With a Kodak (1912) User Reviews

High Tech

[boblipton · 6/10 · 7 September 2012]

You know how in the high tech movies these days, there's someone typing at a computer and while doing so, saying what's being typed? Even if no one else is there? It's a really ugly and uncinematic way to tell the audience what's going on, but it's how the movies deal currently with this bit of high technology.

In the same way, WITH A KODAK examines the impact of high technology on society. It was a common theme of the serious Biographs, but here Mack Sennett and the other members of the company's comedy unit offer a lighter-hearted view of how people dealt with the 1912 equivalent of Facebook -- and the Streisand Effect of blackmail.

This movie may surprise the viewer who is familiar only with Sennett's later, slapstick productions, but this sort of situational comedy was the sort that his bosses approved of. In the meantime, Sennett was learning how to make movies from the best in the business.

With a Kodak review

[JoeytheBrit · 5/10 · 30 June 2020]

Mack Sennett foregoes his usual frantic slapstick for a tale of blackmail which nevertheless still has a rushed feel about it. Edward Dillon and Vivian Prescott are a couple in the employ of Fred Mace and Karen Bruce, both of whom are making sexual overtures towards their employees, so they use a camera to obtain the evidence with which they can blackmail them. All the actors overact in an attempt to make up for the fact that this is a comedy that just isn't funny.

Did someone say "fake news"?

[kekseksa · 17 May 2018]

Although photography precedes cinematography by several decades, the link between the two was always strong. The Lumières were specialists in photographic equipment as initially was Gaumont and many other pioneers o the cinema were photographers. The connection with Eastman Kodak is even stronger. An Eastman camera had been used by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson to develop the Edison Kinetoscope and celluloid, patent in its flexible form by Eastman, had played a crucial part in making film projection possible.

The pocket Kodak camera with its familiar accordeon bellows was fist produced in 1898 just two years after the Lumières' first Paris projection of films. By From 1900 the even simpler Brownie box-camera was available. Thenceforth the two forms of recording images, which, like so many other technological developments since, were also in effect two forms of surveillance. So here the film-camera spies on the Kodak which spies on the two servants' former employers.

And neither of course really tells the truth but rather a manipulated version of the truth - in effect a lie. And when it is not a lie, it is an illusion. In 1908 he Austrian critic Joseph August Lux wrote a book called Künstlerische Kodakgeheimnisse (Artistic Secrets of the Kodak) in which he championed the camera, ironically as a kind of weapon against modernity, believing that the documenting of one's surroundings provided a type of stability. This modern version of sympathetic magic (photograph it and it will remain the same forever) is symptomatic of the illusionism involved in both photography and cinematography.

When Jean-Luc Godard has a character say the reverse in Le Petit Soldat, I assume it is with ironic intent although with Godard one can never be sure. The truth however is that photography is a lie and cinema is a lie 24 times a second. Although, as a director, even speaking through an unreliable character, Godard very naturally (but unfairly) goes on to blame the producers, just as his hero Fritz Lang so often did, for the element of falsehood ("...and every cut is a lie")

But, as we see in this film, the conspiracy begins even before the camera is pointed at its victim and any later processing is merely a refinement of the lie not the origin of it. All in all the film is a very neat little comic parable, far removed from Sennett's later slapstick, and what it says about technology, simple though it may seem, is as true today as ever.

Sadly we do not have Walter McCutcheon's earlier (1908) take on the ambiguity of technology - Bobby's Kodak where the embarrassing revelations made by a boy's new Kodak - this was the year the Kodak first came out - lead to his getting a thrashing. No pain without gain; spare the rod and spoil the film.

Ain't blackmail funny?

[planktonrules · 4/10 · 9 September 2012]

This Mack Sennett directed film is pretty good but it's VERY rushed--mostly because films were very, very brief back around 1912.

The film begins with a man getting VERY chummy with the maid and his wife catches them--and fires the maid. Only seconds later, the wife is making her moves on her husband's male secretary. The husband finds out and fires him. A bit later, the two ex-employees concoct a plan--to photograph themselves with their ex-employers in a compromising position and blackmailing them to take them back.

This film could have been funny but instead just seemed really, really too fast and allowed no time for reactions or subtlety. Worse yet, the big confrontation scene at the end happened way too quickly. Overall, an okay film but nothing more.