Every December I reread Erich Kästner’s Das fliegende Klassenzimmer (The Flying Classroom). It’s a Christmas novel set in a boarding school (an Internat in German). It has some of the elements that later showed up in Harry Potter: feuding groups of students, strong friendships, wise faculty members and some who are less wise, and efforts by students to overcome their limitations. Boarding school stories have been popular for a long time.
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It’s that time of year, so I went looking for Christmas-themed silent movies. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was adapted multiple times. The earliest known version was directed by Walter R. Booth and released in 1901. It survives only in a five-minute fragment. A 1908 treatment is considered lost. That leaves Edison’s 1910 film as the earliest treatment that survives in a reasonably complete form. Marc McDermott is an enjoyable Scrooge, and Charles Ogle, better known as the first actor to portray Frankenstein’s monster on the screen, is Bob Cratchit. This is the film I’ve combined with my accompaniment on YouTube.
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I’ve put up a seasonal silent film with my accompaniment: Le Rêve de Noël, a short 1900 film from Georges Méliès. Just a bit of holiday fun with assorted Christmas scenes. The viewing speed is slowed down a bit from the Internet Archive version which I downloaded; even so, it’s barely over five minutes with start and end titles.
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