Une course d'obstacle

A dozen or so people take part in an obstacle race. Their barriers include getting through a barrel, putting on extra clothes and getting over a wall.

The comic chase was well established in the cinema when Alice Guy made this movie, and it's an amusing entry in the genre. With the race and a cash prize the only goals, there are none of the incidents in the usual chase comedy that puzzle the viewer. Instead, the fun is provided by the clumsiness or agility of the racers.

Alice Guy (sometimes credited as Alice Guy-Blache; Herbert Blache was her husband from 1907 through 1922) could reasonably be called the first movie director; she worked for Gaumont when they first entered films, and was their supervising director through the end of the 20th Century's first decade. Then she came to the United States and, with her husband ran Solax. Her directorial career ended in 1916.

Another early film from Alice Guy to follow the pattern of a chase comedy, "An Obstacle Course" demonstrates a decent continuity across six exterior shots in some five minutes time. In this one, a chase is made out of an obstacle-course race and includes the usual knockabout humor of the day. These early chase films were important in the development of continuity editing and, thus, overcoming an obstacle in the transition to narrative cinema. There's nothing special about this example of what was already by 1906 a common genre--having been initiated by such films as "Personal" (1904) only a couple years prior. Like another 1906 film from Guy, however, that reworks the chase formula, "Une Histoire Roulante," this one, too, features people in barrels, some of whom are pushed and rolled along.