One Girl Swinging (1897) User Reviews

Three Girls

[boblipton · 5/10 · 9 June 2015]

A girl sits on a swing on a stage. Two other girls push her back and forth and the audience can see her petticoats in this short.

This was originally offered as a mutoscope -- a peep-show in which a series of cards were cranked, typically in a penny arcade. It is a simple and primitive film from 1897, reissued five years later and preserved at the Library of Congress in a paper print. In those days, films were not copyrighted, so paper copies were printed in a book and those were copyrighted.

This one is clearly intended as a subject of titillation, offering a glimpse of the subject's undies. Anything more would have been in defiance of public morality.

Having a swinging time 1897 style

[AlsExGal · 6/10 · 18 December 2020]

Only a few seconds long, there is a swing on a stage - you can't see from where it is mounted. One girl is on the swing and two other girls take turns pushing her in the swing. The stage appears to be painted to make it look like a natural setting - maybe out in a forest. This is when films were just images of real life - actualities they called them. This one has the probable added value of showing the petticoats of the girl as she swings toward the viewer, which was quite risque for the time. Normally, women would not be wearing this many petticoats, but in this situation it would have been considered indecent not to be wearing this many.

This can be easily viewed on youtube where you have the added entertainment value of reading comments arguing as to whether it was better to be alive in 1897 or now. I think it is odd to think that these young girls could have died before the end of WWII and still had pretty long lives, at least in reference to the time that they lived.

looking up girl's skirts

[kekseksa · 1 January 2020]

The reviewer is right to be a shade baffled. There is only one girl on the swing and the film's title in the AM&B Catalogue (from 1898) was One Girl Swinging. There are stills in existence of two films where this is very clearly identified as One Girl Swinging although it may also have been known as Three Jolly Girls and the Fun They Had with the Old Swing, which is on IMDB as a separate entry but is a ghost entry. Two Girls Swinging, the other film for which stills exist, had what looks like two little girls on the swing being pushed presumably by their mother. One or other but most probably Both films seem to have been recorded together for copyright purposes as Girls Swinging which is where Niver and Killiam took it from when they transferred the film from paper print in the fifties.

There is of course a mildly voyeuristic element as there was with a great many Mutoscope films at this time (girls struggling on a sofa, girls exercising in the morning etc etc) . A famous example that places such films in a long ad enduring tradition is the "Marilyn Monroe" film wit the skirt blowing up. This is known from a version by Edwin Porter and George Fleming for Edison (What Happened on Twenty-third Street 1903) but Mutoscope had been there first. They made the film A Windy Corner in 1898 and I suspect that A Breezy Day on a Man-o'-War was more of the same. One of my favourite examples of this sort of voyeuristic camera is in a film by a very great film-maker, Jean Vigo. In his 1930 A propos de Nice there is quite an extended sequence where the camera tries to look up the skirts of some girls dancing above. I am not certain what the verdict is but we are in the same general area here as Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Plus ça change.....

Just one girl, not two

[Tornado_Sam · 29 May 2017]

This print is featured as an unadvertised bonus to Kino's magnificent cinema collection "The Movies Begin: A Treasury of Early Cinema" in the second volume, namely "The European Pioneers." The reason they call this an unadvertised bonus is because the print survives in a most faded and blurred condition, thus it is below Kino's standard quality.

In this very short short we see a girl being pushed on a swing on a stage by these other two women. I don't get it. Why did they title this "Girls Swinging"? Is the film I have seen actually "One Girl Swinging" from the same year and same company? Why is the swing on the stage? Why not go on location? Couldn't the girl swing herself without being pushed? This is very baffling. I suppose this was meant to be sexual, but today it comes off as silly and very harmless. One thing to note is that the same year Melies made "After the Ball", which makes you wonder which short came first.

(Note: I plan to later review the nine other unadvertised bonus features as well. This is the first of the ten).