[To read part one of this essay, click here. For part two, here. And for part three, here.]
Early Silent Comedy "In order to laugh at something, it is necessary 1. to know what you are laughing at, 2. to know why you are laughing, 3. to ask some people why they think you are laughing, 4. to jot down a few notes, 5. to laugh. "Even then, the thing may not be cleared up for days."—Robert Benchley
The Earliest Comedies: 1890-1905 What you consider the first comedy in movie history depends in no small part on what you think is funny. The Internet Movie Database lists the first comedy as William K.L. Dickson's 1890 experimental film Monkeyshines No. 1, but given that the white blob at the center of the screen is barely identifiable as a human being, much less a funny one, I think its designation as a comedy derives purely from the short's title.
Then there's the case of poor Émile Reynaud whose "praxinoscope" allowed him to project hand-drawn cartoons to an audience. His animated short Pauvre Pierrot is a whimsical tale of a man serenading a beautiful woman beneath her balcony, but while the Internet Movie Database lists this as a comedy, I don't really see it as such. Reynaud made other films but when his business failed, he threw his invention and most of his films into the Seine. Did he make the first movie comedy only to destroy it later? The world may never know.
Other contenders for the title include boxing cats, boxing brothers, and vaudeville stars Robetta and Doretto performing a series of slapstick stunts for Thomas Edison's company. Each of these probably satisfy somebody's idea of comedy.
But personally, I credit the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, with having written and directed the first full-blown comedy. You remember the Lumière brothers, don't you? They invented the first truly portable and practical combination movie camera-projector; they were also the first moviemakers to charge admission for one of their films. L'arroseur arrosé (Tables Turned On The Gardener), premiered in Paris on December 28, 1895, and shows us the simplest of gags—a gardener is watering the lawn, a mischievous boy steps on the hose, the gardener looks at the nozzle to see what's wrong, the boys steps off the hose, the gardener gets a face full of water.
Admittedly, it's not particularly funny, but L'arroseur arrosé has a beginning, middle and end, creates a sense of anticipation and has a payoff. You've got to start somewhere, right?
Unfortunately, for the next decade or so, comedy pretty much ended there as well. In the early days of film, the only qualification one needed to become a director was access to a camera, and judging from the quality of the comedy made during this era, technical expertise and a sense of humor rarely went hand in hand. Gags tended to be no more sophisticated than that first one; the setups were obvious (boy steps on hose), the payoffs predictable (hose squirts man) and the resulting joke was not likely to elicit much more than a chuckle from anyone over the age of seven.
More elaborate variations on the theme—boy ties rollerskates to sleeping man, man wakes up and falls down—didn't make the films any funnier, just longer getting to the point. Turns out that where comedy is concerned, getting exactly what you expect every single time isn't all that satisfying.
Adding to the frustration for a would-be film historian is the fact that you see the same simple gags repeated note for note over and over again. This was not so much because the gag was particularly funny but because it was often cheaper for a theater owner to make his own version of a film than to pay the rental of the original. Thus, there are many more versions of the mischievous boy gag than you're ever going to want to see.
Even Georges Méliès, the most consistently original director of this early era, wasn't quite able to lick the comedy genre. Although he's primarily known now for his science fiction and fantasy films, Méliès also directed some three dozen comedies, mostly turning on surprising camera tricks —for example, the story of a man preparing for bed only to find it impossible to undress.
The trick photography, usually a series of jump cuts, was the most sophisticated of its day, but when observed in film after film, proves more tiresome than humorous. By his own admission, Méliès was never much interested in character or human situations, a real limitation given that comedy (and drama, for that matter) ultimately is about the inherent absurdity of being human. Without that essential element, his films wound up being about nothing at all and were successful only as long as the tricks were fresh and inventive. As soon as he began to repeat himself, his audience abandoned him for other novelties—he was broke and out of the business by 1913.
