Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906)

Strong and Moving!

People are voting emotionally.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Because the medium of film and just film-making in general was still something obviously mostly new in 1906, there were less rules to go by, which allowed the movie to be very creative and also innovative of its own. This is why these old movies from the earliest days of cinema are often such an interesting watch.And this movie is truly being a creative and innovative one. Basically every sequences in this movie uses an unique set-up, that also use some great innovative movie techniques in them, since the entire movie is basically being a dream-like hallucinative trip.The main concept got based on an early newspaper comic strip, so with some imagination this movie is being one of the very first comic book adaptation, if not the first. Later on some more movies based on this comic would appear, with as a difference that those got animated and were something that the cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay himself was involved with as well.It's a movie that is being played out as a comedy. It's not the sort of comedy that will make you laugh but it's more the sort of short movie that amuses you throughout, though I'm still sure it had its audience laughing, back in 1906.An amusing early, experimental, short, from the Edison studios.8/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

This an inventive little number from Edwin S. Porter, film pioneer and director of the groundbreaking The Great Train Robbery who, after 15 or so years in the business, just seemed to fade away. This adaptation of a Winsor Mckay cartoon is wildly inventive for its time as it follows a gluttonous drunk home from a night on the town and eavesdrops on his dreams. Porter captures the giddy drunkenness of our hero by superimposing his antics over a speeded up panning shot and it's a technique that works incredibly well. He also shows us tiny little imps standing on the headboard of the poor guy's head and jabbing him with their pitchforks before the bed turns into a bucking bronco and flies out of the bedroom window to embark on a flight over the city. This is good stuff.

Placed under the "American Surrealism" genre, apparently, this film is still a fun and very quirky look into the effects of binge drinking.It's rather absurd and silly by today's standards but the silliness lends itself to a sort of contemporary audacity not really seen in very much cinema anymore. Multiple exposures are the special effects trick of this film as the fiend goes through many harrowing experiences, my favorites including his flying over the city and the little demons pounding on his head.It never ceases to amaze me how fast cinema developed from boring and cumbersome shots of factories and people moving to narratives and special effects. Whether this film is any "good" by the standards of then or now doesn't interest me anymore. It's fun and has an air of historicalness to it that makes it worth the time.--PolarisDiB

This movie uses the basics of movie making to their maximum and that's why its just as good today.