"The Sunbeam" is a simple and saccharine short film from D.W. Griffith's Biograph oeuvre, but it's well constructed within its crowded space of a two-floor tenement. The crosscutting between tenants and the match-on-action between apartments and the hallway is exemplary for its era. Title cards are actually welcome, including a bit of puns, such as "thawing" being both metaphorical in the sense of character relations and literal as to dinner.
The story, on the other hand, involving a little girl who leaves her room to play and under the belief that her dead mother is sleeping seems jarring next to the pranks of a gang of youngsters, including stealing a "Scarlet Fever" poster from the police and placing it next to a room door--forcing a bachelor and spinster to create a family with the recent orphan while in quarantine. I would probably check to see if the child has any relatives first, but I guess that would require leaving the confined area of the tenement, which the picture never does.
An Aitor Gametxo re-edited this film and posted in on Vimeo as "Variation on 'the sunbeam'" in 2011. Besides the split-screen effect looking like something Brian de Palma might've done had he made silent films, this video does a nice job of demonstrating the craft of Griffith and company's work in editing and staging.
The story, on the other hand, involving a little girl who leaves her room to play and under the belief that her dead mother is sleeping seems jarring next to the pranks of a gang of youngsters, including stealing a "Scarlet Fever" poster from the police and placing it next to a room door--forcing a bachelor and spinster to create a family with the recent orphan while in quarantine. I would probably check to see if the child has any relatives first, but I guess that would require leaving the confined area of the tenement, which the picture never does.
An Aitor Gametxo re-edited this film and posted in on Vimeo as "Variation on 'the sunbeam'" in 2011. Besides the split-screen effect looking like something Brian de Palma might've done had he made silent films, this video does a nice job of demonstrating the craft of Griffith and company's work in editing and staging.