Comedy Acrobatics Nirvana

The Gaspards

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Yes, right here! I hit the jackpot this past weekend, and of course I'm sharing the wealth with you. Here's the story....

Although I'm partial to the use of physical comedy within a storyline, as in silent film comedy, I've always gotten a big kick out of pure comedy acrobatic acts, especially when they involve eccentric movement, partner work, and some sturdy furniture. I was first exposed to this when performing on the Hubert Castle Circus in the late 70s on the same bill with the Gaspards, whose table acrobatic numéro had many of the same moves you'll see in the vidéos below.

The Gaspards

I've never been able to track down the Gaspards, and just have a few snapshots of them taken at another venue, but about six years ago in London I watched a video clip of what I thought was the sharpest knockabout act I'd ever seen. Of course I wanted a copy, but the collector who had shown it to me promptly disappeared from the face of the earth. Luckily I had written down the name of the act — the Mathurins — and never forgot about it. Then a week or so ago I finally tracked them down to a November 24, 1957 appearance on the British tv variety hour, Sunday Night at the London Palladium, sort of England's Ed Sullivan Show. I got to see the clip for the second time ever on Friday.

I was happy, but then happier still on Saturday when on another episode of the same show I discovered  the Trio Rayros, another excellent comedy acrobatic act, who had twice appeared on Ed Sullivan (5-11-58 and 4-4-59).

And then this morning I woke up to find that my old friend Julia Pearlstein had sent me a link from Carlos Müller to a 1910 film of comic acrobats from the archives of the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique. And guess what? It's really good too!

So let's start with the 1910 anonymous film of three anonymous acrobats. This begins with some standard acrobatics but gets wackier and wackier, and is full of nifty moves, including monkey rolls, pitches to 2-highs, pitches to back sits, eccentric walks, a hat dive, a jump to a thigh stand, the old putt-putt, and some great front fish flops. It's amazing to see so many of these same comic bits in use a half century earlier, yet more evidence that physical comedy vocabulary was transmitted by variety performers directly into early film comedies.




Fast forward to November 24, 1957 and the Mathurins. Many of the same pitches, 2-highs, and partner balances, but more trips, slaps and falls, some ahead-of-its time break dancing, awesome table and chair moves, and the best peanut rolls this side of China... a knockabout encyclopedia!

Did he really say "it looks easy"???  I'm speechless on that one.  

And here's the Trio Rayros at the Palladium three years later (10-4-60). Some of the same plus a 3-high column collapse, and a few nice creative touches with the suitcases. The whole idea of embedding the trampoline, while common nowadays, what with the popularity of wall trampolining, was likely pretty unusual back then. My favorite parts are of course the silly bits: the quickie walk up to and down from the 2-high and the "chair-pull" sequence with the suitcases.

Hmm... the 1910 clip comes from Belgium; the Mathurins were from France; Trio Rayros sounds Spanish but they use the French word for baggage (bagage). The Gaspards were French. As we say in French, coincidence? Maybe not, maybe this specific brand of comedy acrobatics was just more of a French tradition....

• The pratfall that begins with laying first one straight leg horizontally across the top of the table and then, rather optimistically, the other leg, was a trademark of Buster Keaton, which you can see him do during different stages of his life right here.

• You can see more table acrobatics in this previous post, but I'm also going to repeat here one of the clips from that post because it belongs to the same genre as what you just watched. This was from the Colgate Comedy Hour (hosted by Abbott & Costello on November 23, 1952), and the performers are the Schaller Brothers, who also had a comedy trampoline act.

Bon weekend!

Early Film: "An Interesting Story" (1905) — First Slapstick Movie Ever?

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Here's an imaginative 4-minute film from 1905 by James Williamson about a man who gets so wrapped up in the book he's reading that he is oblivious to the world around him. (Yes, had I known about it a month ago I would have included it in this post about the "oblivious gag.") YouTuber changebeforegoing labels this "the first slapstick movie." I would argue the point, but of course it all depends on how you define slapstick.

That was the earliest example I've seen of the steamroller-flattening routine, which reappears in 1909 in Slippery Jim, though without an actual steamroller. It later became a trademark gag of Ringling clown Paul Jung, and was reprised with a twist by Mel Brooks in Silent Movie. See this post for those examples.

