Par le trou de la serrure is a 1901 French silentshortcomedy film directed by Ferdinand Zecca and distributed in France by Pathé Frères. It was also distributed in the United States under the titles What Is Seen Through a Keyhole and What Happened to the Inquisitive Janitor, and in the United Kingdom under the titles What Happened: The Inquisitive Janitor and Peeping Tom.[1]
Plot
Watch Par le trou de la serrure
A hotel porter finds out the secrets of the guests by looking through the keyholes of four different rooms:
in the first one he sees a woman combing her hair,
in the second, what looked like a woman removes her whig and false breasts, revealing that she was in fact a transvestite,
in the third, a man drinks champagne with a woman sitting on his lap,
finally the door of the fourth room opens while he is watching and the furious guest kicks him down the stairs.
Par le trou de la serrure is also characteristic of a certain voyeuristic trend in early cinema in showing what was normally hidden in a hotel room. The film was judged by some, notably Georges Méliès's granddaughter, as being of dubious taste.[3]
^Review and link to watch the film: "A cinema history". Retrieved 7 September 2020.
^Georges Sadoul and Yvonne Templin, Early Film Production in England: The Origin of Montage, Close-Ups, and Chase Sequence, Hollywood Quarterly, Apr., 1946, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Apr., 1946), University of California Press, pp. 249-259
^Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, Méliès et la naissance du spectacle cinématographique, Klincksieck, 1984, p.130.
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