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Palace Picture House · Programme notes

Film history The films that made the movies

Short notes on the landmark films of cinema's first decades: what each one is, how it was made, why it still matters, and which of the famous stories about it are true. Some of them are also rooms in Reel Trouble, a comedy platformer where every room is a movie set.

  1. Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) Fifty seconds of a train, and the audience panic that probably never happened. A room you can play: Arrival of the Pain
  2. A Trip to the Moon (1902) A stage magician fires six astronomers at the Moon, and shows what a camera trick can do. A room you can play: A Trip to the Moan
  3. The Great Train Robbery (1903) Four bandits rob a train in New Jersey, and an outlaw fires his revolver straight at you.
  4. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) A sleepwalker, a town painted on canvas, and a twist ending argued over for a century.
  5. Nosferatu (1922) The unauthorised Dracula that a court ordered destroyed, and why vampires have feared the sunrise ever since.
  6. Safety Last! (1923) How Harold Lloyd hung from a clock high above Los Angeles, holding on with eight fingers. A room you can play: Safety Second
  7. Metropolis (1927) Fritz Lang builds the city of the future, and the film is cut to pieces within months.

More notes are at the printer's

The programme runs from the 1890s to the end of the 1930s, and new notes join it as they are written and checked. Each one lists its sources. The pictures here are from the game, whose sets are built from scratch: there are no frames from the films themselves.

The audience is on its way

Now play the films

Reel Trouble is a comedy platformer where every room is a movie set, from 1896 on. The free demo has six rooms, a secret room and a premiere.

Play the free demo on itch.io (opens in a new tab) Send the demo to my desktop See the game

Free · Desktop: browser, Windows, Mac, Linux · Played with a keyboard