Educational Media Reviews Online

Totaling more than ten hours, this fascinating three-disc cornucopia of over fifty short films is the second installment of Kino International’s historically invaluable project of making available early work produced by the venerable Gaumont Film Company that has until now largely remained unseen by North American audiences. To this day the longest-running film production company in the world since its founding in 1895, Gaumont studios was an especially powerful force behind the burgeoning development of early cinema, and this collection, spanning the Studio’s second decade, is of enormous historical interest for what it reflects of the state of the young art in France, both as a source of internationally influential innovation and, as reflected by increasingly recognizable emulations of Hollywood genres and techniques, a struggling competitor against ascendant American film production for the global cinema market.

The first disc features forty short films, each no longer than eight minutes yet totaling over three hours, by the disarmingly mischievous and playful Emile Cohl (1857-1938), a trailblazing cartoon animator who widened the horizons of the nascent art form with experiments in puppetry, stop-motion animation and hand-drawing, double-exposure, and sprightly combinations with live action. Cohl’s earlier formative involvement in late nineteenth-century Parisian anti-establishment circles, such as anarchists, bohemians, Modernist poets and, most prominently, as a graphic designer and caricaturist in the Incoherents art movement, is reflected the insouciance and whimsy of his films, such as the proto-surreal stick figure experiment Fantasmagoria (1908), considered to be the first two-dimension cartoon.

The second disc, slightly longer than the first, features twenty-two films varying in length up to thirty minutes directed by the prolific Jean Durand (1882-1946). A journalist before becoming an innovator of short comedies, Durand went on to direct over 140 more films for Gaumont studios. This collection gathers slapstick comedies and action adventure dramas, showcasing Durand’s zeal for presenting wild animals (such as lions, elephants, and camels), scenes of comical disorder of interiors and destruction of orderly settings, elaborate single-shot tableaus and even American-style Westerns shot in Southern France. Many of Durand’s films feature actors from a squadron of acrobats he maintained, and numerous titles in this collection are from serial comic productions involving eponymous characters Calino, Zigoto, and Onésime. The disc also includes a mini-documentary surveying Durand’s career.

The third disc, nearly two and a half hours long, showcases three films by Jaques Feyder (1885-1945), one each by Romeo Bosetti, George-André Lacroix, Etienne Arnaud, Henri Fescourt, and Gaston Ravel, followed by three anonymous films. Lengthier on average than that the material appearing on the previous discs, the comedies, realist, and slapstick films on this one illustrate greater technical refinement and sophistication in editing, systematic use of long-shots and close-ups, and, among the disc’s Special Features, synchronized sound and full-color film. Among the highlights of the disc, particularly notable is the experimental complexity and boldness of Ravel’s Feet and Hands (1915), the story of a courtship articulated through close-ups of the characters’ extremities.

The titles from each disc can be selected in either chronological or alphabetical lists. Intertitles appear in English and the entire collection is accompanied with interpretive modern music by different contemporary performers for each disc. Highly recommended both for large public library collections and, especially, for academic collections serving film studies programs.