Appointment by Telephone (1902) User Reviews

Learning to use film to tell a funny story

[wmorrow59 · 6/10 · 29 May 2002]

This very brief film, which consists of only three shots, could hardly be simpler. In the first scene, a man in an office uses his phone to make an appointment. Having done so, he takes his hat and jacket and exits. Next, he is seen on a public street, before a restaurant, waiting to meet someone. (And I suspect that the camera was hidden, for the passersby seem quite unselfconscious, and no one reacts to the camera.) A pretty young woman arrives. She and the gentleman greet each other happily, and enter the restaurant. In the third scene, a waiter seats the couple by a window, through which we can see passersby on the sidewalk outside, where the man and woman just met. Seated, they lean in together intimately and chat. Our eyes are drawn to the window by the arrival of another woman, who sees the couple and appears upset. She storms into the restaurant. The man reacts with horror when he sees her, then drops to his knees and pleads forgiveness as his companion cowers in fear. The angry woman produces a riding crop and begins flogging the man, as the waiter tries to intervene. The End.

And that's it. It may not sound all that hilarious, and yet I'll bet when this film was first shown, it was greeted with raucous laughter. Bear in mind, this was still very early in cinema history. The director, Edwin S. Porter, was at this point in the vanguard of those filmmakers who were teaching themselves the rudiments of storytelling through the arrangement of brief scenes. It was all new to the audiences, too. So while those early film-goers watched Appointment by Telephone they had to make certain connections: 1) the man is making an appointment, 2) he's meeting a woman, 3) the woman is not his wife, 4) the angry woman IS his wife, and 5) his wife already suspected something was going on, for she arrived already armed with a riding crop. And it's all topped off with a good old-fashioned beating, sure to get laughs.

These very early films may look simplistic and crude today, but they should be regarded as experiments in an entirely new form of storytelling. And the next time you go to a current release, especially a comedy, you may well find these 'crude' elements being recycled in newly digitized formats, superficially updated with color and Dolby sound.

The Fade

[boblipton · 5/10 · 18 July 2020]

A businessman leaves the leave to go to a lunchtime assignation.

Here's Edwin S. Porter learning to tell a story on film, and a humorous story at that. True, the humor is sadistic and fallen a but out of favor,and the camera technique isn't used that way any more. However, when you're setting out to build a film grammar, you have to experiment, and when you experiment, sometimes the results are not what you hoped they would be.

To be a trifle less obscure, when the young man leaves the office to go to the restaurant, there is a fade from the office to the street outside the restaurant. Nowadays, there would be a cut. Heck, there would be a cut to the restaurant's interior.

So the technique did not survive. That doesn't make the attempt any less valid.

Linking Scenes

[Cineanalyst · 1 February 2010]

"Appointment by Telephone" is a simple early comic sketch by Edwin S. Porter (director of "The Great Train Robbery" and America's most important filmmaker from before D.W. Griffith). It consists of three shots and is a good example of the progress Porter was making in linking scenes together, as film-making gradually evolved beyond the format of a single shot-scene as a complete film, to the establishment of the story film. Often, a lecturer would describe and narrate a film to audiences, which would aid their initiation to and understanding of these more complex narratives.

The first scene shows a man inside an office; he makes an appointment by telephone and then leaves the room for his date. By his exiting of the room, an intelligible continuity is established between the first shot and the second shot. In the second scene, the man is seen arriving outside a restaurant. The transition between shots two and three also establishes good continuity and is even somewhat of a reverse angle shot. It's the interior view of the restaurant, as the man talks to his date. The comedy comes when his wife arrives and breaks up the date. Creatively, the wife is first seen in the background, through a window. She delivers a punitive, comedic ending to the events, which seems to have been a common finale to many early films, beginning with the Lumière film "The Sprayer Sprayed" (L'arroseur arose) (1895). From here, Porter made more ambitious pictures, such as "Jack and the Beanstalk" (1902), "The Life of an American Fireman" and "The Great Train Robbery" (both 1903).

According to Charles Musser ("Before the Nickelodeon"), this film was a remake of a two-scene Edison subject with the same title from 1896.