres.

British Pathe - part one

British Movietone (see 26 February post) is one British newsreel now available in its entirety online, but the most important British newsreel collection - and one which goes back to the silent era - to be found on the web is British Pathe. Pathé newsreels ran in Britain from 1910 to 1970, while the company also produced cinemagazines like Eve’s Film Review and Pathé Pictorial, as well documentaries and other shorts. 3,500 hours of this collection was made available online in free low resolution download form four years ago, thanks to funding from the Lottery-based New Opportunities Fund.

The British Pathe site is therefore a superb resource for discovering silent non-fiction film, and in future posts I’ll be providing a guide to some of the treasures to be found. However, I’m going to start with the unexpected - fiction films. Pathé somehow picked up assorted pre-First World War films, some though not all made by its French parent company, and these got digitised alongside the newsreels and are available on the site. There is no index to these fiction films, so below is a list of some of the ones that I have been able to find, with descriptions and some attempts at identifying them, as few are given correct titles or dates:

(the first title given is that on the British Pathe database - enter this in the search box to find the film)

THE FATAL SNEEZE = comedy in which a man suffers from an increasingly violent sneeze. This is That Fatal Sneeze (GB Hepworth 1907).

THE RUNAWAY HORSE = comedy in which a runaway horse causes chaos. This is a famous comedy of its time, Le Cheval Emballé (FR Pathé 1907).

FLYPAPER COMEDY = This is a French comedy with Max Linder, in which Max has flypaper sticking to him which he then finds sticks to everything else.

THE FANTASTIC DIVER = early trick film in which a man dives into a river fully clothed then returns by reverse action in a swimsuit.

THE RUNAWAY GLOBE = Italian? comedy in which a giant globe intended for a restaurant runs away down a street and is chased by a group of people before being sucked up by the sun, only to be spat out again.

THE MAGIC SAC [sic] = French trick film in which an old man hits people with a sack and makes them disappear.

MYSTERIOUS WRESTLERS = French trick film where two wrestlers pull one another to bits. This is a brilliant George Méliès trick film, Nouvelle Luttes Extravagantes (FR Star-Film 1900).

ATTEMPTED NOBBLING OF THE DERBY FAVOURITE = section from a British racing drama, made by Cricks and Sharp in 1905.

THE POCKET BOXERS = trick film in which two men place two miniature boxers on a table and watch them fight.

ESCAPED PRISONER RETURNS HOME = guards wait while prisoner bids a tearful farewell to his sick wife. This must be a James Williamson film, perhaps The Deserter (GB 1904).

LETTER TO HER PARENTS = extract from a drama at which elderly parents are upset at a message they receive.

ASKING FATHER FOR DAUGHTER’S HAND = scenes from a film where a fiancée has to prove himself to the father.

HAVING FUN WITH POLICEMEN = British comedy in which two legs stick out of a hole in an ice-covered pond, placed there by boys to trick a policeman.

POINT DUTY = a policeman is run over by a car and put back together again. This is How to Stop a Motor Car (GB Hepworth 1902).

THE MOTOR SKATER = comedy where man buys a pair of motorised skates and causes chaos.

RUNAWAY CYCLIST = comedy where man buys a bicycle and causes chaos (as can be seen, this was a common theme for comedies of the period).

FIRE = mixture of actuality film of a fire brigade and a dramatised fire rescue. This is Fire! (GB Williamson 1901).

HAMLET = scene with Hamlet and his father’s ghost, using trick photography, from Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s production of Hamlet, a feature-length film (GB Hepworth 1913).

THE DECOY LETTER = early, rudimentary Western, where a soldier lures away an innkeeper with a decoy letter and attempts to assault his wife.

THE VILLAGE FIRE = comedy fire brigade film. This is The Village Fire Brigade (GB Williamson 1907).

THE RUNAWAY CAR = French comedy in which three men try to ride a bicycle and then a car.

RESCUED BY ROVER = a dog finds a kidnapped baby. This is of course the famous Rescued by Rover (GB Hepworth 1905).

Anyone who recognises the descriptions where the film has not been identified, or has the time to take a look at the films and identify them, or finds other fiction films on the site, do let me know.