8 January, Paris: The Italian film version of The Lady of the Camellias, by Gustavo Serena and starring Francesca Bertini, is to be distributed in France. 22 January, Paris: Jacques Feyder, a young Belgian actor, has been taken on as a director by Léon Gaumont on the recommendation of Gaston Ravel. 18 February, France: Several business magazines have remarked on the number of foreign films invading the French market at a time when French production is suffering from a lack of work. 25 February, New York: The first cartoon in the "Krazy Kat" series, Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse Discuss the Letter G, is being shown. It was produced by Frank Moser from an adaptation of George Herriman's comic strip. 26 February, Los Angeles: Charlie Chaplin has signed a year's contract with the Mutual Film Corporation. He is to receive $10,000 a week plus the lump sum of $150,000 on signing. 12 March, New York: Release of The Habit of Happiness, directed by Allan Dwan and starring Douglas Fairbanks, an attractive newcomer to the movies. 27 March, Chicago: The young actress Gloria Swanson has married Wallace Beery, who is always cast in brutish roles due to his rough-hewn features. 27 March, Los Angeles: The Lone Star studios have been equipped by Mutual to make Chaplin films. 29 March, Paris: The committee formed to study the use of films for educational purposes has been appointed by decree. 31 March, England: The American firm Triangle has taken control of 882 movie theaters within the block booking system. 1 April, Rome: Actress Pina Menichelli is setting the screen ablaze in Giovanni Pastrone's Il Fuoco. 7 April, Paris: The French Union of Cinematographers has published its first official journal, L'Ecran. 13 April, New York: Today sees the release of a new William S. Hart film. Entitled The Aryan, it has been written by the Triangle Corporation's celebrated cowboy star. Steve Denton, better known to the public as Rio Jim, is a renegade who scorns law and morality until the day when he is redeemed by the love of a young woman, in the beautiful form of Bessie Love. The "good bad man" character is a role that Hart has turned into his own. Now in his fifties, Hart's image of a Man of the West was honed by 20 years of stage experience before entering films in 1914, at which time he began working for his friend Thomas H. Ince. Hart made an immediate impression in his first season of two-reelers and has since moved on to feature-length films that he directs himself. In 1915 he followed Ince to Triangle, where his popularity now rivals that of Broncho Billy Anderson. 17 April, New York: Thomas Ince has released his most ambitious picture to date. Produced by the Triangle Corporation and symbolically entiteld Civilization, it draws its inspiration from The Battle Cry of Peace, a J. Stuart Blackton film adapted from the Hudson Maxim book Defenseless America. The message of this ten-reel film is determinedly pacifist. A portrait of Woodrow Wilson, who has just been re-elected to the US presidency on a non-interventionist ticket, makes a significant appearance at the beginning of the film. In one of the most effective scenes in Civilization, the commander of one of the warring powers' submarines refuses to sink a passenger ship. Clearly, this is a barely-veiled allusion to last year's torpedoing of the line Lusitania in which 124 Americans died. The first half of the film is superbly controlled, depicting war sweeping over the landscape by using a succession of striking images: the silhouetted troops, ranks of charging cavalry, guns strewn over the hillside -- all seem to sink through a pall of smoke as though descending into a pit of hell. At the climax of the picture, Christ returns as a submarine engineer to preach peace at the head of an army of pacifist women. Equally memorable are the less rhetorical images, such as the old woman who stares in grief as the men are taken off to war, and a shepherd boy trying to release a dove. 22 April, Paris: Two young girls, who are appearing in court for attempted murder, have stated that their crime was inspired by a film. 13 May, Paris: The German-owned movie theater Palais Rochechouart has now reopened its doors under the management of Alphonse Frank. 15 May, New York: Screening of Charlie Chaplin's first film for Mutual, The Floorwalker with Edna Purviance and Eric Campbell. 17 May, Paris: With the appearance of Zigomar, Fantômas and the vampires, has the cinematograph become a school for crime? Several gangsters recently caught by the police have confessed that the latest episodes of Mysteries of New York had influenced them in their criminal activites. Brenier, the member of parliament for Isère, climbed onto the rostrum of the Chamber and demanded that the government prohibit the screening of "cinematographic performances which, in the guise of fantastic adventures, teach the most skillful means of killing and robbing." The Minister of the Interior, Louis Malvy, agreed and is currently in charge of setting up a special commission charged with the examination and control of films. Film censorship is not a new phenomenon. For quite some time, mayors and departmental police chiefs have made the decision, independently of Paris, to ban the showing of The Adventures of Bonnot or The Grasping Hand in their districts. From now on, the officials at the Place Beauvau will be responsible for the morality in films, even to the extent of cutting them. Many have given hypocritical reasons for their decisions. It is said that the chief commissioner requested the cutting of a suicide scene, declaring "No violent deaths must be shown while there is a war on." 18 May, Paris: Gaumont has released La Pied qui étreint (The Grasping Foot). The film is a parody of Les Vampires, directed by Jacques Feyder, which starred André Roanne, Georges Biscot and Musidora. 