Category: Marcel Perez
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Marcel Perez: One Name Behind the Camera
Marcel Perez kept revising his onscreen persona and his character’s name throughout his career. His years working in the U.S. Found him sporting three different character names, and a different costume and persona each time he changed distributors. But one thing remained constant throughout all of this. He is always billed, as director, as Marcel…
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What’s a Nice Car Like You Doing in a Comedy Short Like This?
Putting Humpty Together Again, Thanks to the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress It isn’t often that a two-reel comedy can be reassembled by accessing a reel from one archive and a reel from another, but we were fortunate in the case of this film. Oh! What a Day (1918) is a…
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Charlie Chaplin, Marcel Perez, and a Pair of Drowning Ladies
There was a lot of borrowing and sharing of material in the days of silent comedy shorts, a tradition that grew out of vaudeville and circus. In the milieu of live comedy performance, there were certain routines that were a particular comedian’s property, to be sure, but there were many routines that everyone knew and…
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Buster Keaton’s Leap to ‘One Week’, and Marcel Perez’s Jump from “Split-reelers” to 2-reelers
Stretching to Two Reel Length was no Stretch For Marcel Perez What has always struck me as remarkable about Buster Keaton (well, one of several things) is his maturity as a filmmaker at the ripe old age of 25. His first solo release, One Week (1920), looks nothing like any of the 14 two-reel Arbuckle comedies…
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Marcel Perez…or “Marvel” Perez?
Buster Keaton’s Idea of “Impossible Gags” Take on ‘Popeye’ Proportions In the Tweedledum/Twede Comedy Shorts Stylistically, there are two things about the American films of Marcel Perez that make them stand apart from the work of all the other slapstick comedians of the silent era. One of them I can’t yet put my finger on.…
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The Humor of “Jackass” and AFV In the Early 1900s, as Performed by Marcel Perez and Others
The injury humor of Johnny Knoxville, the Farrelly Brothers, and thousands of anonymous klutzes is nothing new — French and Italian comedians were doing it during movies’ first decade. Last September, a lot of people sent me a link to an article in the New York Times that articulated something I’d been thinking for some…