On the Roof

Star Film catalogue number 100, Sur les toits: a one-minute rooftop farce in which two burglars climb into an apartment, bind a woman, and throw her from a window before trapping the arriving gendarme in a skylight and escaping. Méliès at his most theatrical and least fantastical. Three-dimensional painted décor that competitors quickly copied. Included in the Will Day collection and preserved in the French archives, it is a key document of 1897 cinema's leap from actuality to staged crime comedy, the Paris rooftop as a set, the chase already a grammar.