BFI's restoration of Alice In Wonderland (1903)

[spadeneal]

is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeIXfdog ... ure=digest

1903 really seems to have been a year when long pictures with reasonably coherent stories began to take hold. Edison's The Great Train Robbery, AM&B's Kit Carson are the two that I know from this year prior to this Stow & Hepworth effort, which I had never heard of. Anyone know of others? Méliès' The Impossible Voyage -- which is really quite long for its era -- was made in 1904.

spadeneal

[boblipton]

Any idea if KIT CARSON is easily available anyplace?

Bob

[spadeneal]

My information might not be the freshest, but from what I understand Kit Carson was issued both as a coherent film and in individual, short lengths, and what LoC has is just a couple of the short lengths. The long version may have appeared after The Great Train Robbery. In any event, I've never seen what may remain of Kit Carson, of great interest to me as a Wallace McCutcheon, Sr. film.

spadeneal

[Derwiddian]

Other long 1903 films:

Uncle Tom's Cabin (Edison/Porter) 19 minutes

The Kingdom of Fairies (Melies) 16 minutes--and quite worth watching

Aside from The Great Train Robbery and Alice in Wonderland, I haven't come across anything else available on video longer than 9 minutes.

[spadeneal]

I've seen both of those. The Kingdom of the Faries is great, whereas Uncle Tom's Cabin is a magnet for bad synch jobs.

spadeneal

[boblipton]

Well, Melies' VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE can come in at 14 minutes depending on how fast you crank it and that's 1902.

Bob

[spadeneal]

Méliès was definitely ahead of the curve in fairly long storytellers -- even before La voyage dans la Lune, there was The Dreyfus Affair, his first version of Cinderella and Bluebeard at least. He was making at least one moderately long story film a year from 1899, when the average film was still only one minute or less, the rule through about 1901.

spadeneal

[spadeneal]

The Dreyfus Affair is posted on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_LgdB3o5Qk&NR=1

I couldn't find part 8, but I think it's contained in what is called "Part 9" as these are two lengths posted together and are a continuation of the same scene. Doesn't have a strong story arc, though everyone in France in 1899 would have been hip to the facts of the case. It does have some impressive sets, and of course, an impressive length for a dramatic film '99 -- in the US there's nothing that quite compares to it in that year.

spadeneal

[Derwiddian]

Just to be pedantic, I might add that the core version of La Vie et la Passion de Jesus Christ (Pathe/Zecca) came out in 1903. Probably in the neighborhood of 20 minutes. The 44-minute version we have today includes later accretions, with a different actor playing Christ.

Armed with that information, perhaps it would be possible to determine roughly which tableaux are from 1903. In which case, be my guest, but I can't really imagine the Nitrateville cavalry rushing to do that.

[spadeneal]

If there was a place whereby I could see it, I would be perverse enough to try. These are the kinds of challenges I relish!

spadeneal

[boblipton]

The Dreyfus Affair is posted on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_LgdB3o5Qk&NR=1

I couldn't find part 8, but I think it's contained in what is called "Part 9" as these are two lengths posted together and are a continuation of the same scene. Doesn't have a strong story arc, though everyone in France in 1899 would have been hip to the facts of the case. It does have some impressive sets, and of course, an impressive length for a dramatic film '99 -- in the US there's nothing that quite compares to it in that year.

spadeneal

I believe all of DREYFUS is on last year's MELIES set. Couldn't tell you for sure since my copy is out on loan.

Bob

[Derwiddian]

La Vie et La Passion is on Image DVD, along with From the Manger to the Cross. Also, I've seen the whole thing on the web, but I'm not sure it's there now.

In reply to Bob Lipton, you are right: all nine segments of The Dreyfus Affair are on the Melies set. As there were reputedly 11 segments altogether, a couple may be lost.

Also, if we are discussing 1902 films (which I thought at the time was off-topic), you might add Porter's Jack and the Beanstalk at 10 minutes. I thought it was a good effort for Porter, though certainly not in the Melies class.

[Derwiddian]

Sorry. Another double post. Advancing senility, I guess!

[spadeneal]

Porter's Jack in the Beanstalk is one my daughter's (16 yo) favorite silent films. She loves the cow.

spadeneal

[moviepas]

The Australian film, The Story of the Kelly Gang(1906) is said to be the longest and first feature of early days. This partly survives and on DVD as a study film with a book.
The Salvation Army had a film division in Melbourne Australia around 1900 called Limelight Productions run by a Herbert Booth & Joseph Perry. They did one in 1898 and in Sept 1900 they released at the City hall their feature, Soldiers of the Cross which was made up of sequences and many large format slides(all the slides are said to have been saved and in the National Archives in Canberra) which toured US in 1907. Was this the first feature film or is is disqualified because of the slides??? The footage appears all lost now. Booth was a family member of the Salvos founder.

