Pathé filmmaking in Nice c. 1908
1/ space and place in Le Médecin du château
Two thieves send a telegram to a doctor requesting that he come urgently to the château. Once he has left in his chauffeur-driven car the thieves approach his villa, murder the maid who has come out to investigate the disturbance and break into the doctor's home. His wife and young son barricade themselves in the doctor's study from where she telephones to the château and tells the doctor of their dilemma. He rushes back in his car, picking up two policemen on the way, and arrives at the villa in time to save his wife and child from being murdered.
(See here for the plot summary published in Moving Picture World in March 1908.)
(See here for the plot summary published in Moving Picture World in March 1908.)
This 1908 Pathé film, director unknown, was released in England, Australia and New Zealand as The Physician of the Castle and in the US as A Narrow Escape. Though there are no contemporary references in the French press to confirm its French title, Pathé historian Henri Bousquet found it listed in the company's Joinville-le-Pont register, presumably under the title Le Médecin du château. That the contemporary German title was Der Arzt des Schlosses suggests that the Ur-title was indeed Le Médecin du château. It remains odd that this internationally known film seems to have gone unmentioned in France.
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The presumed original title is oddly understated for so 'thrilling' and 'dramatic' a film. The titles of other 'scènes dramatiques' from the Pathé catalogue at around the same time point to the drama more directly: 'The Miller's Hatred'; 'Forgive Me Grandfather'; 'The Miserly Father'; 'A Thief By Necessity'; 'Poverty and Probity'; 'The Poacher's Wife'; 'The Right To Live'; 'The False Coin'; 'The Sacrifice'; 'The Policeman's Honour'; 'The Bargee's Daughter'; 'The Worker's Revenge'; 'The Arab Knife', etc.
The translation of Le Médecin du château is also problematic, since the French 'château' is not what is commonly understood by the English 'castle', but rather a country or suburban residence, more substantial than a villa but on the same scale. (See here for examples of French suburban villas and châteaux from this period.) Overall, A Narrow Escape is a much better title.
The film has two strong themes at its core: threats to bourgeois comfort and communication over distance. Key motifs for this last theme are the motor-car, the telegram and the telephone. As Tom Gunning has explained (1991B , see bibliography below), it is one of several films in this period deriving plot and thematic elements from André de Lorde's 1901 Grand Guignol play Au téléphone. He doesn't mention Alice Guy's film Au téléphone, now lost, but lists Nonguet's Terrible Angoisse (Pathé 1906), Porter's Heard Over the Phone (Edison 1908), Griffith's The Lonely Villa (Biograph 1909) and Weber's Suspense (1913). Gunning also mentions the parodies in Sennett's Help Help (Biograph 1912) and, somewhat later, Gance's Au secours (1924):
Le Médecin du château is almost always discussed in relation to its early use of cross-cutting between distinct spaces (see Salt 1985A+B; Gunning 1991A+B; Abel 1994, p.194; Perron 2001 & 2004; Le Forestier 2006, pp. 293-94; Gauthier 2008, pp.111-12).
The cross-cutting occurs in shots 12 to 20 of the film's 27 shots, in three different ways.
Firstly, from the doctor's villa, shot 12, to the château, shots 13 and 14, then back to the villa, shot 15:
The cross-cutting occurs in shots 12 to 20 of the film's 27 shots, in three different ways.
Firstly, from the doctor's villa, shot 12, to the château, shots 13 and 14, then back to the villa, shot 15:
This is alternation between the two generally defined locations, rather than between two specific spaces, since shots 12 and 15 show two different rooms in the doctor's villa, and the two shots showing the château are of two different parts. Any sense of simultaneity is not strong: while certain things are happening in one place, other things are happening in another place. This 'in the meantime' doesn't correspond to our viewing time. In the 36 seconds it takes woman and child to run from one room to another in the villa, a title-card announces 'Arriving at the castle', the gates of the château are opened and the doctor's car pulls in. In the ellipsis between this and the shot of the château's living room, the car goes up a long driveway, is parked, and the doctor is brought to where his client and family are to be found. We see them exchange pleasantries and discuss the business of the telegram before we cut back to the doctor's wife and son at the villa.
