The Sick Kitten

It's so simple and plain. Acting is perfect. Story line is marvelous. Cats are magnificent as always. I rate this movie 10/10.

This isn't the most engaging of films, but it is important in the development of cinema technique because of the way in which pioneering British filmmaker George Albert Smith transforms what would otherwise be a flat and somewhat dull film with the simple insertion of a close-up. The film shows two children and a couple of cats, one of which is supposed to be unwell. The cat sits on the girl's lap as a boy in an over-sized hat fetches a jug. The girl spoon-feeds medicine to the little kitten and it is at this point that Smith switches to a close-up of the kitten so that we can see it happily licking its medicine from the spoon. The film then returns to what was the establishing shot to show the boy removing his hat and bowing. It's no great shakes,and is fairly unremarkable when seen today, but it has a place in cinematic history.

This short feature combines pleasant, enjoyable material with good craftsmanship and some imagination. It was a remake of the 1901 film "The Little Doctors", which apparently was permanently lost. Remade and given the simpler title "Sick Kitten", it's a charming and creative little movie.

The engaging mini-story involves two children and two cats, one of which is unwell. The children's acting is really pretty good. They are lively, and they are naturally presented as being cute, but they are believable as well.

A number of G.A. Smith's films show that he seemed to have had the knack for getting believable performances like these from his cast.

As simple as the story is, both the tone and the technique are commendable. In many movies today, such scenes are too often presented with some kind of extraneous crudity inserted into the sequence, to keep it palatable to those with short attention spans. Alternatively, such scenes can be marred by labored post-modernist references or other pretentious material, to avoid the appearance of being too innocent or naive. To make this kind of simple, positive family scene believable and effective is really a more worthwhile achievement.

The technique is also worth noticing, as it shows one continual scene broken up into multiple segments with different camera viewpoints. While using this kind of technique is perhaps not a monumental creative insight, this seems to be one of the very earliest films to use it, and it certainly shows an appreciation for the material and for how best to communicate it to an audience.

This is George Albert Smith's remake of his own film "The Little Doctors" (1901), which probably had its negatives worn out due to reprints--hence it being remade. The original film is probably lost forever. These two pictures must have been quite popular in their day. Smith essentially introduced the close-up to motion pictures in 1900 with "As Seen Through a Telescope" and "Grandma's Reading Glass", enhancing upon the medium close-up that had been quite popular since the Edison Company's "The Kiss" (1896). In Smith's two aforementioned films from 1900, the close-ups are point-of-view shots, with a mask around the camera lens to create circular vignettes. In "As Seen Through a Telescope", a man with a telescope looks at something, then the film cuts to a close-up of what he's looking at through the perspective of the telescope.

"Sick Kitten" contains a similar one scene, three-shot structure. There's a long shot, or establishing shot, followed by a close-up and the end takes us back to the original long shot position. The close-up in this film, however, doesn't involve camera masking or any character's point of view. It's a standard (as we know it today) close-up. It's also a match on action shot. It's seamlessly done and creates a good continuity. The same year, Edwin S. Porter's "The Gay Shoe Clerk", which is a reworking of "As Seen Through a Telescope", used a similar three-shot continuity: two establishing shots with a close-up inserted in the middle. Smith took this idea further within the same year in what is probably his most advanced surviving film, "Mary Jane's Mishap". Films with multiple shots were nothing new by 1903, but the scene dissection on display in these films by Smith were quite rare. For comparison, the most popular film from 1903, "The Great Train Robbery", has multiple shots, but they are all scenes in themselves. Oh, "Sick Kitten" doesn't have much of a story itself--just a couple of kids feeding a sick kitten. The cut to the close-up occurs during the feeding. Additionally, the children demonstrate that they were very aware that they were being filmed; the boy bows and holds his hat at the end.

Known as "The Sick Kitten", the 55 seconds short film presents a boy and girl taking care of two kittens, one of them apparently sick is fed with a spoonful of milk. I use the word apparently because it's very easy to notice the kitten isn't sick, the way she/he drinks the milk with so much energy, almost attacking the spoon and by the way cats aren't so easy to deal with specially with a spoon.

George Albert Smith's "The Little Doctor and the Sick Kitten" works like a small magic trick. There's a problem to be solved (sick kitten), there's one solution (boy playing the doctor bringing the milk) and everyone gets happy and clapping at the ending. There isn't much to be said that this is one of cutest things ever filmed and more than 100 years later is still here for all of us to see it. Mention must be made about the quality of the film which is still impressive even for being from the early ages of film, the images are brilliantly presented, not grainy at all, you can see each scene with precision.

Well, I guess that's it. Now watch it. 10/10