Getting Evidence

A jealous husband arrives in the office of Hawkshaw, a private detective. The husband is certain that his wife is being unfaithful, and he wants the detective to produce photographic evidence. The detective tails the wife, and thinks he has caught her, but a sudden mishap prevents him from getting a photo. Despite this and further setbacks, the dedicated detective presses on, determined to fulfill his assignment.

- Written bySnow Leopard

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1906 - Kathleen Mavourneen (Edwin S. Porter, T Edison, T Moore)

Captain Clearfield, a wealthy landlord, assaults Kathleen with the help of an accomplice, but Terence O'More arrives in time to break up the attack. Clearfield then tries to get his way by intimidating Kathleen and her father, but again help arrives in time. Clearfield and his accomplice then come up with their most violent plan yet.

- Written bySnow Leopard

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1906 - The Black Hand - World's 1st Mafia Movie (Wallace McCutcheon)

Directed by Wallace McCutcheon
Cinematography by Billy Bitzer
Starring Robert Vignola, Anthony O’Sullivan (gangsters)
Distributed by Biograph Company
Release date March 29, 1906
Country United States
Running time 11 m.

"The Black Hand", True Story of a Recent Occurrence in the Italian Quarter of New York, is a short crime drama. The film is included in our program to illustrate the work of our star Billy Bitzer.

A gang by the name of Black Hand demands a big amount of money from a local businessman. If the demands are not met it threatens his daughter. Then the gang kidnaps the girl anyway and sends one of its members to collect the ransom.

· Two members of a gang write a threatening letter to a butcher, demanding that he give them money, or else they will harm his family and his shop. The butcher is afraid and upset, but he is unable to meet their demands. The gang then kidnaps his daughter, leading to a series of tense and dangerous confrontations.

- Written bySnow Leopard

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1906 - The Terrible Kids

Two boys and their dog cause chaos with their practical jokes.

Directors:

Wallace McCutcheon, Edwin S. Porter

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1906 - Three American Beauties

Images of a rose, a young woman, and the American flag.

Directors:

Wallace McCutcheon (uncredited), Edwin S. Porter (uncredited)

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1907 - The 'Teddy' Bears - Edwin S. Porter _ Wallace McCutcheon _ Thomas Edison

Seven toy teddy bears of varying sizes suddenly come to life, getting in all sorts of merry misadventures.

Directors:

Wallace McCutcheon (uncredited), Edwin S. Porter (uncredited)

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The “Teddy” Bears (1907)
Production Company: Edison Mfg. Co. Producers/Directors: Wallace McCutcheon and Edwin S. Porter. Photographer: Edwin S. Porter. Transfer Note: Copied at 18 frames per second from a 35mm print preserved by the Library of Congress (Richard Marshall Collection), with supplementary portions from a 16mm print preserved by the Museum of Modern Art. Running Time: 13 minutes.

Part charming fairy tale, part violent political satire, and part accomplished puppet animation, The “Teddy” Bears may strike us now as a bizarre mix.

In a sense, this film asked its audience to provide its unity. Many early films relied for full comprehension on viewers’ knowledge of preexisting stories and popular fashions. But this one stretched the audience to the limit, asking for knowledge of the English fairy tale “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and an the incident in President Theodore Roosevelt’s life as a hunter that led to the Teddy bear craze in the first place. According to the story, Roosevelt had gallantly refused to shoot a small wounded bear during a 1902 hunting trip. His “sportsmanship” led political cartoonists to draw “Teddy” Roosevelt alongside increasingly cute bear cubs, and toy stores began selling cuddly stuffed bears, with button eyes and movable joints, as Teddy bears.