The next alternation, shots 15 to 17, is between two specific spaces within the villa, the study and the living room:
Here the sense of simultaneity is stronger. Woman and child run into study and, after a moment, they barricade the door with furniture, then stop and listen. What they hear is the noise of the thieves breaking into the reception area that they have just left. In the next shot we see the thieves enter that room and, in turn, stop and listen. What they hear is the noise of the woman and child making the barricade. There is a chronological inconsistency here, since the making of the barricade had stopped by the end of the previous shot. To each side of shot 16 the woman and child are silent. There is nothing for the thieves to hear:
The simultaneity is only apparent, then; as in the first instance, all we know is that while one thing is happening in one place, another thing is happening in another place.
The last alternation is again between the villa and the château, but this time between the same rooms in each, the doctor's study in shots 17 and 19 and the château's living room in shots 18 and 20. And this time the passage from one space to the other is chronologically consistent, and the impression of simultaneity is very strong:
The last alternation is again between the villa and the château, but this time between the same rooms in each, the doctor's study in shots 17 and 19 and the château's living room in shots 18 and 20. And this time the passage from one space to the other is chronologically consistent, and the impression of simultaneity is very strong:
Bernard Perron has analysed at length the spatial dynamics of this film, paying specific attention to the representation of sound in the second passage of alternation. He doesn't point out the chronological inconsistency since his object is to show how the representation of listening informs our sense of the spaces represented:
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Through its spatial range, which exceeds visible information, and the attention given to the localization of its source, sound makes it possible to bridge the gaps separating diegetic spaces. Most of all, it permits the realization of intelligible transitions between these spaces (...). In this way, the supposed proximity of the scenes inside the physician’s HOUSE (the living room and the office) is established through the actions of the characters as they prick up their ears toward an off-scene source. The sound event sets up the terms of the parallelism. This is a clue given to the audience so that they can understand the film and fill in the gaps between shots or scenes. (Perron 2001, p.83)
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Earlier in his essay Perron had foregrounded a deficiency in the film relating to the supposed proximity of the rooms in this alternation:
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The Physician of the Castle is unable to establish the contiguity of the two rooms of the physician’s house it presents to us, namely the living room and the office (...). It doesn’t connect these two rooms; it juxtaposes them. It is not even able to articulate proximal disjunctions between on-screen (here) and off-screen (there) spaces in order to, retrospectively, create a parallelism within the same place (...). Off-screen space remains a vacillating metonymic region that neither surrounds on-screen space nor exerts a continuous pressure on it. Rather, each shot is considered as an autonomous unit, a setting for an event to take place, in short, a scene. The expanse off-screen is not so much spatial (the there of a here) as narrative. What I call the “off-screen scene” is this portion of diegetic space that is nonvisible as well as noncontiguous to the setting (over there), yet connected to it through the narrative’s development.
(Perron 2001, pp.79-80) |
Perron's analysis of how off-screen space works is illuminating and persuasive, but his complaint that the film doesn't establish contiguity between the living room and the office misses an important point. He seems to be disappointed that the film doesn't intensify the suspense as Griffith would do a year later, putting just a door between the aggressors and their would-be victims:
Terrible Angoisse (1906) had also put just a door between the aggressors and their victims, though this is represented in the same shot rather than across a cut. One of the aggressors is seen through the glass door before bursting through to murder the woman:
The Lonely Villa, perhaps influenced by Terrible Angoisse, also shows the aggressors bursting through a door at the back of the space:
In Le Médecin du château the threat is never immediate in this way. When the woman and child are in the living room they are separated from the aggressors by the front door, a hallway, and the living room door, which they have barricaded. When they get to the study they are separated from the aggressors by the barricaded door between the hallway and the living room and by the living room itself, then by a corridor or corridors between the living room and the study, and by the barricaded door of the study. The hallway is not seen, only implied, and the corridor is only just visible beyond the doorways through which woman and child pass:
Nonetheless, these spaces say explicitly that the rooms in which we see, in turn, the aggressors and victims are never contiguous.
