From Screen to Stage and Back: Max Linder and the ‘Cinematographic Sketch’,1908

Abstract

Between 1908 and 1913, as Max Linder emerged as a major international film star for Pathé, he made a specialty of combining film projections with live theatre performances. In these ‘cinematographic sketches’, action that began onscreen appeared to continue onstage. Using considerable primary-source evidence drawn from French, British, and American film and theatre trade periodicals, the essay demonstrates the liminality of Linder’s multimedia stardom during cinema’s ‘transitional period’ by demonstrating how frequently he went from screen to stage and back.

Keywords

Theatre film Max Linder Pathé multimedia stardom

Max Linder in the flesh is becoming as popular as in the pictures.

–John Cher, 1913

In 1907, Pathé was the largest film producer in the world, with an output in that year alone of 351 different film titles coming out of its Vincennes and Montreuil studios in suburban Paris.¹ As Pathé spearheaded the emerging film industry’s shift from selling to renting, its films were increasingly distributed and exhibited by a growing network of subsidiaries in France and around the world.² On 4 July 1908, Pathé employees and their families gathered at the Cirque d’Hiver, which had recently become Pathé’s flagship film theatre, for a celebration.³ The featured entertainment began with a series of theatrical and vocal performers, but culminated with an unusual appearance by Pathé’s comedy film star Max Linder, ‘who began a scene on the screen, only to finish it … on the stage’, a novel ‘combination of photography and reality that produced an enormous sensation’.⁴

Mr. Max Linder, the brilliant young comedian of the Variétés, along with his Pathé studio colleagues, achieved an enormous success with a new idea that is bound to have many applications. The first part took place on the screen: called to the Cirque [d’Hiver] by telephone in the middle of his lunch, he rushed off, and after bumping into things along the way, he arrived at the show and entered the Cirque [d’Hiver] in a pitiful state, his clothes in tatters. Greeted by gales of laughter, he appeared on the stage for the second part, which was the true continuation of the chase in the film.⁵

Thus, the action appeared to begin onscreen and continued onstage. With this surprising segue from screen to stage, a pre-recorded sequence presumably filmed in the city streets appeared to be adjacent and continuous with the real space inside the theatre. Linder then recited a monologue, delivering an auditory performance that supplemented the silent moving pictures just screened.

Linder’s combination of performance and projection were hardly unprecedented, as the assiduous research of Gwendolyn Waltz has amply demonstrated.⁶ Waltz points out that these ‘stage-and-screen hybrids’ most commonly involved what she terms an ‘alternation format’, with action alternating between screen and stage.⁷ Waltz notes that short films were often projected onstage as part of theatrical performances for ‘racing or chase scenes’, while some performers ‘capitalized on the alternation format for strikingly original entrances onto the stage’ like Linder’s, which she discusses.⁸ Frank Bren calls these stage-and-screen combinations ‘cinema-theatre’, chronicling Linder’s ‘cinema-theatre’ during the early 1910s in the context of his international film stardom.⁹ Jörg Schweinitz considers Linder’s screen-to-stage transfers in a 1912 Berlin appearance, treating them as a form of ‘materialization’ which he likewise links to the early star system.¹⁰ Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk usefully ask what Linder’s combinations of theatre and film tell us about the larger historical relationship between stage and screen.¹¹

This essay follows Kessler and Lenk by using Linder’s multimedia performances from 1908 to 1913 as a way of emphasising just how much he straddled the presumably clear-cut distinction between the media of theatre and film. Film historians Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs describe a historical trajectory from ‘theatre to cinema’, but Linder’s ‘cinema-theatre’ quite literally enacts movement in the opposite direction, from film to theatre.¹² While some theatres were indeed converted into cinemas, in 1912, the Cirque d’Hiver was renovated precisely to allow more space for theatrical performances:

