Max Takes a Bath
[1] This approximately seven minute long film was released in France and marks the beginnings of many trends that would become increasingly popular for cinema, such as the optical effect of the vertical vantage point.
Additionally, Linder was the first actor whose name could be used for advertisements which helped launch the success of what would become one of the most popular film genres of all time; the comedy.
Max is in a doctor's office where he gets a prescription to take a cold bath every day for one month in order to treat his nervous twitching.
During this sequence, viewers watch the famous scene of Max scaling a building still under the tub and the authorities subsequently following.
In this film, Lucien Nonguet uses two optical effects one being a vertical vantage point for the scenes where the bathtub and people are moving up and down a wall, and the other being a close-up of Max's face.
The vertical vantage point was first used in the film L’Homme-Mouche or The Human Fly[2] where Georges Méliès has an acrobat dancing and doing tricks on the wall.
Ultimately, this led to the film's success because by 1911, the annual cinema attendance in Paris, France reached more than three million.
In this shot, the mise en scène includes a lot of texture on the walls, trinkets on the desk, and an unusual pattern on the chair.
After passing an iron fence and brick wall, Max is seen scaling the side of a building to reach the roof in order to successfully escape the police.
In this time period, silent films were a unique art form of storytelling that was encapsulated by the elaborate form of silent film acting that required actors to convey exaggerated physical gestures and to convey complex emotions and narratives without the usage of dialogue.
With limited intertitles, it was important for actors to portray the wide range of emotions through excessive facial expressions and body language.
In this film, the actor does small excessive body movement of shrugging his shoulders for the narrative that he has a nervous trait that he is attempting to cure.
These are prime examples of a methodical way of acting that enabled the viewer to see what range of emotions the character is experiencing and interpret the context to what they might be thinking.
Even with consistent head turning and hand gestures, these were all imperative techniques that were executed to get the context of the scene across to the audience.