We can thematise the hallway and corridor as delaying devices that contrast with instances of immediacy. The delay/immediacy opposition operates throughout the film. The telegram sent by the thieves takes time to arrive at the doctor's villa, a delay that enables them to get from the telegraph office to the villa. The ellipsis between the shot of the thieves running from the telegraph office and the next shot where they are lurking by the doctor's villa foregrounds the superiority of montage over mise-en-scène when it comes to moving between places:
We can thematise the hallway and corridor as delaying devices that contrast with instances of immediacy. The delay/immediacy opposition operates throughout the film. The telegram sent by the thieves takes time to arrive at the doctor's villa, a delay that enables them to get from the telegraph office to the villa. The ellipsis between the shot of the thieves running from the telegraph office and the next shot where they are lurking by the doctor's villa foregrounds the superiority of montage over mise-en-scène when it comes to moving between places:
Montage's superiority is affirmed again in communications between the villa and the château. The telegram urges immediacy ('Come at once to the castle. Child seriously ill') but itself takes time, contrasting later with the immediacy of telephonic communication. Barricaded in the study, the wife is able to telephone her husband.
The immediacy of the communication over distance is expressed, para-doxically, by proximity, the camera's closeness to the speakers. The intensification in these two shots is striking. They are perhaps the most powerful close-ups in early French cinema, with a precedent in Terrible Angoisse (1906), though there it is only the distant husband who is focused on, as he listens to his wife being murdered:
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In Le Médecin du château the telephone call urges the doctor to return home, but his return is far from immediate - the journey takes three shots over thirty-four seconds:
From this we have the strong impression that the château is at some distance from the villa. However, the shot that had showed his outward journey was preceded by a shot of the thieves at the villa gates looking in the direction of the departing car, and was followed by a continuation of the shot, with the thieves still looking in that direction. The strong implication is that the shot of the car approaching the château is what the thieves see, and that hence the château is within eyeshot of the villa:
That outward journey was shown in one shot lasting fourteen seconds. The disparity between this and the laborious and lengthy return suggests that topographical exactitude is sacrificed in the name of narrative effect. All the while he is returning - he stops to pick up two policemen on the way - the thieves could be murdering his wife and child. That we don't know how close they are to the door of the study intensifies the suspense, and that is an effect of the non-contiguity of living room and study.
When, in shot 25, the car arrives at the gates its occupants - the doctor, the chauffeur, the two policemen and a dog that has appeared from nowhere - all rush towards the house:
When, in shot 25, the car arrives at the gates its occupants - the doctor, the chauffeur, the two policemen and a dog that has appeared from nowhere - all rush towards the house:
We know that the house is some distance from the gate, that there are steps leading up to the front door, that there is a hallway, living room and corridor to be crossed, but this time there are no more delays. The film reaches a climax of immediacy in shot 26 where, six seconds after the car pulls up and three seconds after the thieves break into the study, the doctor rushes in through the now open door and, with the two policemen, rescues his wife and son. For me, the visual climax of the film is this, seven bodies in a writhing mass centre-screen:
Somewhat laboriously, I admit, I have argued that the spaces between the door, the living room and the study, though unseen, are nonetheless represented, and that they bear significantly on the film's narrative shape. Now I want to look at how the spaces that we do see shape the themes of the film. Richard Abel (1994, p.193) signals that the film's 'exclusive focus on the domestic milieu of the bourgeoisie' is an unusual feature. The two homes shown are a key aspect of this focus. The interiors are of course studio constructs, compiled from stock elements that signify bourgeois comfort. This is the living room at the château:
And this is the living room in the villa:
Elements of this décor were used to represent a beauty salon in the film L'Institut de beauté (below left), made at the same time as Le Médecin du château. We might conclude that this positions the doctor's villa at a lower social level than the château, the décor of which includes painted mythological subjects (Diana and Actaeon?) that would not have been used as the décor for a beauty salon. Incidentally, L'Institut de beauté also features a striking close-up (below right) of the same actress, I think, as in Le Médecin du château:
