Comedy Acrobatics Roundup

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Wow! 400 posts!! (Have you read them all?)  Never thought I'd make it this far.  But it's fitting that the big 4–0–0 be about comedy acrobatics. Yeah,  my keenest interest is physical comedy happening to real characters in real-life situations, but the truth is I never get tired of comedy acrobatics. By which I mean acrobatic acts that are prone to go wrong because at least one performer is blessed with clown DNA. Or that the act is performed by eccentric movers who are just too damn silly to conform to Standard Acrobatic Form.

Found this 1912 postcard on eBay, and now I own it. 
Anyone know anything about Palo or Sellerie?

You guys have sent me a few clips that were new to me but — not to be competitive — I've also uncovered a few more, so here's the latest round-up, presented in what I take to be chronological order. Enjoy!

1900:  Georges Méliès
We'll begin with this curiosity from 1900, Fat and Lean Wrestling Match (Nouvelles Luttes Extravagantes) by Georges Méliès. (You saw Hugo, right?) This one's full of Méliès' trademark stop-action substitution camera tricks, some smoother than others, but still it offers a glimpse into variety acts at the turn of the previous century.




1920: The Jumping Tommies
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, which offer this description. Not hilarious, but the short guy has a couple of comic moments and the concluding chair trick is quite nifty.




1935:  The Runaway Four
This is a trio I know nothing about, but according to IMDB they were in the short, All-Star Vaudeville (1935), so probably this is from that. No matter. They have serious acrobatic chops and an original brand of humor. They're amazingly oddball and, for their era, decidedly fey. They establish their tumbling skills in the first 20 seconds, and from there on out they just seem to be free associating.




1945:  Donovan and Byl
This is said to be the only recording of Donovan and Byl's music hall tumbling act, from a film short, Randle and All That. A live audience sure would help, but a nice act indeed. It's everything that can go wrong while trying to get into a two-high, with a touch of Dead or Alive thrown in at the end. Especially like the head-eating bit!




1959:  Les Marcellys
From 1959, here's a superior table act by the French tumblers, Les Marcellys, filmed at the Moulin de la Galette in Paris for the French tv show, La Piste aux Etoiles.




2013: The Maiers Comedy Trapeze Act
Last but hardly least, here's a comedy trapeze act that's recently gone semi-viral. What I like about this one is the commitment to character, matched with inventive trapeze work. They are Sabine Maier and Yogi Mohr, and have lived and worked together since 1988. They are based in Berlin, are approaching 50, and have three children. Yogi plays a goofy-looking nerd, and Sabine a proper lady, perpetually embarrassed. Yogi comments, "We look normal. We don't even go to the gym. We just do warmups and practice our routine."



If you want to get analytical, here's a longer version of the same act.



And one more tidbit from this creative duo:




That should be enough to keep you all off the streets and out of trouble! Some links:
• Web site for Die Maiers.
• All of my comedy acrobatics blog posts.

Special thanks to Dan Vie, Hank Sapoznik, Jeffrey Weissman,  Jim Bacci, Riley Kellogg, and Tanya Solomon for the links, plus anyone else I'm likely forgetting!

I Told Ya So!

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Here's the beginning of my post from 5 weeks ago...

And here's the front page of today's NY Times:


You can read the whole Times article here.

Revenge of the Silents

Will The Artist and Hugo Compete for an Oscar?

[post 221]
Despite frequent tributes to the stars of the 1920s, despite all those beautifully remastered DVD sets, despite your enthusiasm and mine, our modern world has pretty much relegated silent film comedy to the nostalgia bin. Most of the younger generation has only vaguely heard of Chaplin or Keaton, much less seen any of their films, and names like Charley Chase, Harry Langdon, or Fatty Arbuckle mean nothing to them. I know; I teach college.

There are both good and bad reasons for this. Admittedly, the quality of these early films can vary drastically — not unlike television today. Many are formulaic, with minimal character or story development. Other than the action sequences, the pace must seem slow to a visual generation used to shots lasting only a couple of seconds. And did I mention — horrors! — they're in black and white?

But presentation is also a major problem. Before you'd plunk down cash to buy a silent film comedy on DVD, you're more likely to go to YouTube to watch one of the comedian's movies, or more likely just an out-of-context clip. You're going to be sitting at your desk, probably surfing the net at warp speed, seeking instant gratification. The video and audio quality is likely to be poor, depending on the source and the amount of compression for the web. Frustrated with the small size, you enlarge it to full screen, but now it's all blurry and pixelated. The sound track, coming out of your computer's sole speaker, is likely to be generic, just some ragtime tune slapped on top. If the clip doesn't grab you in twenty seconds or less, you're gone.

