Category: Silent Comedy Film History
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Accidentally Preserved by the Kinetophone
When the Thomas Edison Company set out to make its sound films in 1913, preservation wasn’t necessarily what they were going for. However, what survives of the Kinetophone films allows the viewer of today a very special window into the past. The system was complicated, at times fussy, and required multiple operators to make it…
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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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Douglas MacLean – Picking Up Where Douglas Fairbanks Left Off
There were two main types of feature-length comedies made during the silent era. There were the slapstick ones, which sputtered initially in the late ‘teens until Chaplin figured out how to make this work, and the ones that didn’t star slapstick comedians. The second kind had a run from 1915 through the end of the…
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Silent Comedy Features Without All That Slapstick
Douglas Fairbanks spent six years making feature-length light comedies, mainly playing a semi-typical middle-class young man on a series of adventures. Once he made The Mark of Zorro, there was no turning back to that format. The five- or six-reel non-slapstick comedy genre did not end when Doug moved into costume pictures, but its discussion…