Société Générale des Cinématographes Éclipse

"A charming story of a young society girl and the pathetic love of a youth..." Considered a lost film.

French adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”.

Jeanne Doré becomes the accomplice of her son Jacques who unfortunately commits a crime to help his mistress, Fanny, find money.

To the rhythm of a frenzied choreography, acrobatic matches come to life on a black background. Leaving their matchbox, they line the film in circular, concentric movements. In an almost aquatic momentum, the squadron of little bits of wood mould the contours of a character, a run-of-the-mill smoker, before transforming into a funny harness. The film ends when the matches, again transformed, take on the appearance of a distinguished man who, after several attempts, finally finds a way of lighting his cigarette.

The homeless Polycarpe steals a rifle from some careless society sportsmen and goes on a mindless shooting spree. (MoMA)

The King is dead, and the heir is his newborn son the prince. Uncle Otto arranges to have the kid poisoned. However, his little sister prays for her brother back, and divine intervention grants her wish for Christmas.

The cyclist is dispatched upon an important errand, and his humorous and alarming adventures by the way form the subject of this series. Misadventure follows misadventure with great frequency, but the cyclist comes up smiling every time, mounts his machine, and again resumes his journey. Accidents which would maim or kill an ordinary mortal serve only to spur him on to fresh exertions in a mad search for physical inconveniences and dangers, which always present themselves. (Picture World)

An animation where real life objects turn into animations.

An Émile Cohl animation short.

The film begins with a shot of Wilbur Wright starting the engine; an unidentified assistant (quite likely his brother, Orville) is seen at the front of the aircraft. From there, shots of the aircraft in flight with Wright at the controls along with an unidentified passenger cut to shots of onlookers on the ground, presumably military and press liaisons. The aircraft is shown in side-to-side flybys as well as low-altitude passes directly toward and away from the camera. The aerial shots begin at the 1:34 mark immediately after a shot of the aircraft coming to a landing directly approaching the camera. (Wikipedia)

Charles Servaes as Polycarpe becomes an inspector of sort; he goes around measure the length of women's skirts in Paris to make sure they don't reveal tooo much leg for the moral Apaches of Montmartre.

Polycarpe is in the cavalry in this one. He gets a date with the hefty young woman who seems to work in the dungeon of the barracks. However, while another soldier makes time with his girl, Polycarpe can't seem to get off base for one reason or another.

The sugarcane industry in Argentina: the factory, the train, the workers' houses, the Indigenous workers.

French horror short from 1911.

A little man buys a paper and begins to read it as he walks down the street. It is so absorbing -- as the title indicates -- that he doesn't notice anything else. He knocks down streetlights and walks into women who stab him with enormous hatpins, yet goes on reading.

Arthème loves playing the clarinet. He plays it in the streets, in the park, in the streetcar (at least when he does not miss it!). When he unfortunately walks under a piano clumsy removers are hauling, the heavy instrument falls down on him and he swallows his clarinet. A lot of people try to extirpate the protruding instrument but they all fail. Three farriers finally succeed in making him return to his former self.