Nothing you haven’t seen before from Méliès, but you could do worse and probably have. Helps that it’s short.
I liken Méliès from 1896-1904 as going to visit great grandmother and she just bakes all the time and loves all her grandkids and there’s all these cookies and pound cake and rum cake and a thing of trail mix and just a general good fat time to be had while you visit. And she’s delightful and has lots of funny…
To be perfectly frank, I have no idea what the majority of you were watching. The movie I saw was splendid, compelling, and perfectly satirical.
Art is utterly subjective, and I suppose film is exactly the same way. So 80% of you think this film was pretentious boring utterly useless twaddle, and then 20% of us were mesmerized the entire time and thought it was rather fucking brilliant in its own way.
I have no idea what you all were…
Ow? The real thing for me that docks the half-star is that a solid third of this, just like with Little Nemo, is ‘stock movement,’ where the animation goes back and forth repeating itself. It literally makes the proceedings a minute or two longer than it would be, really pads it out. I don’t know whether McCay couldn’t do it without that, whether he thought audiences would be so wowed they’d wanna see everything repeated every five seconds, or because…
Like all good Christians, the commandment to not be a gossip-mongerer is being roundly ignored.
“The minister recalled his trust”
Wait… was he just creepin’ on her before that?
“This short film is presumably lost”
But please, feel free to give it five stars and talk about how amazing it was. You fucking idiots.
EDIT: Gonna leave this up for the sake of posterity, but it looks like the powers that be at Letterboxd finally recognized the 1903 version as the one everybody has watched and enjoyed and the 1898 version as one they can probably just re-label with its native French name and leave at the bottom of…
There were two Infernos released in 1911. This is the other one.
Both are Italian. One is feature length, is well known in silent circles, readily available, and easy to follow with english translated subtitles.
The other one is this one.
Twenty minutes. Italian AF.
Italian* subtitles, Italian narrator telling all of you Italian blind people what the Italian subtitles say, and long dead Italian actors Italian acting the everloving shit out of everything.
It is gorgeous and has excellent music…
