1904 Poll

[Lencho of the Apes]

Choose your favorite films from 1904 (according to IMDb).

– Each person votes for up to 20 movies. Do not feel compelled to fill the maximum allowable number, if you're enthusiastic about fewer than twenty.
– Do not rank the films except the number 1, it gets two points..

Users are urged to post their provisional lists as soon as possible so that others may use them for recommendations. You may, of course, revise your lists at any point prior to the deadline.

Ballots posted by new members who have not participated in other parts of the forum will not be counted.

Deadline for 1904 lists will be Monday, March 1st at approximately 5 PM Pacific Time.

[Lencho of the Apes]

Preliminary list:

Panorama View: Streetcar Motor Room

Burglary At Night
The Christmas Angel
A Day In The Hayfields
European Rest Cure
The Ex-Convict
How the French Nobleman Got A Wife
The Impossible Voyage
An Interesting Story
Japanese Varieties
Maniac Chase
Meet Me At The Fountain
Metamorphosis Of A Butterfly
The Moonshiner
Personal
The Strenuous Life or Anti-Race Suicide
The Suburbanite
La Valise de barnum
The Wandering jew
Welding The Big Ring

[greennui]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JswT7cYzUKs

Grand Display of Brock’s Fireworks at the Crystal Palace (George Albert Smith)
Blackpool Victoria Pier
Panorama du port d’Alger
Panorama View, Street Car Motor Room
Court Ladies Bathing
La Danse du diable (Gaston Velle)
Barcelona Park at Twilight (Segundo de Chomón)

[---]

1. "An Interesting Story" (James Williamson, 1904)

"Grand Display of Brock's Fireworks at the Crystal Palace" (George Albert Smith, 1904)
"The Cook in Trouble" (Georges Méliès, 1904)
"The Christmas Angel" (Georges Méliès, 1904)
"The Impossible Voyage" (Georges Méliès, 1904)
"Le Bey de Tunis et les personnages de sa suite descendant l’escalier du Bardo" (Alexandre Promio, 1904)
"The Ex-Convict" (Edwin S. Porter, 1904)
"Burglary at Night" (Gaston Velle, 1904)
"Ball Passing Through a Soap Bubble" (Lucien Georges Bull, 1904)
"Barcelona Park at Twilight" (Segundo de Chomón, 1904)
"The Untamable Whiskers" (Georges Méliès, 1904)

[flip]

The Impossible Voyage (Georges Melies)

An Interesting Story (James Williamson)
La Danse du Diable (Gaston Velle)
The Terrible Turkish Executioner (Georges Melies)
Raid on a Coiner’s Den (Alf Collins)
Maniac Chase (Edwin S Porter)
Les Cartes Vivantes (Georges Melies)
Panorama View, Street Car Motor Room (Billy Bitzer)
The Cook in Trouble (Georges Melies)
L’Assassinat du Ministre Plehve (Lucien Nonguet)

[cinesmith]

I've rarely ventured into this end of the pool. We're talking about some very obscure short films (edit- NOT '26' , imdb lists 1831 titles) that were made at this time. (For those we even know of!?) Most of the known ones are by Melies alone and you want to pick the top 20?

In a completely separate detail, this is the year that Ray Bolger (Jan 10) Cary Grant (Jan 18) Glenn Miller (Mar 1) Iron Eyes Cody (Apr 3)
John Gielgud (Apr 14) Val Lewton (May 7) Jean Gabin (May 17) Robert Montgomery (May 21) Ralph Bellamy (July 17) Keye Luke (July 18)
Peter Lorre (July 26) Greer Garson (Sept 29) and Dick Powell (Nov 14) were all born!?!

other film related events: (per wiki)

-As shown in the film series Westinghouse Works, some filmmakers begin to move away from eye-level filmmaking and use the camera to explore spaces from an angle usually inaccessible to the average person.

- William Fox purchases his first Nickelodeon.

- 23 June: Marcus Loew founds the theatre chain, the People's Vaudeville Company, which later was renamed Loews Theatres which was the oldest theatre chain operating in North America when it was merged with AMC Theatres in 2006

[flip]

I've rarely ventured into this end of the pool. We're talking about some 26 films that were made at this time.
(For those we even know of!?) 8 are by Melies alone and you want to pick the top 20?

where do you get the number 26 from?

if i advanced-search imdb for films from 1904 with 10+ votes (so ones certainly still viewable today), i get 205 results

[cinesmith]

Sorry. I was clearly looking at a very small portion. Per imdb full roster there's some 1831 titles but we're talking the very early era so these are mostly single reels. I'm obviously a newbie in this realm but I'm just boggled by the efforts per an era where we're talking about some projects where there's little info left about who made them let alone how many are still around as most are likely lost.

edit- Feeling like a coin collector who shows up with my wheat pennies and everyone is pulling out the Aureo medallion of Massenzio over here.

