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Voidsville Follies

Works featuring "music" (7)

The Cake-Walk Infernal

Georges Méliès (director/lead)
Star (production)

Language: Silent, released in Jun 1903
Minutes: 4

The Hollywood musical from Hell. [Star Film 453-457]

Featured elements:

: dance; fantasy; music

The Melomaniac (Le Mélomane)

Georges Méliès (director/lead)
Star (production)

Language: Silent, released in Aug 1903
Minutes: 2

A music lesson, using telegraph wires - and the teacher's head. Must be a French thing... [Star Film 479-480]

Featured elements:

: beheading; fantasy; music

La Polka des Trottins

Alice Guy-Blaché (director)
Félix Mayol (lead)
Gaumont (production)

Language: French, released in 1905, month unknown
Minutes: 2

The Phonoscène was an antecedent of music video and is regarded as a forerunner of sound film. It combined a sound recording with a film shot with actors lip-synching to the sound recording. The recording and film were synchronized by a mechanism ('Chronophone') patented by Léon Gaumont in 1902.

Featured elements:

: music

The True Jiu-Jitsu (Le Vrai Jiu-Jitsu)

Alice Guy-Blaché (director)
Armand Dranem (lead)
Gaumont (production)

Language: French, released in 1905, month unknown
Minutes: 2

The Phonoscène was an antecedent of music video and is regarded as a forerunner of sound film. It combined a sound recording with a film shot with actors lip-synching to the sound recording. The recording and film were synchronized by a mechanism ('Chronophone') patented by Léon Gaumont in 1902.

Featured elements:

: ethnic stereotype; music

That Ragtime Band

Mack Sennett (director/producer)
Mabel Normand (lead)
Ford Sterling (lead)
Alice Davenport (lead)
Edgar Kennedy (lead)
Nick Cogley (lead)
Charles Avery (lead)
Echo Park (location)
Keystone (production)

Language: Silent, English titles, released in May 1913
Minutes: 12

Dissonance erupts when Mabel's attention divides the band. Highlight: performers using the amateur show to market their...um...business...

Featured elements:

: backstage; comedy; music; revenge

Be Silent, My Sorrow, Be Silent (Молчи, грусть, молчи)

Pyotr Chardynin (director/lead)
Vladimir Siversen (cinematographer)
Vera Kholodnaya (lead)
Vitold Polonsky (lead)
Olga Rakhmanova (lead)
Kharitonov (production)

Language: Silent, Russian titles, English subtitles, released in May 1918
Minutes: 45

Apparently, an attempt to address class conflict in the standard weepy melodramatic format (complete with violin). While the fragments that remain do not provide a convincing critique (compare with Child of the Big City (1914)), it's still more substantial than other surviving works by this director.

Featured elements:

: addiction; backstage; breaking class; circus; flashback; forsaken; gambling; gold digger; melodrama; metatheatre; music; poverty; prejudice; servitude; sugar daddy; treachery

Carmen/Gypsy Blood

Ernst Lubitsch (director)
Alfred Hansen (cinematographer)
Hanns Kräly (writer)
Prosper Mérimée (author)
Pola Negri (lead)
Harry Liedtke (lead)
PAGU (production)

Language: Silent, English titles, released in Dec 1918
Minutes: 80

The power of a Carmen production derives from a hot Carmen and a tortured Don José. This version is only semi-powered: we see a tortured José, but this Carmen has nothing that could make a good man fall. So, a heavy dose of suspension of belief is required to get through this, yet in the end it wasn't worth the effort.

Featured elements:

: Bizet's Carmen; bookends; dance; death scene; ethnic stereotype; femme fatale; forsaken; music; obsession; prison

head city has waived all rights to all work here that's not stolen from somewhere else.

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