Another war film this week, this time from France. La Grande Illusion (also known as Grand Illusion) is a 1937 WWI film directed by Jean Renoir, who co-wrote the screenplay with Charles Spaak. The title of the film comes from a book – The Great Illusion by British economist Norman Angell – which argued that war is futile because of the common economic interests of all European nations.
In March 1907 James Petrie (J.P.) Chalmers, Jr. (1866-1912), had founded The
Moving Picture World and View Photographer, which soon shortened to
The Moving Picture World. By 1914, it had a reported circulation of
approximately 15,000, and was an influential early trade journal for the
American film industry.
The earliest films, from the 1880s, were simply one static shot, but by 1900 a
little editing was being employed and several scenes could be strung together
to tell a story, with written card in-between each to let the viewer know what
was happening or to insert some dialogue. These films with no spoken words were
purely visual art, but theatre owners would hire a pianist or sometimes a full
orchestra to play music that fit the mood of the film at any given moment.
Georges
Méliès', French filmmaker and innovator sometimes referred to as the
first "Cinemagician", made his last movie in 1913. Two of his most well-known
films are A Trip to
the Moon (1902, see below) and The Impossible
Voyage (1904), Verne like fantasy-science-fiction stories, but he was
also an early pioneer of horror cinema, which can be
traced back to his Le Manoir du
diable (1896).
His last movie in 1913 was Le Voyage de la famille
Bourrichon, a 15 minute silent film. Unfortunately only about 200 of
Méliès's 531 films still exist, and this does not appear to be one of them. I
was able to find this one still though, which gives the idea the journey may
have been by train.
On further searching a French website gave the synopsis of the film as this:
Pursued by the hounds of his creditors, the noggin family decided to flee.
After an eventful train trip and a stay in a haunted inn the noggin will be
forced to pay their debt to escape the persistent obsession.
It seems that Noggin is the translation of Bourrichon - not quite as glamorous, is it? And here is one more still from that same website:
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