Given that no one has deigned to comment on this movie I feel compelled to since this film pioneer can't be overlooked any longer. Paul Nadar was a photographer, he specialized hinmself in famous people and his portrait of Sarah Bernhardt is one of his notorious works.
To start off, this is NOT a movie... It's 6 movies! put together. Since film techniques were yet to be developed, filmmakers would let the camera roll till the roll was over and suddenly stopped. This gives us, in this particular case, films that go slightly over one minute long. In 1950, once Nadar was dead, the French government purchased his material. His films ended up at the Cinémathèque française where they were restored by mythic Henry Langlois helped by his assistant Marie Epstein (Jean Epstein's sister). The films were edited together and released under the title Programme Nadar by 1970.
Supposedly, this material was filmed in 1896, but who knows for sure. Four of the filmed pieces consist of dances. Two of the dancers have been successfully identified as Carlotta Zambelli (ballet) and Loie Fuller -who performs a serpentine dance in this movie, pretty much like the ones filmed at the Edison studios-, as a matter of fact, the black walls in the back remind very much of Edison's Black Maria studio. The two last films share no relation with the others (all of them are hardly related to one another either way, as I said, we're talking about different films edited together). Well, the two we get to see in the end consist of crowded places. The camera is placed in a public square in one of them and in a nearby street, I believe, in the last one.
This movie can't get a fresh rating since it shouldn't even exist. It is purely Langlois' film obsession. Buy, analyzing them separately, we can conclude that Nadar did not evolve the medium. His films merely copy what others had made before. Anyway, we've got his point of view here.
Solomon Roth
