Création de la Serpentine (1908, France)

Fourteen years earlier, Thomas Edison's company had filmed the Serpentine dance -- a woman in a flowing road, waving arms around, producing pretty geometric patterns -- as the entire point of SERPENTINE DANCE. But the movies had moved on, and in this movie, Segundo de Chomon uses it as a point of grammar in this rather confused, although interesting film. We get scenery, with a fiddler playing as 18th century patrons do a minuet; we get some Melies moments as the devil appears, makes the dancers vanish and takes the fiddler to pandemonium, where they produce an entire corps de ballet doing the serpentine dance. It's quite lovely.
But it's clear that De Chomon was trying to integrate these elements and produce a story, using these bits as grammatical devices. And the story is a bit muddled. Is dance the product of the devil? Are the dancers imps tempting the audience into evil?

L'insaisissable Pickpocket - 1908

Country: France
Here's yet another fine trick film made possible by the camera-work of Segundo de Chomon, the man to whom Pathe turned whenever they wanted to take a chunk of Georges Melies' market away. Here he does Melies one better in a film that was much copied.
It's a film in which a pickpocket constantly escapes the flics, and the technique for the camera tricks is fairly obviously: stop the camera, remove the actor, have the other actors come on and start the camera again. Still,l the variations are numerous and keep you interested in how he's going to do it this time and, more interesting from a technical viewpoint, there are several scenes that were shot on site -- not in the studio, where people like Melies had all the factors under control.

La maison Ensorcelée (1907, France)

At its heart, this is a variation on one of Melies' most imitated -- especially by himself -- shorts: some travelers enter an abandoned house, and then, inside, everything goes all pear-shaped, as chairs vanish, the house rocks back and forth and the travelers are, eventually, scared out of their wits.
As such, it is not much. However, its director, Segundo de Chomon, elaborates the theme enormously. First, this one is shown in a dozen separate scenes, as first we see the travelers approaching the house and the spirit haunting the place is shown. In the middle are two major stop-motion pieces as food is carved by invisible hands.. The camera also moves, showing the house rocking back and forth.
But although this is much more elaborate than the usual Melies pieces, it does not depart from the basic situation. It uses the tricks, largely, for their own sake. It would be in the next couple of couples that these camera tricks would cease to be the point of the film and become part of the grammar of cinema.

El hotel electrico (1908, Spain-France)

In summation, as baggage is checked in that baggage moves by itself to a room where it opens itself revealing lots of brushes that now move out. We next see a man and a woman sitting down before we see the man's boot get unbuckled by itself. With the boot off, a brush moves itself up and down on the front end. We next see the woman's coat come off by itself before her hair gets a thorough brushing-also by itself-before the hair ties itself into a bun. Then comes a scene of a man in front of a wall full of electrical switches. As he pulls one large switch down, we cut to a scene of various chairs and other furniture moving in chaotic ways as the short ends...Primitive but still fascinating look at trick photography in the early 20th century. Must have truly awed audiences back then. Definitely worth a look for silent film buffs.