Two from Vitagraph

I mentioned several months back that I bought a box set from Kino Lorber of comedies from the Vitagraph studio, which was active in the early days of filmmaking in America. I'd only watched one of the shorts so far, and recently watched another pair of them as each of the was shorter than even a standard one-reeler:

First up was The Boy, the Bust, and the Bath. A bunch of people live at a boarding house with a shared bathroom. A women who lives there is down in the common room working on making a hat, using a bust that looks a lot like her to keep it on. Two of the other residents try to flirt with her; you'd think all of these people would have known each other for a fairly long time already, the way they seem to do in most sound-era films set in rooming houses. A kid who also lives in the house takes the bust and sticks it in the bathtub, so that when the men living in the house try to take a bath, they'll think they're walking in on a naked lady.

The second short was even shorter, at three minutes: Get Me a Stepladder. In this one, a man wants to hang a painting for his wife (actually played by a man in drag; presumbaly Vitagraph didn't have enough women around the day they made this one), and puts a chair on top of a table to get to the required height. Needless to say, the chair and table fall out from under him with the intent of comic effect. The wife looks for a ladder and has some difficulty getting it back to the room, again with comic effect. This second half of the short also showed how flimsy the sets were as one of the walls shakes fairly noticeably.

I have to say that even though both of these shorts are from before 1910, they're still relatively poor even when compared to other stuff that I've seen from the era. I'd have thought that by 1908, the short three-minute length that had appeared in "documentary" shorts, where they basically set up a camera and filmed real life going on, would have been a thing of the past, but apparently not. Yes, I know that D.W. Griffith's Those Awful Hats from around the same time is also only about three minutes, but that one was made as more of a sort of public announcement, like modern day trailers before movies, only with a great joke to make the message. And the first one is basically a one-joke movie. It wasn't uncommon for other movies of this era to have more fully fleshed-out plots.