The "Teddy" Bears

Osservaciones generales (en Alemán): «The story of the hunting expedition when Theodore Roosevelt had declined to shoot a bear cub after killing its mother had become so embedded in the popular imagination that it was now represented by a furry stuffed toy known as a “Teddy” bear. Teddy bears became a nationwide fad. The “Teddy” Bears, made by Wallace McCutcheon and Edwin S. Porter for Edison, was meant, according to its advertisements, to be a satire on the teddy bear craze.
The first part of the film is a recounting of the very popular fairy tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, told in sequential scenes and in a variety of indoor and outdoor spaces, with vestiges of the temporal overlapping that characterized Porter’s early films. Originally a tale of bears eating an intrusive female fox, now changed into the story of a curious girlchild who escapes harm by jumping out the window after being discovered by the bears in their house, the story featured a heroine who comes from who-knows-where and tries out identities as she samples the porridge and the beds of Papa Bear, Momma Bear, and Baby Bear.
In the Goldilocks character, we might find an unconscious reflection of the immigrant who attempts to find a role in the New World and is regarded as an object of suspicion by established society. The fairy tale is ambiguous on the question of where its sympathies lie. In the film, the cruelty of the hunter who shoots the pursuing bears (clearly human beings in furry costumes) as they chase Goldilocks through the woods hands over our sympathy to the bears. In a direct reference to the Teddy Roosevelt mythology, Goldilocks pleads with the hunter to spare the life of the bear cub. He does so, and Goldilocks goes in the house to collect the toy teddy bears; the hunter then emerges with Baby Bear, a chain around its neck, an orphan and a prisoner.
The third element in this mixture of fairy tale and contemporary political life is an animated sequence showing a group of toy teddy bears of assorted sizes putting on a kind of acrobatic display. According to Charles Musser, the animated sequence took 8 days of work, moving the teddy bears between each shot. It is seen through a peephole by Goldilocks as she snoops around the house. Typically for this period, there is not a lot of narrative logic for the animation sequence, even if it does serve to underline the Goldilocks role as an outsider looking in. It is there to provide an attraction for the audience. It is a spectacle outside the narrative continuity. Porter was often drawn to the time-consuming technical work that provided wonder and entertainment.» – Eileen Bowser, Pordenone 2009

Publicados Giornate del Cinema Muto Pordenone 2009, Katalog