Early Film: Trapeze Striptease

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Here's an oddity, a Thomas Edison film from 1901 featuring an enthusiastically received striptease on the solo trapeze. True, she finishes with more skin still covered than most of today's acts start with, but I suspect it was still pretty risqué at the time.

Book Report: The Max Linder Story

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If I've convinced you in my recent posts that Max Linder is worth knowing about, then you might want to read more, no? But when it comes to books (you remember books) there's still nothing in English devoted entirely to Linder, and the two books in French are both by his daughter, Maud Linder. Luckily, they're excellent and it would be great to see them translated into English.

Max Linder Était Mon Père [Max Linder Was My Father]
by Maud Linder
Paris: Flammarion: 1992

So if you missed or forgot my unforgettable first post on Maud Linder, you may not know that in 1925, still in his early forties, Max Linder — the biggest pre-Chaplin international star — died in a double-suicide with his 21-year-old wife, callously leaving behind a 15-month-old daughter, Maud, who grew up not even knowing who her father was until the age of 20.  This book is less a bio of Linder père and more an account of Maud's rediscovery of her father and her subsequent efforts to rediscover his work and revive his artistic reputation. It's a unique tale of a highly intelligent and motivated woman who somehow managed to separate her deep personal pain from her respect for her father's artistic genius.  No easy thing, and quite admirable.

Les Dieux du Cinéma Muet: Max Linder 

[The gods of silent film: Max Linder]

by Maud Linder
Paris: Editions Atlas, 1992

This is a gorgeous book that every Max Linder fan should own, whether you read French or not. It's designed for the coffee-table at 11½' x 14", with144 glossy pages — 36 pages of text, the rest filled with well captioned, high-quality photographs, including 16 pages of color plates:  Linder on set, Linder on stage, Linder in newspapers and magazines, Linder in real life, Linder on film. Especially tantalizing are publicity stills of Linder from lost films, films whose names we no longer know. 

Here are a few shots to whet your appetite:

 

 

 

The Ciné Goes to Town

French Cinema, 1896–1914

by Richard Abel
(University of California Press, 1998)

Last but not least at a hefty 568 pages is this exhaustively researched and insightful academic study of early French cinema, in which Max Linder is a key player.  I have yet to read all of it, but enough to trust Abel's thorough knowledge of the subject. He is especially strong at tying together the growth of film technique, the social forces in France at the time, and the artistic geniuses involved in forging this new art form. While the French are often criticized for claiming they invented everything, they were in fact the main innovators in early cinema.

Although written before the release of the two Linder DVDs reviewed in my previous post, and only taking us through 1914, Abel did manage to see pretty much every early Linder film available at the time, many of which are still unavailable to the public outside of various European film archives.  It's a bit frustrating to read about films you can't see. Hopefully some day we'll be able to plow through this history with instant access to all of the films covered.

Early Film: Slippery Jim (1909)

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Here's a curiosity for you from 1909, years before the Keystone Cops and then Arbuckle, Chaplin, Keaton, et. al. ushered us into the heyday of silent film comedy. Produced by Pathé in France under the title Pickpock ne Craint pas les Entraves (pickpockets fear no barriers), it was released in the U.S. under the title Slippery Jim, with English inter-titles.

The pickpocket in question is arrested by the police, handcuffed, and locked in a cell. For the next eight minutes he repeatedly and nonchalantly proves himself to be a master escape artist thanks to his talent as a contortionist and shape shifter. It's all very clever, but it's all accomplished by camera tricks, specifically stop-action substitution.

The Catalonian director, Segundo de Chomón, had worked with that pioneering French movie magician, Georges Méliès, and the film is full of the same sort of tricks of construction — bodies being assembled from component parts — that hearken back to the days of Joseph Grimaldi.

Some of Chomón's visual effects are remarkably smooth for 1909 (e.g., splitting the cop in half), others quite amateurish (e.g., the aerial bicycle). The unnamed performer seems agile enough — watch him scamper up that water pipe — but since the "physical" comedy is faked, perhaps we should just call this "visual" comedy... or live animation! Still, it's quite watchable, and amusing enough. The original music for the film was composed by Antonio Coppola in 2008.

The Steamroller Gag

At least that's what I call it: the flattening of a living, breathing human being into a pancake. Here's the segment again from Slippery Jim, though here they're flattened by a swinging door.

