The Unknown Adaptation of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: Amateur Theatre, Film Avant-garde, and the Magic Lantern

Abstract

The Unknown Adaptation of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: Amateur Theatre, Film Avant-garde, and the Magic Lantern Anna Kovalova (bio) In December 1932, the Rochester Community Players (RCP), one of the oldest continuously operated amateur theatre organizations in America, premiered A Christmas Carol, an adaptation of the famous story by Charles Dickens. This innovative production included scenes “on screen”: Scrooge’s visions of the past were presented as films projected during the performance. These films were made with the involvement of Dr. James Sibley Watson, Jr. and Melville Webber, key figures in the history of American avant-garde cinema. Adaptations of Charles Dickens’s works have become a wide field of study; there are many excellent books and articles on how Dickens has been adapted in theatre and in cinema.1 Some of these works are focused on A Christmas Carol in particular, but none seems to mention the Rochester version. In Dickens Dramatized, by H. Philip Bolton, the fundamental reference for the dramatic versions of Dickens’s works, there is a list of 357 adaptations of A Christmas Carol staged in 1844–1984 (Bolton 237–67), but the RCP adaptation is not included in this list. The same can be said about the list of “Notable Film, Television, and Radio Adaptations of A Christmas Carol” compiled by Richard Kelly (233–37), as well as the more detailed filmography in Fred Guida’s monograph, A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations (171–232). One might expect that, thanks to the involvement of Watson and Webber, the RCP production would interest historians of the American film avant-garde rather than Dickens scholars. However, although the revolutionary films by Watson and Webber, The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933), have become classics of world avant-garde film, and have [End Page 208] received considerable attention from critics and scholars,2 not much has been written about the directors’ biographies and their other work in cinema.3 The only widely available source on the films of Sibley Watson that mentions the RCP Christmas Carol is the scrapbook compiled by his mother, Emily Sibley Watson, which contains clippings from newspapers and magazines as well as documents related to various productions (“Scrapbook”). The research in the present article on the RCP Christmas Carol is based on newspapers and archival collections in Rochester, and the principal source is the reel of the film preserved at the George Eastman Museum. Unfortunately, this print does not contain any sound records. Thanks to newspapers, we know that the film scenes from the RCP Christmas Carol were talkies: The visions of old Scrooge appear before one’s eyes–scenes of his childhood, his school days and events in his career which haunt his memory as they are recalled in the ghostly visitations. This illusion, which gives realism to the scenes, could not have been done a few years ago, before moving and sound pictures were made practical. (“Christmas Carol to Begin”)4 By investigating this film, I will try to trace its place both in the history of Dickens adaptations and in the American film avant-garde. It was an experimental adaptation that looked both forwards and to the past, a theatre production and a talking film combining the latest technical innovations with traces of archaic forms of media, such as magic lantern projections. The RCP Christmas Carol: Its Creators and History The Rochester Community Players were a part of the Little Theatre Movement in the United States. Since the 19th century, more and more small theatres involving amateurs had opened up, this tendency becoming even stronger in the 1910s and 1920s, when motion pictures began to take a considerable amount of the “big” theatres’ audience.5 “Little theatres” opened up all around the country, and many books were published for people who wished to take part in the movement one way or another.6 Clarence [End Page 209] Stratton’s guide, Producing in Little Theatres, first published in 1921, was in its sixth edition by 1930. In Rochester, NY, there had been various attempts to set up an amateur theatre. In the 1910s there were The Little Theatre of Rochester, founded...