In future variety turns are to form a part of the programme at the Cinema Pathé Cirque d’Hiver. For this purpose a large stage is being erected … . The work has in no way affected the performances, which have been given continuously since the opening nearly a year ago.¹³

Five months later, the same trade paper reported, ‘Having lost many artistes through the advent of the moving-picture camera, the stage is now recruiting its stars from the cinema world’.¹⁴

This movement from cinema to theatre was itself partly consistent with Linder’s career at this time, which did not ‘progress’ uni-directionally from theatre to cinema, but instead moved back and forth, across and between, film and theatre. Following David Mayer, who questions the nearly ubiquitous historical ‘narrative of early separation and distinct boundaries between stage and film’, Linder’s example clearly demonstrates what Mayer describes as the ‘ways theatre and film met, interacted, overlapped, co-existed’.¹⁵ Linder’s ‘materializations’ (as Schweinitz terms them) may demonstrate the novelty and public appeal of live personal appearances by early film stars, but, given the frequency of Linder’s stage performances during this period, his combinations of cinema and theatre also indicate the extent to which his emerging stardom was more liminal than most film historians would have us believe. Moreover, his live appearances embedded cinematic forms like the chase and cross cutting (which also appeared in Pathé films of the time) within the theatrical mise en scène of French music hall.

Staging Cinema

The chase was a staple genre of early cinema as well as a specialty of Pathé. Cinematically, the chase provided a dynamic logic for filmmakers to link together more or less adjacent spaces into more or less continuous temporal sequences through editing. Tom Gunning explains, ‘Every chase film exploited the permeable barriers of the frame and created, through editing, a synthetic space in which exits from one shot or location were immediately sutured to an entrance in another shot or location’.¹⁶ As Gunning elaborates, ‘These films traced a clear line of diegetic action, creating a fully legible course for the spectator to negotiate as action moved from locale to locale and from shot to shot’.¹⁷ Linder’s screen-to-stage transitions pushed the spatial logic of the cinematic chase even further to create a paradoxically synthetic space that seemingly conjoined his exit from off of the screen with his entrance onto the stage.

For theatre producer and filmmaker Victorin Jasset, whose 1911 series of articles for the trade periodical Ciné-Journal constitutes one of the first published efforts to trace the history of international film style, ‘the chase … reigned supreme’ during the years 1904–05.¹⁸ But, according to film historian Georges Sadoul, ‘Linder’s comedy seldom involved chases’.¹⁹ Unlike Linder’s film comedies, however, the film of Linder projected at the Cirque d’Hiver seems to have been similar to Pathé chase films shot outdoors like Cheval Emballé (1908).²⁰ Additionally, inasmuch as a telephone call is the inciting incident, the film of Linder projected at the Cirque d’Hiver bears some resemblance to Pathé’s Médecin du Château (1908), one of several Pathé films made between 1906 and 1908 in which cross cutting was used to show both sides of a telephone call.²¹ Unlike the split-screen effects used to show telephone conversations in other films of the period, both Pathé’s Terrible Angoisse (1906) and Médor au Téléphone (1907) employ cross cutting to depict the individuals talking on the telephone.²² The film of Linder rushing from his meal to the theatre screened onstage bridged the two physically separate spaces on the respective ends of a telephone conversation, but also appeared to more impossibly bridge cinematic space and real space when Linder appeared onstage.

Liminal Stardom

Linder’s career was at a turning point in July 1908: he was quite literally between cinema and theatre. He had been regularly appearing in Pathé comedy films since 1905 – one of his most recent was Mes Voisins Font Danser (1908), released in June 1908, just a few weeks prior to Linder’s screen–stage appearance at the Cirque d’Hiver.²³ At the same time, Linder was also acting in the theatrical comedy Le Roi at the Théâtre des Variétés, although he appeared in only one scene and spoke but seven lines.²⁴ He was by no means a theatre star, nor could he yet be considered a film star. In 1908, Linder acted in plays and in films. Richard deCordova’s analysis of the emergence of the star system in the United States helps specify the liminal status of Linder’s incipient stardom. According to deCordova, when theatrical performers appeared in films, ‘the spectator navigated an intertextual path that moved back from the film directly to a discourse produced by the institution of the theater’, whereas ‘the identity of the picture personality was produced and maintained largely by the cinema itself’.²⁵