The film begins by asking only for detailed memory of the fairy tale, as the Goldilocks character intrudes into the three bears’ home to find the too-hot, too-cold, and just-right bowls of porridge and the too-hard, too-soft, and just-right beds. In this film version, the three bears (played by costumed actors) have their own Teddy bears, and Goldilocks spies through a knothole upstairs a group of six stuffed bears, which perform synchronized acrobatics. The amusing animation in the minute-and-a-half shot shown here was photographed a frame at a time and took Edwin S. Porter a full week of eight-hour days, according to Moving Picture World ’s believable report. The animation is made even more complex by being combined into the separately photographed “knothole.”

The care taken with that shot underlines how the whole production was more elaborate than all but a few films made during this period, when full reels would typically be turned out in a day or two. One exhibitor offered stuffed Teddy bears to “every lady attending” a special screening. After its theatrical run, the film was shown in a New York department store as a merchandising tie-in to further sales of Teddy bears.

In the film’s conclusion, provided by its satiric retelling of the story of Teddy Roosevelt and the spared bear cub, it is Goldilocks who saves Baby Bear by pushing away TR’s rifle after he has shot Mama Bear and Papa Bear. The deaths come as a shock after the domestic scenes. As a political satire, there may be more than a hint of manifest destiny hubris shown in the film’s closing shot back at the bears’ home, to which TR hauls his leashed captive and where he helps Goldilocks to plunder an overflowing armload of Teddy bears. Variety praised the “acrobatic antics” of the animation but not the conclusion: “Children will rebel against this portion. Considerable comedy is had through a chase in the snow, but the live bears seemed so domesticated that the deliberate murder…left a wrong taste of the picture as a whole.”—Scott Simmon

About the Music
The animation sequence is accompanied by a popular instrumental piece, from 1905: Die Parade der Zinnsoldaten (The parade of the tin soldiers) by Leon Jessel. It has often been used to accompany novelty acts, of which this sequence is certainly one.—Martin Marks

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THE “TEDDY” BEARS (1907)

This bizarre silent reel, helmed by Edwin S. Porter (photographer of the technically impressive Great Train Robbery) and produced by the Edison Mfg. Co., was a contemporary re-imagining of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Though only thirteen minutes in length, Porter manages to pack in a fairy tale narrative, an oddball political satire, and even an impressive bit of stop-animation. The bulk of the reel is a straight-forward re-telling of the Goldilocks tale, interrupted by a short animated section with acrobatic, Exorcist-esque teddy bears, and finishing up with a Teddy Roosevelt-impersonating hunter ‘saving’ the day by massacring Ma and Pa Bear. Fortunately, the cub is spared, alluding to Teddy Roosevelt’s real-life compassion toward a bear cub that led to the ‘teddy’ bear craze of the early 1900s.

The reel is obviously crude, with its few highlights including nice costuming and set pieces, the painstaking animation process (apparently shot frame by frame during a grueling week-long filming session), and a set of exterior shots in the snow. The real point of interest, I think, is the compelling amalgam of genres and narratives at play within such a short film. Such bold dismissal of coherence rarely exists today, nor did it exist much further into the subsequent decades, as films became longer and more complex. Part of this is due to technological limitations; the short reel format didn’t have a lot of room for storytelling, and therefore relied heavily upon an audience’s understanding of the narrative. Thus, we have the odd mixture of fairy tale, marketing, and politics.

This is also important to keep in mind when we consider the emergence of film as its own unique art form. As with any new media, there are initial struggles to be taken seriously as ‘art’ and also to distinguish itself with unique contributions independent of other media. We see similar experiences throughout the 20th century: photography’s effort to find a footing within the art world, then eventually supplanting painting in the realist genre, instigating painting’s move toward abstraction; the gradual acceptance of Internet art into the museum system; and even the current debates questioning whether video games can be art (Ebert says no, in case you haven’t heard).