Indeed, comedies made before 1906 are more significant for their role in advancing editing techniques—the point-of-view iris shot and the cut-in to emphasize the key prop in a joke, the "wipe" in Mary Jane's Mishap (1903), the dissolve in Méliès's Les Cartes Vivantes (1904)—than for any humor they may contain. The Big Swallow (1901), for example, is remembered now only for what might be the first close-up in movie history (and no, Lillian Gish wasn't in it).
Historic though it may be, hilarious it isn't.
Max Linder (Again) As I mentioned in Part Three of this essay, the first international film star was the French comic, Max Linder. He was also the first true film comedian—the first to develop a "language" of gesture and expression that not only overcame the limitations of silent film but took advantage of the relative intimacy of the medium.
Thanks to the close-up, a storytelling device unique to film, an actor no longer had to play to the back row of the theater—the camera brought the back row to him. Whether intuitively or by design, Linder realized the broad gestures and inane dialogue of music hall comedy were largely devices for indicating to an audience what to pay attention to as the actors set up a gag. On film, simply lifting an eyebrow would suffice.
While situational comedy had been around since the theater of ancient Greece, until film allowed for recognizable settings, and more importantly, recognizable characters with recognizable needs and desires, film comedy was limited to the most simplistic gags. With a reel of film growing longer—around ten minutes rather than the 45-seconds of the Lumière brothers' standard offering—it became possible for filmmakers to put fully-realized characters and situations on the screen, and so far as I can tell, Linder's "Max" was the first three-dimensional character in the history of movie comedy. You can imagine "Max" existing before the cameras started rolling, continuing to exist after they stopped, and in between, behaving on screen the way a real person would, albeit at the heightened levels required of farce comedy.
With the elbow room to portray an actual character, Linder could derive laughs from the juxtaposition of this character—the dapper aristocrat—and the chaos he created around it, a welcome breakthrough, believe me, if you've suffered through more than a hundred comedy shorts featuring mischievous boys and one-note gags.
Not to mention he was just better at it than anybody else, until Charlie Chaplin came along in 1914 to raise the bar.
Because, as I mentioned before, Linder worked during a time when it was cheaper to buy a camera and steal an idea than to pay the rental fee on the original film, it's easy to compare and contrast the way different filmmakers handled the same comic idea—a laboratory experiment, if you will, in what is and isn't funny.
For example, one of the favorite props used to generate laughs in turn-of-the-century comedies was glue—apparently, a hundred years ago pots of the stuff just sat around waiting for people to fall in it. Alice Guy's La glu (The Glue) (1907) is typical of the era: a mischievous boy brushes glue on various surfaces—a staircase, a bicycle seat—much to the consternation of various adults. Basically a one-joke pony repeated over and over again to no great effect.
Linder, on the other hand, in the one-reeler Max ne se mariera pas (Max Is Stuck Up) (1910), built on the idea the way a classic comedian would. On his way to his fiancee's for dinner, Max stops at a bakery to conduct a little routine business and accidentally gets stuck to a sheet of flypaper. What begins as a minor inconvenience, shrugged off with bonhomie and good humor, becomes a minor annoyance, then becomes a potential source of embarrassment when he arrives for dinner only to find he's still stuck, and escalates into a full scale disaster as he and his future father-in-law wind up wrestling over a serving dish and destroying the entire set.
You've seen this sort of progression in a hundred comedies, from the Marx Brothers to Adam Sandler, but you didn't see it before Max Linder, not in a movie anyway.
And now because I love you, I present my favorite Max Linder short, Max victime du quinquina (Max Takes Tonics) (1911). He made it three years before Chaplin, but if I had told you Linder copied it move for move from the little Tramp, I dare say you'd believe me. The intertitles are in French (with a German translation!), but there are only a couple and the gist is easy enough to figure out—feeling rundown, Max visits a doctor who prescribes a tonic of red wine and quinine bitters. Soon roaring drunk, Max is mistaken for a big shot and helped "home" by a helpful policeman.
