Superstition andalouse (1912) Online

This film doesn't really seem at all like a film you'd be seeing from Segundo de Chomón, the Spanish filmmaker hired to beat Méliès at trick films. I mean, his stuff was all gimmicks, and there was rarely an attempt to tell a story. (Okay, there was but the story was all special effects based). The narrative for this one is pretty complex for a 1912 film, and it's also pretty long for a film of that time. 10 minutes was considered full-length by 1912.

The film begins with a man (Pedro) and a woman (Juanita) sitting at an outdoor cafe. A gypsy (who totally overacts) shows up to beg for money. Of course they turn her down, and that's only the beginning of this strange film.

Part of what made the story so easy to follow was the subtitles. (of course this is 1912 so I guess I shouldn't be too impressed by this). Compared to Chomón's other work, it's a huge step up. The shots are closer to the actors, with some closeups when the monsters are shown in the jars, and some medium closeups which look very up-to-date compared to the stagy films of the earlier days of film (no more scene-by-scene storytelling which was typical of Méliès's work, why couldn't Méliès do stuff like this??). The way the camera pulls toward Juanita to before going on to her daydream is particularly interesting and it's notable this a technique the Edison company used in "The Passer-by" from the same year.

The coloring job is particularly impressive. According to the modern title card at the beginning, the process they used for this was called, and I quote, "Pathécolor ó Cinemacoloris" which is also a method they also used to color Chomón's "Burgos" from the previous year. The color here is less brilliant looking, having been faded by time, but it still has a nice look that adds to the movie. All in all, this is pretty great for the time and despite hilarious overacting, it's something fans of the silent era will want to check out.

Superstition andalouse (1912)

*** (out of 4)

Segundo de Chomón directed this interesting French film about a young woman who begins to daydream about what she'd like to happen to the man who harmed her. At just ten-minutes this film is very much worth watching for a number of reasons. The biggest is the fact that it was hand tinted and I must say that the colors look remarkable and it's certainly one of the most impressive jobs I've seen from any film of this era. The other reason to check the film out is that it really does a nice job at letting the visuals tell the story. I found the film to be very interesting as we could zoom into the girl and then "enter" her daydream and then the camera would zoom back out once that was over. I really liked the style that de Chomon brought to the picture and there's no question that it holds your interest throughout the running time.

This elaborately colored one-reeler is available, as I write this, for viewing on Youtube. It shows Segundo de Chomon adapting to the changes in film story telling -- a lot better than his producers, who put a few too many titles in, disrupting the flow of imagination as Juanita daydreams of the increasingly elaborate revenge that a gypsy girl will bring down on her boyfriend because she has not let him give her alms.

This piece is told in multiple scenes, in an increasingly artificial world. The venue shifts from a realistic courtyard to a wild, stagebound prison in which various stage monsters appear. In some ways this hearkens backwards to half a dozen years earlier -- a couple of lifetimes in the evolution of cinema at his point! -- when de Chomon was Pathe's lead director in driving Georges Melies out of business. I am impressed by his attempts to combine the old and new film grammars: the naturalistic new grammar and the surrealistic old grammar in the depths of daydream. But the effect is disrupted by the occasional titles, informing us, for example that "the nightmare continues." Ignore them if you can.

Considering how easy it is to find this movie for free on the Internet and that it only takes up about ten minutes to watch, I can recommend fully to any and all to check it out.

Put up against other films of its time it feels light years ahead in its creativity, especially in set design and camera effects. Not that it is at all gimmicky, the effects serve a purpose in its story telling.

However, beyond the imaginative film making, the acting is as what you might expect; overly theatrical and broad. It's just a nice little ditty of a film, nearly a century away from all things CGI.