And I think she is the Pathé regular Renée Doux, seen here in the 1905 film La Confession:
The château's décor reappears in Le Droit de vivre (1908), where its opulence contrasts with the humble aspect of the protagonist, a poor peasant girl:
It reappears again in Conscience de magistrat (1908) as a space of affluence that contrasts with later penury:
In Le Médecin du château, though the living room in the château is presented as more luxurious than the room in the villa, these are spaces of more-or-less the same type. Elements of décor from both are used for a château's interiors in Madame fait du sport (1908):
The women in the two spaces of Le Médecin du château are very similar, as are their pot plants:
The buildings themselves, on the other hand, are very different in type and scale:
The château is also more secure, with gates that need to be unlocked by a gatekeeper, while the gates of the villa are left open:
Above all, the higher position of the château, physically, is emphasised by the slow climb upwards, in two shots, of the doctor's car towards the château and its more rapid descent, in four shots, back towards the villa:
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The topographical relation of villa to château is an invention, created by montage, though the actual topography of each shot contributes to this articulation of space and time. The overall topography of the film is broader, opposing city and countryside. The space where the robbers plan their crime is urban and the space where they execute it is rural:
More exactly, the opposition is urban/suburban, but to know that depends on identifying the locations not as generic spaces but as specific places. One location in particular invites identification:
The specific place on display here is Gairaut, a villa-infested suburb in the hills overlooking Nice. In the film and in this postcard we see the most substantial residence of the district, the château de Gairaut:
The château is still there, though it is not now visible from the road:
The gateway to the doctor's villa and the roads along which he travels all look like they are in the vicinity, though I fear that the area is too much transformed to allow any further matches:
Nonetheless, this is a convincing composite picture of the area as a quasi-rural suburb. The film's topographical scheme opposes this suburb to the city, where the action begins, firstly with the two thieves planning at the terrace of a café:
There are no distinguishing features to help localise this café, but the narrative presents it as near the central post office in Nice, since that is where they have walked to in the next shot, in order to send the telegram:
The narrative's topography follows the telegram from city to suburb. The white line on the map to the right connects the post office (P.T.T.) and the château de Gairaut as the film's two identified locations. The black lines connect these locations to the production base, the Pathé establishment at the villa Tomatis, on the route de Turin:
The studio is where the interiors were filmed, of course, but it is also an exterior location for the film. The building at the right of the photograph above represents the doctor's villa. It is more easily recognised in this photograph:
This villa is used again in at least four later Pathé films (all at Gaumont Pathé Archives):
It is common for buildings belonging to a production company to be used as exterior locations, applying the rule of convenient proximity. Rarer is the use of those buildings' interiors; an interior will always be a studio construction, rather. We do see, of course, the interior of the studio itself, though that is a place that is rarely presented as place.
A studio is a place in which spaces are made. The actual 'théâtre de prise de vue' in the vignette above is to the untrained eye generic, little different from those built by Pathé at Vincennes or Montreuil. In films such places disappear behind the spaces created within them, except in self-reflexive films where the specificity of the space is foregrounded and is revealed as place, as in the example right, a film about filmmaking. The interior of the studio building at Vincennes is visible behind the space created within it.
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So far I have only found one similarly self-reflexive film made at and representing Pathé premises in Nice, Romeo Bosetti's Un idiot qui se croit Max Linder (1914). This film doesn't show us the studio. All we see of the premises is an office where Bosetti himself, director of the Pathé subsidiary Comica, is visited by the idiot who thinks he is Max Linder:
The reflexivity here is intensified in that the actor playing the idiot is Jules Vial who, as Gaétan in several Bosetti-directed films, was indeed a poor imitation of Max Linder.
