Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
Charlie Chaplin with other puppet figures in Ladislas Starewitch's
Amour noir, Amour blanc
(
Love in Black and White,
1928)
WILLIAM MORITZ
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY
Valka zukov roachi
(The Battle of
Stag-Beetles) ( 1910);
Strekozai I muraviei
(The Grasshopper and the Ant) ( 1911);
Miest
kinooperatora
(The Cameraman's Revenge) ( 1911);
Rozhdyestvo obitateli lyesa
(The
Insects' Christmas) ( 1912);
L'Épouvantail
(The Scarecrow) ( 1921);
Les grenouilles qui
demandent un roi
(Frogland) ( 1922);
La voix du rossignol
(The Nightingale's Voice)
( 1923);
Le Rat de ville et le Rat des champs
(The Town Rat and the Country Rat) ( 1926);
L'Horloge magique
(The Magic Clock) ( 1928);
La Petite Parade
(The Steadfast Tin
Soldier) ( 1928);
Le Roman de Renard
(The Tale of the Fox) (shot 1929/30, released April
1937);
Fétiche mascotte
(The Mascot) ( 1933)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Holman, L. Bruce ( 1975),
Puppet Animation in the Cinema, History and Technique
.
Martin, Léona Béatrice and Françoise Martin ( 1991),
Ladislas Starewitch
.
Comedy
DAVID ROBINSON
In a bare quarter of a century, the silent cinema created a tradition of film comedy as
distinctive and as selfcontained as the
commedia dell'arte
-- from which, however
remotely, it seemed to derive something of its character.
The cinema arrived at the end of a century that had witnessed a rich flowering of popular
comedy. Early in the century, both in Paris and in London, archaic theatrical regulations
had forbidden spoken drama in certain theatres, and thus provided unintended stimulus
for the inspired mime of Baptiste Debureau at Les Funambules in Paris, and for the
English burletta, with its special combination of music, song, and mime. Later, the new
proletarian audiences of the great cities of Europe and America found their own theatre in
music hall, variety, and vaudeville. With these popular audiences, comedy was in constant
demand. When life was bad, laughter was a comfort; when it was good, they wanted to
enjoy themselves just the same. Famous comedy mime troupes of the music halls, like the
Martinettis, the Ravels, the Hanlon-Lees, and Fred Karno's Speechless Comedians, can be
seen as direct forerunners of one-reel slapstick films. Karno, in fact, was to train two of
the greatest film comedians, Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel.
BEFORE THE WAR: THE EUROPEAN ERA
The earliest comic films -- still only a minute or less in length -- were generally one-point
jokes often inspired by newspaper cartoons, comic strips, comic postcards, stereograms,
or magic lantern slides. The world's first film comedy, the Lumières'
L'Arroseur arrosé
(
Watering the Gardener,
1895), was directly derived from a comic strip showing a
naughty boy stepping on a garden hose and then releasing his foot as the unwitting
gardener peers into the nozzle.
By the turn of the century, however, films were growing longer, and film-makers began to
discover the specific qualities of the medium. Georges Méliès and his imitators used
cinematic tricks, like stop action and accelerated movement, for comic effects. In the
years 1905-7 the chase film -- which typically featured an ever-growing crowd of
eccentrics in escalating pursuit of a thief or other malefactor -- became very popular with
audiences. The bestknown exponents of the genre were the directors André Heuze in
France and Alfred Collins in England.
The year 1907 brought a revolution, when the Pathé Company launched a series of
comedies featuring the character Boireau played by the comedian André Deed ( André
Chapuis, born 1884). Deed was the cinema's first true comic star, and achieved
international popularity with his grotesque, infantile, comic character. From Méliès, with
whom he probably worked as an actor, Deed learnt much about the craft of film-making,
and particularly trick effects.
