User reviews

This is a fascinating little self-reflexive film: one of the earliest (the first that I think I've seen, at least) of behind-the-scenes footage of the making of a film in a studio. There are earlier films of filmmaking, but they're of actualities at the scene rather than the creation of a scene. Such as the early Lumière one, "Fête de Paris 1899: Concours d'automobiles fleuries," where a cameraman filmed another cameraman filming a parade, rather than the creation of a scene. Moreover, Alice Guy, Gaumont's main director and production head, is filmed here directing a Phonoscène, an early experiment combining sound and film. This filming of that filming or rehearsal, however, is silent, and the figures between the cameras are illuminated by a striking backlighting effect putting them in silhouette, as the lights are focused on the Phonoscène to be recorded by the other camera.

The subject of the Phonoscène being shot (according to Alison McMahan, author of "Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema," a scene from the opera "Mignon"), which is yet another dance film (so very many of them being made in early cinema), as well as presumably a singing one, is of far less interest than the filming of it. Here, we may see the process by which Guy employed the phonograph horns with pre-recorded wax cylinders to rehearse her performers to sync with the sound, as a photographer takes still photographs, as the cameraman stands by to begin filming after rehearsal, and the world's first female director orchestrates the scene.