[Holymanm]

seen zippo :0

[rischka]

the impossible voyage

don't worry cinesmith, it's an esoteric area of interest perhaps but most are easily accessible ( and, of course, short )

[cinesmith]

the impossible voyage

don't worry cinesmith, it's an esoteric area of interest perhaps but most are easily accessible ( and, of course, short )

Not worried so much as bewildered by the practice. It gets into the weeds as it were. If we were rating the best work by an artist and thus started listing sketches or incomplete works. The historical significance of these 'shorts' are mostly capturing images rather than performances. There's far fewer instances of creative plots as the very mechanics were still mostly rudimentory.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ballot...
1. A Day in the Hayfields (Cecil M. Hepworth)
Barcelona Park at Twilight (Segundo de Chomón)
Metamorphosis of a Butterfly (Gaston Velle)
An Interesting Story (James Williamson)
Bullet Piercing a Soap Bubble (Lucien Bull)
Assassination of the Russian Minister Plehve (Lucien Nonguet)
Grand Display of Brock’s Fireworks at the Crystal Palace (George Albert Smith)
The Devil's Dance (Gaston Velle)
The Gallants of the Park (Segundo de Chomón)
Maniac Chase (Edwin S. Porter)

in the last few yrs, logged...
NERVY NAT KISSES THE BRIDE (Edwin S. Porter)

watched for the poll (10!)...
THE DEVIL'S DANCE (Gaston Velle)
METAMORPHOSIS OF A BUTTERFLY (Gaston Velle)
THE IMPERCEPTIBLE TRANSMUTATIONS (Georges Méliès)
THE MERMAID (Georges Méliès)
5/ ASSASSINATION OF THE RUSSIAN MINISTER PLEHVE (Lucien Nonguet)
GRAND DISPLAY OF BROCK’S FIREWORKS AT THE CRYSTAL PALACE (George Albert Smith)
MANIAC CHASE (Edwin S. Porter)
BARCELONA PARK AT TWILIGHT (Segundo de Chomón)
A DAY IN THE HAYFIELDS (Cecil M. Hepworth)
10/ HOW A FRENCH NOBLEMAN GOT A WIFE THROUGH THE 'NEW YORK HERALD' PERSONAL COLUMNS (Edwin S. Porter)
PERSONAL (Wallace McCutcheon)
THE GALLANTS OF THE PARK (Segundo de Chomón)
MEET ME AT THE FOUNTAIN (Siegmund Lubin)
THE SUBURBANITE (Wallace McCutcheon)
15/ AN INTERESTING STORY (James Williamson)
THE ESCAPED LUNATIC (Wallace McCutcheon)
BULLET PIERCING A SOAP BUBBLE (Lucien Bull)

https://youtu.be/IQ_Scf0BxZM
https://youtu.be/TqgtOn8upPQ

[---]

Plot is one of the things I'm not as interested in. I watch these old fucks, cos most are 2/5 or 3/5, but every 100 or.so one changes my life. It's not too much time investment

I also believe in the value of just consuming everything, as edification. I don't really believe in studying the arts, in an academic sense, but I do believe in consuming as much as possible. I believe it informs my understanding of everything else I watch, and I guess also every other experience I'll ever have, probably almost entirely subconsciously, helping the blind feelings in my ornate brain make sense of themselves and their contextuality

[---]

#DrivingWithGreenlandDogsChangedMyLife

[uuni]

1. Grand Display of Brock’s Fireworks at the Crystal Palace (George Albert Smith)

The Ex-Convict (Edwin S. Porter)
Court Ladies Bathing
The Devil’s Dance (Gaston Velle)
Barcelona Park at Twilight (Segundo de Chomón)
Panorama View, Street Car Motor Room (Billy Bitzer)
The Mermaid (Georges Méliès)
Barnum's Trunk (Gaston Velle)
Panorama du port d’Alger
The Wonderful Living Fan (Georges Méliès)
European Rest Cure (Edwin S. Porter)
Blackpool Victoria Pier
The Suburbanite
An Interesting Story (James Williamson)
The Impossible Voyage (Georges Méliès)
The Metamorphosis of a Butterfly (Gaston Velle)
How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the ‘New York Herald’ Personal Columns (Edwin S. Porter)
A Day in the Hayfields (Cecil M. Hepworth)
Meet Me at the Fountain (Sigmund Lubin)
Le Bey de Tunis et les personnages de sa suite descendant l’escalier du Bardo (Alexandre Promio)

