The Oxford History of World Cinema (33 page)

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.