A Trip to Mars (1910)

I think the list of films I've reviewed is still looking a bit short, so it's time for me to do again what I last did a couple of months ago: pad it out a bit with a couple of short, early silent films which are available online. Yes, I know. Shameless. I saw this film to the gloriously anachronistic soundtrack of Rise by Public Image Ltd, which happened to be playing in my iTunes library at the time. The film is shorter than the song.

This little gem is another one from no less a figure than Thomas Edison, a name which instantly shocks you into grasping just how long ago this was made. The film should not be confused with Méliès' Le Voyage dans la Lune. I've seen Edison being unfairly criticised for this film being a rip-of of the earlier film and it isn't; it's entirely different, just a similar broad concept, which is fair game. Of course, Edison did in fact rip off Méliès by distributing his film without regard to copyright, but that has nothing to do with A Trip to Mars.

The plot is simple, as it would have to be in a film this length, and delightfully bonkers. A mad scientist, with a rather jolly looking skeleton hanging on the wall of his lab, invents a Cavorite-style anti-gravity thingy. Said McGuffin promptly lifts our hero out of the window and (wisely glossing over the inconvenient fact of, you know, thousands of miles of utter vacuum) to Mars. There he encounters a bunch of tree people whose costumes, as ever for these early films, evoke theatre rather than any suggestion of realism. He is then picked up by a giant devil-type creature, who blows freezing air on him so he's in the middle of a snowball, and throws the snowball all the way back to just outside his window on earth. We end on some anti-gravity hi-jinks as the room spins around.

If that didn't already sound fun enough, the effects are great too. It's a wonderful, wonderful film. Put the title into a search engine and watch it now. It's only five minutes of your life.

Frankenstein (1910)

“…”

Oh my. I’ve no idea how I’m supposed to judge this film, more than a hundred years after it was made. It’s completely alien to my entire conception of what a film actually is, far more so than the several 1920s silent films I’ve seen. At least they can be watched from a modern perspective of what cinema is supposed to do, minus sound. This can’t, but it’s utterly fascinating to see.

For a start, it’s just twelve and a half minutes long, which is why I’ve been able to knock out two movie reviews in one day. That’s only long enough for half a dozen set-piece scenes which is what we get. Such plot as there is gets relegated to the intertitles.

The picture is so blurred that it’s impossible to make out the actor’s facial features, which isn’t helped by the fact that everything takes place in mid-shot. The camera is completely static- it’s more like watching a play than a film, even one from as little as ten days later. One scene is quite clever, though, using an on-screen mirror to give us two different perspectives on the screen.

Given how blurred and indistinct the actors are, the acting styles are not exactly understated. There are lots of big, big gestures from actors who are presumably based mainly in the theatre. It’s often not so much like narrative but something closer to dancing. Everything is about spectacle rather than plot.

It’s fascinating to see the different tints for different scenes, which works particularly well in the scene where the monster is slowly coming to life from skeletal beginnings in a large cauldron. The orange tint gives a real sense of being in a furnace. The whole scene is extremely effective, and is actually a superb example of special effects. It’s just a pity that the picture is so blurred that we never really get a proper glimpse of the monster.

One historical oddity is that the first thing we see is a credit to Thomas Edison, whose company was responsible for this film. That’s how long ago this was.