[flip]

yeah there's a some great film from around 1900, almost everything was experimental in the true sense of that word then because no one had done much yet. not for everyone but i know a lot of people here watch a lot of stuff from that era so polls make sense to do for sure

[Lencho of the Apes]

Instead of "artist's completed works vs sketches," probably the best analogy that can be drawn is with the history of theater. Medieval playwrights were mighty unsophisticated, compared to Shakespeare or whomever, but what they did is still worthy of study, whether you want to look at it in terms off what they accomplished in and of itself with the means at their disposal OR if you want to trace the development from their relative simplicity toward the more elaborate, "fully realized" and modern style that gradually came into being.

And of course, you have a powerful weapon at your disposal: if it doesn't interest you, you don't have to do it. Start up again next month, when we do actual real talkies with color photography and stuff.

But... come on... can you tell me this isn't beautiful, just for what it is?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ud1aZFE0fU

[cinesmith]

'Flying Train' looks amazing! It's true that I've been more of a follower of film at the point where it had evolved to being feature length. There's just a bit more leg work here to drum up stuff. I've no objection to any of the forms, genres, etc. It's just simply harder to come across as much of the material that's over a century old.

[Holymanm]

my 'problem' with these early flicks is just that it feels weird to log 60-second movies... to put them in your log and assign ratings to them... and it feels weird to watch movies without logging them. the mind reels!

aside from that, how could you not find them fascinating? they're magical, fantastical creations with scarcely any precedent

[...]

Some of the appreciation of the early stuff can come from seeing how things developed or were addressed in the early years of film, and that can be mixed with raw admiration for what was accomplished, even if it isn't like a movie today.

Look at the lighting and camera set up/staging of the scene in this Westinghouse short:

http://youtu.be/AMfpYi2KCWk

That, along with fascination at what is being shown, I mean working with molten metal is just kinda inherently interesting, makes this stand out for me as good cinema.
Whereas this one:

http://youtu.be/f1Pumk97xKY

is more contextually interesting, the assassination of Plehve being of some major importance in its own right, and how it is covered by Nonguet for French cinema adds another layer of interest as Russia and France were allies at the time and there is also a lingering connection to the Dreyfuss affair that hangs over the possible response, where Nonguet and Pathe seem to be taking a purely sensationalist approach to something that the French public would have strong reactions to.

Beyond that, there is also an interesting little element of film language used here that was seemingly intended to ease comprehension of the action in the time, but now complicates how its understood for being archaic. Just before the cut between camera set ups, we see the assassin appear to hurl his bomb at the carriage, then there is a cut and we see the same again from this new angle. The replication of action was seemingly intended to clarify that the cut is showing the same thing from a new angle, but to modern eyes it appears more like a second bomb was thrown as repetition of action was deemed superfluous as the audience could accept an edit as continuation rather than something entirely new. (Plus the explosion of the carriage was pretty nifty by the standards of the era.)

This one, which I watched for an earlier poll, after noting Lencho's review:

http://youtu.be/uPsCYE5bhQk

is flat out amusing for its early inventiveness in how they handled the chase scene and some of the physical humor. Having "Napoleon" climb a tree until he's offscreen only to have him come down another is clever and funny for being unexpected from that era, while some of the character humor is just amusing for its own sake.

[MrCarmady]

wow, wuppertal looks like a grand, majestic city, maybe i ought to visit it

[Lencho of the Apes]

Damn, Greg -- I swear, I was lying in bed last night thinking "If we were to talk wbout 1904 in terms of narrative pleasure, how would I make a case for something like Maniac Chase?" and I decided it was beyond me. Glad you're around.

Welcome back, Sally! My eevil scheme worked!

[Holdrüholoheuho]

PERSONAL vs.
HOW A FRENCH NOBLEMAN GOT A WIFE THROUGH THE 'NEW YORK HERALD' PERSONAL COLUMNS

1/

http://headcity.com/follies/films/silent/personal.html
This Victorian jugs-jiggling jam-session ("Personal") was a big hit in 1904. But most of the money went to the remake by the Edison company: Edwin S. Porter's How A French Nobleman Got A Wife Through The New York Herald Personal Columns. That led to a lawsuit, but the suit failed, with the court ruling that though the photography was copyrighted, the story wasn't.

