Come unto the cinema of 1911, all ye that labour and are heavy laden! Tontolini is depressed and cannot shake it off. Only the cinema – and a Tontolini film – can make him laugh again. The physical presence of artists leaps across a hundred years and we fall under the spell of their movement, the spell of the absolutely contemporary. Victor Klemperer, an enthusiastic cinema-goer (and diarist) wrote in 1912 that the cinema was showing “life, liberated and no longer of this Earth” and that moving pictures were “joyous games with the manifestations of life: they glide past us, delightful in the inexhaustibility of their forms, while all life’s problems recede.” (Das Lichtspiel, 1912). The crime thriller was the hit genre of 1911, and it is introduced in the second part of the opening programme. There is suspense and horror in both these films by Albert Capellani, not least because innocent people are arrested and convicted of murder. The final image of L’Homme aux gants blancs (1908) is very powerful. A Paris street scene, enriched with documentary fidelity, is watched by the camera from among the watching bystanders. While it registers the events in front of the police car, the objective atmosphere is disturbed by our agonising consciousness of the unprovable innocence of the man being arrested and the unprovable guilt of the other. The feeling remains, insistent, while the passersby on the screen disperse, the protagonists disappear and the scene fades out. For the true story of the white gloves had been revealed to us, the viewers: we had seen, in a spectacular triptych, how they had been ordered by phone by a hotel bell boy and, in a close-up, as anticipatory evidence, how the salesgirl had secured a loose button on one of them, and thus could later identify the owner of the glove. We see the latter take the stolen pearls out of his pocket and with them the gloves, which fall to the ground unnoticed, to be picked up and slipped on by the one who will commit the murder…

The historical case of Joseph Lesurques, who was executed in 1796 (Le Courrier de Lyon, 1911), did not merely serve as subjectmatter for 19th-century plays and novels. It also played a major role, as a classic example of a miscarriage of justice, in the campaign against the death penalty (which lasted from 1795 to 1981, when Mitterrand’s bill was passed into law). The acrimony of the political positions is even echoed in the language of the 1911 blurbs advertising the film: “The scene presented this week by Pathé Frères is a horrifying true story, which ends with the most appalling miscarriage of justice of the last century. This powerful drama has been reconstructed by the Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres (S.C.A.G.L.) with the most extreme care taken in its mise en scène and with the most eminent actors of the Paris theatre. The action is shot on location in the actual places where the events took place and viewers of this moving production will have a real sense of the tragic happenings of more than a hundred years ago.” (Ciné-Journal no. 135, march 25, 1911).

The films of these years are anonymous and serial, and we generally do not know the names of the participants on screen or behind the camera. Nor do we need to know them, for in 1905 or 1908, it is the production company and the production series (the genre) that define a film. When organising the 1907 programme, however, in the light of Amour d’esclave, a gorgeous mise-en-scène of classical antiquity, I asked myself for the first time, ‘Who made this sophisticated film?’ It is Bousquet who provided the name of Albert Capellani, and further on in his catalogue I discovered that two other outstanding films from the 1907 programme also owed their existence to Capellani, the atmospheric and realistic women’s drama Les deux soeurs and the delightful féerie Pied de mouton, an affectionate celebration of the cardboard set shortly before its demise.

Has anyone ever tried to figure out why film history before 1920 was reduced for decades to Lumière-Méliès-Griffith and not Lumière- Méliès-Capellani-Griffith? Was it perhaps the influence of Surrealist anti-highbrow propaganda? From his very first film on – the memorable Le chemineau of 1905, based on an episode from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – Albert Capellani transports the contents and qualities of bourgeois culture to the cinema. He films Zola, Hugo and Daudet – his Arlesienne of 1908 has unfortunately been lost. His many fairy tale films (scène des contes), biblical and historical scenes reveal him as a great art director, who also adopted the latest developments in modern dance and worked with its stars Stacia Napierkowska and Mistinguette. Highly versatile, he had an unerring sense of the best approach to a given genre. In the outdoor sequences of his scènes dramatiques such as Les deux soeurs and Mortelle idylle (1906), he uses for moments the realistic effects of the photographic medium in a manner unparalleled at the time. Yet such was his cinematic power that he did not even need this; he could film big cotton wool snowflakes dropping in Le chemineau and make them look bitterly cold.

When Albert Capellani (1870-1931) joined Pathé in 1905, he had already enjoyed success as an actor (for André Antoine and at the Odéon), director (at Firmin Gémier) and administrative director (of the music hall L’Alhambra). In 1908, Charles Pathé appointed him direc­tor of the new company S.C.A.G.L., which was founded that summer to compete with Film d’Art. By the end of that year, Capellani had made the following films for S.C.A.G.L.: L’Arlesienne (now lost), L’homme aux gants blancs (fragment of 130m out of 310m survives) and L’Assomoir (not on the programme), which at 740 m (some forty minutes long at 16 f/s) is considered the first full-length French film. (It premiered, according to Bousquet p. 177, on 21.12.08 at the Cirque d’Hiver).

Mariann Lewinsky