[Derwiddian]

Another long film of the pre-1903 days was Melies' Robinson Crusoe, which going by catalog numbers was a bit longer than the earlier Le Voyage dans la Lune. If we assign a December 1902 date to Crusoe, which is likely, it was the longest film to its time. Unfortunately, only a minute survives, which can be viewed on the recent Flicker Alley release. The surviving stuff seems to comprise two separate clips from rather late in the film, based on a scene-by-scene description in the New York Times of May 21, 1903.

[spadeneal]

The Australian film, The Story of the Kelly Gang(1906) is said to be the longest and first feature of early days. This partly survives and on DVD as a study film with a book.
The Salvation Army had a film division in Melbourne Australia around 1900 called Limelight Productions run by a Herbert Booth & Joseph Perry. They did one in 1898 and in Sept 1900 they released at the City hall their feature, Soldiers of the Cross which was made up of sequences and many large format slides(all the slides are said to have been saved and in the National Archives in Canberra) which toured US in 1907. Was this the first feature film or is is disqualified because of the slides??? The footage appears all lost now. Booth was a family member of the Salvos founder.

I have heard of the Ned Kelly film, but I do not feel qualified to comment on it's relative value as a dramatic feature. But the first feature film in history, bar none, completely qualified is Versicope's Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897) which originally ran between 90-100 minutes. That's it's not a story film is wholly irrelevant as to whether or not it's the first feature film. I am curious as to how we arrived at the 45 minute mark as distinguishing a feature from a short. Clearly a three-reel film made in 1909 -- such as those Vitagraph produced -- was considered a "feature" in its time.

Comparable to Soldiers of the Cross is James H. White's Love and War (Edison 1899) which used four film inserts in connection with magic lantern slides, a pianist and a quartet that sang a medley of specific tunes that worked out to a complete story. White just filmed the segments; I'm not sure who was responsible for the program as a whole. If the slides and music could be located I would think this would be a dandy experience to revive. I have no idea how long it ran; the filmed inserts are quite short and add up to maybe two minutes.

I am interested in the evolution of lengths of negative film in the early days; they seem to have had more influence on the running time of the average subject from 1901 back than almost any other factor. Kinetoscopes are very uneven in terms of playing time, ranging from 20 seconds to 50, and seem to last only as long as the action onscreen lasts, sometimes clearly shorter than that. The Lumières introduced a 50 second length which was the standard in Europe for awhile. Even Méliès -- who should have known better, as he discovered editing -- utilizes uniform 70 second lengths in The Dreyfus Affair, and clearly the action of each scene is planned to conform to this length.

However the whole Veriscope project seems designed with the purpose of eradicating all obstacles to what Enoch Rector was hoping to achieve. We will probably never know how much film they could hold in their magazines, as even the battered 30 minutes which survive from Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight is the result of film from three cameras trained on an indentical setup and edited together. But I doubt that the Veriscope folks would have shot in one minute lengths, and it is recorded that they had many miles of film at their disposal in Carson City.

spadeneal

spadeneal

[urbanora]

The Dreyfus Affair is posted on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_LgdB3o5Qk&NR=1

I couldn't find part 8, but I think it's contained in what is called "Part 9" as these are two lengths posted together and are a continuation of the same scene. Doesn't have a strong story arc, though everyone in France in 1899 would have been hip to the facts of the case. It does have some impressive sets, and of course, an impressive length for a dramatic film '99 -- in the US there's nothing that quite compares to it in that year.

L'AFFAIRE DREYFUS does not survive as a complete set. Of the eleven original scenes, two are missing - episode 2, showing the degradation of Dreyfus, and episode 11, where he is led away to prison after the trial.

Rather than view the YouTube version, which has been ripped from the DVD, why not view instead the version made legitimately available by Lobster Films on Europa Film Treasures, here: http://www.europafilmtreasures.eu/PY/36 ... fus_affair

I'm writing a piece on Dreyfus for The Bioscope, which will be published shortly.

[spadeneal]

Thanks for the tip on Europa. One would always prefer to see these things in their fully legitimate context, but commercial search engines are not always so awesome in locating the best version available -- not even the one on YouTube.

Looking forward to your exegesis on the Dreyfus Affair. The Guardian just published a little notice on Alice:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog ... first-film

[boblipton]

The Hepworth ALICE is available at the BFI subsite on Youtube, honestly available. At the moment it is the most recent upload. There are also lots of other interesting uploads there and I doubt anyone would accuse the BFI of doing illegal things. The link is

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=BFIfilms#g/u

or just head to Youtube and input BFI into the search field.

Bob

[Christopher Jacobs]

Was Melies' THE DREYFUSS AFFAIR originally released as one "long" movie, or was it made available (either exclusively or as an alternate choice) in the individual episodes?

Melies' CINDERELLA (1899) runs about 6 minutes and since the scenes dissolve from one to the next rather than cut (as also done in A TRIP TO THE MOON), it's obvious that the film was intended as an entire unit rather than a series of scenes one could rent/buy individually to stick into a film program.