It's in two parts:
Part One
Part Two
Speaking of French comedy, you might also check out the work of Linder's fellow Frenchman, Ernest Bourbon, who performed under the name Onésime. A particular favorite of the surrealists, Bourbon relied heavily on trick photography in such shorts as Onésime horloger (Onésime, Clockmaker) (1912), in which to receive an inheritance more quickly, he builds a special clock to speed up time. I confess, he's not really my cup of tea—to me, he plays like the poor man's Méliès—but you might want to track him down nevertheless.
And finally, as if to prove that "French" and "sophisticated" aren't necessarily synonymous, film historian Matt Berry recently wrote about one of the earliest examples of scatological humor, 1903's Erreur de porte (The Wrong Door), in which a country bumpkin can't tell the difference between a telephone booth and a lavatory. It's bathroom humor—literally. You've been warned.
Next: Part Four (b): Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin and the Keystone Comedies
I was going to put together my list of the ten best movies of 2010, but I think I only saw two, and one of them, Hot Tub Time Machine, is such a shoo-in for the Oscar this year I thought why bother.
Instead, in the spirit of pure narcissism—and because I'm still working on my marathon essay on the years 1906-1914 and have nothing else to post—here are the ten subjects I most enjoyed writing about in 2010 (click on the highlighted link to read the original post):
She was an actress in the early days of sound best remembered now for getting her neck bitten in Bela Lugosi's Dracula. But I love her for uttering my favorite line of dialogue from the World War I flying ace movie, The Last Flight:
"What are you changing your shoes for?"
"On account of I can walk faster in red shoes."
9. Norma Shearer It's fun—occasionally—to admit you're wrong and when I picked Norma Shearer as the best actress of 1931-32 for her performance in the comedy Private Lives, I had to admit I had been wrong in dismissing her so quickly in the past.
8. Ham Actors You remember that Oscar ceremony where Wallace Beery beat John Barrymore around the head and shoulders with a rotary dial telephone? You don't? Well, it happened, at least here at the Monkey.
7. Movie Lists I think I once vowed never to do a list—so, of course, this year I did two. Or three, counting this one.
6. The Aging Of Greta Garbo But for an anomalous couple of weeks when somebody's droid app led to 3500 hits a day on my post about Popeye the Sailor, this post—a chronological series of photographs of Greta Garbo, ranging from childhood to old age—is the most popular one I've ever written.
5. Anita Page Did you ever fall in love with a hundred year old dead actress you're not married to? You did? What are you, some kind of freak?
4. Leave It To Beaver In Japanese Actually, I mean Yasujiro Ozu's classic comedy I Was Born, But ..., the story of a couple of mischievous boys who discover their dad is a middle management toady who survives as the butt of his boss's jokes. Why? "He pays my salary."
"Then don't let him pay you," his son says.
"Yeah!" the little brother adds with the implacable logic of a six year old. "You pay him instead!"
2. Very, very old movies I still say a rocket hitting the moon in the eye is one of the greatest images in the history of movies.
1. The Marx Brothers Only a fool would write an eight-part, 12,000 word essay and not claim it as his favorite post of the year. Well, the Monkey may be crazy, but he's no fool.
Must-See Films:A Trip To The Moon (1902); The Great Train Robbery (1903)
Trying to say definitively who invented the movies is a little like trying to say who invented fire—the records are sketchy, everybody who knows for certain is dead, and what evidence that does remain comes largely from the self-serving accounts of Thomas Edison's patent lawyers.
And where do you start, which is to say, what was the first indispensable step toward what we now think of as motion pictures? If I knew his name, I'd say it was the first caveman who thought to entertain his neighbors with shadow puppets and firelight. In fact, two of the key elements of film, movement and representation, have been staples of art and entertainment since at least the ancient Greek stage.
Turner Classic Movie's recent documentary, Moguls and Movie Stars, began with seventeenth century Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens who in 1659 invented the magic lantern show—a process of projecting light through a painted slide onto a wall or screen—and in terms of being entertained while sitting in the dark looking at pictures on a wall, the magic lantern is a reasonable place to start a history of the movies. Over the course of the two hundred years that followed, these magic lantern shows became quite sophisticated—by stacking slides one in front of the other and manipulating them, a projectionist could create the illusion of movement—and were one of the most popular forms of entertainment during the 19th century.
