Before I begin writing about Dream of a Rarebit Fiend(1906) for the Avant-Garde Blog-A-Thon, I have to admit that I'm eating a Welsh Rarebit right now (purely for the sake of an accurate study, of course). It's tasty! For those who have not had the pleasure of this tasty toast treat I’ll include a recipe. Grill some yourself and then read on (and let's hope that the reported nightmare-inducing power of the infamous dish is just a myth).
If avant-garde cinema owes any of its origin to the work of Edwin Stanton Porter the debt is for Porter's Dream of a Rarebit Fiend. And if Porter's experimental film succesfully abandons a realistic representation of the world as we know it then it owes a similar debt to the work of the brilliant illustrator and animator who inspired it, Winsor McCay.
McCay’s "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend" was a popular comic strip that ran in the Evening Telegram in the years 1904-1914. The strip was a cautionary statement against overindulgence targeted at adults. In the comic, the titular protagonist experiences a severe nightmare that reveals shortcomings in his social behavior and the consequences of such behavior. The character then wakes up, blames the bad dream on a surfeit of Welsh Rarebit and, shaken by the experience, swears off the stuff. The dreamworld setting of the strip allows McCay the freedom to bend the laws of the physical universe, twisting streets into tunnels, turning beds into walking beasts, stretching pipes into spaghetti, and morphing people into giants; nothing is safe from the artist's penchant for transfomation. In the 1920s McCay created four hand-drawn animated films based on the strip, but Edwin S. Porter, working for the Edison Manufacturing Co., made a much earlier live-action adaptation of it.
Porter is best remembered for his narrative innovations in The Life of an American Fireman (1903) and The Great Train Robbery (1903). He may have bitten off more than he could chew in the effort to translate McCay’s unstable comic strip dreamworld into a live-action feature; nevertheless, we have to respect the attempt. While McCay’s universe of the surreal was limited only by his imagination and skill as an artist, Porter had to overcome the technical limitations of an artform still in its infancy. In the end, Porter’s experimentation with the camera tricks invented by Georges Melies and others produced a film that etched out possibilities for cinema to reject depictions of the stable, known world and embrace unpredictability.
Film historian Kevin Brownlow reveals on the Unseen Cinema DVD that Porter’s movie was inspired by Reve a la Lune (Pathe, 1905), and, in turn, Dream's unusual subject matter (the world of dreams) and creative use of stop-motion, multiple exposure, swish-pans, matte shots, and other effects invited other filmmakers down the road of experimentation ( Victor Fleming’s When the Clouds Roll By (1919), for example). The thread of avant-garde cinema, then, stretches back to Porter and his contemporaries.
So, what occurs in the Rarebit Fiend’s dream? While the Edison Military Band plays the march-like tune “The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend,” Porter opens with a medium shot of the Rarebit Fiend voraciously feasting on the titular dish at a restaurant, and washing it down with plenty of (in fact he’s two-fisting) Bass ale. There are seven or eight empty bottles on the table and, still unsatisfied, he opens yet another.
Now reeling in drunkenness, the Fiend staggers outside and holds onto a streetlamp for dear life while the world around him spins out of control. A dizzying multiple-exposure combined with swish-pan (see photo left) makes us feels as disoriented as he must.
Somehow the drunkard manages to get home, climb into bed and fall into a deep sleep. What follows is the dream of a rarebit fiend, a nightmare trip through an overindulged mind.
A weakness in Porter’s film becomes painfully obvious during the ending. As mentioned above, upon waking the victim of a traumatic rarebit nightmare laments the culinary overindulgence of the previous evening. Unfortunately, Porter’s picture is bereft of both dialogue (silent era, of course) and intertitles. Thus the punchline of McCay’s strip, that droll expression of regret, is never expressed. As a result, the film finds no resolution; we’re left wondering if the fiend has learned a lesson or no. However, a satisfying narrative is less essential here than in Porter’s other work because Dream of a Rarebit Fiend is more about visual experimentation than storytelling.
Edwin S. Porter gets credit for helping to develop narrative cinema, but he deserves a nod for pioneering avant-garde techniques as well. Dream of a Rarebit Fiend provided other filmmakers with an inspiring glimpse at the expanding potential of cinema. Experimental filmmaking did not begin with Porter’s effects movie, but it did get an early influential push in the right direction.
Now, go toast some rarebit and read more about the experiments of the avant-garde at the Avant-Garde Blog-A-Thon. Careful with that ale, Eugene.