Vintage French collector's card. Félix Potin series 2 (1908). See also
de.frwiki.wiki/wiki/Collection_F%C3%A9lix_Potin
André Calmettes (1861-1942) was a French stage and screen actor an director. After being a stage actor for twenty years, Calmettes became artistic director and director of the company Le Film d'Art, founded by the Laffitte brothers. Its films were distributed by Pathé Frères. Until the early 1920s he acted on stage, mainly at the Parisian theatres Odéon, Vaudeville, Gymnase, and Porte St. Martin.
In 1908, to cover the noise of the spectators, André Calmettes had the great idea of asking for his next film a newly written music accompaniment. Thus the first composer to compose a film score was Camille Saint-Saëns for the historical film L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise/ The Assassination of the Duke of Guise, directed by Calmettes and Charles Le Bargy. The music was most often played "live" by a pianist in the auditorium during the projection. In general, silent cinema was never really silent, as live accompaniment by music, lecturers or sound effects behind the screen would be available. Yet, films for which complete scores were written remained rare. Mostly, a collage of existing classic or modern popular tunes would be used, or so-called incidentals, sheets with mood music fit for certain scenes of drama, comedy, action, or tragedy.
L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise was scripted by Henri Lavédan and starred Albert Lambert as the proud Duke de Guise, Charles Le Bargy as the perfidious king Henri III, and Gabrielle Robinne as Guise's mistress who in vain warns him for danger at the royal palace. The murder scene was inspired by a famous painting (1834) by Paul Delaroche, which had already resulted in a so-called Living Picture in 1897 by the Lumière Frères. Remarkable was that Le Bargy, in contrast to the wildly gesticulating actors in the films by e.g. Méliès, focused on facial expression and kept the rest rather restrained.
In the space of three years, from 1909 to 1912, Calmettes managed to attract actors already famous on the stage (Sarah Bernhardt, Réjane, Mounet-Sully, Cécile Sorel, a.o.) to perform in a rather theatrical style in adaptations of classics of literature, notably William Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth), Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist), Honoré de Balzac (Ferragus, The Duchess of Langeais, Colonel Chabert, the latter co-directed with Henri Pouctal). Indeed, while Calmettes directed some 30 films on his own, he also co-directed three with Henri Desfontaines and four with Pouctal. His last co-direction was the 1912 film Les trois mousquetaires, starring Émile Dehelly as D'Artagnan. From 1913, Calmettes devoted himself to the theatre again and appeared in the cinema only as an actor, notably in André Hugon's Le Petit Chose (1923). Though in hindsight often criticized for their theatrical style and lack of realism, Calmettes' films at Film d'Art much contributed to the growing respectability of the medium of cinema. Apart from literary roots, Calmettes' selection of films was often also based on novels and theatrical plays that had become operas as well (Carmen, Mignon, Rigoletto, Don Carlos, Macbeth, Tosca, La dame aux camélias).
Sources: French Wikipedia, IMDB.
