Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906)

Let's be realistic.

How sad is this?

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

35 years before Dumbo showed what happens when you drink too much - hint, pink elephants appear and do some crazy s*** - there was this little 7 minute short, done only several years into when motion pictures where even a thing in the world. The premise is simple: a guy is eating and drinking his fill, and when I say drinking I mean the booze sort. When he stumbles out of the restaurant everything is topsy-turvy, literally. He can't stand straight and puts himself up against a pole, but the camera does an effect - a few, actually - to simulate like a pendulum the world swinging back and forth, and then there is a rear-screen or double-processing of the film so that there's another dimension behind our protagonist.He goes home to try and sleep it off, but this is where his troubles get worse in dream-time. I have to wonder if a lot of the early pioneering filmmakers saw this (it was co-directed by one of them, the Great Train Robbery's Edwin S Porter), since the idea of going up into the air in dreams - and in a bed, no less, which I seem to recall being in a number of animated/live-action kids movies over the years - and it's innovative. It's dazzling to see a man like this in a bed going up into the air, and it's terrifying too; there's a moment where the bed spins around over and over as if it won't ever stop (and one knows logically the person isn't in the bed, but the magic trick part of this is different).Apparently it was a big "hit" for whatever that means for 1906 with a whopping 192 copies being circulated. But no wonder; there wasn't really anything like this before, albeit it's of all things a *comic strip movie* (take THAT Marvel!) and how the directors put their subject through the surreal wringer is extraordinary. Is it all perfect, no, but for the period it caught my attention and brought me on a roller-coaster ride, in a manner of speaking. As far as nickelodeon attractions go, this is as good as you can get, and there's a moral to if it one thinks about, you know, drinking till you can't drink anymore is such a good idea.

In one respect, it's funny how people complain that nearly all commercial film has to offer these days is a never-ending range of special effects, rather than focus on characterization in order to move a story forward. I won't exactly defy this opinion, but I find it interesting because one may say that's pretty much how narrative cinema began its course, attracting audiences with its ability to go beyond physical laws and still let the special effects remain a mystery. Surely the earliest films of a Méliès or a Porter could not offer much depth in terms of characterization, which was one reason why they could never, according to most at the time of their making, be considered a threat to the art of live theater. Even so, these films were still bound to fascinate as their fantastic visual extensions seemed to require no compromises.Initially based on a comic strip by Winsor McCay and featuring vaudevillian Jack Brawn, THE DREAM OF A RAREBIT FIEND may not strike one as Edwin S. Porter's most outstanding achievement. He had behind him THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, which for its time was remarkably complex in structure and photography, so by comparison, the nightmares of a man-about-town who has allowed himself too much food and drink in one evening appears rather anchored in the vaudeville-tradition, less uniquely suited for the possibilities of film. At least it's easy to think in that direction at first. However, Porter does not disappoint; through inventive, unpredictable use of the camera, he did in 1906 make a strong case as to just why film deserved to be estimated as a medium on its own terms, rather than being compared to the theater stage. Certainly the feeling of intimacy provided by live actors performing on a real stage cannot be obtained with film, but Porter's recognition of film's advantages to the theater stage is one of the things which make his films so enjoyable to this day, THE DREAM OF A RAREBIT FIEND being no exception. Plotwise it may be rather ordinary, but it's what Porter does with this much-used topic that is the point. The clever effects have a close to dazzling effect at times, and it's not hard to see why it has later gained a reputation as a "surreal" work. That Porter, like Méliès, chose to explore the technical aspects of film- making in the earliest days, rather than consider more advanced methods of telling a story, may simply have been because even they were unable to foresee the full potential of the new medium; but seen in retrospect, to let technique come before dramaturgy was in fact a necessity. Every creative medium is a handcraft in essence, and the rules must be settled before they can be questioned.

This an inventive little number from Edwin S. Porter, film pioneer and director of the groundbreaking The Great Train Robbery who, after 15 or so years in the business, just seemed to fade away. This adaptation of a Winsor Mckay cartoon is wildly inventive for its time as it follows a gluttonous drunk home from a night on the town and eavesdrops on his dreams. Porter captures the giddy drunkenness of our hero by superimposing his antics over a speeded up panning shot and it's a technique that works incredibly well. He also shows us tiny little imps standing on the headboard of the poor guy's head and jabbing him with their pitchforks before the bed turns into a bucking bronco and flies out of the bedroom window to embark on a flight over the city. This is good stuff.

This movie uses the basics of movie making to their maximum and that's why its just as good today.