29 May, Paris: The National Cinema Board has met to decide on import duties for foreign films. French film producers want to be protected but need to avoid a heavy tax on the importation of raw film stock. 16 June, Paris: Gaumont has presented Têtes de femmes, femme de têtes from the director Jacques Feyder. The cast includes the young Françoise Rosay, Kitty Hott and André Roanne. 16 June, New York: The Jesse Lasky Feature Play Co. and Famous Players have merged to form Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. Adolph Zukor takes the post of president. 24 June, Washington, DC: Charles Chaplin's long legal battle against Essanay had ended in defeat. The case has gone all the way to the Supreme Court, which has ruled in Essanay's favor. The litigation was caused by a film entitled Charlie Chaplin's Burlesque on Carmen, a send-up of Cecil B. De Mille's Carmen, with Charlie capering around as "Darn Hosiery" and playing a realistic death scene with Edna Purviance before showing the audience how it was done with a prop dagger. After the comedian's departure to Mutual, Essanay decided to turn the squib into a four-reeler, inserting new scenes directed by Leo White and featuring Ben Turpin as well as salvaging material discarded by Chaplin. When the film was released in April, Chaplin immediately went to the courts to seek a remedy. In May his attorney Nathan Burkan appealed for an injunction to prevent Essanay from distributing the film, claiming that it was a fraud on the public and that Chaplin's rights as an author had been infringed. The application for an injunction was dismissed by Justice Hotchkiss of the New York State Supreme Court, and Essanay launched a counter-suit against Chaplin for an estimated $500,000 in lost profits on films that they claimed he still owed them. Now the US Supreme Court in Washington has upheld Hotchkiss' decision, and Chaplin has emerged from the experience a sadder but wiser man. In the future the comedian's contracts will stipulate that there will be no modification or mutilation of his movies after they have been made. 30 June, Paris: The tenth and final episode of The Vampires, entitled Nights of Blood and directed by Louis Feuillade, is now to be seen on our screens. Since the release of The Red Code, the third episode in the series, the whole of France has passionately followed the misdeeds of the splendid Irma Vep, a brown-eyed brunette whose name is an anagram of "Vampire." Musidora plays the evil-doing character, who is under the orders of the Grand Vampire, interpreted by Fernand Hermann. Dressed as a simple maid, shorthand typist or as a man, Musidora has, above all, stirred audiences in the part of the female cat burglar, because "her black tights cling to her ivory body," as the song goes. Musidora has been endowed with a provocative figure, which allows Irma Vep to glide swiftly through the shadows to steal and murder, the exact opposite of the sweet and docile Elaine Dodge of the Mysteries of New York serials. At the climax of the film, morality triumphs, because the vampire is killed by a revolver shot. Louis Feuillade has moderated the tone of the serial, primarily because the commissioner of police, Lépine, did not appreciate the failure of justice in the previous episodes. Musidora herself has been vigorously active in trying to persuade the authorities not to ban The Vampires. She has been successful. How can one possibly resist the charms of Irma Vep? 1 July, Paris: Georges-Michel Coissac has published an article in Ciné-Journal "moralizing about the cinema and calling for the banning of vulgarity on the screen." 21 July, Paris: Critics and public alike have been knocked sideways by the latest Cecil B. De Mille film, The Cheat. Some have vigorously condemned the now notorious scene in which the rich and evil Japanese, played by Sessue Hayakawa, brutally bares the shoulder of a young American woman, the fragile Fannie Ward, to brand her with a red-hot iron. And one either loves or hates the director's tricks with light and shadow, enhanced in tinted copies of the film. Among The Cheat's most fervent admirers is the writer Louis Delluc, who claims that the film is not only a revelation but also proof that cinema is an art form. 1 August, Atlantic City: Roly-poly comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle has just signed a truly unprecedented contract. Powerful producer Joseph M. Schenck has effectively offered Arbuckle a film company over which the comedian will maintain complete artistic control. Called The Comique Film Corporation, it will be financed and distributed by Paramount. As writer, director and star, Arbuckle will be earning $7,000 a week plus 25 percent of the profits. This deal will secure him a yearly income of over $1 million. Life is sweet for the Fat Man. After years in the wilderness he has at last been transformed into a big star. 5 August, Riverside, CA: A selected public was invited to the preview of Intolerance (originally entitled The Mother and the Law), directed by D. W. Griffith. The film opened to general audiences on 5 September.      