When in 1909 Deed was wooed away from Pathé by the Itala Company of Turin (he was
to return to France two years later), Pathé already had an even greater comic star to take
his place. This comedian, Max Linder, possessed an apparently inexhaustible comic
invention, and was a performer of exquisite skill. The most durable and prolific of Pathé's
stable of comic stars was Charles Prince (born Charles Petit-demange Seigneur), who
made nearly 600 films in the course of ten years, in the character of Rigadin. Other Pathé
comedians included Boucot ( Jean-Louis Boucot), the established variety star Dranem,
Babylas, Little Moritz, the stout Rosalie ( Sarah Duhamel), Cazalis, and the comic
detective Nick Winter ( Léon Durac).
The Boireau and Max series proved an incomparable draw at the box-office and Pathé's
rivals strove to compete. Gaumont poached the comedian Romeo Bosetti from Pathé, and
he directed a Romeo series and a Calino series (starring Clément Migé) before returning
to head Pathé's new Comica and Nizza comedy studios on the Côte d'Azur. Bosetti's
successor at Gaumont was Jean Durand, whose greatest innovation was to create a whole
comic troupe, called Les Pouics, whose orgies of slapstick and destruction were
particularly admired by the surrealists. Out of the group emerged Onésime ( Ernest
Bourbon), who starred in at least eighty films which sometimes rose to truly surreal
fantasy: in
Onésime contre Onésime
, for instance, he plays his own wicked alter ego
whom he ultimately dismembers and devours. As Léonce, Léonce Perret, subsequently to
become a significant director, specialized in a more sophisticated style of situation
comedy. A plump, cheerful, clubbable man, his comic disasters generally involved social
or amorous mix-ups rather than slapstick farce.
Gaumont's prolific star director, Louis Feuillade, personally directed two comedy series
featuring charming and clever little boys, Bébé ( Clément Mary) and Bout-deZan ( René
Poyen). The Éclair Company's child star, a precocious English boy called Willie
Saunders, had little of their charm but enjoyed brief success in an era when the audience's
appetite for comedy seemed inexhaustible, and led every French film company to develop
its own, albeit often ephemeral, comedy stars.
The Italian cinema developed a parallel but distinctive school of film comedy, which
produced forty comic stars and more than 1,100 films in the six years between 1909 and
1914. At the start of this period Italian cinema was undergoing great industrial expansion.
Giovanni Pastrone, energetically building the fortunes of the Itala Company, recognized
the commercial success of the French comedies which were being imported into Italy, and
lured André Deed to his studio in Turin. Deed's new Italian character of Cretinetti proved
as successful as Boireau, and the hundred or more films he made for Itala assured the
company's prosperity.
Deed's transformation from Boireau to Cretinetti was not unusual in the comedy
production of this era. The character names were regarded as the property of the company,
so that when a comedian changed his allegiance, he had to find a new name. Moreover,
every country where the films were shown tended to rename the character. Thus Deed's
Cretinetti became Foolshead in England and America, Muller in Germany, Lehman in
Hungary, Toribio in the Spanish-speaking countries, and Glupishkin in Russia. In France,
the former Boireau now became Gribouille, only to revert to his original name when he
returned to Pathé in 1911, the change being formally acknowledged with the film
Gribouille redevient Boireau
.
The success of the Cretinetti series launched a frantic competition between the companies
to recruit comic stars wherever they could be found -- in circuses, music halls, or the
legitimate theatre. Pastrone launched the Coco series with the actor Pacifico Aquilano. At
the rival Turin studio of Arturo Ambrosio there were Ernesto Vaser as Frico, Gigetta
Morano as Gigetta, and the Spanish Marcel Fabre as Robinet. In Milan, the Milano
Company launched the French comedian E. Monthus as Fortunetti, shortly afterwards
changing his name to Cocciutelli. In Rome, however, Cines discovered the greatest native
comedian of the period, Ferdinand Guillaume, who adopted the successive comic
identities of Tontolini and -- after defecting to the Turin company Pasquali -- Polidor.