And then there was Eadweard Muybridge, who on a bet took a series of photographs in 1872 of a galloping horse to prove that all four of its hooves leave the ground simultaneously when it runs. Strung together on a glass cylinder and spun quickly enough, this "magic lantern show gone mad" created the illusion of a horse in motion. Muybridge also had a fondness for photographing nude models performing mundane tasks and audiences had a fondness for paying to see them, proving once again that pornography often drives the acceptance of new media. (Also check out Étienne-Jules Marey who similarly used a "chronophotographic gun" to capture remarkable images of birds in flight.)
But if we think of movies as something involving a strip of film and a projector, then I think the history of movies starts with Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince who in 1888 used a single-lens camera and paper film produced by George Eastman to film two seconds worth of fashionable men and women walking around a garden in Roundhay, England. Along with equally brief footage of horse and buggy traffic crossing a bridge in Leeds, Le Prince is generally credited with producing the first "films" in movie history.
Alas for Le Prince, while preparing for a cross-Atlantic trip to exhibit his invention in New York, he boarded a train bound for Paris in 1890 and literally vanished without a trace. Although theories abound—suicide, fratricide, assassination—his disappearance has never been explained. In fact, investigators turned up no leads at all and the case went cold until just seven years ago, when, while combing through its nineteenth century archives, Paris police found a photograph dating from 1890 of an unidentified drowning victim who bore a resemblance to Le Prince. But whether it was positively him or how he might have drowned on a moving train, no one can say.
After Le Prince, the story of film picks up with Charles-Émile Reynaud. A French science professor who directed and exhibited what may have been the world's first animated film, Pauvre Pierrot ("Poor Pete"), his most lasting contribution to film history was the invention of a camera that recorded images not on photographic plates but on perforated film advanced by sprockets, resulting in longer filmed sequences than a cylinder or drum would allow.
Reynaud demonstrated his camera-projector, which he called the Praxinoscope Théâtre, at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889 (the one with the Eiffel Tower). In the audience was the famed American inventor Thomas Alva Edison who had been struggling to come up with his own movie camera without much success. By his own admission, two of Edison's greatest inventions were credit stealing and patent lawyers, deploying armies of the latter to accomplish the former—along with the light bulb, his most lasting and influential contributions—but he later insisted that his epiphany that the future of motion pictures depended on perforated film on sprockets was purely coincidental. The U.S Patent Office agreed.
"Everyone steals in industry and commerce," he said later. "I've stolen a lot myself. The thing is to know how to steal." (An idea he no doubt stole from his attorneys.)
Reynaud died penniless, but Edison—or more precisely his assistant William K.L. Dickson—ran with Reynaud's ideas (and, I don't know, maybe some of his own), and by 1894 created what he called the Kinetoscope, essentially a "peepshow" housed in a bulky cabinet, whereby the bored and the curious could one at a time watch brief films for a nickle. The movies were neither artistic nor adventuresome—just brief scenes of men sneezing, couples dancing, Annie Oakley shooting—but for a time at least the paying public was enthralled.
It was two French brothers, however, Auguste and Louis Lumière, who first thought to exhibit movies not to one person at a time but to a theater full of paying customers. Starting their careers in film as assistants in their father's photographic firm, the brothers—Louis as the inventor, Auguste as the business manager—developed a new and improved camera-projector. Where Edison's Kinetoscope was bulky and hard to maintain, the Lumières' combination camera-projector, the cinématographe, was light and mobile and relatively easy to use. In December 1895, these two brothers rented a hall in Paris and charged the public admission to see their new invention—the first time in history an audience paid money to see a motion picture in a theater.
