All praise due to the Eye Institute which is increasingly restoring and making available a wide range of rather different early US shorts and most particularly filling gaps in out knowledge of the work of the Vitagraph Company.
Because the Vitagraph's own film-store was destroyed in a disastrous fire, there had been a notable lack of material available for judging their output. But Vitagraph ws the best organised, the most prolific and the most popular US film-producer of the time and it is not surprising that European archives contain a good selection of their films.
In their absence, a myth has grown up that US film-making was in some way dominated at this period by the work of D. W. Griffith at Biograph but there is not a scrap of truth in this. The later importance that Griffith's films would assume for critics (who saw in them - in many ways rightly - the foundation, for better and for worse, for the later US style of film - was basically read back, quite unhistorically, into the earlier period.
But in the early 1910's there is no doubt that it was the Vitagraph style that was more admired, certainly outside the US - we have the testimony of both Jasset at Éclair and Feuillade at Gaumont to this effect - and, as more Vitagraph films become available, we can begin to see why.
Most Vitagraph films, it has to be said, are not desperately exciting but they show a consistent attention to composition and fluid screen-movement (what came to be known as mise en scène) which remains singularly lacking in the work of Griffith (who compensates by the use of heavier and heavier editing).
The other thing that impressed both Jssset and Feuillade about Vitagrph films was their naturalness (a quality very important to European film-nakers at the period). This is in part a function of the mise en scène, but it is also a function of the content (ordinary people in ordinary situations) and of the acting. Pickford, Elmer Booth and later the Gish sisters are rightly praised for bringing a degree of naturalness to Biograph films (despite generally melodramatic material) but John Bunny's complete ease in front of the camera is in another league and was undoubtedly the key to the popularity enjoyed by the Bunnyfinches. Finch, who is really the comedian of th team, is allowed a certain more licence but even she turns in natural, easy performances.
An indication of the real-life quality of the comedy is its use of double-take. Farcical comedies involving cross-dressing were common enough and Finch is a superb male impersonator. But of course the absurdity of most such farces lies in the fact that the imposture is not immediately seen through (as it would be in real life). Here, despite her convincing male appearance, Bunny sees through the impersonation immediately (as he would) and knows perfectly well that it is his wife; in fact he spotted it as quickly as I did as a viewer (even with privileged information from the earlier scene). So he is able to turn the tables on his jealous wife by arranging for his colleagues to dress up as supposedly "loose women" (also very well done). It remains only a mild and simple domestic comedy but the skill and style with which it is executed are nonetheless impressive.
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