Entente cordiale (1912)

Entente cordiale (1912)
Article 5665 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-16-2019
Directed by Max Linder
Featuring Max Linder, Jane Renouardt, Stacia Napierkowska
Country: France
What it is: Max Linder comedy short

Max allows a friend to stay in his apartment. When they both fall in love with a beautiful maid, the rivalry causes them to engage in a duel.

Yes, there’s no apparent fantastic content in the plot description, and given that I recently covered a Max Linder short that (to my mind) was mistakenly classified as a fantasy, I found myself wondering if the same problem would crop up in this one. However, such is not the case; there is some clear fantastic content to be found here in the final scene, which involves dancing inanimate objects. There’s also some implied fantastic content when several characters believed dead come back to life, and though it’s clear they were faking being dead, I couldn’t help but note that one of the characters was a chicken, which certainly seems rather outre. Then there’s a touch of surrealism to the short, such as the scene where a piano is hitched up to the rear of a horse and buggy. As for the short itself, I found it genuinely amusing and a clear example of how Max Linder paved the way for Charlie Chaplin; there are some great comic bits here and there. This one is a lot of fun.

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The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912)

The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912)
Article 5664 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-15-2019
Directed by Harold M. Shaw
Featuring Martin Fuller, Mrs. William Bechtel, Walter Edwin
Country: USA
What it is: Drama with fantastic elements

A poor newsboy lives in squalor with his abusive grandmother. However, he comes by a ticket to a picnic hosted by the Fresh Air Fund, an organization which takes poor city kids out to the country to enjoy nature.

From what I gather, the Fresh Air Fund was a real organization (which, according to IMDB, still exists), and this short amounts to a commercial for the charitable group. In some ways, it’s quite effective; the opening scenes with the boy in the city are rather depressing and make you feel for the boy. The fantastic elements have to do with a story told to the boy at the picnic about a boy who escapes from a wicked witch with the help of the fairies and is allowed to escape by boat to the Land Beyond the Sunset, a world without worries. The story is shown visually, and it’s pretty apparent who the witch and the fairies are within the context of what’s happening. The ending is both fascinating and problematic; when the picnic breaks up, we’re left wondering whether it was just a momentary respite in the boy’s life; does he have any option other than returning the squalor of his daily existence? The movie gives him an out, and even though the ending is somewhat haunting and ambiguous, one is left wondering a little whether the Fresh Air Fund may have been exaggerating their influence. Still, it’s the ending that really makes this one memorable.

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Cinderella (1911)

Cinderella (1911)
Article 5663 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-11-2019
Directed by George Nichols
Featuring Florence La Badie, Harry Benham, Anna Rosemond
Country: USA
What it is: Fairy tale

Thanks to her fairy godmother, Cinderella gets a chance to go the ball and dance with the prince. What will happen?

If you’re going to do a comprehensive review of fantastic cinema, you’re going to encounter a lot of fairy tale adaptations, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the story of Cinderella proved to be the most common of these. I’ve seen so many versions that after a while, I grow to appreciate any new detail that adds a bit of novelty to the story. This short take on the tale has a few. To begin with, Cinderella’s father actually appears as a character; in most versions, he either never appears or is assumed to be dead. Granted, the most he’s really given to do is to have a scroll grabbed from him by the dominating stepmother, but at least he’s present. Another novelty is that the coach, horses and footmen and magically created indoors rather than outside, which forces the fairy godmother to create a magic exit for the coach to go through. Last is that the fairy godmother makes a final appearance at the climax of the story. These may be small details, but with a story that is so familiar, I found them to be welcome distractions, though taken as a whole, this is just another version of a familiar tale.

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Max fait du ski (1910)

Max fait du ski (1910)
Article 5662 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-9-2019
Directed by Louis J. Gasnier and Lucien Nonguet
Featuring Max Linder and Gabrielle Lange
Country: France
What it is: Slapstick

Max goes skiing and proves not to be particularly competent at the task.

IMDB classifies this slapstick short as a fantasy. Perhaps it is; the print I saw feels like a fragment, so there is a chance that something fantastic happens in the missing footage. As to what it could be, I have no idea; the plot description on IMDB gives no hint on what it could be. So let’s classify this one as a false alarm and this review as more of a warning for those expecting something more. On its own terms, it’s not bad; Max Linder was a talented physical comedian, and his antics are on the fun side. Still, it’s pretty obvious and hardly essential.

