User Reviews

Duel au pistolet (1896)

Gabriel Veyre directed this film, which has two men facing one another with pistols pointed. We see a group of people watching and then they fire with one man falling dead. There has been quite a bit of decade on whether or not this duel was staged or if it was something that really happened. Obviously a real death being filmed is something that would be highly debated today. Personally speaking, I'm going to guess that this here was just staged and especially since when the film starts the men already have their weapons drawn and pointed at each other. I'm no expert on duels but wasn't it common for them to pace and then turn? Either way,t his here is quite interesting to watch.

A dramatization or not? That is the fundamental question that anyone would ask after see this short movie of 25 seconds, one of the first produced by Veyre at Mexico, at least if she or he see it only one time. It isn't a futile matter ask that since is a human life in question. In the case of affirmative answer, and is very probably that it is would be the correct answer for many reasons, like the existence of a contemporary gender itself very popular in explore dramatic deaths in movies as The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scotland or Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auborn Prison, is a more realist death than usually. In the case of a negative answer, there would be one of the first registers of a human death before the camera lens. Edison only would register a real death – and of one elephant! – seven years after. Believing in the dramatic reincarnation of a truly event option and like Veyre is almost exclusively know to film "portraits of reality" in Lumière style, and he was cinematographer for them, that movie should be considered like his L'Arrouser Arosé? Certainly that isn't the case once the pretensions of show it like a real event are completely strange to L'Arrouser and more closely related with reconstitution from historical events as Spanish-American War produced few years after.