New Yorker review (online) SAVED FROM THE FLAMES DVD

[DShepFilm]

anuary 25, 2008
DVD of the Week: Past Perfect

Historical importance and giddy wonder converge in “Saved From the Flames: 54 Rare and Restored Films 1896-1944” (Flicker Alley), a wide-ranging three-disk anthology of short films. The works, ranging from primordial fictions and early documentaries to political propaganda and musical shorts, were lovingly collected and preserved by Serge Bromberg, of Lobster Films and David Shepard, of Blackhawk Films, and the slant is Franco-American. Kiriki_4_2 The three earliest films in the set, by the Lumière Brothers, are presented as never before: Bromberg owns the original negative to one of them, and the print it yields has an astounding sensual warmth; a hand-tinted copy of their 1896 “Card Party”—found by Bromberg in a French cheese shop!—is a Cézanne painting come to life. Georges Méliès performs magic on-screen as well as behind the camera, as director and star of “Excelsior!—Prince of Magicians,” from 1901, of which Lobster Films has the sole existing copy. A 1908 animation by Emile Cohl, “Fantasmagorie,” foretells the wildest inventions of the Fleischer brothers (represented here by an eye-popping Technicolor dreamscape and a follow-the-bouncing-ball musicale) and Chuck Jones (whose ultra-modernistic 1944 campaign cartoon for F.D.R. is also included). Josephine Baker takes part in the antic erotic fantasy “The Fireman of the Folies-Bergère,” from 1928; Kids_venice1 Duke Ellington is featured at the piano and with his band in the 1929 “Black and Tan”; Jacques Tati stars in a riotously inventive 1935 furniture commercial; “Kiriki, Japanese Acrobats,” from 1907, features astounding funambulists with a comic secret. Best of all is Charlie Chaplin’s second film, “Kid’s Auto Race,” from 1914, a manic metafiction in which a surly, aggressive precursor to the Little Tramp hogs the cameras set up to capture the action at an auto race. This living time capsule is a cornucopia of revelation and delight.—Richard Brody