Le Moulin maudit (1909) Online

This is, in its surviving form, a split-reel melodrama by Alfred Machin, whose best-remembered work is the anti-war drama, MAUDIT SOIT LA GUERRE made just before World War One broke out. Although the acting in this one is fairly primitive, and the miller's character is indicated that, despite being fairly well-to-do for the period -- he does own his own windmill -- he dresses in foolish-looking clothing that is heavily patched.

Despite these problems, this is a pretty good piece of film, not only for the dramatic way in which the miller takes his revenge on the cuckolding pair, but also the way it is shot. At this period, most American films were proscenium-arch-bound. Griffith was just getting started, but in Europe, they were already sophisticated. This is shot outdoors, with several well-chosen cuts and a couple of camera movements to keep composition. Also, the print I saw was beautifully stencil-colored, which certainly doesn't hurt.

The "windmill" films of Alfred Machin - this and the, in its own way, even more shockingly bleak L'Âme des moulins of 1912 - are really quite something and mark Machin out even at the very beginning of his career as a film-maker of great originality and a certain brilliance. He was a photo-journalist who had been hired by Pathé in 1907 to travel to Africa to make hunting films. This was almost certainly a response by Pathé to the enormous success in 1907 of the notorious tongue-in-cheek fiction hunting film Løvejagten made by the Danish company Nordisk (notorious and successful because Olsen had supposedly acquired two lions from a local zoo purely with the intention of shooting them on set). Machin was sent to Africa therefore to make "the real thing" - which he did (hippo and panther) but he also acquired his own personal menagerie of pet panthers and monkeys, some of whom would go on to star in Pathé comedies and in Machin's own later extraordinary "animal-cast" films. They would also (perhaps it was condign punishment) be the death of him because he was mauled by one of the pet panthers and never really recovered from the experience.

Tha Africa trip was though also a sort of "pilot" for future "ethnographic" films that Machin would make during his second trip to Africa (1910-11) and which would establish a pattern for other later Pathé cinematographers (Livier in Dahomey, Lejards in Sudan/Mali). In between the two African trips Machin, a continual "box of ideas", spent his time in Europe filming in Holland and in Flanders (Flemish Belgium). .The Dutch films shot in an almost preposterously "picturesque" fishing village outside Amsterdam, Volendam, are just touristic nonsense (all clogs and tulips) but this film, made in Belgium, and, as far as one knows, the first Belgian film, made with otherwise unknown local actors, is absolutely stunning.

After his return the second time from Africa, Machin would work fr a time making comedies for Pathé's newly-formed Nizza subsidiary (in Nice), in most of which Mimir the panther would play a leading role, making Machin one of the first off the mark in establishing the craze for wild animals in films. He then returned to establish fully-fledged film-making subsidiaries in both Holland and Belgium.

The "torture by windmill" famously introduced in this film would remain until the war Belgium's only claim to cinematic fame. With the war, during the war, after the war, years and years after the war, it was able to dine out on its image as doughty little war victim and produced a constant flow of weepy propaganda films illustrative of Teutonic beastliness and Belgian pluck. But it did not altogether forget its founding father. Watch the 1916 film Le Moulin tragique and you will rediscover "torture by windmill" but not done to quite such shocking effect as by Machin himself.