A young woman in jester's garb performs several magic tricks, using stop-motion camerawork in this late trick film from Walter Booth.
By 1912, the Melies-style trick film was at its end. Georges Melies would cease production this year, Segundo de Chomon would largely end his career as a director and retreat to cinematography. In retrospect this film looks like such films remained in the catalogues for several years, and perhaps Charles Urban thought he needed a few, so he hired Walter Booth, who had been largely working with early animation for the past couple of years, to make this one.
What makes this movie interesting is that the Jester smokes cigarettes. Although more than a hundred years later, cigarettes are no longer fashionable, and scenes of smoking are often trimmed out of old movies, for most of the 20th Century, a lot of people smoked, and a lot of movies showed people smoking. The problem lay in continuity. When it might take an hour to set up a shot, it was difficult for characters to smoke without unrealistic variations in cigarette length that betrayed that time lapse. It would become a job for the script girl to maintain that continuity.
Here, the cigarette on which the lead puffs is key towards maintining the illusion of no time passing.
By 1912, the Melies-style trick film was at its end. Georges Melies would cease production this year, Segundo de Chomon would largely end his career as a director and retreat to cinematography. In retrospect this film looks like such films remained in the catalogues for several years, and perhaps Charles Urban thought he needed a few, so he hired Walter Booth, who had been largely working with early animation for the past couple of years, to make this one.
What makes this movie interesting is that the Jester smokes cigarettes. Although more than a hundred years later, cigarettes are no longer fashionable, and scenes of smoking are often trimmed out of old movies, for most of the 20th Century, a lot of people smoked, and a lot of movies showed people smoking. The problem lay in continuity. When it might take an hour to set up a shot, it was difficult for characters to smoke without unrealistic variations in cigarette length that betrayed that time lapse. It would become a job for the script girl to maintain that continuity.
Here, the cigarette on which the lead puffs is key towards maintining the illusion of no time passing.
