Princess Nicotine; or The Smoke Fairy 1909

This tale of a tormented smoker was the most celebrated special effects film of its day, the subject of a 1909 article in Scientific American and a chapter in a 1912 book entitled Motion Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked. “The effect of The Princess Nicotine when thrown upon the screen is so startling that it defies explanation by the uninitiated,“ reported Scientific American; “The little fairy moves so realistically that she cannot be explained away by assuming that she is a doll, and yet it is impossible to understand how she can be a living being, because of her small stature.“ Trick films were a specialty of the New York-based Vitagraph Company, then America’s leading film producer. Vitagraph had been founded back in 1897 by magician Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton, a newspaper illustrator and “lightning sketch“ vaudeville cartoonist. Their interests intersected in trick films, inspired by Georges Méliès’s pioneering French fantas