I was hoping to get more of the Halloween appropriate shorts up this weekend.  The 1907 batch from Segundo de Chomon will help the mission.  Two of these films, The Red Spectre and Satan at Play, tend to get conflated,  The first video is a cleaned-up combination of the two, followed by the original films.










 

Melies' output in 1907 was a bit more shambolic.  One of his main fantastiques, Under the Seas, an adaptation of Verne's 20,000 Leagues, is poorly preserved, only available in fragments, and mostly without the handtinted prints.  The Eclipse is complete, at least.  His more ambitious attempt at Hamlet is unfortunately lost.









 

Just six months shy of Charles Tait's Kelly Gang claim to the first "feature" film at 60 minutes, French playwrite and actor Michel Carre offered his 90 minute film L'Enfant Prodigue, now considered the first feature film "from Europe".  Carre would refilm his play in 1916.  Either way, the film is basically just a static camera film of his three-act play without any adiitional cinematic flourishes.  It's in public domain but doesn't appear to be on Youtube at the moment.

In America, the Edison company had broken down into various splinter independent studios, such as Mutoscope/Biograph, Vitagraph, Selig and a newcomer, Kalem, which produced the first version of the novel Ben Hur, directed by Sidney Olcott.  The 15 minute film survives in shoddy condition and, unfortunately, none of the hand-tinted prints manufactured in Paris (as hand-tinting was almost exculsively a French indulgence) have been recovered.  This film is short enough for its historical significance to register, but for a biblical movie filmed in Brooklyn....well.




And from Edwin Porter, a perverse little bit of Goldilocks, I guess.



 

Before moving on to 1908, one note of historical importance.  The British director, George Albert Smith, developed the first form of color film process, true color film as opposed to hand-painted prints.  He called this Kinemacolor, and it enjoyed a brief popularity for a few years before losing favor around 1915.  In fact, an early version of Birth of a Nation, which was not completed, was filmed using this color process in 1911.  Interestingly, for the British-based trademarks, both Kinemacolor and Smith's distributer, Charles Urban's Natural Color Kinematograph Company, did not use the proper "colour" spelling.  The following films were among the first (and the few surviving) films which were primarily shown for demonstration purposes around this time.






 

This is all great. I'm so ignorant.

Emile Cohl




"Father of the Animated Cartoon", we've seen several other candidates for that credit (probably Reynaud, if we're being accurate), but Cohl entered the ring with his 1908 Fantasmagorie, and many others, some lost some not.







 

It seems unlikely that Melies had lost interest in hand-painted color film, and he would return to the format in some later films.  More likely, such prints, always in exclusive availablity due to the time and expense of their production, are yet more casualties of these depleted collections.

Segundo de Chomon however continued to prolifically produce a number of colorful cinema confections, including his own tribute to Melies' prior classics.










 

Despite the strides, technical and aesthetic, that we've seen in French cinema especially, the badge of prestige was still leveraged more on how this new art form cohered to the more traditional (respectable) mediums of literature and theater, rather than focused on the aspects wholly unique to cinema itself.  Obviously there's evolutionary overlap, as Melies and his peers are deeply steeped in traditional literature, from folk and fairy tales to popular genres like science fiction and mysteries, just as they're inherently dependent on certain theatrical production standards.  But rather than marvel at the camera tricks and techniques which can defy physical space, these techniques were more often viewed as perjorative as Melies' source - simply as tricks, carnival sleight-of-hand, even charlatanism.  Meanwhile, as we first saw in the feature-length production of Michel Carre's Prodigal Son, using film to merely ape a theatrical production was more auspiciously received.  And we see it again a year later with the more modestly 17 minutes of The Assassination of the Duke of Guise, a handsome picture which is nonetheless more reknowned for its acceptance among the higher brows of the French fine arts community, being produced by Le Film d'Art (founded specifically to appeal to France's "cultural elite"), directed by established and venerated theater professionals, rather than the more hoi polloi entertainers like magicians and such, and given an original screenplay from an eminent "man of letters", Henri Lavedan, all of which conferred upon the film medium a touch of gravitas.  Cinema had finally broken the intelligensia's cherry.  And since the major liability in the cinema form at the time remained a lack of sound (although synchronized sound cylinder recordings were becoming more common), the additional grace of a new original score from Camille Saint-Saens placed that cherry right on top.

Among the other remaining French output of 1908, I'd rather highlight the film from Albert Capellani, L'Arlesienne, a film which had been an established play by Alphonse Daudet, which used the esteemed original score from that play by Georges Bizet, and marked the inauguration of SCAGL (trans: the Cinematographic Society of Authors and Writers - the first use of "auteur" by filmmakers), a parallel attempt among French filmmakers to command their proper due respect.  Almost as a punctuation, "The Girl From Arles", despite being an adaptation of a traditional  three-act play, is not confined to the theater at all, being shot on location in the south of France, making good use of its Roman amphitheatre.  Also, perhaps more impressively, it exhibits probably the very first use of a camera pan, creating a nearly 180 degree panorama.  It shares its prestige from traditional theater and classical music all while emphasizing cinema's liberation from the stage.