Here in its entirety is that groundbreaking film, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat:
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the only proper way to study movie history is to watch movies, and when I sat down and watched a couple of dozen of the Lumière brothers' best-known movies (judging by the number of votes they've received on the Internet Movie Database), it quickly became clear that while the Lumières may have invented the camera, they didn't have a clue what to do with the camera. Their films never progressed beyond fifty-second home movies of whatever they happened to be standing near—trains entering a station, babies eating breakfast, etc.—audiences quickly grew jaded and early in the 20th century, the brothers famously concluded that "the cinema is an invention without any future." Instead, they turned their full attention to photography, finding their lasting success with a color photographic process, the Autochrome Lumière, which they patented in 1903.
It was instead another Frenchman, Georges Méliès, who was the first to grasp the unique potential of the new motion picture technology. A stage magician by trade, Méliès saw movies as a successor to the tradition of fanciful entertainments. Where Edison and the Lumière brothers used their cameras to record reality, Méliès realized that through editing and photographic trickery, film could be used to create a new reality, one that could never exist apart from film. It was perhaps the single greatest insight in movie history.
Among his many movies, one, Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip To The Moon), from 1902, is perhaps the one indispensable film from the quarter century of film history and gave us the single most famous movie image before Charlie Chaplin first donned his little tramp outfit.
I'll grant you, A Trip To The Moon is a relic by the standards even of the decade that followed it, but it was also wholly original, deriving from nothing before it, inspiring so much of what came after it, and containing images that are still unique and unforgettable despite the passage of a century's worth of filmmaking. Or to put it another way, that The Simpsons could spoof A Trip To The Moon as an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon (in French, no less) without the need to explain it, tells you all you need to know about how much a part of the culture Méliès really is.
Unfortunately, Méliès wasn't much of a businessman, and Edison and his lawyers were able to copy prints of A Voyage To The Moon and exhibit them in the United States without paying royalties. Too, Méliès stopped progressing as a filmmaker. His 1912 movie, The Conquest Of The Pole, for example, could have been made a decade earlier in terms of its sets, acting, storyline and editing, and while D.W. Griffith later said of Méliès "I owe him everything," Griffith and others quickly surpassed him in terms of artistry and technique.
Méliès went bankrupt in 1913 and wound up selling toys in Paris's Gare Montparnasse train station. He was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 1932 and died six years later.
Méliès's story is a none-too-subtle reminder that while movies are the greatest art form of the 20th century, they're also a business, and whatever else you can say about Thomas Edison, he did figure out how to make money from the movies and to popularize the medium. While men such as Le Prince and the Lumière brothers were more clever inventors and Méliès was a superior artist, it was Edison who made movies pay, and his realization that nobody was going to buy a film projector if there were no films to project on it may have been the second greatest insight in movie history. Certainly the most practical.
A variety of men made movies at Edison's behest, but the two most important were the aforementioned W.K.L Dickson and Edwin S. Porter. Dickson was primarily an inventor and his contributions as a filmmaker are largely those of a cinematographer recording his own experiments. His first works, the first American films, are simple scenes filmed in his own workshop—men blacksmithing, sneezing or shaking hands.
These snippets of life provided the content of Edison's peepshows and in the beginning were sufficient to satisfy the public's curiosity. But with more interesting films arriving from the Lumière brothers and especially Méliès, Edison realized he needed more substantial fare if his fledgling film company was to survive. Edison put Porter, who had formerly worked as a touring projectionist for a rival company, in charge of motion picture production at his New York studios, and there Porter set to work filming not just workplace scenes, but stories.
Porter directed more than one hundred eighty films between 1898 and 1915, but far away the most important and enduring of them is the 1903 western, The Great Train Robbery.
"In literature and music, as well as movies," Daniel Eagan wrote in America's Film Legacy, his collection of essays about the National Film Registry, "the past can seem slow, obvious and at times filled with odd, unexpected touches too far removed from our experiences to decipher easily—which makes The Great Train Robbery an even more remarkable achievement. The blockbuster of its time, it has lost none of its power to entertain over the past hundred years."