As Linder emerged as perhaps the most internationally popular of these new ‘picture personalities’, his associations with theatre nevertheless lingered. Unlike any of the picture personalities analysed by deCordova, whose ‘fame stemmed from his or her appearance in films, not from previous theater work’, Linder remained closely tied to theatre because he continued to perform onstage concurrently with performing in films.²⁶ In 1909, for example, the trade journal Variety could still report Linder’s appearance in the theatrical revue Et aïe donc? at La Cigale without making any mention at all of his work in films (although several Pathé films were reviewed on the very same page).²⁷ ‘In late summer, 1909’, however, Richard Abel writes,

Linder began appearing in a regular series of Pathé comedies, with his name soon included in each film advertisement … . Although initially he still assumed a different character from film to film, certain patterns began to emerge in the choice of situations as well as in the structuring and articulation of gags.²⁸

From August to December 1909, Linder’s fame as a film performer grew with a series of film comedies that included Amoureux de la Femme à Barbe (1909), Le Petit Jeune Homme (1909), Un Mariage Américain (1909), Les Surprises de l’Amour (1909), Petite Rosse (1909), À Qui Mon Cœur (1909), Le Voleur Mondain (1909), En Bombe (1909), La Vengeance du Bottier (1909) and Avant et … Après (1909) – all produced during this five-month period.²⁹ At the same time, Linder also performed in the revue Et aïe donc?, which had opened at La Cigale on 29 October 1909, and continued into the following year.³⁰

Unlike Charlie Chaplin, whose theatrical career ended definitively when he began making films, Linder continued to perform in the theatre for many years after he started making films for Pathé in 1905.³¹ Yet, many accounts of Linder treat his theatrical work simply as a prelude to his work in cinema. In one of the few accounts devoted to Linder’s theatrical performances, René Jeanne places special emphasis on Linder’s uses of film on the stage, which Jeanne argues should merit a place in theatre history.³² After 1908, these typically took the form of a live transition from screen to stage. Linder made a specialty of entering the stage after a film showing him traveling to the theatre was screened, with the action in the film appearing to continue onstage. In many cases, Linder then delivered a dramatic monologue.

Cinematographic Sketches

Commentators used different terms to describe the way Linder ‘began a scene on the screen, only to finish it … on the stage’, as Comœdia put it in 1908.³³ John Cher, the continental correspondent for the British film industry trade journal The Bioscope, who reported regularly on Pathé and Linder, initially called Linder’s combinations of film and live performance a ‘cinematographic sketch’, or a ‘“sketch film” or play, in which cinematograph and stage scenes are intermingled’.³⁴ Later, Cher reversed the latter terms, describing Linder’s intermingling of film and theatre as a ‘film sketch’, while praising how ‘moving pictures and a stage spectacle have been coupled together with complete success’.³⁵ In 1912, another Pathé comedian, André Deed, ‘known to moving picture enthusiasts all over the world’, was ‘appearing, not on the screen, but on the stage’, Cher reported, giving Parisian audiences a rare ‘opportunity … of seeing him in the flesh’.³⁶ In a 1912 letter to Georges Dureau, editor of Ciné-Journal, Deed gave credit to Linder for having originated onstage combinations of cinema and live performance in a show at the Olympia.³⁷ Similarly unaware of Linder’s earlier performance for Pathé employees at the Cirque d’Hiver, The Bioscope reported (in French) in 1913, ‘It is remarkable to see how popular the “film-sketch” … has become in music-hall programs. We believe this novelty owes its existence to Max Linder, who first performed it in an Olympia theater revue four years ago’.³⁸

