Some More YouTube Videos

These are too good not to post.

First up, a British filmed version of Alice in Wonderland from 1903. It's only about 8 minutes long, so there's really no excuse for not giving it a look. The film's only surviving negative is badly damaged, as you'd probably expect from such an early movie, but what's there to be seen is fascinating.

At this point, there weren't really a lot of narrative guildelines to follow when making a fictional film. (Most movies at this point were novelty items based solely around capturing movement, like images of trains going into tunnels or blossoming flowers). So the movie kind of jumps around the story heedlessly, not so much trying to tell the audience the tale of how Alice falls down a rabbit hole and enters Wonderland as it is trying to illustrate the story viewers already have in their heads. On this video, there's an audio commentary by film historian Simon Brown giving you some background on the production, which he says was the longest British film then produced.



Just an incredible piece of film history. The Internet is goddamn amazing.

I hesitate to put up this next one, because the Jeffrey Lyons commentary is so horrifyingly annoying. You're trying to watch rare footage and the guy's babbling on about Spanish ranch owners he has known.

In 1934, apparently, a young Orson Welles and an acquaintance named William Vance directed a brief, extremely surreal silent film called Hearts of Age. Astonishingly, the thing ahs sruvived and someone has put it up on YouTube. It stars Welles as Death and his first wife as an old lady. Some of his favored techniques are already visible in this footage, including his taste for extreme close-ups at odd angles.

Finally, here's an older, sadder, fatter Orson drunkenly screwing up a wine commercial shoot with regrettably hilarious results. Yes, it's tragic what became of the man, but I'd like to think he'd be able to look back on this period of his life with a sense of humor.