Cines also boasted another of the best comics of the period, Kri-Kri, personified by
Raymond Fran, who like Fabre had trained as a clown in the French circus and music
hall. Italian producers took note of the popularity of Bébé and Boutde-Zan, and groomed
their own child stars, Firuli ( Maria Bey) at Ambrosio and Frugolino ( Ermanno Roveri) at
Cines. Cines's most charming and enduring child star was Cinessino, played by the
nephew of Ferdinand Guillaume, Eraldo Giunchi.
The films and their subjects were often repetitive, but this is hardly surprising, given that
they were turned out at the rate of two or more a week. Characteristically, each film
established a particular setting, occupation, and problem for the comedian. Every clown
in turn would be a boxer, a house-painter, a policeman, a fireman, a flirt, a hen-pecked
husband, a soldier. Novelties, fashions, and foibles of the day were all grist to the mill --
motor-cars, aeroplanes, gramophones, the tango craze, suffragettes, temperance
campaigns, unemployment, modern art, the cinema itself. Yet, even in their short, simple
films, the best comedians brought the vitality of their own personality and peculiarities.
Deed/Boireau/Cretinetti was frenetic, with the over-enthusiasm of a child (quite often he
chose to adopt infantine clothes, like sailor suits). More often than not the chains of comic
catastrophe were provoked by his own eagerness to fulfil his chosen role whether as
insurance salesman, paper-hanger, or Red Cross volunteer. In contrast,
Guillaume/Tontolini/Polidor was quaint, sweet, and innocent, the passive victim of comic
holocausts, often finding himself obliged to disguise himself, with delirious and delightful
effect, as a woman. Kri-Kri excelled in gag invention. The handsome Robinet's disasters
generally arose from the manic enthusiasm with which he threw himself into every new
undertaking, whether cycling or ballroom dancing.
Although the Italian school of comedy was originally inspired by the French example and
the immigrant Deed, these films possess something indigenous and inimitable. The streets
and houses and homes, the life and manners of the petty bourgeoisie whose well-ordered
existence our heroes so carefully observe and so recklessly disrupt, convey the world and
concerns of pre-war urban Italy. Although some basic forms of the one-reel comedy may
have been imported, the films of the Italian comics drew heavily and profitably on earlier
native lines of popular comedy -- circus, vaudeville, and an ancient tradition of
spettacolo
da piazza
which provides a link with the
commedia dell'arte.
Other countries enjoyed their smaller share of this brief, prolific period of European film
comedy. In Germany the clown-stars included Ernst Lubitsch and the infant Curt Bois.
The insatiable cinema audiences of Russia had the ever love-lorn Antosha (the Pole,
Antonin Fertner), Giacomo, Reynolds, the fat Djadja Pud ( V. Avdeyev), the simple
peasant Mitjukha ( N. P. Nirov), and the urbane, silkhatted Arkasha ( Arkady Boitler).
Despite a strong music hall tradition, which contributed a number of stars to American
film comedy, Britain's star comics, Winky, Jack Spratt, and the most talented, Pimple
( Fred Evans), showed little of the verve or invention of the French and Italians.
This era of European comedy nevertheless made its own distinctive contribution to the
development of film style. While the cultural pretensions of more prestigious dramatic
and costume films led their makers to borrow style as well as respectability from the
stage, the comedians were unfettered by such inhibitions or ambitions. They ranged
freely; much of the time they shot in the streets, catching the atmosphere of everyday life;
yet at the same time they were employing and exploring all the artifices of camera
trickery. The rhythm of talented mimes was imposed upon the films themselves.
Europe's golden age of comedy was brief, and was ended by the First World War. Many of
the young artists went off to the war and did not return, or never retrieved their prewar
glory after service and war injuries. Film tastes and economies were changing. The Italian
cinema's immediate pre-war boom burst like a bubble when the old markets were
disrupted. Meanwhile, the old comedies were made to seem archaic overnight, in the
blaze of new competitors from the other side of the Atlantic. The American film industry,
already migrating to the open spaces and spectacular natural décors of the West, was
poised to dominate the world cinema industry.