Ben Model

Contrast that with sitting in a crowded audience watching a restored print (film!) on a large screen. The music has been composed specifically for this movie and is being performed live by a talented and enthusiastic pianist, perhaps by an entire band. The audience is laughing loudly (they always do) and probably cheering and jeering as well. Soon you forget that it's not in color, you forget that you can't hear any dialogue. Instead you're marveling at all that creativity, wondering why they can't make movies like that any more. Silent film as a live performing art! But.... I'm guessing the number of people who've had this experience is way under 1%.

Is it at all possible, however, that the tide may be turning?

Not only are live performances of silent films growing in popularity, but two major commercial films about the silent era have just opened to rave reviews and serious talk of awards for best film of 2011. The first is The Artist, an actual black & white silent movie, which I previewed in this earlier post, when it almost won the Cannes Film Festival. The second is Martin Scorcese's Hugo, based on the novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a book I wrote about in this earlier post on Georges Mélies. Hugo's not silent, it's color, and it's even available in 3D, but much of it as a tribute to Mélies and the inventiveness of early cinema.

More on both of these shortly, but first honorable mentions to some of the silent film series that have paved the way. In New York, there are at least two ongoing series that you should know about, both of which have the imprint of Ben Model, silent film historian, composer, and pianist. The Silent Clowns Film Series, ongoing since 1997, presents about ten events a year, all free, and all featuring Ben on piano, with programming by Bruce Lawton and film notes by Steve Massa. Many of the films screened are not available anywhere else and are usually seen on newly restored prints. Always a fun time, full of revelations, and after the movies are over, Ben, Bruce, and Steve hold court, fielding questions from an audience of fellow fans.

Ben has also done a lot of similar work for the Museum of Modern Art, including the current film series Cruel and Unusual Comedy, focusing on social commentary in American slapstick, which he curates with Ron Magliozzi and Steve Massa. The most recent installment, however, focused on some marvelous rare early European comedy shorts from the Desmet Collection of the EYE Institute (Amsterdam). This was billed as "a sort of highlights reel of a complete 5-program series that will be presented at MoMA during 2012." Judging by what I saw in October, this collection is a significant find. And while I hope it eventually ends up on DVD, that won't be as cool as having seen the movies accompanied by a live band, with my Bloomfield College colleague Peter Gordon on saxophone!

Another place in NYC to learn more about the silent era is The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, which houses exhibits on movie history, but also has a steady stream of screenings and lectures. If you're in town December 17th, don't miss master magician Ben Robinson's lecture, Magic and the Silent Clowns:   There is a strong link between some of cinema’s great comedians and magic. Performers such as Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Harpo Marx started out in the world of vaudeville; many of their finest gags grew directly out of their love of magic. Magician and author Ben Robinson will show scenes from such movies as Grandma’s Boy, Sherlock Jr., The Circus, and Duck Soup to examine this important connection between magic, comedy, and cinema.


Also in New York, the Film Forum provides another home for screenings of silent movies with live musical accompaniment. They are currently in the midst of a Monday night series, The Silent Roar, featuring MGM films from 1924 to 1929, with Steve Sterner on the piano. Buster Keaton's The Cameraman plays the day after Christmas.


Enough tooting the Big Apple's horn.... don't want to make all those New Yorkers blush! Back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Bérénice Bejo & Malcolm McDowell in The Artist

The Artist

This is a French film directed by Michel Hazanavicius, most recently known for his OSS 117 spy spoofs, and starring Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo (real-life wife of Hazanavicius). Other than its bland title, I was utterly won over by The Artist, whose story unfolds against the backdrop of the transition from silent films to sound. There are obvious parallels with Singing in the Rain, except The Artist actually is a silent movie, and a black and white one at that. It's also stylish and sweet, quite funny, and very well acted. Dujardin and Bejo are easy to fall in love with, and John Goodman as the cigar-chomping Hollywood mogul and Uggie as the dog Uggie are both hilarious.

Jean Dujardin as George Valentin

Although the male lead, one George Valentin, is dashing, athletic, and comic, very much in the style of Douglas Fairbanks, The Artist does not attempt to recapture the world of the great physical comedians. "It wasn't the slapstick that meant so much to me. It was the melodramas," explained Hazanavicius. "The point was to share that sensual experience I felt sitting in the cinema watching Murnau's Sunrise." Be that as it may, the style is sumptuously visual and the acting ultimately physical. And did I mention that it's very well done?

