Les chats boxeurs

Damn you Welton – you've doomed us all! Skip forward over 100 hundred years and, aside from pornography, the internet's second biggest use is surely the sharing of videos of cats doing stuff that is amusing, cute or amusing and cute. I'm not saying that Professor Welton (professor of what I am not sure) is to blame for this but certainly this must be one of the earliest examples of an amusing cat video and/or spoof video using cats in place of humans. AT barely 30 seconds long this very early short film is essentially a shot of part of Welton's vaudeville act which involves, well, two cats boxing one another in a tiny "ring" while Welton is visible just behind the foreground (he is too close for it to be called background) to keep an eye and lend a hand when necessary.

In terms of modern value it must be said that there is almost none as the shot is fairly static, the action pretty simple and the attitudes of the cats perhaps too aggressive to really be classed as cute. OK neither of them hurt one another but it comes over as more than harmless toying. In terms of history then yes the film has historical value given its early place in the development of cinema – but there are better short films that display more creativity and exploration that come from the same period. Personally, I prefer to just think of it as a fore-runner of the many, many cat videos clogging the internet.

Shortly after the early Kinetoscope experiment "Leonard-Cushing Fight", featuring the two boxers Jack Cushing and Mike Leonard in a boxing match, this movie got made at the Thomas Edison's Black Maria Studios, featuring two cats, fully equipped with boxing gloves, having a go at each other. So perhaps with some imagination you can call this movie the first ever made spoof and it certainly is the first ever done comical subject at the Thomas Edison's Black Maria Studios.

The subject of Professor Welton (exactly what was he a professor in I wonder?) Vaudeville's act of two boxing cats is sort of amusing and cute. No doubt that animal right organizations now days would do anything to ban this movie from being shown was it made today but truth is that this is a pretty harmless act. The gloves take away a lot of the blow, so no cats got harmed during the making of this motion picture and actually seeing cats fight on the streets with their claws is of course something far more violent and violent looking, even though it's just nature, unlike obviously putting gloves on a couple of cats and let them fight in a small boxing ring.

Henry Welton himself (the professor from this movie its title) sets the cats up against each other and he can be seen picking them up toward each other. These two cats obviously had no grudge toward each other but were put up to it to fight. Perhaps not the most kind thing to do but you also have to remember that this was 1894 when these sort of animal vaudeville acts were very common and part of everyday's life.

The camera is pretty close up to the fight but it covers the entire fighting area. It's not entirely symmetric, since it only shows one side of the ring. Nevertheless it's an effective composition, since it shows everything that needs to be seen and apart from its shaking images, it's perfect. The same can be said about the quality of the movie. Hardly any grain here in this one.

A nice little comical turn from the boys at the Edison Manufacturing Company.

8/10

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A great many of the earliest Edison Kinetoscope movies featured popular performers who presented samples of their vaudeville acts or other similar specialties. There were also a fair number of early Edison features that showed boxing. This short movie combines the two genres, and it also demonstrates rather efficient composition in its use of the camera.

Professor Henry Welton apparently had an entire vaudeville act that featured cats trained to perform all kinds of tricks, so that the "Boxing Cats" routine was really only one of many such routines in the full show. The high popularity of boxing at the time probably made this a fairly obvious choice for the Edison crew to film.

The footage shows a tiny boxing ring, with the cats batting away at each other with their paws. The camera field catches the entire ring plus Welton behind it, looking on, so that even in a limited field it includes the entire scene. The miniature boxing gloves on their forepaws makes it look much like human boxing of a kind. It seems to have been largely harmless for the cats involved, since the gloves would probably have prevented them from inflicting any injuries on each other.

The footage itself is mildly entertaining, and the movie is also worthy of note as an example of the content and technique in the early Kinetoscope films.

The cats in this movie must have retired from showbiz by now. At least I hope so

"fWhen "movies" first began""...... I am tired of hearing it. Can we please stop patronising the past. In 1894 they filmed novelty acts just as they would continue to do throughout the decade and beyond. The genre became particularly common iafter the inroduction of the newreel and the "magazine" (c. 1909) and the highpoint for this kind of spectacle in the cinema probably occurrs in the twenties and thirties when such material filled the newreels shown certainly with other films but also shown in the many specialist newsreel cinemas which continued to exist until the advent of television. After which such novelty items continued to be filmed in just the same way for the small screen and they are today to be found all over the internet. There has been no very noticeable change in the nature of such films at any time.

This is not a every wonderful film. Edison films are extremely poor both with respect to quality and content compared with the work, just a few years later, of the Lumière operators in France which effectively pushed Edison and the rival Mutoscope company both to abandon peephole exhibition and to broaden and improve the content and quality of their films. But novelty acts involving acrobats, magicians, trained animals and so on remained part of the repertoire of all film companies until the 1910s when they began to be included in the newsreels and film magazines where they would remain until the advent of television. All that changes is the way the repertoire is organised and then the particular medium that transmits them. To confirm this fact, jsut do a google search for "boxing cats"....