Strangers in Strange Lands
Saturday, 1:00 pm, The Paramount
For the second year, musicians Paul Reisler and Terri Allard will lead a group of Charlottesville schoolchildren who have composed songs to accompany today’s Family Day presentation of classic silent fantasy films: Edwin S. Porter’s Jack and the Beanstalk (1907), Georges Méliès’s Gulliver’s Travels (1902), W.W. Young’s Alice in Wonderland (1915), and Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917).
Alien lands and landscapes were a favorite theme for pioneer French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Among the hundreds of historical subjects, fantasies, and trick films produced by Méliès are loose adaptations of several famous fantastic novels. Reduced to only a few minutes’ running time, this first filmic version of Gulliver’s Travels bears little resemblance to the Jonathan Swift story from which it was drawn. But here at least Gulliver does reach the land of the giants, Brobdingnag, whereas many of the later adaptations never take him any farther than his first stop at Lilliput.
At a length of more than 10 minutes, the fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk was one of the longer short subjects of its day; at a cost of $1,000, it was also one of the most expensive. Although director Edwin S. Porter’s films for Edison from this period may now seem stage-bound, in their time they were innovative and revolutionary. Jack and the Beanstalk survives today because it was copyrighted as a “paper print” at the Library of Congress, then rephotographed back to film many years later.
In 1915, the feature film was still new to movie audiences, but only a handful of those that still exist remain memorable. Fortunately, the few fantasy films of the time, such as Rumpelstiltskin and the “Oz” features, retain their appeal today due to the timelessness of their themes, whimsical costumes, and sets drawn directly from picture books, and the employment of primitive yet magical effects that still delight. The first feature-length adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic story Alice in Wonderland proves no exception, despite the loss of some footage to time and nitrate decomposition.
Which brings us to The Immigrant, certainly one of the greatest short subjects ever made, and perhaps the best of Charlie Chaplin’s many fine short comedies from his early period of explosive output and creativity. If D. W. Griffith turned the cinema into art, then Chaplin refined it into the art of the people, and in so doing made his name and image forever associated with “the movies.” Although no Lilliputians or Mock Turtles make appearances in The Immigrant, in its own way the film is just as fanciful as the other subjects in this program, infusing the often harsh reality of the turn-of-the-century immigrant experience with wit, charm, humor, and hope.