There were also various Passion Play films made around 1898-99, but I don't know of any other dramatic or fiction films from that era longer than a minute or so. Any other examples anyone knows of?

--Christopher Jacobs
http://hpr1.com/film
http://www.und.edu/instruct/cjacobs

[urbanora]

Was Melies' THE DREYFUSS AFFAIR originally released as one "long" movie, or was it made available (either exclusively or as an alternate choice) in the individual episodes?

Melies' CINDERELLA (1899) runs about 6 minutes and since the scenes dissolve from one to the next rather than cut (as also done in A TRIP TO THE MOON), it's obvious that the film was intended as an entire unit rather than a series of scenes one could rent/buy individually to stick into a film program.

An interesting point to make. L'AFFAIRE DREYFUS was made available an individual episodes each with their own catalogue number. Obviously the hope was that showmen and exhibitors would book the lot, but probably quite a number just booked the trial scene (which is represented by two catalogue numbers). But for CENDRILLON, although the full film is numbered 219-224 in the Star-Film catalogue, and 4219-4224 in the Warwick Trading Company catalogue, it was clearly meant to be bought in its entirety only, with the catalogue number not assigned to the individual parts and the dissolves specifically referred to its catalogue descriptions (at least in the English catalogue).

There were also various Passion Play films made around 1898-99, but I don't know of any other dramatic or fiction films from that era longer than a minute or so. Any other examples anyone knows of?

Pathe issued a four-part [correction - it was eight parts] version of the Dreyfus trial in 1899; British examples are James Williamson's three part (210 feet) SLOPER'S VISIT TO BRIGHTON (1898); Robert Paul's four part (320ft) OUR NEW GENERAL SERVANT (1898); Lewis Sealy's three-part (180ft) song film SIMON THE CELLARER (1899); and the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company's KING JOHN (1899) which was in four scenes, though not really displaying a continuous narrative.

However we have to be wary of looking at films of this period in the light of how films developed later. As the work of Charles Musser in particular has demonstrated, at this period the exhibitor was frequently the creative person involved, putting together programmes - particularly of war subjects like the Spanish-American and Anglo-Boer War periods - which demonstrate ideas of narrative construction beyond that considered by most film producers. If we want to see how the long narrative was starting to develop (chiefly for the non-fiction film, admittedly), we need to look at programmes just as much as catalogues or surving individual films.

[Rodney]

Melies' CINDERELLA (1899) runs about 6 minutes and since the scenes dissolve from one to the next rather than cut (as also done in A TRIP TO THE MOON), it's obvious that the film was intended as an entire unit rather than a series of scenes one could rent/buy individually to stick into a film program.

That's a great point. It would also keep other people from slicing the film apart. I noticed the dissolves between scenes when I first saw it and thought "boy, he's taking a long time with these dissolves. They're slower than usual" before immediately realizing that he was probably inventing this scene changing technique for the first time, and there was no "usual" yet.

[spadeneal]

The long dissolves with Méliès was a technique he used for a long time after 1899. Some of them are genuinely beautiful -- especially in hand-painted prints -- and I think he ultimately decided to keep the dissolves long for aesthetic reasons. Perhaps he saw them as analogous to the changing of scenes in a regular, proscenium arch stage play. Admittedly an armchair observation -- the only interview I've read with Méliès, sadly, does not go quite so deep into such technical questions.

spadeneal

[urbanora]

Looking forward to your exegesis on the Dreyfus Affair.

Here it is (part one of three on Dreyfus films):

http://bioscopic.wordpress.com/2010/03/ ... us-part-1/

[moviepas]

Spadeneal. Interesting reply to the feature length version of the fight and it does qualify on length regardless of the subject matter. The first full length cartoon feature is said have been made in The Argentine well before Snow White.

There may have been an earlier version of the Kelly story but this might have been incorporated into the 1906 version we were talking about.

There were two films made of The Mutiny on the Bounty in Australia around 1911-12,

US director Fred Niblo was here around 1916-17 and made some features for a local theatre company called JC Williamson's. James Cassius Williamson was a US stage actor who had his own traveling company and ended up here with his then wife Maggie Moore(they later divorced) in the 1800s and their major play was Struck Oil!. The Niblo films were made in Melbourne where I was born and live. Little survives, of course. Niblo is famous for Ben-Hur 1925.

What about the use of 70mm negative film which, apparently, Biograph used around 1900?

ALICE IN WONDERLAND:

I got a DVD documentary from USA today that has 1903 fragments and a 1915 version of the story on it but yet to open it.

[spadeneal]

Urbanora,

Fine job on your essay on L'Affaire Dreyfus! I look forward to the future installment(s).

spadeneal

[urbanora]

Here's part 2:

http://bioscopic.wordpress.com/2010/03/ ... us-part-2/