Merry Christmas! If your heart-cup happens to be overflowing with holiday spirit right now, perhaps you can do me a favor. I can't find a single image online for A Christmas Accident. If you have one, let me know. This post would really benefit from a few visuals specific to the film. In the mean time, you can see the whole thing (all 15 minutes of it) here.
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Christmas-themed silent films are always about death. It’s implicit in everything they celebrate: family, hearth and home; the bond between parents and children. We watch these films, from a distance of a century, and wonder how much of what they depict would be gone, were it all real. The house, maybe. The gifts, probably. The people, for sure. All of them, even the tiniest children, gleefully opening presents. But of course, the people—the actors—really are dead. It’s difficult to forget this.
Maybe, if I didn’t take this morbid approach, I wouldn’t find A Christmas Accident so creepy. There’s an undertone to this little film so grim it has stayed with me for years; yet, with one exception, there is nothing in the plot itself that could be called dark. It’s a simple story of a miser’s redemption, facilitated by a little girl, pure of heart. No one (no person, anyway), dies. The ending is happy. So it must be me.
But still, there is strangeness here. Imagery and compositional choices meant, I think, to tweak things embedded deep in our brains, things stretching further back in our collective memory than Victorian stories do.
