1901-1910

Mark David Welsh wrote:
A young girl living in Salem attracts the romantic attentions of both a frontiersman and one of the village elders. When she rejects the latter, he attempts to force her to accept him by accusing her of witchcraft…Read More »

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Anna, a young girl from a poor but honest household, is offered an attractive position as a lady’s companion in London. Her childhood friend is worried, but she goes anyway. To Anna’s horror, the “distinguished house” turns out to be a brothel and her first customer soon awaits her. She manages to smuggle a letter for her parents out of the country, but what she doesn’t know is that her childhood friend Georg is already on his way to save her. Will Anna ever escape the white slave trade?Read More »

A dour ten minutes during which a young woman takes the job a family man. Mostly of interest as a “glimpse of views on women’s emancipation and employment at a time when they were invading the office world as stenographers and typists” (Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi).Read More »

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Baby’s Toilet is a 1905 British short film directed by Cecil Hepworth. The film features Hepworth’s baby daughter Elizabeth being bathed and dressed by her nurse, and was categorised by Hepworth as a “Domestic Scene”. In the film Hepworth combines a series of shots to produce a narrative depicting the bathing process from beginning to end. He would later acknowledge the influence of the pioneering work of the Lumière brothers on this and other similar films he produced in the 1900s. The print of Baby’s Toilet survives, and Patrick Russell of the British Film Institute observes: “Long after Elizabeth Hepworth’s own death, the affecting innocence of infancy remains a basic human theme. Baby’s Toilet has lost none of its charm.Read More »

A wealthy, callous moneylender finds a terrifying way to learn about money’s limitations.Read More »

On a warm and sunny summer’s day, a mother and father take their young daughter Dollie on a riverside outing. A gypsy basket peddler happens along, and is angered when the mother refuses to buy his wares. He attacks mother and daughter but is driven off by the father. Later the gypsy sneaks back and kidnaps the girl. A rescue party is organized but the gypsy conceals the child in a 30 gallon barrel which he precariously places on the tail of the wagon. He and his gypsy-wife make their getaway by fording the river with the wagon. The barrel, with Dollie still inside, breaks free, tumbling into into the river; it starts floating toward the peril of a nearby waterfall…
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In this story set at a seaside fishing village and inspired by a Charles Kingsley poem, a young couple’s happy life is turned about by an accident. The husband, although saved from drowning, loses his memory. A child is on the way, and soon a daughter is born to his wife. We watch the passage of time, as his daughter matures and his wife ages. The daughter becomes a lovely young woman, herself ready for marriage. One day on the beach, the familiarity of the sea and the surroundings triggers a return of her father’s memory, and we are reminded that although people age and change, the sea and the ways of the fisherfolk remain eternal.Read More »

An unscrupulous and greedy capitalist speculator decides to corner the wheat market for his own profit, establishing complete control over the markets.Read More »

A king exacts vengeance upon his faithless mistress and her lover.Read More »