The critical attacks on The Birth of a Nation had resolved Griffith to turn The Mother and the Law into an epic sermon, a mighty purge for hypocrisy through the ages, called Intolerance. The slums of today, Renaissance France, Belshazzar's Babylon, and the Crucifixion itself should all speak of man's inhumanity to man in the name of virtue. Hollywood was awed as Griffith flung up halls in which men looked like flies, walls on which an army could march. Extras were hired in regiments. Built under a shoud of secrecy, what had loomed over the bungalows of Sunset Boulevard was the palace of Belshazzar, King of Babylon, setting for the Feast of Belshazzar on the eve of Cyrus of Persia's conquest of the city. Griffith's opulent and untutored imagination festooned this vast set with Egyptian bas-reliefs and Hindu elephant gods as well as Babylonian bearded bulls. To take it all in, he sent G. W. Blitzer and his camera aloft in a captive balloon, slowly drawn back to earth in the first equivalent of the modern crane shot. Until Douglas Fairbanks' castle set for Robin Hood in 1922, it remained the largest backdrop for a movie scene, and neither has ever been topped.      When Griffith's backers faltered, he bought them out with long-term notes that he did not finish paying off until the early 20s. The picture reached 400 reels, with no end in sight, but Griffith went grimly on. "If I approach success in what I am trying to do in my coming picture," he said, "I expect an even greater persecution than that which met The Birth of a Nation."      In adding three more stories to that of The Mother and the Law to make up the film Intolerance, Griffith, as Variety said, departed "from all previous forms of legitimate or film construction..." He had made four-part films before. Now the attraction he felt for this form led him to attempt something entirely new. He told all four stories simultaneously, uniting them by the constantly repeated shot of Lillian Gish rocking a cradle, an image derived from Walt Whitman's "Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking." In Griffith's own words: "The stories begin like four currents looked at from a hilltop. At first they four currents flow apart, slowly and quietly. But as they flow, they grow nearer and nearer together, and faster and faster, until in the end, in the the last act, they mingle in one mighty river of expressed emotion."      As such, Intolerance is, in Terry Ramsaye's words, "the only film fugue," and as such it entirely failed of public favor. In spite of the splendor of its spectacle, in spite of its incredible cast -- among those who played roles were Constance Talmadge, Monte Blue, Bessie Love, Miriam Cooper, Ruth St. Denis, Elmo Lincoln, Colleen Moore, Carol Dempster and Douglas Fairbanks -- audiences were cold to it. Two years after its release, Griffith, realizing the inevitable, released the modern and Babylonian episodes as two separate films, but even their receipts did relatively little to relieve him of the burden of debt with which Intolerance had saddled him.      Many reasons have been advanced for the failure of this great and unique film. The most common and most probable is that audiences found it simply too overwhelming, that they could not follow, or become emotionally involved in, these stories that wove in and out of one another with such awesome speed. It has also been suggested that the pacifism that was a leading motif of Intolerance was hardly the note to strike in a year when America was preparing to enter World War I.      No one has ever imitated the formal idea on which Intolerance was based, but its spectacle was in Cecil B. De Mille's mind ever since, and but for it Eisenstein might never had made Potemkin, Chaplin The Gold Rush, or von Stroheim Greed. Equivocal, inconclusive, naïve, Intolerance still marks the artistic peak of the early silent film era. 11 August, Paris: Pathé is screeing the two first episodes of Louis Gasnier's new American serial, The Exploits of Elaine, once again starring Pearl White. A Pathé-Exchange production, it has been made as a follow-up to Mysteries of New York. 14 August, Stockholm: With the release of his latest film, Kärlek och journalistik (Love and Journalism), interpreted by Jenny Tschernichin-Larsson and Richard Lund, the prolific director Mauritz Stiller has created a new genre of film: domestic comedy. 5 September, Paris: Abel Gance has just completed The Right to Life, a psychological drama shot in nine days on a small budget for Film d'Art. Relations are tense between Gance and Louis Nalpas, the head of Film d'Art, who often refers to the young director's "disordered and odd" imagination. Nevertheless, Nalpas has faith in Gance: he has just signed a year's renewable contract with him. Gance is to provide him with 10 films for which the director will be paid 1,500 francs each. 15 August, Los Angeles: Creation of The Artcraft Pictures Corporation at Paramount. This new distribution company is to devote its energies to distributing Mary Pickford films. 11 September, Rome: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti has published a manifesto labeled The Futuristic Cinema. 14 September, Los Angeles: Samuel Goldwyn has resigned his position as administrative president of Famous Players-Lasky due to a series of disagreements with the new president Adolph Zukor. 