At the Olympia in 1910, Linder was part of La Grande Revue, where he was featured in the eighth tableau (of twenty-six) entitled ‘Cocher! à l’Olympia’, which included a film credited to Pathé.³⁹ Le Matin applauded this part of the revue, ‘in which the cinematographic characters suddenly come to life and become the living actors on the stage’, as the highlight of a superb show.⁴⁰ As he had done earlier, Linder’s entrance to the stage was preceded by a short film produced by Pathé, Vite à l’Olympia, ‘a cinematic chase played by the cinema king himself, Mr. Max Linder’, in which he rushed through the streets of Paris to arrive at the theatre on time.⁴¹ As the Film Index reported in a profile of Linder,

In this play Max is seen both on the screen and on the stage. The audience has become impatient on account of the non-arrival of their favorite as it is long past the time for the play to begin, when suddenly their attention is attracted by seeing the one they are waiting for appear on the screen, hurrying from his house in a great state of excitement, fearing he will be late for the theatre.

Fate seems against him, however, for the more he hurries the greater the difficulties that come in his way to prevent him from getting to his destination. Finally the lights go up and then, to the surprise of all, there is Max in the flesh, tattered and torn after his adventureous [sic] trip on which the audience has accompanied him. He greets them and tries to explain, but they let him see that they know all about it and, of course, have nothing but sympathy for him. So the play goes on.⁴²

According to the Film Index, Linder’s ‘contract with Pathe Freres [sic] allows him to appear at the Theatre des Varietes [sic] in Paris and also at the Olympia’, describing his number for the Olympia’s Grande Revue as ‘a very unusual kind of a piece’.⁴³

After La Grande Revue closed during the summer of 1910, the Olympia began rehearsing a new revue that opened in October.⁴⁴ In Vive Paris! Linder was once again featured in the eighth tableau (of thirty-five) entitled ‘Une Nuit à Montmartre’.⁴⁵ Once again, Linder’s performance combined cinema with live performance. Variety reported: ‘Max Linder, of Pathe [sic] fame, does a boxing match on skates with Tom Pender, in a Montmartre cafe. They lead up to this with a moving picture showing Linder at a match, where he acquires a mania to spar. The skit is a number on the Jeffries-Johnson fight’.⁴⁶ Films of boxer Jack Johnson fighting James Jeffries for the heavyweight championship on 4 July 1910 were slow to reach Paris. Gaumont was even able to distribute a parody, Combat entre Blanc et Noir, before Johnson-Jeffries Fight (1910) could be widely seen in France.⁴⁷ Linder’s timely screen and stage parody involving boxing on roller skates did not last for long in the Olympia revue, since he was hospitalised with appendicitis on 27 November 1910.⁴⁸

A year-and-a-half later, on 6 June 1912, Linder performed a similar burlesque boxing match on roller skates as part of a ‘kinéma-sketch’ he staged at the Brasserie-Cinéma Rochechouart, which seated an audience of more than one thousand.⁴⁹ The burlesque prizefight pitted Linder in the ring against Nick Winter, the fictional lead character in Pathé’s series of parodic detective films (played by Georges Vinter) – the two had just appeared in the film Max Linder contre Nick Winter, which had just been released two weeks earlier.⁵⁰ According to Abel, ‘During the summer of 1912, surviving titles suggest that the Max series played off a variety of earlier or concurrent films’.⁵¹ Max Linder contre Nick Winter brought together two of Pathé’s most popular character-based series while blurring the distinction between fictional screen characters and the actors who played them. In the film, Abel notes, ‘the comic easily outwit[s] Pathé’s premiere detective’.⁵² But, it is unclear if the film shown onstage for Linder’s cinematographic sketch at the Brasserie-Cinéma Rochechouart was excerpted from Max Linder contre Nick Winter or from another recent Linder film, or whether it was shot for use in this or one of Linder’s earlier film sketches. John Cher reported in The Bioscope:

I spent a most enjoyable evening last Thursday at the Brasserie Rochechquart [sic] Cinema. The occasion was the special performance given for the benefit of the Courrier’s fund for military aviation, and the star turn was a boxing match on roller skates between Max Linder and Nick Winter, the famous film actors. It was more than a boxing match, it was a cinematograph sketch, invented by Max Linder. Amidst the applause of the large and expectant audience, the referee entered the ring—which had been erected in front of the screen—and, after introducing the detective, announced the conditions of the fight. Some minutes elapsed before anything else happened; meanwhile Nick Winter—his coolness for once having deserted him—began to show signs of nervousness, while the referee, seconds and audience anxiously awaited the arrival of Max. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’, said the referee, ‘I am very sorry but’—then some one suggested the telephone—which happened to be in the ring. Immediately Max Linder was rung up. Out went the lights and the picture of the missing combatant answering the phone was shown on the screen. The house shook with laughter. Then the film showed us Max preparing to come, meeting with many accidents on the way with disastrous results to his clothes, until at last in a fainting condition he arrived at his goal. The lights went up and down the centre of the hall came our hero, just as we had seen him on the screen. Eventually the fight commenced—it was ludicrously funny and ended by the second being knocked out by the boxers, both considering themselves as winners. I do not think I have ever heard such genuine applause as greeted Max Linder’s sketch—it was a terrific success. There is no doubt that the appearance of cinema actors in connection with a film adds enormously to the public interest in the pictures and those who act them. The ‘cinematographic sketch’ has a great future.⁵³

During the early 1910s, Max Linder was the primary proponent of the ‘great future’ Cher predicted for the cinematographic sketch. According to Bren, ‘In September 1912, Max, accompanied by the famous actor/dancer Stacia Napierkowska, played to great acclaim at stage venues in Barcelona, Madrid, and Lisbon—again, in shows that combined “live” and filmed scenes’.⁵⁴ Later in 1912 and in 1913, in Berlin and in St. Petersburg, respectively, Linder performed a variation of his cinematographic sketch in which he was shown arriving by balloon onscreen before falling down onto the stage in a hail of debris, thus appearing to crash through the roof of the theatre.⁵⁵

In ‘Flesh and Blood’ and/or ‘Cinemality’

By 1913, Linder was the most successful film star in the entire world, earning an unprecedented annual salary of one million francs from Pathé.⁵⁶ A result of Linder’s frequent cinematographic sketches, however, was that in 1913 (at least in Paris), Cher wrote, ‘Max Linder in the flesh is becoming as popular as in the pictures’.⁵⁷ This created some confusion among theatre patrons as to whether or not Linder would be physically present in the theatre or only onscreen. Cher was himself subject to this confusion, announcing one week that Linder was to open a new season at the Olympia performing ‘in ‘flesh and blood’ upon the stage’ after two of his films were screened.⁵⁸ But the Olympia’s ‘Max Linder season’ during July–August 1913 involved no live performances by Linder, only screenings of Linder’s films, turning the music hall into a cinema for the summer. Thus, a week after heralding Linder’s return to the Paris stage, Cher had to retract this notice, and demurred that only ‘Max Linder’s “cinemality” – if I may coin the word – is at Olympia, and as large as life on the big screen’, blaming the theatre’s advertising for the misunderstanding.⁵⁹ On 11 October 1913, however, Linder, ‘the cinema king’ was onstage at the Olympia ‘in the flesh’ for the opening night of the new revue Palais de la Danse.⁶⁰

In the interim, shortly after the ‘Max Linder season’ ended, but before the opening of Palais de la Danse, Max Linder appeared in ‘flesh and blood’ at the Paris Alhambra as part of C’est le Tango qui est la Cause de Ça, in which Linder (as he had done previously) came crashing down onto the stage after a film screening showed him arriving by balloon.⁶¹ Billboard reported:

The Alhambra has reopened for its regular season. Max Linder is the headliner. He retains much of the act which has already helped him to so many laufs [sic], tho [sic] there are modifications to suit the Paris public. The turn is opened by the stage manager, who appeared before the curtain to present the excuses of the management for the non-appearance of Linder. He had gone out to try a new automobile, the manager said, and had not shown up since.