This was done in live performance earlier than 1909 in a pantomime by the Byrne Brothers, and later became associated with the Ringling Brothers clown, Paul Jung, whose steamroller was powered by clowns walking inside it. Here's the description from my Clowns book (glad I remembered I wrote this!): In Jung's version, the steamroller plows into a clown street cleaner, leaving behind an oilcloth silhouette of him on the ground, flat as a pancake. The cloth victim is placed on a stretcher. A clown policeman tries to arrest the reckless driver and is in turn flattened by the powerful machine. Finally, a dwarf with a false head is struck by the steamroller; his head rolls off and is also flattened.

And here's a variation on the gag from Mel Brooks' 1976 film, Silent Movie. Brooks, Marty Feldman, and Dom DeLuise hope to convince Burt Reynolds to appear in a modern silent movie they're trying to make.

Appendix: Segundo de Chomón

From the excellent Europa Film Treasures web site:
Directed by Segundo de Chomón, Catalan artist settled in France, this film renews the genre of the effect film, mixing successfully chase films and effects films. Chomón’s imagination is wilder than ever. Chomón makes the most of his rare technical skills in an interminable series of effect films with Julienne Mathieu his spouse for the company Pathé Frères. This Spanish man from Teruel leaves his office job to become a colorist for Georges Méliès. A good part of his career is spent at Pathé’s where he participates in the set up of a system of industrial coloring; the Pathécolor. In 1901, Chomón settles down in Barcelona. He directs numerous documentaries, has a go at animation and effects. Called back by Pathé to Paris, Chomón works as a camera operator on The Goose that laid golden eggs in particular. He directs all in all about forty films and makes an attempt at every genre. Action, laughter, imagination and much madness… As a Pathé advertisement of the day read: “If it’s funny, then we’re sure to go see it !”


Update (12-4-11): Here's an effusive review of the film from Matt Barry, whose Art & Culture of Movies Blog is well worth checking out.

Woody Allen & the Boxing Kangaroo

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The hardest act I ever had to follow, bar none, was the boxing kangaroo on the Hubert Castle Circus. Here's Woody Allen battling a kangaroo when he was playing ringmaster at the Hippodrome in 1966.

I've seen feistier kangaroos, but I suspect this critter was intimidated by Allen's reputation as a take-no-prisoners pugillist.




Update: That is, if you can call a film clip from 1896 an "update." I just came across this 27-second clip of a boy boxing a kangaroo, part of a 5-minute Edison film called A 1896 Fairground Programme. You can see the whole film on Europa Film Treasures.

Early Film: The Kiriki — Japanese Acrobats (1907)

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This one has recently surfaced on Facebook and YouTube, but probably most of you haven't seen it yet, so let's add it to my early film collection, complete with all the background info.

First just enjoy the video...




Hopefully you got the joke! What I like about it is how it progresses from the plausible to the implausible. Quite silly, quite funny. Here's that background info, courtesy of the excellent web site, Europa Film Treasures:

Ki Ri Ki — Japanese Acrobats
Production date: 1907

Irresistible film that inspired many artists (including choreographer Philippe Decouflé), this three-minute gem was shot by Segundo de Chomón (1871-1929), special effect specialist hired by Pathé to direct a series of films based on special effects and meant to compete with those of Georges Méliès.

 Chomón witnesses the birth of the cinematograph in 1896 during a stay in Paris. This Spanish man originating from Teruel quits his office job and starts working for Georges Méliès as a colorist. He moves on to Pathé Frères where he contributes to set up a system of industrial coloring: the Pathécolor.


In 1901, Chomón settles in Barcelona. He directs numerous documentaries, has a go at animation and effects. Called back by Pathé to Paris, Chomón works as a camera operator on Le Roi des Aulnes (The Erl-King) in particular. He directs all in all about forty films and makes an attempt at every genre.


This film only existed in its black and white version. Thank to the collaboration of the Cinémathèque Française, depositary of the black and white original single-perf negative, we have been able to make three positive prints. Hélène Bromberg colored the film in the old fashion way, frame by frame, using as a color chart a 2-meter long fragment of the nitrate original, rediscovered in a private collection.

___________________________________

Segundo de Chomón’s tumblers, human pyramid virtuosos, hobble along but their somersaults fall a little flat. And once the “trick” is disclosed, the capers reveal themselves to be bluff. But what skill! A buffoonery far from ridiculous.

 Chomón is an editor, and he masters effects and splicing marvelously. The film is back in its original splendor. It will turn you upside down.

