Before people start saying "pretty good for 1911" I wish they would pause to think a little. The average output of films in any year is fairly dire (look sometime at the record for 2016, remembering to include "television" in your survey) and the cinema can only be judged reasonably on the best that is made. 1911 was the year Asta Nielsen appeared in The Black Dream and The Ballet Dancer, the year Milano produced L'Inferno and the Odyssey, the year that Perret made L'automne du coeur, the year Griffith made The Last Drop of Water, A Child of the Ghetto and Enoch Arden, the year in which Thomas Ince made The Lieutenant's Last Fight, the year in which Vitagraph produced The Tale of Two Cities and Selig produced The Maid at the Helm. On a lighter note, it was the year in which unjustly forgotten comedienne Sarah Duhamel starred in Le Torchon brûlé (once seen, never forgotten, the last word in marital disputes)and in which animator Walter R. Booth made The Automatic Motorist. So there was nothing much wrong with 1911. In fact, with medium-length and feature-length films starting to take off in a big way, it was a rather exciting year for cinema.
Would that 2016 was as interesting! After the "Bunnyfinches", they are unexciting but happily we now have a fair few of them to watch (largely thanks to the Dutch archivists) and, they bear witness to the naturalistic style that Vitagraph developed in these years and which was much admired in Europe (especially in France Italy and Russia, where naturalism was most influential. The composition (as always in the "Bunnyfinches") is excellent, the fluid use of the screen-space and the depth of shot is admirable and the acting impeccable. The Bunnyfinches were not the most exciting thing that was happening in 1911, but they were comfortable, smile-making situation comedy (here a shade cruel) at its best. The equivalent, you might say, of quality television today. I have no difficulty at all in understanding why the films were so popular and Bunny so highly regarded. One can only regret that in the years after Bunny's death, such comedy (Mr and Mrs Drew apart)was so effectively drowned out by the cacophony of gormless slapstick.
