Year: 1910
Director: J. Searle Dawley
Country: US
Language: N/A
From the first film in 1895, the Lumiere Brother's Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, to about 1916, when D.W Griffith's Birth of a Nation was all the rage, the fixed camera was all the rage. Albeit likely due to constrains of the technology at the time and not due to lack of creativity or audience demand, the fixed camera is now seen as the most primitive form of filmmaking. Even silent film lovers don't really "count" these pictures as anything but historical documents.
This is an early film adaptation of Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol. It's a story about a scrooge who is visited by three ghosts of Christmas.
If anybody could prove that the fixed camera films had artistic significance, rather than just being historical relics, it would be Director J. Searle Dawley. With Frankenstein (1910) he created a picture with great phychological depth and with A Christmas Carol (1910), a fairly better known story, he would create quite a character driven achievement.
Dawley projects his scrooge as the brutal old geezer that he is. The actor's body expression suggests that the character is a frail old man, yet the scenery suggests he is hard and utterly bureaucratic. The framing of the film is often very tight, pushing inward, always feeling clenched or closing, like Scrooge himself. The scenes involving the ghosts are very poetic and dreamlike. They do well in evoking specific emotions from us (such as when Scrooge feels pangs of guilt over not having loved)
Remarkable in pacing and style, this adaptation of Dicken's classic may not be the best, but it certainly is very thought provoking. Its well made considering its time and certainly shows that not all stationary cam films are relics. Brilliant staging and brilliant acting I must say.
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