Esmeralda

Year: 1905

Runtime: 10 mins

Director: Alice Guy-Blaché

Drama

It was the first film version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Partial adaptation

Notre-Dame de Paris: The novel adapted for Esmeralda

A Dancer, a Bell Ringer, an Archdeacon, and a Soldier Are Drawn into a Fatal Contest beneath the Stone Memory of Medieval Paris · by Victor Hugo, John Sturrock

Why this book?

Alice Guy-Blaché and Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset's 1905 Esmeralda is the earliest known screen treatment of Hugo's novel and necessarily reduces it to a brief silent sequence centered on Esmeralda and Quasimodo. Its historical importance is greater than its textual coverage: a film lasting only minutes cannot reproduce Frollo's intellectual and religious collapse, Gringoire, Phoebus's duplicity, the Court of Miracles, the politics of sanctuary, the cathedral's architectural history, or the novel's fatal chain of mistaken loyalties. John Sturrock's complete translation gives readers the vast urban and moral structure from which early cinema extracted the immediately legible figures of dancer, bell ringer, persecution, and rescue.

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