The space above is a reconstruction in the studio of the Comica office, though I couldn't say whether it is supposed to be the premises in the centre of Nice (at 9 Avenue de Notre Dame) or an office near the studio on the Route de Turin. A notice in Ciné Journal in 1911 (right), suggests that the studio premises were a place of business as well as a place for making films.
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In this brief scene from the 1911 film Le Torchon brûle, Sarah Duhamel is wrestling with her husband in front of a bar near the studios on the Route de Turin, 'A la halte du Cinéma Pathé':
'La Halte' means that this was also a stopping point for the tram from Nice.
This photograph shows Pathé filmmakers in front of that bar:
This photograph shows Pathé filmmakers in front of that bar:
The villa next to the route de Turin studios is, then, one of the three identified places in Le Médecin du château. Each of these places serves a largely generic purpose in the film but each has, independently of that function, a history of sorts as a place. The château de Gairaut was built c.1900 for Joseph Giordan, a local politician, and belonged more recently to the Russian politician and businessman Serguei Pougatchev. The Hôtel des Postes or Poste Wilson was built in 1888; in 1983 a plaque was placed in the main hall commemorating postal workers who died for France: 'Combat. Déportation. Exécution. Pour la liberté, contre le nazisme.'
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The history of the Pathé frères establishment on the route de Turin is told in passing as part either of the history of the company or of the history of filmmaking in Nice and environs. I have assembled some elements of that history in an appendix to this post.
My concluding observation on Le Médecin du château is that a discussion of a film's spatial dispositions can take a quite different turn if its spaces are read as places. This film is rightly celebrated as a stage in the development of narrative form; it is also important, in my view, for its engagement with a specific topography. It is a landmark in the history not only of narrative cinema in Nice but of place-specific fiction film tout court.
My concluding observation on Le Médecin du château is that a discussion of a film's spatial dispositions can take a quite different turn if its spaces are read as places. This film is rightly celebrated as a stage in the development of narrative form; it is also important, in my view, for its engagement with a specific topography. It is a landmark in the history not only of narrative cinema in Nice but of place-specific fiction film tout court.
2/ Who made Le Médecin du château?
Among the people in the photograph of a film company at Nice are, apparently, Emile Pierre, Henri Andreani and Z. Rollini:
My guess is that Rollini, who ran the studio, is the man in the middle, immediately above, and I think it is also he in the centre of the photograph below, behind the small boy:
This photograph of 'the actors and the personnel of the Pathé studio in Nice in 1908' was published by Georges Sadoul in Les Pionniers du cinéma, the second volume of his Histoire générale du cinéma. In his 80 ans de cinéma: Nice et le 7e art (1979), René Prédal reprints the photograph and gives this commentary (p.24):
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The studio in Nice probably existed around 1908 [as attested by the photograph]. Georges Sadoul confirmed to me in a letter of 22 November 1963 that he had cited the names of none of the personalities who figure on the photograph because the Cinémathèque had no idea who they were.
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I have tried myself to match these people with the actors in Le Médecin au château, but my facial recognition skills are not up to the task:
I haven't had much better luck matching these actors to the actors in any of the studio's other 1908 productions. It was by recognising locations and matching the décors used, rather than by matching faces, that I would identify these eleven films as made in Nice: Le Médecin du château, Madame fait du sport, L'Institut de beauté, Conscience de magistrat, Le Droit de vivre, Corso tragique, Le Rempailleur de chaises, La Faute d'un père, Le Spectre, and Cambrioleur sentimental.
Sadoul's photograph is of the actors and other personnel of the studio, which should include the directors working there. Only one of the eleven films I know to be made in Nice in 1908 has an identified director, Corso tragique by Albert Capellani. Given that none of Capellani's other attributed films from this year appears to be made in Nice it seems that he was not a part of the permanent personnel but came specifically for this one film, the exterior scenes of which were shot during the Carnival in February 1908.