Each genre reaches a certain critical tipping point or threshold, often represented by a landmark media event (e.g. Birth of a Nation, Citizen Kane, etc.). In 1907, film hadn’t quite reached that point. However, many critical indices were falling into place, and some of the most important of these were the ability for mainstream capitalism, politics, and popular culture to appropriate the new art form for its own uses. All are present in The ‘Teddy’ Bears: Teddy bears were a popular fad and a clever marketing device (no surprise, coming from Edison’s studio) and New York department stores featured the reel after its initial theatrical run. And, though its satirical potency is difficult to gauge now, we do have some form of commentary on President Roosevelt as well. This, and other shorts like it, showed that the emerging media of film was available for use as advertising, popular culture, and propoganda, and therefore taken seriously by an increasingly mainstream audience. These are all important milestones in the transition from novelty to art.

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1908 - The Sculptor's Nightmare - D.W. Griffith - Wallace McCutcheon

At a political club, the members debate whose bust will replace that of Theodore Roosevelt. Unable to agree, each goes to a sculptor's studio and bribes him to sculpt a bust of the individual favorite. Instead, the sculptor spends their fees on a dinner with his model during which he becomes so inebriated that he is taken to jail. There he has a nightmare, wherein three busts are created and animated from clay (through stop-motion photography) in the likenesses of Democrat William Jennings Bryan and Republicans Charles W. Fairbanks and William Howard Taft. Finally an animated bust of Roosevelt appears.

- Written byFiona Kelleghan <[e-mail]>

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«Выход рабочих с фабрики» (фр. La Sortie de l'usine Lumière à Lyon, 1895) — документальный короткометражный фильм; один из первых фильмов, снятых братьями Люмьер, и исторически первый фильм, показанный публике на большом экране^[1]. В русскоязычных источниках фильм также упоминается как «Выход с завода», «Выход рабочих с завода братьев Люмьер».

Впервые фильм был показан 22 марта 1895 года на конференции, посвящённой развитию французской фотопромышленности. Этот же фильм открыл знаменитый первый платный киносеанс из десяти фильмов в Париже в подвале «Гран-кафе» на бульваре Капуцинок 28 декабря 1895 года.

Интересные факты[править | править вики-текст]

· Фильм снят 22 марта 1895 года у ворот фабрики братьев Люмьер, которая была расположена в Лионе по адресу Монплезир, улица Сен-Виктор, 25.

· Сохранились три сделанных Люмьерами (возможно, с разницей в несколько часов, судя по изменениям в освещённости и положении тени от деревьев) съёмки этого сюжета — эти варианты воспроизведены в выпущенной на DVD подборке «Первые фильмы братьев Люмьер». Согласно комментарию Бертрана Тавернье к этой подборке, на разных сеансах (особенно ранних) Люмьеры могли демонстрировать любую из этих съёмок, что можно подтвердить также попавшими в газетные репортажи о первых сеансах описаниями особенностей каждого из вариантов (репортёры упоминали появление на экране собаки, велосипедиста, лошади или повозки, которые есть не в каждой из трёх версий). Существование этих версий позволяет предположить, что Люмьеры не просто засняли выход рабочих с собственной фабрики, а сделали в течение дня несколько «дублей», заранее согласовав с рабочими порядок съёмки.

· В каталоге торгового дома Люмьер фильм значится под номером 91.

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Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon (French: La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon), also known as Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory and Exiting the Factory, is an 1895 French short black-and-white silent documentary film directed and produced by Louis Lumière. It is often referred to as the first real motion picture ever made,^[1] although Louis Le Prince's 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene pre-dated it by seven years.

Plot

The film consists of a single scene in which workers leave the Lumière factory. The workers are mostly female who exit the large building 25 Rue St. Victor, Montplaisir on the outskirts of Lyon, France, as if they had just finished a day's work.

Three separate versions of this film exist. There are a number of differences between these, for example the clothing style changes demonstrating the different seasons in which they were filmed. They are often referred to as the "one horse," "two horses," and "no horse" versions, in reference to a horse-drawn carriage that appears in the first two versions (pulled by one horse in the original and two horses in the first remake).^[2]

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