Les feuilles chéant

In 2012, 100 years after the release of this movie, a movie starring Eddie Murphy called "A Thousand Words" had roughly the same plot. In "A Thousand Words" Eddie Murphy's character believed that he would die when the last leaf fell from a tree in his backyard. The leaves only fell when Eddie spoke so he had to be more judicious with his words if he wanted to live.

In "Falling Leaves" Dr. Earl Headley (Mace Greenleaf) tells Winifred Thompson (Marian Swayne) that she will die of consumption by the time the last leaf falls (i.e. By winter's end). Consumption was the name of tuberculosis back in the days. Her little sister Trixie (Magda Foy), taking the statement quite literally, tried to tie the leaves to their branches to keep her poor big sister alive.

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One of the most celebrated of Alice Guy's Solax films, "Falling Leaves" is a remarkably moving and sweet short, based as it is in a child's naiveté in trying to save her older sister from dying from tuberculosis. The business of her tying falling leaves back to tree branches, to prevent the prediction she overhears from a doctor that her sister will be dead when the last leaf falls, also reminds me of another early film to feature moving foliage and a character called "baby," as the child here is nicknamed. That film, the Lumière brothers' "Le Repas de Bébé" (1895) is usually remarked upon for its windswept background as it is for being a prototypical home movie. Moving pictures in two senses of the words. "Falling Leaves" adds a third, metaphorical sense in its melodramatic appeal. Moreover, the baby here attempts to arrest that movement, the passage of space and time. Odd thing is, she succeeds. Although Hollywood wasn't the center of the filmmaking world yet, evidently Hollywood endings were already becoming a thing.

I've seen this one a couple times before, but especially reviewed it again now because it's also an early film to deal with medical care and a contagious disease. Besides D.W. Griffith's "A Country Doctor" (1909), I'm not aware of much earlier than this. Reviewing both back to back, a comparison is in some ways telling. Both are cleverly framed: Griffith's film cinematographically by bucolic panning shots and Guy's plot, reportedly, follows that of a popular song of the day, "The Consumptive Girl or Baby's Secret." Appropriately, then, the girl's illness in the film is announced by her piano playing being interrupted by a coughing fit. Both films feature a good amount of crosscutting, too. While Griffith's is more for excitement, Guy employs it for a bifurcated narrative that in the end will combine. Technically, there's also some nice tinting effects, including for day-for-night shooting, in the surviving prints of this one, and at least one shot features strong low-key lighting. We still get the tableau style of title cards announcing proceeding action, but the simplicity of the story and the complicating of the plot with the parallel narratives helps to overcome that.

Perhaps, most remarkable, however, is that Guy's film focuses on the domestic sphere for the affect of illness, as opposed to the professional priority of Griffith's gaze on the actions of the doctor. Guy wasn't only the first female filmmaker; she was a filmmaker who provided an entirely unique perspective--all the more valuable as it was amid a male-dominated profession. Although one of the most effective, "Falling Leaves" is hardly her only film to privilege the perspectives of women and children. Such a viewpoint entirely alters the trajectory of such a picture; while Griffith's is oriented towards action, Guy's sympathies are with the family's coping. The family's doctor is a minor character, and the other one is, too, for most of the scenes. Nature, though, remains a prominent feature in both, and the pretty landscapes are tied with movement as well as serving as stark contrast to the heinous diseases inside.

Falling Leaves (1912)

*** (out of 4)

Melodramatic but good film from Alice Guy-Blache about a young girl who overhears the family doctor saying that her older sister won't live by the time the last leaf falls off the tree. The sister is dying of tuberculosis so the young girl goes outside and starts to tie leaves back to the tree and by doing this she gets the attention of a doctor who knows a cure. FALLING LEAVES is exactly the type of film that D.W. Griffith had been making for about three years but Guy-Blache manages to bring her touch to the subject and while it's way too dramatic at times, the heart of the story is certainly brought to the screen with care. Again, if you're not used to movies from this era then it's best you don't start here but I thought for the most part the film's story was told with a certain loving care that makes it worth viewing. Guy-Blache manages to make the film move at a very good pace and there's no question that she knows how to build up some tender moments and especially the scene with the young girl trying to put leaves back on the trees. The cinematography is actually pretty good throughout with some nice shots and the new music score also benefits to the film quite well.

Alice Guy's US career produced relatively few really good films but Guy was a great searcher after ideas and would from time to time, as she had done in her French career, come up with a good one. It is excellent news for instance that her "race film" of 1912, A Fool and his Money has now been rediscoveerd and restored and let us hope that one day her In the Year 2000, a more sophisticated remake of her earlier Résultats du féminisme, will also be rediscovered. She has also a very good instinct for topical subjects. Her Making of an American Ciitizen, again 1912, if rather crudely presented, was a sharp-witted repsponse to the controversy over immigration tht preocupied the US in these years. Here similarly she has taken the subject of the "white plague", tuberculosis, a disease known thoughout history but considered in the nineteenth century to be the mal de siècle, and produced a typically modern account (cinema custiomarily allied itself with modernity in this way) that rejected the romantic fatalism of nineteenth-centiry accounts. It is clever idea to privilege her Frenchness - picked up by the Moving Picture World review - by a reference to the best known example, Murger's Scènes de la vie de Bohème, and, as it were, reverse the magnets. So it would be quite inappropriate for the girl to die in this film. While "the beautiful death" of Mimi is accepted as a fatality (an aspect even more strongly emphasised by the theatrical and operatic versions), here the doctor's fatalism is shown as being out of tune with the times when advances in medical understanding of tuberculosis and the establishment of specialised sanatoria were rendering it perfectly preventable and treatable (emphasised in a series of films of the subject made by Edison at this time for the in assoication with the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis). The "miracle cure" of Dr. Earle is a bit false and glib (again a rather typical crudity in Guy's deveopment of her ideas) and attracted criticism but unlike the Edison films (which were more or less public service films), this is intended more as a fable of outr time. No more Mimis. It also sows hw well Guy understood the optimistic US conviction about the value of progress and the "optional" nature of death.

Early cinema was male dominated, as it is now. There was one exception, however. Alice Guy-Blache, co-owner of Solax Studios and the first director to create a plot to a movie (1896--The Cabbage Fairy). In 1910, her and her husband, along with a third partner, formed the Solax film production studio in Ft. Lee, N. J. She was the primary director at the company.

Her work stood apart from her male directing colleagues in the industry for her sensitivity and compassion. In March 1912 "Falling Leaves," her look at tuberculosis is a tear jerker. A common theme as seen in the example in "Falling Leaves," Guy-Blache's films are replete with child heroes--after all, the doctor wouldn't have stopped at the house if the kid wasn't hanging leaves outside on the trees. Her first film for Solax was 1910's "A Child's Sacrifice." During her career Guy-Blache wrote, directed or produced over 1,000 films, from shorts to feature films. Her movie-making days ended in 1920 when she was only 41 years old. But she was still active in writing her autobiography in the late 1940's.

Her motto hanging on her wall at Ft. Lee, N. J. Solax Studio for all the actors to see was "Act Natural."