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Bout-de-Zan Vole Un Éléphant (Tiny Tim And The Adventures Of His Elephant)

Director: Louis Feuillade
Year: 1913
Runtime: 0:09
Source: Youtube

This one's a trifle, but it has charm.  A tiny short with no dialogue, it follows the young boy Bout-de-Zan as he steals a small elephant from the circus, and then gets into a few harmless, slapstick-filled mishaps with it.  It's too short for any coherent plot or resolution, and I suppose that's not the point anyway.  The elephant's cute, and it's a charming and harmless bit of children's entertainment, but on a personal note, it's hard to overcome the melancholy I feel when looking at circus animals.

There's not much else to report here, but a tiny bit of research uncovers that this was a part of a series of Feuillade shorts starring the young urchin Bout-de-Zan.  (Although his means are unclear: he looks like Chaplin's Tramp, but it does appear that he lives in a nice home with patient, well-to-do parents.)  The Bout-de-Zan series succeeds an earlier series starring a similar character Bébé Apache.  These serials combined contains a stunning 150 shorts directed by Feuillade in five years.  I have to recognize that film has a long history predating the turn of the century, and that by the time the list begins, this was a booming international industry with many different audiences being served.  Even 1000 films is only enough to get an incomplete story of that industry.


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