The birth of silent comedy: Patineur Grotesque

The Lumières wow the world

Patineur Grotesque had its origins in an invention manufactured by Auguste and Louis Lumière: the Cinématographe, which could both record and project film. The Lumière brothers used it to make brief silent films and show them to audiences; these displays were the first cinemas. When they proved a hit in France the brothers toured them internationally, and sent representatives to far-flung cities to wow their populations and capture scenes from abroad.

One of those representatives was Marius Sestier, who travelled to Australia in 1896 and shot films in Melbourne and Sydney. The Lumières’ early films, each just under a minute long, showed slices of life (workers pouring out from their factory, Auguste and his wife feeding their baby, children playing in the sea) as well capturing comedic snippets such as a trick rider pretending to fall off his horse again and again. Sestier focused on similar subjects. He shot 15 films of the Melbourne Cup, including one showing the jockeys weighing in before the race. In Sydney, he shot passengers disembarking from the Manly Ferry – and a ‘burlesque rollerskater’ in Prince Alfred Park. These rollerskaters often performed busker-style for casual audiences, such as the queue outside a circus. In Sestier’s film, you can see the crowd assembling as they realise a performance is going on (and small children being hurried away as the mooning begins).

Where was the skater?

In 2005 an intern from the NFSA’s Research Program looking at the records of the Centre National de la Cinematographie (CNC) noticed that Patineur Grotesque existed but hadn’t been collected by us; it was supplied upon request by CNC in 2007.

The location of the film was unknown, but curator Sally Jackson did a public call-out on Facebook for help identifying it, which unearthed a photograph that pinpointed Prince Alfred Park. This in turn helped her narrow down the date range, and to propose that Patineur Grotesque is Australia’s earliest surviving film.

Although it had been screened in France in 1897, we can find no record of it being screened in Australia until 2010, when we showed it in Canberra’s Arc Cinema as part of a Sestier tribute attended by two of his great-grandchildren.

The film historian Georges Sadoul credits Patineur Grotesque as a forerunner of Charlie Chaplin. If only the unknown skater in a Sydney park could have known he was making cinema history – in more ways than one.