Screen Snapshots, Series 1, No. 2

A nickelodeon-era fever-dream stitched from newsreel off-cuts and star-spangled gossip, Screen Snapshots, Series 1, No. 2 is less a narrative than a celluloid séance: Mack Sennet’s bathing beauties splash like mythic naiads in Malibu foam while Chaplin’s silhouette pirouettes behind them, a shadow-puppet of impending modernity; Will Rogers twirls a lariat of wry aphorisms at the camera, each loop tightening around the throat of pre-Hays innocence; stunt pilots barnstorm across a bleached sky, their propellers carving white scars into the cobalt, a prophecy of mechanized warfare; Mary Pickford’s dimples flicker, ghostly, between frames of a pie-fight that predates the custard canon of slapstick; the whole reel unspools like a peppermint ribbon left to melt on the sun-baked boards of a boardwalk, its sprocket holes gaping like missing teeth in the grin of 1920.