Underplayed Gems

A Lightning Sketch (1896)

A Lightning Sketch poster
Directed by
Georges Méliès
Genre
documentary film, silent film
Country
France
Elsewhere
IMDb
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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How it feels

This is a series of four short silent films from 1896. Each one shows an artist quickly drawing a caricature of a political figure. The films are lost but described as playful demonstrations of speed and skill.

fastplayfulnostalgicsimplehistoricalcharminglighthearted

What happens

A Lightning Sketch (French: Dessinateur) was a series of four 1896 French short silent films directed by Georges Méliès and released by his Star Film Company. Each film showed an artist—very probably Méliès himself—drawing a caricature of a notable political figure in less than a minute. Three similar films were also made at about the same time, in July 1896, by the Anglo-American filmmaker J. Stuart Blackton, as a series called Blackton Sketches; Blackton would later make another film in the same vein, The Enchanted Drawing (1900). Méliès returned to sketching on film in his 1903 short The Untamable Whiskers, in which the process of drawing comic faces on a blackboard was undercranked so as to seem to occur with great speed. Numerous political caricatures by Méliès, presumably similar to those made in the A Lightning Sketch films, survive in the collection of the Centre national du cinéma. All four films in the A Lightning Sketch series are currently presumed lost. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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