15 September, Paris: André Antoine is filming the street scenes for Coupable (Guilty) in the place du Tertre in an attempt "to catch life in full flight." 30 September, Paris: Max Linder is leaving France and the exceptional state of affairs caused by the war. The star has just embarked on the liner Espagne for a long and daring crossing to the US. The journey is the result of his new contract that binds him for a year to Essanay, the famous Chicago film company. A few weeks ago, George K. Spoor was at Max's bedside in a Swiss military hospital. At that time, Max was suffering abysmally from pneumonia, which he had contracted two years previously during the Battle of the Marne. In addition, earlier in the war, Linder had been a victim of gas poisoning and suffered a serious breakdown. Spoor gave him the golden opportunity to replace Charles Chaplin who had left Essanay to go to Mutual. Once in America, the French comedian will earn $5,000 per week and should be able to direct 12 films. His health will benefit from the sea voyage, and he hopes to be able to shoot the first scenes of his new film, Max in America, on arrival. 16 October, New York: Australian-born swimming and diving champ Annette Kellermann (who was called "the world's most perfectly-formed woman" and billed as "the Diving Venus") has already gained attention for advocating the "scandalous" one-piece bathing suit. She causes a further stir when she is seen naked with her flowing hair under a waterfall in Herbert Brenon's Daughter of the Gods - becoming the first major female star to appear nude on screen. This controversial film, Kellermann's second feature, is also the most expensive film of the decade with a budget of $1 million. Kellermann's earlier films include Siren of the Sea and The Mermaid (both 1911), and her first feature, Neptune's Daughter (1914). 20 October, Prague: Lucerna has released A Little Heart of Gold, produced by the playwright and actor Antonin Fencl. 30 October, New York: There is a siren among the stars: Annette Kellerman, the fish-woman of A Daughter of the Gods, has met with unprecedented screen success. Directed by Herbert Brenon in Jamaica, the film features 10,000 extras, 2,000 horses and... 20 camels! Producer William Fox had to build a small town there to accomodate all those involved in this remarkable and daring spectacle. 31 October, Berlin: Gustav Streseman, a deputy, has asked for a parliamentary debate on the importation of foreign films. 12 November, New York: Selznick Pictures Corporation releases Herbert Brenon's 8-minute short, War Brides, starring Alla Nazimova. She plays a young factory worker whose husband is killed in the war and who shoots herself rather than allow her unborn child to be born into a warmongering society. Its release has been suppressed, because its message has been misunderstood. It is correctly anti-German, but it is also anti-war at a time when such a position is losing its authority and appeal. 30 November, Vienna: The pomp and circumstance surrounding the funeral of Emperor Franz Joseph, who died on 21 November in Schönbrunn Castle, has already been shown in the majority of movie theaters around Austria. It was Alexander Kollovrath and Sacha-Film that succeeded in filming the event. In the record time of three days, they made 255 copies, immediately distributing them all over the country. Sacha-Film was founded in 1910 by Count Alexander Kollovrath, the former parliamentarian. A big fan of cinema, Kollovrath is attached to the cinematographic archives of the War Ministry. His official duties have included facilitating the acquisition of material and film stock necessary for production. Sacha-Film is the first large production company in Austro-Hungary. There is also Lucerna, that presented A Little Heart of Gold (Zlate Sredeck) on 20 October, directed by playwright Antonin Fend and played by Antoine Nedosinska. 13 November, New York: Release of Behind the Screen. In this two-reeler for Mutual, Charlie Chaplin portrays a hired worker named David at a film studio. In the film's infamous 'gay' scene, he kisses a young girl (Edna Purviance) who has dressed in masculine clothing as a masquerading way to find work. This upsets his brutish and burly foreman Goliath (Eric Campbell) who believes they are homosexual and teases them mercilessly by acting 'prissy' to mock them. 4 December, Hollywood: Charlie Chaplin, happily, never fails to astonish us. His eighth film for Mutual, The Rink, is a madcap comedy set in a skating rink, around which Charlie glides with almost balletic ease. Embroiled in Chaplin's antics are the delightful Edna Purviance and the hulking Eric Campbell, instantly recognizable by his beetling eyebrows, bristling beard and forbidding moustache. 9 December, USA: Charlie Chaplin has won his case to prevent publication of an unauthorized biography, Charlie Chaplin's Own Story. He instigated proceedings in October. 16 December, Paris: The press has had a preview of the first episodes of Louis Feuillade's Judex, with Musidora, Yvette Andréyor and René Cresté. 16 December, Los Angeles: Samuel Goldfish has formed a new production company, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, in association with Edgar and Arch Selwyn, the Broadway producers. 31 December, Johannesburg: Harold Shaw is making The Voortrekkers: Winning a Continent for African Film Productions. The film is a historical fresco recording the history of South Africa's "Afrikaaners," as the settlers of Dutch descent became known.