It is not unusual that no director can be attributed to any of the other ten films. Henri Bousquet's Pathé filmography lists 582 films for 1908, but can give directors for only 76 of them. In his biography of Jean Durand (p.37) Francis Lacassin quotes a list made by Durand of directors working for Pathé in 1908, the year he joined the company: 'A dozen directors made films there, be it at Vincennes, Montreuil or Nice.' The list includes Louis Gasnier, Lucien Nonguet, Capellani, André Heuzé, Charles Decroix, Gaston Velle, Henri Gambard, Alfred Machin, Camille de Morlhon, Georges Monca and Daniel Riche. Durand doesn't mention Paul Burguet, Georges Fagot, Georges Denola, René Leprince, Segundo de Chomon or Ferdinand Zecca, and Lacassin points out that he omits Zecca's brother Louis, otherwise known as Z. Rollini, who had just established the studio in Nice. Given that he was in charge of the place at this time, Rollini is the one person who is sure to be in Sadoul's photograph.
The first two years of Pathé film production in Nice are somewhat obscure. The only person known to be working there consistently is Rollini himself. Lacassin (2001, p.40) quotes a 1922 essay by Rollini on the origins of French cinema where he evokes those early years:
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From 1908 to 1911 we filmed lovely scenes, both in the studio and in the open air, and directors who are today famous made their débuts there. In winter, under a radiant sun, the photography was impeccable. This studio was, for that time, perfectly equipped, thanks to the zeal of a managing director who was responsible for making the films and writing the scenarios, in short for creating and imagining everything - I shan't mention his name to spare his modesty. [Rollini means himself, of course.]
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In his two books on Alfred Machin, Lacassin gives unflattering descriptions of the filmmaking for which Rollini was responsible at Nice:
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To begin with, the studios on the route de Turin were placed under the direction of Z. Rollini [...]. The short comic films he supervised were slapdash and crude, vastly inferior to those made at Gaumont by Louis Feuillade or Roméo Bosetti. (Lacassin 1968, p.446)
Whereas the studios in Vincennes and Montreuil specialised in prestige productions, dramas or comedies starring Max Linder, Nice was a production-line of cheaply made short comedies. Each film was a succession of grimaces, kicks to the backside and other vulgar gags executed by local artistes or poor souls left behind by third-class touring companies. (Lacassin 2001, p.40) |
This has become a standard view, or at least I haven't seen it contested, but it seems to me an unfair assessment of filmmaking under Rollini in that first year of the Pathé studio in Nice. Even if we discount Capellani's Corso tragique as a Vincennes-type production that only came to Nice because of the Carnival setting, most of the films identifiable as Niçois are, like Le Médecin du château, serious dramas, not crude comedies. I will concede that Le Rempailleur de chaises does involve grimacing and kicks up the backside, but L'Institut de beauté and Madame fait des sports, two other Nice-made comedies from 1908, are relatively sophisticated, no less so at least than comedies produced by Pathé in Vincennes or Montreuil that same year, nor indeed than those produced by Gaumont.
Lacassin goes on to describe how things changed almost overnight: 'Until the day when, in November 1910, Charles Pathé lured Bosetti away from his rival [Gaumont] and gave him control of the Nice studio and of a subsidiary company, La Comica.' This too has become a standard version, with somewhat more justification. With the creation in 1910 of two subsidiaries, Bosetti's La Comica and, under Rollini's direction, La Nizza, Pathé filmmaking in Nice for the next four years became exclusively devoted to comedy, often of that slapstick variety wrongly identified with the Nice studios before 1910.
