L'assassinat du duc de Guise (1897) Online

Georges Hatot began as a director of crowd scenes on stage and moved into films. There he specialized in scenes of murder and assassination, sure to please the members of the audience who liked blood and thunder.

This one is modeled on the painting by Paul Delaroche and is an extension of the stage act known as "tableau vivante". Intended to get around laws which forbade depiction of immoral acts like nudity on stage, there was an exception if there was no movement. You could put a nude woman on stage if the purpose was artistic enough, and what could be more artistic than a painting?

Tableau vivante survived on the stage well into the 20th century -- take a look at the film MRS HENDERSON PRESENTS for a based-on-the-facts story. In the movies it still survives in modified form, both in movies based on comic books, which often reproduce panels and let them hang on the screen for a long time, and in modified form: notice the re-imagining of the famous Norman Rockwell Saturday EVENING POST cover showing a family sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner, re-imagined as a Black family and shot with a moving camera in Ridley Scott's "American Gangster".

The Duke of Guise is worried about the king's evil intentions. A lady warns the duke, considering it appropriate that he should not go to the council. The king summons him and the guards stab him. The actors come from the French Comedy: Auguste Le Bargy, Alber Lambert, Gabrielle Robinne, Berthe Bovy. The music is a synfonic composition of Saint-Saens. This was a success of the "Film Art", a film production company that transposes many literary works into the cinema, looking for a cultured public.

L'assassinat du duc de Guise (1897)

The Guise family is very well-known in France and this here acts out an assassination plot. This film from the Lumiere company was obviously filmed on a stage and I'm going to guess that it was a part of a play. The camera was set up and part of it was filmed. For the most part this here was a very entertaining act. Of course, it's been chopped down to fit a fifty-five second movie but I actually thought it was very entertaining. The title gives away what's going to happen but I thought the film did a very good job at leading up to the violence and then pulling it off.