A surreal comic delight - 1908 - The Thieving Hand - J. Stuart Blackton

One can draw a comparison between the birth and exponential growth of cinema and the formation of a star:

Stars are formed from huge clouds of dust and gases, mainly hydrogen and helium (which, combined, are called nebula). As the dust and gases swirl around, they break into clumps and contract due to gravitational forces. As the clumps bump each other and collect more dust and gases, they get bigger, and their gravity, which holds the star together, becomes stronger. Since gravity is so strong, the particles become more tightly packed. Once it is hot enough for nuclear fusion to occur, a star is formed. 

What makes this period (1904-13) so exciting is that it is before the art of film is ‘hot enough for nuclear fusion to occur’ and its star is born. Due to the rapidly evolving technology of the camera (within thirteen years, filmmakers were already making films that were twenty times the length of the Lumiere Brothers’ first actuality films from 1895) and the pioneering vision of filmmakers around the world (the Australians made the first feature film in 1906, the Italians made the first explicit political film a year earlier, etc.) film was very much still ‘dust and gases swirling around’.  

In 1908, film had yet to settle on an expected estimate length or branch off into particular genres; there was a wonderful overlap and fusion of unexpected ideas. There are few better examples of this then J. Stuart Blackton making The Thieving Hand two years after making the first American animated film, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. Whereas Humorous Phases was a primitive but entertaining attempt at making an animated film, The Thieving Hand was a pseudo-surrealist live action comedy centring around a false limb.

The Thieving Hand amalgamates some of the most interesting ideas that we have encountered in the films of the first decade of the twentieth century; one can find the visual trickery of Méliès, the comic timing of Max Linder, the narrative sequencing of Porter and the playfulness of Blackton’s own animation work. The film shares certain surrealist elements with Porter’s Dream of a Rarebit Fiend; however, the surrealist aspects of The Thieving Hand are less explicit but more comic. 

The film involves a one-armed street cobbler helping an upper class man (whose hat and cigar bear an uncanny resemblance to Max Linder in Le Premier Cigare d’un Collegien ), who repays the favour by purchasing him an arm from a limb shop (see above). The otherworldliness of the limb shop juxtaposes with the previous scene on the street in an unerring manner that Méliès’ shorter films do not quite manage. The use of a false limb functions in a more subtle and effective manner than one of Méliès’ demons; the limb also manages to function as the proverbial devil on the shoulder of the protagonist (or perhaps even, the protagonist’s subconscious) and land him in trouble.   

The film successfully synergises the aforementioned influences and styles and delivers a simple and thoroughly enjoyable film. In fact, I would suggest that it is an excellent ‘entry point’ for films from this decade. It is thoroughly engaging for a first time viewer, while also alluding to much of the best work of this decade.

Surrealism begins? - 1906 - Dream of a Rarebit Fiend - Edwin S. Porter

There is a lot more to Edwin S. Porter’s oeuvre than just The Great Train Robbery. Dream of a Rarebit Fiend may well have been another forerunner for the surrealist movement. As mentioned in an earlier post, The 1903 version of Alice in Wonderland presented the audience with moments from Carroll’s work as she went down the rabbit hole which hinted at later works of surrealist film-making. In Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, the transition between the waking state and dreaming is more hallucinatory and therefore more interesting and more explicit from a surrealist perspective.

Whether or not this was his intention is debatable. Dream of a Rarebit Fiend was based on a comic strip of the same name by Windsor McKay (see above) that ran in the Evening Telegraph from 1904-1914. The strip was the modern equivalent of a medieval morality play; it warned its readers against the perils of overindulgence. McKay set the majority of the strip in the main character’s dreams, thus allowing him to probe an imaginary world free from physical laws.

Unfortunately, we cannot discover what particular element of McKay’s comic attracted Porter to this project. I would suggest, however, that authorial intention can often be misleading and limiting when attempting to read any form of art.

But before beginning a discussion in relation to the surrealist sections of the film, we must not overlook the opening scene. In this scene, we encounter the film’s protagonist devouring his rarebit and guzzling one of many beers on the table (see above). Here we have film’s earliest example of gluttonous grotesquery – it is really quite hard to watch, particularly when he spits out some of his beer. The director is deliberately establishing a protagonist who the audience has little or no sympathy for, his subsequent suffering is welcomed.
As he exits the restaurant and the world around him starts to spin as he approaches a lamppost, we are given film’s first example of what the Russian Formalists termed defamiliarisation:

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. (Shklovsky) 

The crucial distinction here is the discrepancy between perception and reality. Film will allow us to portray dreams in a manner which does make it “increase the difficulty and length of perception”, in a manner unique to this particular art form. Whereas a painting may evoke a particular image from a dream (see Dali’s Dream brought on by a bee flying through a pomegranate, one second before waking up below) and writing may evoke images that we can nurture and embellish in our imaginations, film can provide its audience with the entirety of a dream in a particular physical space where we expect to see a representation of reality.

In the latter moments of the film, such as where the protagonist’ bed is flying through the city, it is clear that the protagonist is dreaming. But at the moment where he approaches the lamppost, the two worlds amalgamate with one another, and it is at this moment that the initial defamiliarisation occurs. This is also the film’s most exhilarating moment. The energy of the protagonist combines with the dizzying whirling of his surroundings to draw the audience into his drunken revelry and subsequent dreaming.

The film has clearly taken some of its ideas directly from Méliès’ work from this period. For example, when the protagonist is being attacked by what appear to be devils as he sleeps (see above), they appear to be reminiscent of the devil in Méliès’ 1905 film Le Diable Noir. Dream of a Rarebit Fiend makes the breadth of Méliès work clearer; his discovery and implementation of ‘trick’ film-making not only heavily influenced all science fiction film but also the representation of dreams (and blurred drunkenness) in films.

To conclude however, Porter’s own diverse cinematic achievements must be highlighted. Porter is film’s first directorial chameleon and seems to be comfortable in any genre he dabbles in. As discussed in the post on The Great Train Robbery, he may not have had the creative freedom that Melies enjoyed, yet he still managed to make technically and cinematically important films that helped shape American cinema.