Director: Segundo de Chomón
Nationality: French
Length: 2' 41"
Genre: trick film
Sound: silent with soundtrack
Original elements: black & white
Producer: Pathé
Composer: Eric Le Guen
Original language: French

Early Film: First Prize for Cello

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First Prize for Cello
produced by Pathé in 1907
Length: 2:43
from Europa Film Treasures


I find comic films from the earliest days of cinema — the pre-Arbuckle, pre-Keaton, pre-Chaplin era — to be fascinating but not necessarily funny. First Prize for Cello, on the other hand, really made me laugh. I love the escalating absurdity, I love the assembly line inside the apartment (the dresser up the stairs!), and I especially love the ending. There's no directorial credit on this, but someone knew what they were doing.

Enjoy!




That ending reminds me of the George Burns story, which he used in the title of his memoir, Living it Up: or, They Still Love Me in Altoona! If I'm remembering it correctly, Burns tells of a dismal (pre-Gracie) career in vaudeville, where he was going nowhere fast. However, one night he played Altoona (Pennsylvania) and everything clicked, the audience absolutely loved him. He thought he had finally figured it all out, but in the next town and all the towns after that he continued to bomb. Still he persevered, strengthened by the knowledge that they still loved him in Altoona. And then there's our cellist, undeterred to the end and ultimately triumphant, a testament to the performer's eternal optimism.

Early Film: Georges Méliès at the Cinémathèque Française

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If the name Georges Méliès rings a bell at all, it probably makes you think of that wacky Trip to the Moon movie from the Dawn of Film that was okay in its time, but... that time was long ago. Yes, Méliès almost single-handedly invented special effects, pioneering such techniques as stop-action substitution, dissolves, multiple exposures, and time-lapse photography, in the process creating the science-fiction film genre, but nowadays his corny sense of humor, flimsy storytelling, and overuse of the same gimmicks make the work seem dated. In fact, it was out of fashion by the time the Keystone Cops came on the scene in 1912

And yet... and yet... there is much to admire in his films. His dreamscape visuals, based on his own superb drawings, are a precursor to surrealism and all that followed, including animation ranging from Yellow Submarine to many a music video. His appearance in this blog, however, is a result of me stumbling upon an exhibition of his work, Méliès: Magicien du Cinéma, at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris earlier this summer, while visiting the Jacques Tati exposition. The Méliès exhibition turned me on to some crazy crossover between his brand of cinema, inspired by stage magic, and the world of clowning and physical comedy.

Méliès' began his performance career as a magician and in 1888 bought and ran the famous Paris magic theatre, Théâtre Robert Houdin. Exhibits on filmmakers don't always have a lot of stuff to show, other than the movies themselves, but this one was stuff-eriffic, full of all sorts of magic and early film equipment, and even a large-scale model of Méliès' studio (unfortunately destroyed in 1947) in the nearby Paris suburb of Montreuil.

[Small world department: Houdin was a great French magician whose name was adapted by Ehrich Weiss, who as Harry Houdini became even more famous than his hero; years later Houdini was said to have given Joseph Keaton, Jr. his enduring nickname after the 6-month-old boy survived a fall down a flight of stairs: "that's quite a buster your son just took."]



But What Does This Have to Do with Physical Comedy?
Yes, the exhibition has since closed, but here are a couple of clips with ties to physical comedy.

The first is Guillaume Tell et le Clown (1898), loosely related to the classic William Tell clown entrée, a parody of the legend of William Tell, who was said to have saved his own life and sparked a rebellion against tyrannical rule by successfully shooting an apple off his son's head with a crossbow. In the clown entrée, as performed by François and Albert Fratellini, difficulties in balancing the apple on the son's head and then the son eating the apple down to the core thwart the clown's aspirations to greatness. (This entrée was collected by Tristan Rémy in his book, Entrées Clownesques, most of which is available in English, translated by Bernard Sahlins in Clown Scenes.) Charlie Chaplin used the gag in a short 1917 war bonds charity film he made with Scottish comedian Harry Lauder. That movie was never released, but Chaplin came back to the gag again in his 1928 silent movie, The Circus.

Update: For a discussion about the why and wherefores of performing the William Tell entrée in 2009, see this post (and subsequent posts) on Jon Davison's blog.

