THE LIVING PLAYING CARDS (1904)
aka Les cartes vivantes
Article 4182 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-20-2013
Directed by Georges Melies
Featuring Georges Melies
Country: France
What it is: Magic short

A magician performs some tricks with a giant playing card that can change its pattern.

The title is derived from the fact that the face cards end up emerging as real people. Yes, this is another of Melies’s magic trick shorts, and in some ways is pretty ordinary. He does, however, do a particularly nice job of staging this one, especially in the way he sets up some of the humorous bits, such as the opening part where he becomes frustrated at trying to get the audience to tell which card from an ordinary size deck he’s holding, requiring him to magically increase its size. This is one of the better examples of this particular type of short.

LITTLE NEMO (1911)
aka Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics
Article 4181 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-19-2013
Directed by Winsor McCay and J. Stuart Blackton
Featuring Winsor McCay, John Bunny, George McManus
Country: USA
What it is: Live action/animation

A cartoonist makes a promise that he will make some of his comic characters move through animation.

In the history of motion pictures, Winsor McCay is primarily known for giving us one of the great early animated shorts, GERTIE THE DINOSAUR. This one predates it, and serves as something of a warm-up for that one. The structure is basically the same; the live action sequences begin with McCay stating his goal to a group of people. We then have a few scenes of him at work, usually with the addition of some comic pratfalls (usually involving lots of pieces of paper falling onto the floor). The movie concludes with the presentation of the animation. This one isn’t quite at the level of the Gertie short, largely because the animation, though well done, is rather aimless; it lacks the characterization and the interaction that add to the charm of the later movie. Still, as a warm-up, it’s interesting, and part of the animation features two characters sitting on thrones in a dragon’s mouth, so there is some fantastic content.

THE LILLIPUTIAN MINUET (1905)
aka Le menuet lilliputien
Article 4180 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-17-2013
Directed by Georges Melies
Featuring Georges Melies
Country: France
What it is: Magic trick short

A magician makes little people appear out of playing cards and do a dance.

This Melies short exists in only fragmentary form; just the last minute or so survives. However, since it seems to be another example of Melies’s magic films, I get the feeling that what we’re missing is the setup, which I bet involves the magician setting out the table, producing the playing cards, making them increase in size, and then setting some face cards on the table, which come to life and begin to dance; the last part pretty much is a reverse of the process. The title attraction is definitely present. My main impression is that it is a pretty conventional but rather charming take on a familiar Melies theme; I suspect the missing footage might well render the thing a bit too long, thereby losing some of its charm.

LIFE OF AN AMERICAN FIREMAN (1903)
Article 4178 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-14-2013
Directed by Edwin S. Porter
Featuring Vivian Vaughan, Arthur White, James H. White
Country: USA
What it is: Early action short

Firemen rush to put out a burning house and to save the residents inside it.

I found a copy of this movie on YouTube that ran eleven minutes, which I thought was curious because the movie itself is only about six minutes. I’m glad that I did, though; the eleven minutes consist of two different edits of the film. The cuts are identical until the final three minutes. The first one then shows a scene of the rescue of a woman and a child from within burning house itself, followed by the same scene reenacted from outside the burning house. The second version shows these two sequences edited together so it makes one continuous piece of action. Left to my own devices, I would have interpreted the two prints thusly; the first one was the unedited “raw” footage, while the second was what was actually shown to audiences. I remember seeing something similar with a short D.W. Griffith film at one time, only with the distinction that the unedited version of the film was nearly incomprehensible until you saw the edited version.

Well, I would have turned out to be wrong. If the notes and user comments on IMDB are to be trusted, than the first version was how it was first shown to audiences at the time; the second version was a reedit from three decades later to make it conform more with editing expectations at that time. Actually, I’m rather pleased by this discovery; I found the first version much more interesting because of the curious technique of showing the same scene from two different viewpoints.

As for the fantastic content, I find this somewhat ambiguous. The first scene shows a fireman dreaming of a woman and a child; they turn out to be the ones in the fire. This scene could have two possible interpretations; either the woman and the child are known to the fireman (possibly his wife and child), or the fireman has a premonition, the latter interpretation being the one that would yield fantastic content. Unfortunately, the rest of the film doesn’t do anything to clarify either of these interpretations, thus leaving us in something of a grey area.