La biche au bois

Context matters. Viewing "La Biche au bois" today, such as in the video circulating online, one would be given to dismissing it as another and rather worn early hand-colored dance film. Pretty, perhaps, but nothing one can't also find in the prior such films of "Annabelle Serpentine Dance" (1895 and thereafter). Simply viewing early cinema from YouTube or home video collections, however, says more about one's own times than it does about how these films were originally seen. Annabelle's performances, beginning a tradition of cinematic imitations of Loïe Fuller's dancing, were first seen individually on 35mm film looped through the peep-hole viewing Kinetoscope. "La Biche au bois," on the other hand, wasn't only based on, but was also part of, a theatrical play--shot on 58mm wide film and projected along with a magic lantern background to elaborate a scene in the play and to a large audience. It was part of a unique multi-media presentation and anticipated subsequent, if less intricate, exhibition of films as part of programs that also included theatrical acts, magic lantern slides and other entertainments and that were a dominant form of film exhibition--in theatres, vaudeville and music halls, opera houses and fairgrounds--until the nickelodeon age and rise of cinema-specific venues for a steady product of story films. Although I've read there's a restoration out there, what we have in those videos available online now is a reduction print to safety film of a picture divorced from that original context.

One of the most important influences on the development of the story film was the French theatrical tradition of féeries. This is largely because of their adoption by cine-magician Georges Méliès, who made some of cinema's earliest multi-scene narratives with films such as "Cinderella" (1899), "Bluebeard" (1901) and "A Trip to the Moon" (1902). In turn, this influenced other filmmakers to make their own féeries, or fairy-tale films. For example, in England, there was R.W. Paul's "The Magic Sword" (1901) and, in America, Edison's "Jack and the Beanstalk" (1902)--both, as with much of the product of Pathé, which became the world's biggest movie studio, were largely imitative of Méliès, with fairy godmothers guiding heroes in their quests across scenes and including by dreamlike, superimposed visions and other trick shots. I bring this up because "La Biche au bois" may very well be the first cinematic féerie, and it was part of a play that Méliès would later loosely adapt as "The Kingdom of the Fairies" (1903).

Based on the fairy tale written by Madame d'Aulnoy at the end of the 17th century and which translates as "The White Doe" or "The Hind in the Woods" or various other titles, adapted to the stage at various points, this film became part of such a performance at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on 14 November 1896. The film and magic lantern slide would be back projected onto the screen when during the play a character's nose grows bigger until exploding and returning back to normal size, all as influenced by good and malevolent fairies. Hence, the smoke effects we see in the film today. In it, the troublesome fairies come out of the character's nose--yup, that hole that seems to be coming out of the ground or, more literally, a stage, is supposed to be a nostril--and continue to torment him with pitchforks and other tools, as well as a bit of dancing, before that puff of smoke emerges from the nostril. The black background may've allowed for the simultaneous use of a magic lantern image with the film. As Laurent Mannoni (see source at end of the review) says, the black background was also a familiar artifact of the chronophotography and cinematography of Étienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demenÿ.

Contrary to what one might find on the internet, including on Letterboxd as of this writing, cinema pioneer Demenÿ had nothing to do with the making of "La Biche au bois" beyond inventing the 58mm camera and projector used to create it. I've already talked about Demenÿ's importance in the history of the invention of movies in my review of "Je vous aime" (1891) and of his assisting the work of another cinema pioneer Marey in my review of "Falling Cat" (1894), but after those prior efforts in chronophotography and scientific films and his projection system, the Phonoscope, for projecting moving pictures, such as "Je vous aime," from glass discs, Demenÿ patented a camera and projector, later named the "Biographe" and "Bioscope," with a beater mechanism and which may've influenced the development of the Lumière Cinématographe--and, regardless, it owes a debt to the prior work, celluloid films and camera developed by Demenÿ's former boss Marey. Anyways, it was the other major studio in the early cinema of France--besides Lumière, Méliès and Pathé--Gaumont, that contracted with Demenÿ to exploit his cinematographic devices and that leased out that equipment and camera-and-projector operator Jacques Ducom to Edmond Floury, director for the Théâtre du Châtelet, for the making and exhibition of "La Biche au bois."

In all, at least 150 films were made for Gaumont with Demenÿ's 58mm camera during 1896 and 1897, according to Mannoni, although it remains unclear whether Demenÿ himself photographed any of them or whether another important figure in early cinema associated with the studio, Alice Guy, the world's first female filmmaker, did either (see my reviews of the contentious "The Cabbage-Patch Fairy" film(s) (1896 and 1900) for more on Guy). It seems that before switching to the emerging standard of 35mm film, Gaumont was content to lease out their equipment and operators for others, like Floury, to make films.

With Ducom operating the camera, Floury had a wooden stage, equipped with the trap door and smoke effects, built on the roof of the Châtelet. Such an open-air set is similar to some of the other earliest stagings in film history by the likes of Méliès, R.W. Paul, or Alfred Clark, the latter of whom while preceding Floury in making a theatrical and spectacle film with "The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots" (1895), also did so for the Kinetoscope, as opposed to the integration of the film within a theatrical and magic-lantern performance, projected on a screen to an audience of more than one at a time. Plus, as with "Annabelle Serpentine Dance" and other early films, as well as magic-lantern slides, it was hand-painted. It must've been quite the spectacle in 1896 and, indeed, contemporary reports regarded the film as the highlight of the show, with one reporter even suggesting the material risqué--what with young women prancing about with exposed legs, one supposes. Best keep those scandalous fairies in the peephole box or up the nose. They're bound to cause all sorts of cinematic mischief when they escape.

(Main Source: Laurent Mannoni's book, which unfortunately has yet to be translated into English, "Georges Demenÿ: Pionnier du Cinéma")