Monday, September 10, 2007

A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Great Train Robbery (1903)

Sssssuuusssshhhhhhhhhhh. These are silent. I actually watched ALL of the following:

Homage to Eadweard Muybridge: still shots (taken quickly to make a series of images that look like they're moving, like a flip book) of all sorts of naked women; naked women walking, naked women turning around to walk up stairs, naked women embracing naked children, naked women jumping . . . . .

The Kiss: older, ugly-ish people kissing

Serpentine Dances: a lady with a dress that flings around like a ribbon wand

Sandow (The Strong Man): a man flexing his muscles that are teeny tiny by today's standards

Glenroy Brothers (Comic Boxing): the title says it except it's not funny really

Cockfight: chickens, and they fight

The Barber Shop: getting a shave, "the new wonder haircut"

Feeding the Doves: again, very descriptive title

Seminary Girls: girls, in what is very clearly a staged set, having a pillow fight in their nightgowns and a den mother type woman comes to break it up, including dragging one of the girls by the feet from under the bed

Exiting the Factory: women, exiting a factory

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat: yep, a train arrives

Baby's Lunch: a baby between a man and a woman, the woman drinks tea while the man feeds the baby

The Sprinkler Sprinkled: a man watering a lawn gets tricked into having the hose shoot water in his face, he then turns and chases the man responsible for the trick, drags him back to the foreground, and shoots him with water

Dragoons Crossing the Saone: men on horses crossing water

Promenade of the Ostriches, Paris Botanical Gardens: there are no ostriches, just people walking

Childish Quarrel: two babies of indeterminate sex fighting because one is mean and takes the other's toys

Lion, London Zoological Garden: a zoo keeper taunts a lion in an itty bitty cage

Demolition of a Wall: men knock over a wall

Transformation of Hats, Comic View: a man sitting on a short stool changes disguises (noses, wigs, hats)

Carmaux, Drawing out the Coke: coke in this case meaning "a hard, dry substance containing carbon that's produced by heating bituminous coal to a very high temperature in the absence of air"--something to do with mining; men at a mine and this stuff in a huge square mass comes out and they hose it down and break it up

Poultry-Yard: girls feeding large ducks

Snowball Fight: adults playing in the snow

Card Party: three men playing cards and drinking what looks like Guinness

New York: Broadway at Union Square: title tells you . . .

A Trip to the Moon: this is one that the book counts (the earliest one); an astronomer devises a plan to go to the moon and take 5 men with him; the genius method is more or less like a long canon and the men are enclosed in the bullet; they get to the moon, moon-men attack them but they can be defeated just by hitting them with an umbrella; the way to get home is just to fall off the face of the moon in the bullet; they fall into the ocean, are rescued, and go home

President McKinley at Home: apparently the first president on film

Pack Train at Chikoot Pass: it's a train

Sky Scrapers of New York City from North River: can't so much see the skyscrapers for the piers and whatnot

San Francisco: Aftermath of an Earthquake: after the big earthquake

The Dog and His Various Merits: he can spin a wheel like a hamster, pull a milk cart, etc

Aeroplane Flight and Wreck (Piloted by M. Cody): big pre-Wright brothers airplane that falls from the 6 feet of air it attained

The Great Train Robbery: this is the other one that counts for the book; men hit and tie up the railroad worker in the office, get on the train, detach the engine from the rest of the train, make the people in the cars get off the train and rob them, get on the engine, and run off only to be caught by other men who were just minutes before having something of an impromptu dance but had been told by the freed (by a little girl who carries a knife in her basket) railroad worker of the robbery

there were more on the disc but I was seriously having trouble staying awake . . . . They are something to see and some of them are amusing in an "isn't that archaic" way but my god, I can only take so many silent clips (even though these were way short for the most part). It's like watching someone else's home movies when you don't know the people in the film and they don't do anything very interesting.

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