Immediately a motion picture is thrown on the curtain. It shows Linder furiously trying to make an automobile go, but which balks his every effort. At last, however, he gets off, but only to have other humorous adventures galore. Finally he is seen climbing into a balloon in which he soars over Paris until he hovers just over the Alhambra Theater. Here he throws out a rope and begins to climb down from the basket; then, out of the flies, dangling on a rope, down upon the stage comes Linder, bedraggled but on the job.

Very much on the job he is. For now the real skit commences. Linder plays the part of a pedicurist who is trying to hide his identity from the husband of the woman he is making love to. Hilda May plays the part of the wife and M. Gerby, the husband, and the scene where the latter has to undergo the torture of being pedicured by Linder is a scream.⁶²

Linder reprised elements of this theatrical skit in the Pathé film Max Pédicure (1914), which was released at the end of April 1914, just after the revue that Linder co-authored with Max Aghion for the Gaîté-Rochechouart closed.⁶³ Still, Linder continued to move back and forth between theatre and cinema, lending his name to the Pathé-Journal cinema in Paris (formerly the Kosmorama), which was renamed the Ciné Max Linder early in 1914.⁶⁴

1913, in Conclusion

For film historians like David Bordwell, the year 1913, which saw the release of longer and more technically accomplished feature films like Germinal (1913), Der Student von Prag (1913), Ingeborg Holm (1913) and Traffic in Souls (1913), among others, is ‘the annus mirabulus’ of international silent film history.⁶⁵ Yet, the rise of the feature film was complemented by the persistence of shorter films, many of which were comedies.⁶⁶ Linder made twelve short comedies for Pathé in 1913, while also appearing in cinematographic sketches in theatres in several different European countries. Programmes of short films (like those of Max Linder), Georges Dureau argued in Ciné-Journal in 1913, constituted ‘the true nature of cinema’.⁶⁷ Just as long feature films of the early 1910s borrowed source material from the theatre, so too the ‘the true nature of cinema’ often encompassed theatre programmes that would have also included one or more live acts.

Late in 1913, a newspaper reporter asked Linder about the ‘question of the picture theater versus the theater’, to which Linder replied that the ‘competition between the two entertainments is growing greater’, opining, ‘I think the picture theater of tomorrow … will be a mixture of cinematograph and theater’.⁶⁸ Some (including Linder himself) have characterised the relationship between theatre and film in this period as a ‘competition’ or a ‘combat’.⁶⁹ But, Linder’s cinematographic sketches offered a ‘mixture’ of the two media that was complementary rather than oppositional.⁷⁰ Linder’s cinematographic sketches demonstrate that, during the period from 1908 to 1913, cinema and theatre were not necessarily engaged in a ‘battle’ or a ‘fight’ – not even one waged on roller skates.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Vincent Longo, Ryan Schaller, Stéphane Tralongo, Laurent Guido, Richard Abel, Peggy Bennett and Karen Chalmer for their generous assistance with research for this article. All translations from French are mine.

ORCID iD

Matthew Solomon

Notes

Matthew Solomon is an associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (University of Illinois Press), winner of the 2011 Kraszna-Krausz award for best moving image book, and of a monograph on Chaplin’s The Gold Rush for the BFI Film Classics series. He is the editor of Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon (SUNY Press), and is currently completing a book on Méliès and material culture prospectively titled ‘Méliès Boots’.

From Screen to Stage and Back: Max Linder and the ‘Cinematographic Sketch’,1908–1913