2/

Chasing Plagiarism
Cineanalyst, 10 March 2010
https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2219205/

This Edison Company chase comedy with an overly-long title is a plagiarized remake of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company's (AM&B) "Personal", which was made and released earlier the same year. In fact, AM&B unsuccessfully sued Edison over it. Such plagiarism was rampant in early cinema; every distributor did it. For foreign films especially, they generally didn't even bother remaking it, but, instead, simply duped the prints and sold them as their own. The most famous example of this is probably the American distribution of Georges Méliès's "Le voyage dans la lune" (A Trip to the Moon) (1902). American film innovators like Edwin S. Porter, the filmmaker of this remake, essentially learned film technique and were encouraged to produce more-complicated story films through the process of duping and remaking the then more-advanced films of Europeans like Méliès and G.A. Smith.

According to Charles Musser (using both his "Before the Nickelodeon" and "The Emergence of Cinema" as sources), the Edison remake probably sold better than the original "Personal". The remake undermined AM&B's distribution practice of initially exhibiting their films to licensed theatres on the vaudeville market while withholding the pictures up to several months before selling them to everyone else. This system allowed Edison's remake to go to the open market before AM&B's original. After the failed lawsuit, AM&B started selling their films soon after production. (By the way, the reason the lawsuit was ruled in favor of Edison was that AM&B had failed to copyright "Personal" as a dramatic work, in addition to their copyrighting the film as a photograph.) Back then, cinema was still a rather small industry and a new one for which laws were being created and adjusted. Some numbers will give an indication of the size of the movie industry. In the lawsuit, AM&B claimed damages of $3,000. This Edison film was the company's biggest hit of the year, for which they sold 71 prints in six months and 85 complete prints total in 1904-1905 (Musser).

Although it's near identical to "Personal", there are some differences between the two films, although I had to look closely at the two to see them (thanks to a handy dual purpose VCR and DVD player). AM&B's film consists of 10 shots, and Edison's consists of nine plus an expositional title card at the beginning. Additionally, "Personal" features nine women pursing the French nobleman (actually, I counted 10 during the scenes at Grant's Tomb, but one of them apparently gave up after that). Porter one-upped the original, with 11 women (although shot 5 appears to discontinuously include only 8 of them). Since both films show every character enter and exit the frame of each shot, the addition of two women is probably the main reason why the Edison remake is close to twice as long (675 feet compared to 371 feet).

Because early chase comedies generally repeated the same set-up of the chase in each shot-just changing the obstacle that the pursued and pursuers faced-in addition to showing every character enter and exit the frame in every shot, the scenes were mostly interchangeable, almost self-contained units. Thus, in the Edison film, the characters scale over a steep embankment in shot five; while in 'Personal', the characters perform a nearly identical act, but do so in shot eight. Other near identical scenes include the initial meetings and beginning of the chase at Grant's Tomb, the crossing of a bridge, and the climbing of a fence. For the remake, Porter dropped some of the less interesting shots and added an opening medium shot of the French Nobleman checking for his ad in the personal column while standing in front of a mirror, and he changed the ending. Originally, the nobleman was forced to marry at gunpoint after being caught behind some bushes, which was probably more comedic and certainly more violent. Porter changed this to one of the women being willing to walk through a body of water to catch her soon-to-be-husband: sweeter, if not as funny.

Next, Porter and Edison made a near-identical remake of AM&B's chase film "The Escaped Lunatic", re-titled "Maniac Chase".

3/

Mario Slugan
Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema: A Philosophical Approach to Film History
https://books.google.cz/books?id=95K8Dw ... &q&f=false

4/

Peter Decherney
Hollywood's Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet
https://books.google.cz/books?id=O2KsAg ... on&f=false


them differently.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

shouldn't "remakes" be called "bodyswaps"?

THE ESCAPED LUNATIC (Wallace McCutcheon)
https://youtu.be/QljMjgyThA4
MANIAC CHASE (Edwin S. Porter)
https://youtu.be/uPsCYE5bhQk

[Holdrüholoheuho]

Again on a somewhat personal (side) note...

Lately, I became an art collector.
I specialize in the local, marginal (marginally also hegemonic), introspective landscape paintings (preferably in watercolors) of the industrial and post-industrial age — and its thematic eccentricities and obsessions.

While researching this field (searching all kinds of flea market auctions), I stumbled upon the following mind-blowing phenomenon of seriality.

It is some sort of a pointless scene with a variable number of birch trees (2, 3, or zero), a pond, a crooked path, and the (highly transmutable) mountain(s) in the background.
On the pic above are 20 depictions (I already discovered few more), I own 7 out of them.
I am still clueless why so many different auteurs (those paintings have different signatures — no two by the same auteur) were painting in so many different years (some of the paintings are dated — dates stretching over decades) over and over and over, etc., etc., etc. the same pointless view.
If there would be depicted Prague Castle (or some other notoriously known landmark), I wouldn't wonder, but this... ???
I was suggested that maybe someone like Bob Ross is behind it, but on the local TV there was never such a program (like Bob's).

