A little classic, much noted and often cited, here in a shortened version reduced to its essentials. Cocotte, a deliveryman’s greedy horse, takes advantage of the absence of its owner – delivering a basket of laundry to the top floor of a building – and helps himself to a whole bag of oats on display outside a seed shop next door. This unplanned extra snack gives the horse the energy to launch into a frantic gallop along the streets of the city, throwing the deliveryman from his cart and overturning everything in its path. In the end, with half the town in hot pursuit, the horse returns quietly to its stable as if nothing had happened. The full version of the film, a pioneering classic of the “chase film” genre, actually articulates a more complicated and destructive fugue, featuring, among other things, the wrecking of a pram (in the shots present in the 28mm copy, the nanny recovers it and drags it along in the chase) and a deft manoeuvre in “reverse” executed by the horse to escape its pursuers. Unlike the action in some (but not all) existing copies of the film, in the montage of this short version the images of the horse gorging itself are not interpolated with the adventures of the driver making his delivery in the building – so it means that this copy thus lacks the cross-cutting, of which, according to several important historians, this film is one of the first known examples.
Although reduced to its bare bones, however, even in this cut-down 28mm version the film still retains an unbridled vitality which makes it easy to understand the reasons for the popularity it enjoyed. Audiences in the first decade of the last century wondered (just as we do) how it was possible to make a riderless horse, running wild, execute moves with such comic timing. The answer is provided by an article published in 1910 in Moving Picture World, announcing Louis Gasnier’s forthcoming arrival in the United States. Besides his artistic merits, the article focuses on his exploits as a man of action: it would seem that the cart pulled by the horse had a coffin fitted under it, a container chosen for its soft lining. In it was concealed Gasnier, dressed in black and wearing a dark mask and gloves, guiding the horse by means of invisible reins of steel. The article informs us that the fearless director’s striving for authentic effect cost him rather dearly: during the shoot, in fact, following the horse’s collision with the scaffolding, the bridles snapped, the cart overturned, and Gasnier was injured rather severely, landing him in the hospital for two weeks. Then as now, however, “the show must go on”, as the author of the article wrote: “Mr. Gasnier’s nerve is shown by the fact that after his release from the hospital he got back into the repaired vehicle and finished the picture.” Hats off to him!

Stella Dagna