TRICK FILMS
THE old saying is that figures do not lie; but a modern one is that they can be made to. Just so the trick film places before one’s very eyes what to one’s inner consciousness is impossible. Two favorite devices of the trickster are brought into play in a recent film which shows a cleverly produced romance woven about such an absurdity as the painting of a landscape by the switching of a cow’s tail. The film tells the story of a ne’er-do-well, in love, pretending to study art. The father frowns on the match, but promises his favor if the son will produce an example of his skill. In desperation the brush and palette are taken to a field, and while the lovers are despairing, a friendly cow approaches the easel. The switching begins at once, and a change in the canvas is seen with every movement until a creditable painting appears. What has appeared astonishing would have attracted less attention had the audience seen that the pictures showing the restless cow were taken at intervals, between which, while the camera was stopped, a real artist worked on the picture, and stepped to one side when the camera was put into action.
The work of the trickster is shown to advantage in reversing a film depicting a building operation. When run backward, a brand-new structure is seen to be pulled to pieces, and its various members hauled away in wagons running backward.
One operator, who had shown boys diving from a high spring-board, has related how, by reversing the film, he let his audience see the boys come out of the water feet foremost, rise through the air the same way, and by a graceful turn land on their feet on the spring-board. Another has told how, by the same reverse motion, firemen, who a moment before had rescued occupants from a burning building, were seen to carry their victims back into the flames. We may perhaps look for some of these enterprising tricksters to illustrate the possibility of that expression of impossibility, “the unscrambling of eggs,” or for one of them, with rare presence of mind, to catch on his lens an accident shattering a number of valuable cut-glass pieces, and then to convert a loss into profit by exhibiting the film reversed, and showing with wonderful effectiveness a mass of broken glass ascend through space and form itself on the table into the perfect originals.