Selemo 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.

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

A magician conjures up a mermaid while fishing.

During a game of hide and seek, a new bride hides in a chest and remains undiscovered until a strange visitation thirty years later.

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.

Opens with a woman posing on a pedestal, dressed in a white body leotard with a sash tied at her hips. Marshall continues with various feminine poses, reminiscent of classic Greek statuary, to accentuate her figure. Film cuts to Treloar posed on the bare stage without a pedestal. He wears brief leopard-skin trunks or short tunic, wrist bands, and Roman-looking laced sandals. His poses accentuate the muscular development of his upper body, particularly that of his arms, and include movements that make the muscles jump. Treloar finishes with a slight nod to the camera.

Two workers leave boxes of explosives with a push cart street vendor while they visit a bar. They return drunk and accidentally drop a box of nitro powder, causing an explosion that wrecks the block and blows off the vendor’s arm. A policeman shows up to the carnage and tries to replace the vendor’s arm with a severed leg.

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

An artist is painting a sunrise at sea. After a few finishing touches he stands back and admires the painting. The sun immediately commences to rise. From all appearances it becomes very warm as the sun rises, and the artist is seen to throw open the window and fan himself furiously. The climax is reached when the artist rushes from the room and returns with a large tub of water and a pair of tongs. Seizing the sun as it soars in the air he plunges it into the tub, causing a great cloud of steam to rise.

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

A weary clock-maker dozes off in a chair. While he is asleep, three women suddenly appear in the midst of his shop. They proceed to show the sleeping clock-maker some new kinds of clocks that they know how to make.

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 camera on an overhead crane travels down a large, long aisle where men are shown working on large machinery on either side. Carts carrying equipment are shown traveling on rails down the aisles. There are also men walking in the aisles. From Bitzer's Westinghouse Works series.

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

The stages that a caterpillar goes through, from larvae to chrysalis, to become a butterfly.

Frenchman Count Hardup advertises for a wife. He gets more than he bargained for when women start chasing him. He's caught by an old maid.

This Gaston Velle movie from 1904 was a fairly venturesome piece of film-making for the era. First, its credits include Jules Verne: his second after the Méliès TRIP TO THE MOON a couple of years earlier. Second, it uses a dozen cuts, irised lenses -- the balloonists' views through their telescope -- panning shots, combined images and tints. The tints were standard for the era, but everything else had to be achieved with great difficulty. In an era when most movies still lasted a minute with a stationary camera and a single set-up, this was pretty much state of the art.

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