Bérénice Bejo as Pepe Miller

At the risk of sounding mushy and sentimental, I was also pleased to see characters that were not total jerks. Yes, self-serving jerks exist, but that can also be too easy of a writing choice. The George Valentin character could have been an arrogant womanizer and a bitter loser. Peppy Miller's stardom could have made her totally full of herself. Goodman's Al Zimmer could have been a ruthless producer. Instead, they all have their positive side, which (spoiler alert) makes a happy ending possible. Yes, you could argue that this is phony and manipulative. After all, Hollywood comes off very well in this French valentine to America, which is no doubt one reason The Artist is creating Academy Award buzz. But not the only reason. It's an exceptional film, and has already won Best Film of the Year from the San Francisco Film Critics Circle and the Boston Society of Film Critics, and has six Golden Globe nominations, including Best Comedy. 


Here's the trailer:

Better yet, here's a short scene from the movie with the director's commentary:

And here's the press kit:
The ARTIST Production Notes

Ben Kingsley as Georges Mélies

Hugo
Martin Scorcese's Hugo is another valentine to the movies, but in this case an American director returns the compliment, reminding us all of France's contribution to early film history, specifically the effects-laden work of magician-turned-director Georges Mélies.  Hugo is quite the contrast, a full-color, all-talking, big-budget Hollywood movie with major stars (Ben Kingsley, Jude Law, Sacha Baron Cohen) and serious technology, including a cool secret world concealed within Paris' Montparnasse train station, which for a price ($17.50 in Manhattan!) we get to explore in 3D. 

But what on earth does this have to do with silent film comedy?

A lot, as it turns out, because [spoiler alert] that crotchety old man winding down his life selling wind-up toys in the train station is — true story — none other than silent film pioneer Georges Mélies, long since forgotten by the public, his early special effects movies all thought to have been destroyed. Not to worry: it is his fate to be rediscovered by an orphaned boy who secretly lives in the station, following in his father's and uncle's footsteps by caring for the clocks, one of which he of course ends up hanging from in the climactic chase scene, à la Harold Lloyd in Safety Last.

Speaking of chase scenes, Sacha Baron Cohen of Borat fame plays a nasty Keystone Kop with a leg brace who is intent on nabbing vagrant kids and packing them off to the orphanage, and therefore much chasing ensues. Unfortunately, Cohen's comic genius does not get full rein here, and the potential for physical comedy is squandered. What is special, and to my mind well worth the price of admission, is the loving recreation of Mélies' Paris studio and working methods — with Scorcese as a cameraman! — which constitutes the final section of the movie. Very cool. Indeed, the whole movie can be seen as a tribute to film preservation, with the film archivist (played by my former student, Michael Stuhlbarg) clearly modeled on Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française.

Here's the official trailer:

A good movie, not necessarily perfect, but its heart is in the right place, and it has an important story to tell. Two weeks ago, when I first saw both of these, I would have thought American judges would be favoring Hugo over The Artist, but the opposite seems to be happening. We'll have to wait and see but, either way, silent film is the winner.

Some More Links:
Ben Model's website
Entertainment Weekly: The Awesomeness of Silent Movies
Wall St. Journal review; they like The Artist; Hugo, not so much
NY Times review of Hugo
NY Times review of The Artist
Silent Comedy Mafia (forum)
Films Muet, French silent film blog
Lobbying for an Oscar (NY Times)
New Yorker review of Hugo by David Denby
New Yorker review of Hugo by Richard Brody

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.

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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: 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.

Chapter 5 — Supplemental Material

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As I said in my previous post, I have a bunch of additional material relevant to each of the twelve chapters of Clowns. This is especially true of Chapter 5, because it focuses on physical comedy. In fact, you could view this entire blog as Chapter 5 supplemental material! In addition, I'm still a huge fan of the Hanlon-Lees and I could overwhelm you with stuff on them, but I'm going to wait for the publication this fall of Mark Codson's book (see below) to dive back into their work.

That being said, a few miscellaneous goodies...

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On pages 5-6, I talk about nineteenth-century performers such as Mazurier and Klischnigg, who did remarkable imitations of monkeys, starring in vehicles such as Jocko, or the Monkey of Brazil. You can get some sense of what that might have been like from this comic turn by Buster Keaton in his brilliant short, The Playhouse (1921).




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Baudelaire on clowns: the Vertigo of Hyperbole

When Tom Mathews' English pantomime troupe visited Paris in 1853, one of the spectators was the French poet, Charles Baudelaire. Despite his well-known interest in the macabre and the grotesque, Baudelaire was somewhat taken aback by the British clown, the "English Pierrot."


