Silent movies - Princess Nicotine or The Smoke Fairy

I have another really short film for you today. It's a little weird but fun - "Princess Nicotine or The Smoke Fairy" from 1909 (I do not endorse smoking with this post, just watching silent films).

In the early days of film people very obviously liked to play around with the new medium - just think of the Méliès films I have already talked about - and this short is no exception.
We have a runtime of a little more than five minutes, so you can imagine there's not much of a plot.

A man falls asleep next to his smoking table - I call it that because it holds several smoking utensils. Those were the days when you needed a pipe, cigarettes, and cigars!
The cigar box holds a surprise, though. Two tiny fairies emerge, ready for some mischief.
The older fairy takes the tobacco out of the pipe and helps the younger one to climb in.

The man wakes up again and tries to light his pipe, but it doesn't work, so he taps it on the table and the little fairy comes back out. He notices the fairies hiding in the cigar box, so he opens it takes out a flower which is blowing smoke at him, it's our little fairy!
The man starts blowing smoke at her and threatening her with a match, she reacts by showing him her bottom.

Then she builds up a stack of matches and sets it on fire. The man uses seltzer water to put out the fire first and then spritzing the fairy, but in the end he spritzes himself.

Today a lot of people probably think of all fairies like a kind of Disney Tinkerbell, but in the old days fairies and elves were not regarded as kind and cute.
Fairies can be mischievous, mean, or downright dangerous.
They kidnap children and leave changelings behind instead (of course today we know that this was one way to explain if children were "different" in any way), but they also lure adults into their world from which they are not able to return or a long time has gone by in the real world once they do return.
Compared to that, our little fairies are still pretty harmless although this one went a bit overboard with her revenge plan.

Hidden wires, giant props, stop motion, double exposures, mirrors, and smoke - there are a lot of tricks in this short film.
It didn't fail to impress.
"Scientific American" published an article with the title "Some Tricks of the Moving Picture Maker" about it, and in his 1912 book "Moving Pictures, How They Are Made and Worked", Frederick Talbot called it "one of the finest trick films ever made in the United States".

Fun to watch!


Sources:

Fritzi Kramer: Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy (1909). A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, April 25, 2017