The work of the Comica and Nizza companies has been more fully documented so I don't propose to discuss it here, except to address a minor point regarding the change that occurred in 1910. There are differing views as to when exactly Bosetti moved to Pathé from Gaumont. For Lacassin it was in November; for Jean Mitry it was in June ('Roméo Bosetti, le premier des burlesques'). In his essay 'Bosetti chez Pathé', François de la Bretèque corrects Mitry: 'In June 1910 (or rather in October) Bosetti leaves Gaumont and returns to Pathé', adding a footnote to his parenthesis: 'So we deduce from the Pathé monthly bulletins; his name appears for the first time in the October 1910 issue. Laurent Le Forestier puts the date back to December, on the evidence of the Gaumont catalogues.'
Whenever Bosetti arrived, the consensus is that he brought to Pathé filmmaking in Nice a talent for creating and developing successive films based on a single character. Series centred on Léontine, Little Moritz, Rosalie, Babylas, Fouinard, les Purotin, Bigorno, Gaétan, Caroline and Roméo (i.e. Bosetti himself) were staples of Comica and Nizza production in this period. According to Eric Le Roy's filmography of comic series, all but the Babylas and Fouinard films were directed by Bosetti. However, the first of these series was in production before, and possibly long before, Bosetti arrived from Gaumont. Léontine ne sortira pas was listed in a June 1910 issue of Ciné Journal and, under the title Rebellious Betty, was reviewed in a July issue of Moving Picture World. Henri Bousquet's filmography quotes this announcement from the British journal The Bioscope, dated April 28 1910:
Whenever Bosetti arrived, the consensus is that he brought to Pathé filmmaking in Nice a talent for creating and developing successive films based on a single character. Series centred on Léontine, Little Moritz, Rosalie, Babylas, Fouinard, les Purotin, Bigorno, Gaétan, Caroline and Roméo (i.e. Bosetti himself) were staples of Comica and Nizza production in this period. According to Eric Le Roy's filmography of comic series, all but the Babylas and Fouinard films were directed by Bosetti. However, the first of these series was in production before, and possibly long before, Bosetti arrived from Gaumont. Léontine ne sortira pas was listed in a June 1910 issue of Ciné Journal and, under the title Rebellious Betty, was reviewed in a July issue of Moving Picture World. Henri Bousquet's filmography quotes this announcement from the British journal The Bioscope, dated April 28 1910:
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The well-known firm of Pathé Frères are to be congratulated upon having discovered Betty. That young person will shortly appear upon the screen as “star” turn in a series of pictures which will shortly be released and those persons in England who have had the opportunity of making her acquaintance predict that Betty will soon be all the rage. She is best described as a frolicsome, mischievous, rebellious, disobedient girl, and she manages to cause trouble and fun wherever she goes.
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The planning of the Léontine series, including the hiring of the (to this day anonymous) actress, must have been done by someone at the Nice studios at some point in early 1910, if not before that, and as likely as not that was the establishment's director, Z. Rollini. In any case, we can qualify the suggestion that Bosetti's arrival changed everything: the serial habit was formed before he came.
In his reminiscences, Rollini points to himself as the creative force behind everything that happened at the Nice studios. His role was, then, like that of his brother Ferdinand Zecca at Vincennes, but on a smaller scale. There was a time when almost everything made at Vincennes got attributed to Zecca, and we should resist the mistake of attributing everything made at Nice to Rollini. I don't think, for instance, that it was necessarily he who made Le Médecin du château. Any one of the twenty or so Vincennes-based directors could have come down, like Capellani, to make just one film or for a longer-term secondment, or it it could have been a permanent member of the Nice personnel. It could well be someone in Sadoul's photograph. Here, supplied by the Internet, is a gallery of Pathé directors, none of whom - needless to say - have I been able to match to the photograph of the personnel at Nice in 1908:
Without documentation, my only resort is internal evidence. The recurrence of the same interior décor allows the identification of films made in the Nice studio, but the external locations of Le Médecin du château already confirmed that, and anyway that doesn't tell us who made the film. A few directors specialised in specific genres, allowing us to exclude, for example, Segundo de Chomon, but whatever their speciality all of the others made at some point a 'scène dramatique' of the Médecin du château type. It is possible that, as happened at Gaumont, certain directors faithfully used the same actors over and again, so that a film is likely to be by Feuillade if it has Renée Carl and René Navarre in it, but without better identification of the actors in the film and more matches to othe films, that avenue seems to be blocked. Nonetheless, I am going to make a suggestion as to who the director of Le Médecin du château might be on the basis of a recurrent actor and an assumption of directorial fidelity.
