Peter Bradshaw 

A Night at the Cinema in 1914 review – ghosts from the early days of film

This collection of silent shorts features a variety of intriguing figures from Emmeline Pankhurst to Charlie Chaplin, writes Peter Bradshaw
  
  

A Night at the Cinema in 1914
Eerie images … a scene from A Night at the Cinema in 1914 Photograph: PR

This is more like a seance than anything else: an eerie summoning of ghosts from the early days of cinema and the 20th century. The BFI's Bryony Dixon has curated a collection of early silent short films from 1914, with a new piano accompaniment. Newsreel footage of the late Archduke Ferdinand's family and the Germans' invasion of Louvain (which looks rather like Berlin in 1945) comes with a newsreel about Emmeline Pankhurst and then a wacky comedy called Daisy Doodad's Dial about a woman arrested for pulling odd faces in public. (Was it an anti-suffragette jibe?) The collection concludes with the explosive birth of the modern: one of Charlie Chaplin's first films, including a gag in which he lights a cigarette by shooting a gun at the tip. (The joke may only really work in silent cinema.) It's a fascinating archival experience, though finally a little necrophiliac and claustrophobic. Perhaps it should be scheduled as a double bill with Polissons Et Galipettes, or The Good Old Naughty Days, a collection of French pornographic silent films from the same era.

 

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