This site is dedicated to the preservation of memory of silent films. Although they were quite important in the evolution of cinema, they remain virtually forgotten nowadays. Since the best way to understand the present is taking an attentive look at the past, here you have some movies, pictures, interviews, etc. on silent cinema. Some occasional material on sound films will also be presented. I hope you enjoy getting to know a bit more about the beauty and sheer fun of these golden oldies.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Frankenstein - 1910
Country: United States
Language: English
Director: J. Searle Dawley
Writers: Mary Shelley (novel), J.
Searle Dawley
Stars: Mary Fuller, Charles Ogle
and Augustus Phillips
Release Date: 18 March 1910 (USA)
Production Co: Edison
Manufacturing Company
Sound Mix: Silent
Color: Black and White (tinted)
Plot Keywords: Frankenstein |
Mirror | Alchemy | Frankenstein's Monster | Experiment Gone Wrong | Gothic
Horror | Horror Movie Remade | One Word Title | Doctor Frankenstein | Reverse
Footage | Remade | Based On Novel | Character Name In Title
Genres: Short | Horror
Frankenstein, a young medical
students, trying to create the perfect human being, instead creates a misshapen
monster. Made ill by what he has done, Frankenstein is comforted by his fiancée
but on his wedding night he is visited by the monster. A fight ensues but the
monster, seeing himself in a mirror, is horrified and runs away. He later
returns, entering the new bride's room, and finds her alone.
Trivia
Since its original release, the
Thomas Edison "Frankenstein" had been listed as missing; no copies of
the film existed. An original nitrate print finally turned up in Wisconsin in
the mid-1970s.
Prior to the film's rediscovery,
only a few images of Charles Ogle as The Monster were known to exist. Interestingly,
Ogle looks a lot younger in the film than he does in the photographs.
This is one of the only
Frankenstein films where the monster is truly created. All Frankenstein films
that followed assembled body parts from various corpses to make the monster. In
this film, Frankenstein uses chemicals and "potions" to create the
monster. The "creation" scene was made by filming a monster-dummy
burning, and then playing the footage backwards.
First filmed version of the story
of Frankenstein's monster.
The Haunted Curiosity Shop (1901)
By 1901, director-illusionist W.R. Booth and producer-inventor R.W. Paul had so much confidence in the special effects techniques they had demonstrated in such earlier films as Upside Down, or The Human Flies (1899) and Railway Collision (1900) - each of which revolves around a single trick effect - that they started making films featuring more elaborate and ambitious techniques, of which The Haunted Curiosity Shop is a good example.
Despite the increased sophistication (since the film gives the appearance of a single shot, it clearly required a great deal of planning to put together), it is otherwise not much of an advance. Its story of a curiosity shop owner discovering that the various pieces of bric-a-brac on his shelves have a life of their own is primitive, and was clearly devised purely as a showcase for Booth and Paul's bag of tricks.
With these limitations in mind, though, it's an effective and engrossing experience, as the poor shop owner is beset by all manner of apparitions: floating heads, disembodied women, Egyptian mummies and an animated skeleton that predates Ray Harryhausen's rather more famous efforts in such films as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (US, d. Nathan Juran, 1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (d. Don Chaffey, 1963) by some six decades. The effects where, respectively, a woman's two halves rejoin themselves and a man in armour is systematically dismembered, are particularly impressive.
The same year, Booth and Paul would make The Magic Sword, a similarly elaborate special effects showcase but which also had a rather more involving multiple-shot narrative.
Michael Brooke
Link: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1016010/
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