In Les Pionniers du cinéma Georges Sadoul reproduces an image from a 1908 film called Victime de sa probité:
His accompanying comment reads: 'The film was directed by Lucien Nonguet, whose wife here plays the rôle of a well-to-do bourgeoise. The vagabond is played by Georges Monca.'
In the wife of Lucien Nonguet - whose first name doesn't seem to have been recorded anywhere - we can recognise the actress who plays another well-to-do bourgeoise in the Nice-made film Madame fait du sport:
If the only other film in which Madame Nonguet seems to have acted - and I have looked hard for her elsewhere in Pathé films between 1906 and 1910 - was directed by her husband, I shall assume that this one too was directed by him. In which case, we have at least one instance of Nonguet working in Nice in 1908. To then attribute to him Le Médecin du château would hardly be justified, given how shaky are my assumptions, but there are two other suggestive facts that might support such a claim. Firstly, Le Médecin du château is effectively a remake of the 1906 Pathé film Terrible Angoisse, which was directed by Lucien Nonguet. It would not be surprising to learn that he was himself responsible for the improved reworking of this material two years later.
The second suggestive fact is a further connection between Le Médecin du château and Madame fait du sport. That the same elements of décor occur in both is a just function of studio production and not evidence of a single director at work. On the other hand, we can match the motor-car used in Le Médecin du château with the one used in Madame fait du sport:
This is, as the IMCDB tells me, a Sizaire-Naudin. The car may well belong to the studio, but I think it more likely that it belonged to an individual working there. It might be Rollini's, but it doesn't turn up in any other Nice-made films I have found, and I would like to think it was Nonguet's. Likewise, I would like to think that Le Médecin du château is Nonguet's, but it will probably need evidence better than what I have presented here to convince anyone.
Appendix 1: proof by décor
There are three principal elements of décor that I have used to identify a film as made in Nice. Two of these are in Le Médecin du château and, since the exteriors establish beyond question that the film is Nice-made, I take the presence of either of those two elements in another film as evidence that it is made in Nice even when there are no corroborating exteriors. (This is mostly the case when all I have of a film is a publicity still or postcard.)
The element that recurs most is the décor of the living room at the château. Here it is in nine different films between 1908 and 1910:
The element that recurs most is the décor of the living room at the château. Here it is in nine different films between 1908 and 1910:
Here are elements of the décor of the doctor's living room in three films:
The third element does not appear in Le Médecin du château, since it denotes an impoverished milieu not represented in that film. The wallpaper in the room of the abandoned mother in Conscience de magistrat recurs in a burglar's living room and a shoemaker's bedroom:
The burglar and the shoemaker also have the same picture on the wall.
From 1911 onwards Nice-made films tend to be marked as Comica or Nizza productions, so the recurrence of décor doesn't tell us anything we wouldn't already know. I have only found one recurrence of the 1908 décors used in a Comica or Nizza film. The mouldings on the wall, here in L'Habit de Little Moritz, can just about be matched to the salon in the château:
In the other direction, the wallpaper in Rosalie détective, a Comica film from 1911, had already appeared in L'Anneau d'argent, a film from April 1910, locating the latter as a Nice production:
Appendix 2: Le Médecin du château, shot by shot.
Like Perron but unlike Salt and Gunning I discount the two titles and the one insert, giving a total of 27 shots:
Like Perron but unlike Salt and Gunning I discount the two titles and the one insert, giving a total of 27 shots:
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