Production
The film was produced by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and was intended to be shown on the Mutoscope, an early motion picture device, patented by Herman Casler in 1894. Like Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope the Mutoscope did not project on a screen, and provided viewing to only one person at a time. Cheaper and simpler than the Kinetoscope, the system marketed by the American Mutoscope Company quickly dominated the coin-in-the-slot "peep-show" business.
The Mutoscope worked on the same principle as a flip book, with individual image frames printed onto flexible cards attached to a circular core which revolved with the turn of a user-operated hand crank. The cards were lit by electric light bulbs inside the machine, a system devised by Arthur Marvin's brother, Henry, one of the founders of the Biograph company. Earlier machines had relied on reflected natural light.
To avoid violating Edison's patents, Biograph cameras from 1895 to 1902 used a large-format film measuring 2-23/32 inches (68 mm) wide, with an image area of 2 × 2½ inches, four times that of Edison's 35 mm format. Biograph film was not ready-perforated; the camera itself punched a sprocket hole on each side of the frame as the film was exposed at 30 frames per second. Sherlock Holmes Baffled ran to 86.56 metres in length, giving the film a running time of 30 seconds (although in practice, due to the hand-cranked gearing of the Mutoscope this would have varied).
The director and cinematographer of Sherlock Holmes Baffled was Arthur W. Marvin (May 1859 – 18 January 1911), a staff cameraman for Biograph. Marvin completed over 418 short films between 1897 and 1911, and was known for filming vaudeville entertainers. He later became known as the cameraman for the early silent films of D. W. Griffith. The identities of the first screen Holmes and his assailant are not recorded.
Biograph films before 1903 were mostly actualities (documentary footage of actual persons, places and events), but Sherlock Holmes Baffled is an example of an early Biograph comedy narrative film, produced at the company's rooftop studio on Broadway in New York City. According to Christopher Redmond's Sherlock Holmes Handbook, the film was shot on April 26, 1900. Julie McKuras states that the film was released in May of the same year. Despite being in circulation, Sherlock Holmes Baffled was only registered on February 24, 1903, and this is the date seen on the film's copyright title card. The occasionally suggested date of 1905 is probably due to confusion with a Vitagraph film titled Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; or, Held for Ransom (1905).
Read more about this topic: Sherlock Holmes Baffled
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