I shall long remember the first English pantomime that I saw. . . It seemed to me that the distinguishing characteristic of this genre of comedy was violence. . . . The English Pierrot was by no means this character pale as the moon, mysterious as silence, supple and mute as the serpent, lean and long as a pole, to which we were accustomed by Deburau. The English Pierrot comes in like a whirlwind, falls like a bale, and when he laughs he makes the room shake; his laughter sounds like joyful thunder. He is a short, thick fellow, who has increased his bulk by a costume filled with ribbons. On his whitened face he has crudely plastered — without gradation or transition — two enormous slabs of pure red. His mouth is made longer by a simulated prolongation of the lips in the form of two carmine strokes, so that when he laughs his mouth seems to open from ear to ear. . . . His moral nature is basically the same as that of the Pierrot we know: insouciance and neutrality, leading to the realization of all the rapacious and gluttonous desires, to the detriment sometimes of Harlequin, and sometimes of Cassandre or Léandre. But where Deburau thrust in the point of his finger so that he might afterwards lick it, the clown thrusts in both hands and both feet, and this may express all that he does: his is the vertigo of hyperbole. This English Pierrot passes by a woman who is washing her doorstep: after emptying her pockets, he seeks to cram into his own the sponge, the broom, the soap, and even the water.... Because of the peculiar talent of the English actors for hyperbole, all these monstrous farces take on a strangely gripping reality.

— De L'Essence du Rire
(my translation)

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In the book, I described The Duel Between Two Clowns, a clown act between Boswell and one of the Price Brothers (apparently William) involving an attempted two-high, a ringmaster, a duel, and some quick change. Amazingly there is an actual transcript of this routine from the 1840s in Entrées Clownesques, a collection of clown texts compiled by the great French circus historian, Tristan Rémy. I have no idea what the original source for this document is. Rémy's book was translated into English by Bernard Sahlins as Clown Scenes (Chicago: Dee, 1997). Unfortunately, for some reason he only includes 48 out of the 60 entrées contained in the original, and Le Duel Entre Deux Clowns ain't one of them. Thanks, Bernie, for forcing me back into the highly lucrative clown entrée translation business!

Here it is, hot off the press. Please use your imagination to see beyond the dialogue and picture the act performed by two very strong clowns.

[Forthcoming!]

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Another link between 19th-century pantomime and early film: First here's a poster of the train wreck from Le Voyage en Suisse (1879):




And now here's a shot from the 1904 Georges Méliès film, The Impossible Voyage, courtesy of the Library of Congress.



Coincidence? I think not.

Méliès was, as many of you probably already know, a stage magician who became a pioneer of special effects in early film. And while we're on the subject, the connections between film effects and circus-style performance is the subject of an intriguing blog that you might want to check out: Circo Méliès.





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And in my first On the Shoulders of Giants installment, I reinforce the obvious connection between the Byrne Brothers' Eight Bells and Buster Keaton's Neighbors by showing the Keaton clip that brings the poster to life (and then some).

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Mistakes? What mistakes?

Probably plenty; here's one.... Mark Codson, whose excellent dissertation on the Hanlons will be published this fall, pointed out that I persisted in translating the title of Le Voyage en Suisse into English, when in fact the show toured to England and the United States with the original French title. I was probably thrown off by a few bi-lingual posters and by a previous commentator or two who also referred to it as A Trip to Switzerland. The correction has been made, so thank you Mark. If anyone has additional corrections, just let me know.
UPDATE (11-17-09): Mark's book is now slated for publication on February 2, 2010. You can order it here.

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UPDATE (11-17-09): You can see a version of Auriol's bottle-walking act in Cirkus Cirkör's production, Inside Out. Read all about in in this post.

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So what's missing?

It's the second longest chapter in the book, and one of my favorites, but it has at least one glaring omission, the work of American pantomime clown George L. Fox. Yes, I do mention him, but that's about it. He was wildly popular and a colorful character (he went insane), but I think at the time it was hard to find all that much about his actual performing. Or perhaps I just ran out of time.

A few years later, when Bill Irwin was first considering doing a show based on Fox's life, I helped him out with some additional research, including uncovering some original pantomime scripts. It was not until 1999 that Laurence Senelick's excellent study appeared: The Age & Stage of George L. Fox, 1825-1877. Armed with this thorough research, Bill finally did his show, Mr. Fox: A Rumination in 2004 as part of his season of work for the Signature Theatre.