Scenes from My Balcony (1904) User Reviews

Rear Window

[boblipton · 5/10 · 22 November 2019]

A man takes his telescope and trains it on a couple of apartments in nearby buildings. He sees some interesting things.

Ferdinand Zecca's early peep-show movie offers the audience a bit of titilation in a modest way. It is noteworthy because he uses a circular matte to frame his observations. He uses that matte to represent the restrict vision through that telescope.

Although the matte survives in modern film making, it is of limited utility. Here, as it would a half century later in Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW, it adds an air of voyeurism to the proceedings.

Beware of imitations

[kekseksa · 9 July 2020]

The one-minute fragment of film that hs long circulated under this title is most certainly not this film. This film (as its US title) makes very clear is of a man on a balcony of a sixth floor flat looking through a telescope at his neighbours. He watches a woman brushing her hair, then what appears to be an old woman removing dentures, wig and false breasts to reveal himself as a bald man. In each case because the man, described in the catalogue as a "vieux farceur" , is quite close, the victims are quickly aware of his presence and he even waves to them. When he focuses on a boy stealing jam in the kitchen, the boy spots him and gets out his dart-gun and shoots the od fellow in the eye. This film was later produced in 28mm for the Pathé KOK home-viewer (predecesor of the Baby) but retitled La Lorgnette indiscrète (The Indiscreet Lorgnette in the US version) and can be seen in its entirety (three minutes) on youtube.

The fragment wrongly identified as this film shows a weird old boy way above the rooftops surveying people at open windows all over Paris. This film, also by Zecca, was called Ce que l'on voit de la Bastille because the "vieux savant" (old scholar who has gone up to watch the stars) is balanced on top of a column.