Put simply, The Great Train Robbery was the first great American film. Not only is the shot of Justus Barnes firing a Colt revolver directly at the camera one of the most indelible images in movie history, but Porter grasped that unlike with the stage, the "best seat in the house" was wherever the camera needed to be to show the action. Porter placed his camera on top of a movie train or riding along with the outlaws on horseback, a "conceptual leap" (Eagan again) that puts the film a decade ahead of its time.
Porter's use of jump-cuts, cross-cutting, matte shots and hand-tinted frames was equally cutting-edge, and that the film also established the narrative conventions for decades of westerns to come makes The Great Train Robbery the most important American film before The Birth Of A Nation a dozen years later.
Despite the commercial success of The Great Train Robbery, neither Porter nor his boss were comfortable with the film's technical and storytelling innovations, and thereafter, to the disappointment of the ticket-buying public, the studio's product reverted to more conventional forms. A Trip To The Moon notwithstanding, ultimately the one thing Thomas Edison couldn't steal was quality and within a few years, immigrant entrepreneurs such as Adolph Zukor and Carl Laemmle and directors such as D.W. Griffith equaled then surpassed Edison as a filmmaker. The company lost steam, Porter left Edison's employ in 1909 and an adverse ruling in an anti-monopoly case in 1915 exacerbated the decline. With the coming of World War I and the closing of the European market, Edison sold his studio and abandoned film altogether.
It was an ironic and somehow fitting end to the master inventor-thief's involvement in the history of motion pictures.
Postscript:Matthew Blanchette steered me to an even earlier surviving film from Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, called Man Walking Around A Corner. It was shot on an earlier version of Le Prince's camera, this one with sixteen separate lenses—it looks more like a spider's eye than a camera. Thanks, Matthew!
Early Silent Comedy
What you consider the first comedy in movie history depends in no small part on what you think is funny. The Internet Movie Database lists the first comedy as William K.L. Dickson's 1890 experimental film Monkeyshines No. 1, but given that the white blob at the center of the screen is barely identifiable as a human being, much less a funny one, I think its designation as a comedy derives purely from the short's title.
Other contenders for the title include boxing cats, boxing brothers, and vaudeville stars Robetta and Doretto performing a series of slapstick stunts for Thomas Edison's company. Each of these probably satisfy somebody's idea of comedy.
More elaborate variations on the theme—boy ties rollerskates to sleeping man, man wakes up and falls down—didn't make the films any funnier, just longer getting to the point. Turns out that where comedy is concerned, getting exactly what you expect every single time isn't all that satisfying.
The trick photography, usually a series of jump cuts, was the most sophisticated of its day, but when observed in film after film, proves more tiresome than humorous. By his own admission, Méliès was never much interested in character or human situations, a real limitation given that comedy (and drama, for that matter) ultimately is about the inherent absurdity of being human. Without that essential element, his films wound up being about nothing at all and were successful only as long as the tricks were fresh and inventive. As soon as he began to repeat himself, his audience abandoned him for other novelties—he was broke and out of the business by 1913.
As I mentioned in Part Three of this essay, the first international film star was the French comic, Max Linder. He was also the first true film comedian—the first to develop a "language" of gesture and expression that not only overcame the limitations of silent film but took advantage of the relative intimacy of the medium.
While situational comedy had been around since the theater of ancient Greece, until film allowed for recognizable settings, and more importantly, recognizable characters with recognizable needs and desires, film comedy was limited to the most simplistic gags. With a reel of film growing longer—around ten minutes rather than the 45-seconds of the Lumière brothers' standard offering—it became possible for filmmakers to put fully-realized characters and situations on the screen, and so far as I can tell, Linder's "Max" was the first three-dimensional character in the history of movie comedy. You can imagine "Max" existing before the cameras started rolling, continuing to exist after they stopped, and in between, behaving on screen the way a real person would, albeit at the heightened levels required of farce comedy.
Because, as I mentioned before, Linder worked during a time when it was cheaper to buy a camera and steal an idea than to pay the rental fee on the original film, it's easy to compare and contrast the way different filmmakers handled the same comic idea—a laboratory experiment, if you will, in what is and isn't funny.
