Silents are Golden: What Were Films Like In The Nickelodeon Era? – Part 2!
Last month, we started exploring the many genres of 1900s nickelodeon films, taking a look at travelogs, military films, the different categories of comic shorts, etc. that were offered in exhibitors’ catalogs. For part 2, let’s dive in again and see what other genres used to amuse theatergoers back then–the choices were vast!
Audiences in the 1900s would’ve seen a mixture of “new” films that were being churned out by the dozen every day and “old” offerings that had floated around for as much as a decade (think Georges Melies’s The Four Troublesome Heads from 1898). Some films, like Life of an American Fireman (1903) and A Trip to the Moon (1902) were famous enough to be considered our first screen classics.
Some of the older films that are still remembered today come from the “Dance” genre–specifically Serpentine Dance (1895), featuring a female dancerwearing billowy waves of silk. The eye-catching moves were pioneered by Loie Fuller, who soon had several imitators. The footage was often beautifully hand-colored. Also popular was the Butterfly Dance (1894) featuring original Gibson Girl Annabelle Moore, wearing a voluminous skirt that she held so it would flutter like butterfly wings.
Other films we’d probably recognize were grouped under the “Mysterious” label–you could almost call it the “Georges Melies” label. Often having magical themes, these were showcases for primitive special effects and still have a lot of charm today. A Trip to the Moon is the most famous, of course (it was so popular that rentals cost around $100), and you’ve likely seen a frame or two of an astronomer encountering a giant, winking moon in An Astronomer’s Dream (1898) or Melies talking to a portrait of himself come to life in A Mysterious Portrait (1899).
There were also beautifully imaginative films inspired by the fairy pantomimes of the 19th century stage, which many people would’ve grown up seeing around Christmastime. The hand-colored film Flower Fairy (1905) has a simple but charming premise, as described by one 1907 catalog: “A beautiful young girl appears at her window, and at a wave of her hands the sill is adorned with the most beautiful flowers. When she is entirely surrounded by the blossoms she vanishes, leaving in her place gaily colored butterflies, which suck honey from the flowers. One small pansy begins to grow and develop to enormous proportions until, in the center, is seen the face of the lovely girl.” Similarly, the very short Amphitrite shows “A pretty girl, clad in tights is seen going through numerous graceful evolutions under water. The fish are seen swimming all around her.”
Other “Mysterious” films are more surreal–or downright bizarre–than magical. The surviving Dog Factory (1904) shows a factory room hung with types of sausages labeled with different dog breeds. Oddly, the sausages are put into a machine that turns them back into dogs for paying customers. Fat and Lean Wrestling Match (1901), which shows exactly what it says it does, also had some weird twists: “After wrestling furiously for awhile, the fat man falls upon the lean one and crushes him as flat as a pancake. The fat man then rolls him up in a package about the size of a carpet bag and lays him on the floor, and winds up by tossing him high in the air. The lean man in coming down falls on the fat man’s head, knocking him to the floor and causing him to explode in a great cloud of smoke…”
Of course, plenty of nickelodeon films were much more straightforward than machines cranking out live dogs. People would’ve enjoyed footage of parades–especially special occasion parades, such as Dewey Parade (1901) “taken at the time Admiral Dewey visited Chicago,” or various army-themed films like Initiating a New Recruit (1898), which “shows a crowd of soldier boys, many of whom are holding a blanket by the edges, and tossing high in the air the victim of their sport.” Footage of battleships was also popular, especially if it showed torpedo launches or how large defense guns operated.
And there was also a genre called “Seaside” or “Bathing,” showing people frolicking in the water in popular holiday locations like Coney Island or Atlantic City. Even this category had opportunities for surreal fun–Midwinter Bathing (1905), filmed by the bay in Boston, shows “A number of sturdy men in bathing trunks… some of them having skates attached to their bare feet and others playing hand-ball. After their exercise they run along the shore, upon which the ice hummocks are piled high and plunge from the end of the ice-covered pier into the freezing waters of the bay… The film is of the very best photographic value, and the subject in every way one of the most remarkable ever made.”
Of all these early motion pictures, whether beautiful, magical, or just plain bizarre, some of most familiar would’ve fallen under the “Religious” label. Many of these films were a series of scenes from the life of Jesus Christ, carefully hand-tinted and running under a minute each. Acted out in a dignified manner, these scenes were similar to the Passion Plays that had been popular in Europe for centuries. An exhibitor could order a series of twenty scenes, fifteen, a dozen, or pick and choose which ones he wanted to put together. There were also brief Bible scenes available like Joseph Sold By His Brethren (1904)or the six-scene The Life of Moses (1905) – running at an efficient five minutes long!
Whenever I watch these old nickelodeon films, I often get a sense of awe, knowing each one–no matter how scratchy or how crudely made – is a little window into history. And while many films from the 1890s and 1900s don’t survive, we’re fortunate to have the ones that did make it through the decades, including milestones like The Great Train Robbery (1903). And happily, surviving trade papers and catalogs can help us get a sense of what’s been lost.
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Information on the films in this article (part 2 of 2) is from historian Darren Nemeth’s reprint of the 1907 Chicago Projecting Co’s Entertainer’s Supplies Catalog No. 22, a very rare catalog from his collection. It’s a wealth of information for anyone interested in the very early days of film and is highly recommended! IMDb.com and loc.gov were also consulted to help figure out the dates of certain films.
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–Lea Stans for Classic Movie Hub
You can read all of Lea’s Silents are Golden articles here.
Lea Stans is a born-and-raised Minnesotan with a degree in English and an obsessive interest in the silent film era (which she largely blames on Buster Keaton). In addition to blogging about her passion at her site Silent-ology, she is a columnist for the Silent Film Quarterly and has also written for The Keaton Chronicle.
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