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The Mermaid (1910)

The Mermaid (1910)
aka Rusalka
Article 5661 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-1-2019
Directed by Vasili Goncharov
Featuring Vasili Stepanov, Aleksandra Goncharova, Andrej Gromov
Country: Russia
What it is: Opera adaptation

A prince jilts a miller’s daughter, who attempts suicide. He is haunted by her image at his wedding. He decides to go back and discover her fate…

Like Feuillade’s THE FAIRY OF THE SURF, this is another early drama in which the story involves romance and ends in an underwater kingdom. Unlike that film, though, the romances in this one all go sour, and the mood is gloomier. In terms of plot this one is more obscure; I’m not sure if the miller’s daughter has truly committed suicide or has survived, or whether the vision during the wedding is a ghost or just the prince’s imagination. However, I may attribute the confusion here to the fact that it’s an adaptation of an opera which most assuredly ran longer than ten minutes; obviously, much plot detail has been obscured. Nevertheless, this one is not as satisfying as the Feuillade film. And for those wondering about the title, there do appear a group of mermaids, albeit ones without fish tails.

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Spring (1909)

Spring (1909)
aka Le printemps
Article 5660 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-29-2019
Directed by Louis Feuillade
Featuring Henri Duval, Christiane Mandalys, Maurice Vinot
Country: France
What it is: Decorative short

Spring is celebrated with mystical characters appearing in vistas of nature.

IMDB splits this short into four different movies, with each movie consisting of one or two of the seven episodes that make up the combined version I saw. I decided to review them as a single entity, taking note that only the first of the four movies is classified as a fantasy by IMDB. Still, any one of the four sections would qualify; each section features characters magically appearing in a spring setting, and relaxing / dancing / cavorting / playing in the setting. As such, there’s no plot; it’s a decorative mood piece that’s pretty to look at. Oddly enough, this is the second movie in a row to feature fairies dancing on water.

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Une excursion incoherente (1909)

Une excursion incoherente (1909)
Article 5658 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-27-2019
Directed by Segundo de Chomon
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Pretty strange

Some people go on a disastrous picnic followed by a visit to a haunted mansion.

This short by Chomon is a very good example of how he had his own vision beyond what he borrowed from Melies. There are four major setpieces in this short – the picnic, the scene at the fireplace, the scene in the bedroom, and the scene outside the mansion. The fireplace scene and the scene outside the mansion are very reminiscent of Melies, but the other two scenes are something else. The grotesque picnic sequence is as surreal as something you’d expect from Luis Bunuel, and there is apparently some speculation as to whether he was influenced by this short. The scene in the bedroom makes some very interesting use of shadow imagery and animation, with the latter element showing a possible influence by Emile Cohl. There’s no real plot to the short; it’s a series of bizarre setpieces, and as is implied by the title, it is incoherent. Nevertheless, it still makes for an interesting viewing experience, and certainly feels different from other shorts of the same era.

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Le papillon fantastique (1909)

Le papillon fantastique (1909)
Article 5657 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-26-2019
Directed Georges Melies
Featuring Georges Melies
Country: France
What it is: Magic short fragment

A magician performs magic involving a giant butterfly and a spider creature.

Apparently, all that is left of this short is a two-minute fragment, but given that it’s a magic trick short, I’m guessing all I’m missing is a few tricks. The best thing about this is its switch of mood halfway through; the sequence with the butterfly is all bright and cheery, but things turn dark and ominous when the spider shows up. Outside of that, it looks like your typical Melies magic trick short – entertaining, but hardly essential.

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Le Miroir Magique (1908)

Le Miroir Magique (1908)
Article 5656 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-25-2019
Directed by Segundo de Chomon
Featuring Julienne Mathieu
Country: France
What it is: Decorative short

A woman sees visions of other women in her mirror and her jewelry.

There’s a certain type of silent short that I’ve decided to call “decorative” shorts. They’re usually very short, have no real plot, and seem to be focused on pretty visual tableaus above anything else. This is an example; it mostly consists of a woman sitting by her makeup bureau and seeing visions of dancing women in her mirror, and then her jewelry. It’s pretty enough to look at (which I suspect is its main goal), and it’s too short to really get dull, so it could be said that it succeeds. Still, it’s rather difficult to assess shorts like this beyond these points.

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Fireside Reminiscences (1908)

Fireside Reminiscences (1908)
Article 5655 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-21-2019
Directed by J. Searle Dawley and Edwin S. Porter
Featuring Miss Abbot, Miss Acton, Edward Boulden
Country: USA
What it is: Marital melodrama

A husband throws out his wife when he sees her embracing another man, unaware that the man she’s embracing is her brother. Three years later, the husband reminisces about his wife at the fireside.

This was apparently based on a popular song of the day. Originally, it looked like the fantastic content would consist of nothing more than of having seen visions of things in a fireplace (which would make it pretty marginal), but one of the visions does not appear to be a reminiscence, but a mystical revelation showing the husband where his wife is now, a circumstance which leads to a happy ending. Evaluating this one is tough, as the print is very badly damaged, and some of the scenes are in poor condition. Overall, though, the story is a little hard to swallow and is fairly slow-moving on occasion. It’s so-so, but nothing essential.

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