Besides, I discovered these 4 (sofar I acquired 2) depictions of the same scene by the same auteur Joža Zemánek.
He seems like was obsessed by this view (again with birch trees) and was (partly) making a living via repeating it over and over.
Those watercolor paintings are dated 1947 - 1951 -1954 -1961 (I expect there are many, many more).


Moreover, I acquired 2 similar paintings by Zora Vyslyšelová.
Both from 1985, first in watercolors (called "Landscape After Rain"), second oil painting on paper (called "Landscape No. 6").


All these exercises in seriality, I intend to hang in the same room (some are already hanging there) in my East Bohemian den and I might call that room "Hall of Mirrors".
Then (when I will be in pension), I will sit in that room and will watch all the possible silent era remakes, or (for a change) bodyswap movies.
Thus (I hope) my analytical skills and sound reason will never leave me.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

And one more personal remark...
I find A DAY IN THE HAYFIELDS (Cecil M. Hepworth) enchanting because it reminds me of reading (as a kid) THE SIX BULLERBY CHILDREN (also called THE CHILDREN OF NOISY VILLAGE) by Astrid Lindgren. I don't remember the storyline of the book anymore but I can recall Bullerby kids played in hay and I was fascinated by it. They not only slept in hay, or jumped in hay from the barn's beams, but also made a labyrinth of tunnels in the pile of hay. In my preadolescent age, it seemed as the coolest cool. And watching this early silent film triggered the flashbacks.

#HayFight
https://youtu.be/TqgtOn8upPQ

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

While researching this field (searching all kinds of flea market auctions), I stumbled upon the following mind-blowing phenomenon of seriality.

It is some sort of a pointless scene with a variable number of birch trees (2, 3, or zero), a pond, a crooked path, and the (highly transmutable) mountain(s) in the background.
I am still clueless why so many different auteurs (those paintings have different signatures — no two by the same auteur) were painting in so many different years (some of the paintings are dated — dates stretching over decades) over and over and over, etc., etc., etc. the same pointless view.

Very interesting! Could this have been an assigned subject in a painting class or perhaps in a painting textbook? That might explain the seriality.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

I believe there must be some model painting that is mimicked.
But I was not able to spot it yet.
The scene is so unspectacular that I am still clueless.
About the painting class (and alike) I am suspicious because of the wide range of dates on the paintings (1941, 1957, 1960, 1964, 1972, 1991).

Various names of the various paintings also suggest different locations (one title even says it's a view on Slovakian Tatras) but as the closest to "reality" seems to me to be the title "View on the Turov Hill" (which is the most repetitive — if the location is specified at all).
Turov hill (in Krkonoše mountains, North-Eastern Bohemia) has a flat shape in reality, so the most "realistic" (and thus maybe closest to the original model painting — if there is any) seems to be the version without birch trees. In the other paintings (seems like) the flat Turov hill transformed into a simple terrain wave, serving as a pedestal to concocted "Himalayas" behind. ???


Btw. the most spectacular "concocted Himalayas" offers this specimen.


Besides these 20+ various depictions (views "from the left"), there are some wider views which made me to discover also few serial depictions of the same scene "from the right."


Versions "from the right" are rarer and more expensive and thus I don't strive to acquire them (as a collector I focus on the views "from the left").

[cinesmith]

Sorting through a third of the films that were dated from 1904 per the IMDB there's a few details I can add here.

I looked at the top 600 titles of the 1863 that are listed.
Only 168 have an actual identified filmmaker associated with the project.
In total, there are only 47 filmmakers identified by name.
Only 37 of these films run over 5 minutes.
George Meiles having made the most which was 29 but only 2 of these are longer than 5 minutes.
They are 'The Christmas Angel' and 'The Impossible Voyage'

The majority of footage at this stage in the advancement of film making was mostly short reels that were documenting things but the vast amount of these very short reels have no credits.

Another noteworthy example is 'Caught in the Act' where a young woman tosses water at a man who is peeping through a keyhole. This has no designations as to who made the film or who stars in it but it's been an early example of the film making process as it takes advantage of pov

The highest rated item is a compilation of shorts made by Thomas Edison because it includes the first footage ever made of a locomotive which would date back to 1897.

[flip]

Only 37 of these films run over 5 minutes.

you can't always trust imdb data for films that old -- this wallace mccutcheon 1904 film https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0231547/ for example runs 7 minutes, but imdb just doesn't have a runtime in its database at all, so it doesn't show up if you search for 6+ minute long 1904 films