Sherlock Holmes Baffled — Wikipédia

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The 30 -second film Sherlock Holmes Baffled
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Sherlock Holmes Baffled is an American silent film in black and white lasting thirty seconds, directed by Arthur Marvin and produced by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, released in 1900.

This is the first film known to date to stage the British detective Sherlock Holmes.

The film was visible in a mutoscope. He was presumed lost until 1968, when a paper copy was found at the Library of Congress and transferred in 16 mm.

Sherlock Holmes enters his living room and realizes that he was robbed but while he confronts the bandit, the latter disappears, with the great surprise of Sherlock. Holmes tries to forget the incident by lighting a cigar but the thief reappears and he then tries to take his loot back by taking out a pistol from his bathrobe and pulling on the intruder who vanishes. Once Holmes recovers what belongs to him, the bag disappears from his hands to reappear in the thief’s hands who quickly disappears through a window. At this precise moment, the film ends unexpectedly in the image of Sherlock completely disconcerted [ first ] , [ 2 ]

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This film was produced by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, created in 1895 by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (first director of cinema and Director at the Edison Kinetoscope of which he leaves the service), Elias Bernard Koopman, Harry Norton Marvin and Herman Casler. It was to be operated using the Mutoscope, patented by Herman Casler in 1894 [ 3 ] . Like Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope, the Mutoscope did not project the film on a screen but allowed a viewing for one person at a time. Less expensive and simpler than the kinetoscope, this system marketed by the American Mutoscope Company quickly dominated the market for film slot to watching films [ 4 ] .

To avoid being in violation with Edison patents deposited on the 35 mm format, the biographer camera ( biographer in English), which, from 1895 to 1902, recorded films intended for mutoscopes, used a very wide film, 68 mm , with a photo size of 2 x 2.5 inches , or four times the size of the 35 format mm the Edison [ 5 ] . The films recorded by the biographer were not pre-perforated; The camera mechanism operated a double punch which made a circular hole on each side of each image during the taking shots made at the rate of thirty images per second.

The mutoscope operated on the same principle as a foloscope, with framed images and printed on flexible maps linked to a circular nucleus which turned by activating by hand a crank [ 6 ] . The cards were lit by electric bulbs inside the machine, a system created by Harry Norton Marvin’s brother, one of the founders of the Biograph Company. The first machines used natural light concentrated by a reflective panel [ 7 ] .

Out of the shots, Sherlock Holmes Baffled had a length of about 86 meters , which gave him a duration of 30 seconds.

Sherlock Holmes Baffled was produced by Arthur Weed Marvin, a close to one of the founders of the Biograph Company. Marvin signed more than 418 films between 1897 and 1911, known as entertainment of the genus Vaudeville. He later became the executive of the first films by D. W. Griffith, themselves produced by the Biograph Company.

  1. ↑ (in) Tuska, Jon, The detective in Hollywood , Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, (ISBN  978-0-385-12093-7-7 ) , p.1
  2. ↑ (in) Julie McKuras, “100 years ago : sherlock Holmes baffled” , Minneapolis : Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections, University of Minnesota Libraries, ( read online ) , Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections newsletters
  3. ↑ Spehr Paul C., “Unaltered to date : Developping 35 mm Film”. In Fullerton, John; Widding, Astrid Söderbergh. Moving images : From Edison to the Webcam. , Sydney, John Libbey&Co, (ISBN  978-1-86462-054-2 ) , p. 17 .
  4. ↑ (in) Anthony Slide, The New Historical Dictionary of the American Film Industry , Lanham, Maryland, Scarecrow Press, (ISBN  978-0-8108-3426-2 ) , p. 22 .
  5. ↑ (in) Bordwell, David; Staiger, Janet; Thompson, Kirstin, The Classical Hollywood cinema : film style&mode of production to 1960 , London, Routledge, (ISBN  9780415003834 ) , p. 265 .
  6. ↑ (in) Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema : The American Screen to 1907 , Berkeley, University of California Press, (ISBN  978-0-520-08533-6 ) , p. 176 .
  7. ↑ (in) Hendricks, Gordon, The Emergence of cinema : the American screen to 1907 , Berkeley, University of California Press, (ISBN  9780520085336 ) , p. 176 .

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