Scott Lord Silent Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock Holmes Baffled (Marvin, 1900)

Author Ron Haydock, in his volume Deerstalker: Holmes and Watson on screen, is succinct in describing the first appearance of Arthur Conon Doyle's Sherlock Holmes on screen, "Directed by Arthur Marvin, Edison's Sherlock Holmes film was shot with only one set, and one strait-on full shot camera angle and can be viewed time and again without boredom. It's fast, entertaining and over before you would like it to be."

Author David Stuart Davies, in his volume Holmes of the Movies, The Screen Career of Sherlock Holmes, acknowledges as part of the consensus, and there seems to be no reference to the author Emil Gaboriau who wrote in 1868 in the films of Georges Melies, that an unknown actor in the 1903 film "Sherlock Holmes Baffled" from the American Mutoscope and Bioscope was the first on screen appearance of Sherlock Holmes and first adaptation of the cannon written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In regard to how early, Stuart Davies points out that it was filmed the same yeart that "The Empty House" was published in the Strand Magazine and I in fact would mention that in a discussion of The Cinema of Attractions/The Cinema of Narrative Integration that it was released the same year as "The Great Train Robbery" from the competing Edison Manufacturing Company. "The audience at seeing the film may also have been baffled, for the film has no recognizable plot and seems to be little more than a series of tableaux of a melodramatic nature without any real continuity."

The cinema of George Melies has been likened to a cinema of attractions in its repetitive use of suprise and sudden appearance, the temporality of attractions are of appearance-non-appearance rather than development. On viiewing the single-shot film as it ushered in a new century with the first appearance on film of the consulting detective, the audience was a baffled as Sherlock Holmes by the abrupt vanishings of a burgler throughout the room through the use of stop-motion trick photography.

Sherlock Holmes in Elsinore, Mystery in Danish Silent Film

Silent Film Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock Holmes i Bondefangelor

Scott Lord Silent Film: The Copper Beeches (Calliard, 1912)

"THe Copper Beeches" in which actor Georges Trevilles starred as the detective Sherlock Holmes, was directed by Adrian Calliard during 1912.

At the time when David Stuart Davies published his volume Holmes of the movies, the screen career of Sherlock Holmes, "The Copper Beeches" was the earliest Sherlock Holmes adaptation of which there was a surviving copy, the series itself being the first authentic representation of the Holmes character. Davies gathered that the plots were faithful adaptations of Baker Street cannon owing to their titles and the fact that "alledgedly Conan Doyle was personally involved in their production". His filmography of lost silent films includes "The Speckled Band", "The Beryl Coronet' and "Silver Blaze" from 1912 and "The Mystery of Boscome Vale", "The Stolen Papers" and finally, The Musgrave Ritual of which there is an existing copy. Silent Film Silent Film Sherlock Holmes

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes The Man With The Twisted Lip (Maurice Elvey, 1922)

Scott Lord Silent Film: Musgrave Ritual (George Treville, 1912)

Silent Film Sherlock Holmes Silent Film