By 1909 the films were getting longer – well, not all of them. In nearly all genres the lengths were now between 100 and 200 metres. This is not much longer than in 1907 and not a great deal less than in 1914 (when the upper limit was about 300 metres). The exceptionally long works were concentrated in the scènes dramatiques (which we would call features today), and from time to time extra-long travel and expedition films were produced, such as Hyacinthe Pirmez’s Chasse en Abyssinie (1908-1909, 900 metres). In the short films of 1909 we are struck again and again by the narrative efficiency and sophistication with which both comic and tragic plots are organised into their 200-metre length, stories of a complexity which, if expanded, could easily fill a feature-length work.

“L’Assommoir (Drink) was the first French feature-length film,” states Henri Bousquet succinctly in the Pathé catalogue of 1909. 740 metres long, Capellani’s film did indeed approximate the length for a feature according to today’s (French) definition – 40 minutes – and was over twice as long as prominent Film d’Art productions of the same period. The talented actor-director Albert Capellani proved himself an outstanding creative director for the Société Cinématographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres (S.C.A.G.L. – Pathé), founded in 1908 by Charles Pathé. Capellani’s versions of Les Misérables (1912) and Germinal (1913) were by far the most successful French films of the pre-First World War period. For a long time we only knew two fragments of his L’Assommoir, but now a complete copy has surfaced in Belgium, allowing us to catch up with this important film of 1908 and, with this screening, formally announce an Albert Capellani retrospective, which we are planning for next year’s Cinema Ritrovato.

Mariann Lewinsky

Capellani’s film is an adaptation not of Zola’s novel but of the play William Busnach and Octave Gastineau derived from it, with the consent but not the approval of the author, first performed at the Ambigu Theatre in Paris on January 18, 1879. As Zola remarked in the preface he wrote for the first publication of the play in 1881, Busnach and Gastineau’s strategy in their adaptation was to present a series of scenes of popular life involving the central characters over some twenty years, linking them together by the persistent malevolence of Lantier and Virginie towards Copeau and Gervaise. Zola noted that this was not a very dramatic strategy, if the epitome of drama is the concentration of classical tragedy; with hindsight we can perhaps suggest it is cinematic rather than dramatic. Capellani follows the play closely, merely omitting a few minor characters and the epilogue following Copeau’s death, thus leaving unresolved the eventual fates of the other three main characters. Although released to theatres in April 1909, the film was finished in time for a gala screening on December 21, 1908, together with several Film d’Art productions. The influence of Film d’Art is evident, especially in the scene of Copeau’s fall from the scaffolding, arranged in different framings of adjoining spaces linked by character movement, like the scene of the Duke’s death in L’Assassinat du duc de Guise, though in L’Assommoir two of these spaces adjoin vertically rather than horizontally.

Ben Brewster, Lea Jacob