''Laura Comstock's Bag-Punching Dog'' is a 1901 silent short film directed by

Edwin S. Porter Edwin Stanton Porter (April 21, 1870 – April 30, 1941) was an American film pioneer, most famous as a producer, director, studio manager and cinematographer with the Edison Manufacturing Company and the Famous Players Film Company. Of over 2 ...

. The film depicts a

vaudeville Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition ...

act featuring Laura Comstock and her trained dog, a pit bull named Mannie. Comstock's act was currently appearing at Keith's

Union Square Theatre Union Square Theatre was the name of two different theatres near Union Square, Manhattan, New York City. The first was a Broadway theatre that opened in 1870, was converted into a cinema in 1921 and closed in 1936.(8 October 1921)Two landmarks to ...

. The film begins with a five-second shot of Comstock and her dog seated at a table and looking at the camera, with a sign in the foreground that says "Laura Comstock". Following this, the rest of the film shows Mannie in front of a rustic backdrop, repeatedly jumping and punching a bag suspended by a rope. Edison's film catalog said that Mannie's "high jumps and lightning-like punches are remarkable and cause one to marvel at the amount of patience that must be necessary to teach a dog such tricks." The technique of opening a film with a portrait-style shot of the performers was new to film. This was an innovation by Porter based on the practice of showing lantern-slide photos preceding the exhibition of filmed scenes. It proved influential, and was adopted by other American producers during this period. Mannie appeared in a number of subsequent Edison films, including several

Buster Brown Buster Brown is a comic-strip character created in 1902 by Richard F. Outcault. Adopted as the mascot of the Brown Shoe Company in 1904, Buster Brown, along with Mary Jane, and with his dog Tige, became well known to the United States of America ...

shorts, the

Happy Hooligan ''Happy Hooligan'' is an American comic strip, the first major strip by the already celebrated cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper. It debuted with a Sunday strip on March 11, 1900 in the William Randolph Hearst newspapers, and was one of the first ...

short ''Pie, Tramp and the Bulldog'', and '' The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog''.

References

{{Edwin S. Porter Films directed by Edwin S. Porter 1901 films 1901 short films 1900s American films American black-and-white films American silent short films Surviving American silent films

See also

References