Joer 1904

Using every known means of transportation, several savants from the Geographic Society undertake a journey through the Alps to the Sun which finishes under the sea.

A magician conjures up a mermaid while fishing.

A Jew who mocked Jesus on the cross is visited by a devil and an angel.

Billy Bitzer filmed 21 short actualities inside the Pittsburgh Westinghouse Works in April and May of 1904. Audiences of the day would have been treated to footage of factory panoramas, women winding armatures and turbines being assembled. These industrial films were produced for the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company.

A cook has his hands full with three mischievous devils, who pop in and out of his kitchen.

Documentary on the process of hay-making, from the cutting of the grass to the stacking of the hay.

The background of this picture represents a scene along the beautiful river Seine in Paris. A gentleman enters, and taking a blackboard from the side of the picture, he draws on it a sketch of a novelist. Then, standing in the centre, he causes the living features of his sketch to appear in the place of his own, which is utterly devoid of whiskers. The change is made so mysteriously that the eye cannot notice it until one sees quite another person in the place of the first. Again another sketch is shown on the board, this one being that of a miser; then an English cockney; a comic character; a French policeman, and last of all, the grinning visage of Mephistopheles. It is almost impossible to give this film a more definite description; suffice it to say that it is something entirely new in motion pictures and is sure to please. (Méliès Catalog)

A Japanese-set magic show. There is a lot of visual trickery on display, ending with an amazing effect using reverse footage and superimposing/projecting images on top of one another.

In a public place in Constantinople at the corner of a bazaar, the executioner is seated upon a stone and is resting from his daily labors while eating a crust of bread. Suddenly there come running into the place a lot of Turkish men and women preceding some Turkish policemen, who drag along four prisoners in chains. The policemen shut up the four prisoners in the pillory. Their four heads stick up through the huge plank, which is provided with four openings. One of the policemen urges the executioner to decapitate the prisoners. He accordingly seizes a mighty sabre and cuts off by a single stroke the four heads, which roll upon the ground.

A brief vaudeville-style demonstration of a "Dog Transformator," a machine that instantly turns dogs into sausages, and amazingly, sausages back into dogs.

Buster Brown creater R.F. Outcault sketches his creation. Part of the Buster Brown series for Edison film studio.

A Chinese conjurer stands next to a table, it becomes two tables. A fan becomes a parasol, lanterns appear and disappear. The conjurer spins the open parasol in front of himself, and a dog leaps out from behind it. The dog becomes a woman, then a masked man appears. The conjurer sits them each on a box a few feet apart: suddenly the woman and man have changed places. The disappearing and the transfers continue in front of a simple backdrop.

This short, otherwise unremarkable feature is of some interest because of the way that it unabashedly caters to the tastes that it perceived in its audiences. Besides combining the elements of the risqué 'blue' movies of the era with the popularity of movies about fires, it also attempted to use the combination to get extra mileage out of it. The movie's title summarises the setup, and most of the footage shows firefighters using ladders to rescue stage girls, clad in portions of their costumes, from an upper level. Although it all seems pretty tame by today's standards, it no doubt provided its male viewers with some brief moments of excitement as the various women hurried down the ladders with their costumes in disarray.

A man hides his valuables under his mattress before going to sleep, blissfully unaware of the two burglars on his roof.

A “madman” escapes prison and the torments of his warders.

The adventures of an inattentive man who can't look away from his book.

A camera moving forward on an overhead crane gives a traveling view of men working on machinery. Carts carrying parts and pieces of machinery pass by on rails; cranes lift machinery; and men perform their various duties, including hammering objects. (Library of Congress)

A deranged man who believes he is Napoleon escapes the asylum and leads his keepers on a wild chase.

A small group of men turn on what appears to be a generator. As the rotary spins, the men make adjustments to the machine and check its operations.

A large group of men are shown performing various tasks in one room at the Westinghouse Air Brake Co. On one side, men are shown pouring a hot liquid into molds on the floor. A conveyor belt delivers items which are then taken off the belt by a man. Men on the other side of the screen appear to be lifting items out of what could possibly be a furnace and putting them on tables. It appears that the men in this room are casting machinery from molds.