User Reviews

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 Melies 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.

It wouldn't last. In another half a dozen years the movie grammar that George Smith had begun developing in Great Britain would render this antique junk, with its parts stripped for entirely different purposes in the movie. But for the moment, this was as good as it got.

This film has nothing whatever to do with Jules Verne and was not in fact even categorised by Pathé as fiction (part of their series "scènes de plain air"). It is simply an attempt to reconstruct a balloon flight, a disastrous explosion in the storm and the subsequent sea-rescue. In common with other "reconstructions" of this period, it is not especially realistic but makes use of various "special effects" techniques that were becoming generally current everywhere during the years 1900-1904 ("iris" views through telescopes, explosions, miniatures), which would gradually combine with developments in animation techniques to produce the very sophisticated and much more realistic effects that one sees in the teens and the twenties. It is not a question of "antique junk" being replaced by "new grammar" (history does not happen in that way) but rather part of a continuous development in the multiple grammars that go to make up the language of cinema in its ensemble. The major influences here are still Méliès and G. A. Smith but much more interesting experimentation was being done in this area by Walter R. Booth (The ? Motorist of 1906 remade as The Automatic Motorist in 1911, Airship Destroyer of 1909 and The Aerial Submarine of 1910). In terms of "figure" animation, the great pioneer is Ladislas Starewicz from 1912 onwards (in Russia and then in France). And one sees the combination of the two in the "monster" films of Willis O'Brien beginning in 1915 and culminating in the 1933 film King Kong.

Needless to say it is an element of film grammar that is more than ever present today in the age of "digitisation". As the French say."it is from the old that makes the new".

This film is an interesting one to study, because of other factors in the French film business, that were going on at the same time. Director Gaston Velle and legendary French film director, Georges Melies (A Trip to the Moon - 1902), were both very busy in their careers at this time. They both were pioneers in a new medium, making their marks, being competitive, in the early days of French film history. They were both working at the same time, so there is an opportunity here to compare and contrast the two directors, in order to give Velle a fair shake in a very new medium.

After watching this film you may feel that Velle was the discount version of Melies. That is not a bad thing. Its just a different thing. It depends on the amount of your exposure to both directors. Why was the running time so short on this film? Why were the edits so choppy on this film, but smoother in a Melies film? Was there a financial issue? I don't think the runtime is a factor really, because Melies was also making films as short as two to five minutes long, as well as, his 15 to 20 minute films at this time. A Trip to the Moon (1902), was 13 minutes long. So, runtimes, sometimes, may not have been an option, that could be controlled in 1904, so a story could be thin on plot, because of forced short runtimes.

It is important to remember, that this was only year eight of the film industry. Humans hadn't reached a decade yet in the grand experiment called motion pictures. Film was an eight year old child. It was nice seeing another pioneering artist, trying his hardest to create a fantasy story, for the sole purpose of entertaining an audience. The editing may be choppy, because of the age of the physical film. Velle also experimented with hand-painted color cells, as this film eventually shows us, as it jumps into color at a critical moment in the film. I am taking a point off on my grade, because an important shot in the film is badly shot at the wrong perspective. It is a shot that is totally controllable and shouldn't have been used, even for 1904. It still doesn't dull the impact this film has towards film history. I am sure, that when people saw this film in 1904, they loved it. Just put yourself in a 1904 frame of mind and love it too.

8.1 (B MyGrade) = 8 IMDB.