Méliès' texte explicatif describes his version as follows: "The clown, wanting to present the scene of Willian Tell and the apple, constructs a mannequin out of various materials and places a melon on its head. When he turns and starts to walk away from it, the mannequin comes to life and slaps him. The clown, surprised, reassures himself that it's truly a mannequin, but when he turns around, he gets struck by the melon in his back. He is grabbed by the mannequin, who has come to life and throws the clown on the ground, escapes, and leaves the clown there all by himself."





The Fat & Lean Wrestling Match from 1990 is even more clever:



Méliès explained that this stop-action substitution effect, which he used so frequently (too frequently), was actually discovered by him by accident in 1897 when his film jammed and he stopped to fix it. "During this minute,'' he said, "the passersby, buses, carriages had moved on of course. When I projected the film, I saw a bus changed into a hearse, and men changed into women.'' Actually the technique had been used two years earlier at the Edison studios in The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots to create a decapitation effect. Whether or not he was familiar with this, Méliès still deserves credit for fully (too fully) exploring the potential of the technique.

Of course film made a lot more possible, but the idea for these transformations was even older. In Joseph Grimaldi's day they were called tricks of construction. Here's some of what I wrote about it in my Clowns book:

Grimaldi's Clown derived just as much fun from gadgets and machinery. Thanks to a lifetime in pantomime, Grimaldi was well versed in trickwork and was himself the designer of many effective "tricks of construction." In these transformations, something new and unexpected was created out of something quite ordinary, usually with satirical overtones, such as changing a lobster into a soldier by boiling it.... Many of these inventions found their way into the circus (and cartoons) as sight gags. Grimaldi's "New American Anticipating Machine," often seen today as the hot dog machine, is the most common example. Clown steals a dog from an unsuspecting gentleman, stuffs the pooch into the machine, cranks the handle, and pulls out a long row of sausages. When the owner returns and whistles for his dog, the sausages wag just like a real dog's tail.

You can read the whole chapter here.

Okay, done with with Physical Comedy
Yep, that's the physical comedy portion of this post, at least for now, but there's more!

Although it's not all that physical, here's his fantasmagorical A Trip to the Moon (1902) for those who haven't seen it:



That voiceover narrative, from a Méliès text, was added later, but for a more modern take you might want to check out this version, using music from Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts, or this one, or this one, both of which have original electronic scores that kind of work in their own way.

Even more interesting because it's visual is the Smashing Pumpkins music video, Tonight, Tonight, which is practically a remake of A Trip to the Moon.



For a shot-by-shot analysis of the movie, check out this post from Dan North's excellent film blog, Spectacular Attractions. North also has an interesting post on episode 12 of the HBO mini-series, From the Earth to the Moon, which intercut scenes of the Apollo 17 moon landing with re-creations of the shooting of Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune.

You can find links to a lot of Méliès material by typing his name into the search engine at:
missinglinkclassichorror.co.uk



The Cinémathèque exhibit book, L'Oeuvre de Georges Méliès, is really excellent. Big, thorough, gorgeous, fun, perfect for the coffee table. Yes, it is in French, but it's lavishly illustrated and includes a ton of Méliès drawings. You can get it from the French Amazon by clicking on the link above.

Likewise there is now an excellent DVD collection of Méliès' films put out by the good folks at Flicker Alley, who do some real quality work in restoring and releasing old movies. I bought this, I really like it, and once I've watched all 782 minutes of it (or enough to sound like I did), I'll post a DVD Report to the blog. And do I really need to mention that the movies look 100 times better on DVD than on YouTube?






























This is also a good place to once again plug one of my favorite blogs, Circo Méliès, described as "a place for the meeting of cinema, circus and variétés in the widest sense of the term." It's in Spanish, and I only speak enough Spanish to get me to the train station and buy a beer (not necessarily in that order), but I still get a lot out of this blog.





Finally, a word of warning to those who think being on top of the latest technology is a guarantee of everlasting prosperity: When Méliès fell out of favor, he couldn't pay back some big loans and went seriously broke, ending up selling toys out of a booth at the Montparnasse train station.



Okay, okay, I know that's a bummer of an ending.




To finish on a more positive note, check out the award-winning graphic novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, in which — spoiler alert! spoiler alert! — Méliès of Gare Montparnasse ends up playing a prominent role. I just came across this last week, but I bought it and read it and highly recommend it. I promise it provides a happy ending to this post.