The Sunday Intertitle: Fighting Weight

78 KILO: MUCH TOO HEAVY FOR A JOCKEY. USE GYMNASTIC EXERCISES.

It’s Robinet again, or Nauke as the Dutch called him. Google Translate translates Nauke into English as “Nauke.” Good to know.

Being too heavy, our man takes part in various torturous exercises to lose weight. I can identify. But I do recommend the low-carb diet, even if you have to be careful not to collapse yourself by taking things too far. It’s not hard to stick to and the pounds or kilos just fall off. Since the only exercise I can abide is walking, the rest are too boring (the scenery stays the same) or too competitive (losing all the time is monotonous).

Wrestling: since Robinet, real name Marcel Perez, last scene last Sunday, from the knees down, in AMOR PEDESTRE, can be thrown through the air, landing flat on the ground, AND get up again, it seems unnecessary to jump-cut him into a floppy dummy so he can do it again. But I always enjoy a floppy dummy so I don’t mind. The figures below are the real Robinet on the left and the dummy on the right.

I don’t know if being flung through the air is a great way to lose weight. Limbs, possibly.

Running seems more like it. I don’t much like running, the scenery goes by too shakily to be appreciated. Robinet’s version, the silent movie kind, is faster, and more violent. It ends with him being thrown through the air again, this time by a karabinieri.

Robinet is a good, agile clown, but frenetic in the early-silent way, and the Italian way: more of a Benigni than a Toto.

At 3 minutes 48 this movie is a fine length. I strongly suspect it’s been whittled down from a more substantial one-reeler. The format looks to be home-cinema, 9.5mm maybe. The gag sequences either start in media res or end that way, suggesting the splicer has been deployed for more than the customary topping and tailing you’d expect in 1910.

Boxing seems like a good way to stay fit and die at the same time. It’s like contact jogging. The prancing is what’s healthy. The hitting, less so. Robinet keeps his shirt and tie on.

The closest I ever got to the ring was videoing amateur boxing for money when I was a student. What was most striking was the sound of trainers squeaking on the canvas, and the “Hss!” sound the fighters made each time they threw a punch. You don’t get that in the movies, and you don’t get it here.

The truncation — if that’s what it is — of the film works very well for the boxing bout, where Robinet-Nauke-Perez lunges at his opponent, flies from the ring into the audience, and the scene is over. I don’t imagine the intact version would be one the level of CITY LIGHTS, but I’m sure there would have been more of it.

There is less of Robinet — his regime has worked, and the only downside of his downsizing is that he’s now a physical wreck who has to be assisted onto the scales.

A comparison with Jerry Lewis is invited by the way he keeps staggering onto his knees as he walks, and then when he’s finally clad in jodhpurs and boots, he turns his toes in to create an amusing spasticity of gait.

Then he attempts to ride his horse by the neck, legs wrapped round its throat. He falls off a couple of times then the film just kinda stops. There’s apparently a DVD of ten Marcel Perez shorts, but I can’t find it. I would be potentially interested.

The Sunday Intertitle: Footsie Index

No intertitles in this unique 1914 short, PEDESTRIAN LOVE. A tale of a man on a make and a receptive maiden is told entirely with closeups of feet. In another film we’d call them inserts, but we can’t here because they’re all there is.

There IS one title of sorts, and I guess it IS an insert — a love letter.

Surprisingly, the film is part of a series built around leading man Marcel Perez, known at this time as Robinet (in other territories, Tweedledum of Nauke), and later as Tweedy. It’s surprising because he never appears except from the knees down, but he manages to give a richly characterful comic performance with just his lower extremities.

A few of Robinet’s short subjects for Ambrosio Films are available on YouTube, like this one, a nea-Bunuelian comedy of frustration. He died in 1929, a silent star to the end, though his short comedy output was varied with bigger films like THE DESTRUCTION OF CARTHAGE (DELENDA CARTHAGO!, 1914) and the title role in LE AVVENTURE STRAORDINARISSIME DI SATURNINO FARANDOLA (1913), which is fun.

The Sunday Intertitle: Extraordinary

THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF SATURNINO FARANDOLA (1915) has everything you count want from a serial-style adventure, and more, EXCEPT —

Babelfish choked on this one, but I think it’s something like “The white man saves you. Here’s your horse. Goodbye!”

The intertitles are unaccountably plain. All the more disappointing in an Italian silent, where usually the title cards display spectacular design flair. Here, the most interesting element is the number plate, which is useless to the audience but presumably helpful to the editor (who can’t be expected to actually read the damned script, obviously).

Apart from this disappointment, the movie, directed by and starring Marcel Perez, heaps largesse upon us — his hero is adopted in infancy by apes (men in costumes with very visible seams, surrounded by real Capuchin monkeys to make the illusion all the more transparent), then joins a gang of adventurers, leading to encounters with sea monsters, a balloon-based gun battle, and a very modish anti-lion costume —

The resemblance to Melies is incomplete, since Melies would have had more consistent props, sets and costumes, I feel, and Melies didn’t make features. At 57 minutes, LE AVVENTURE STRAORDINARISSIME flies past, the lack of close-ups and camera movement scarcely seeming to matter (like Feuillade, Perez contents himself with a slow, uncertain pan once every hour or so). The Tarzan backstory is accompanied by all manner of racist attitudes, including a novel moment when slumbering Chinese guards are disabled by having their pigtails knotted together. Other things you won’t see elsewhere: a score of prisoners are embedded in barrels with just their heads sticking out. Saturnino rolls them to the river and drags them to safety upstream, using a rope which each man grips in his teeth; soldiers squat on top of balloons, taking pot-shots at each other, while cannons are fired from the baskets — miniatures, backdrops and full-scale live action all captured in a  single pass through the camera. Somebody show Gilliam!