FRAGMENT | An apparition appears when the threat of foreclosure looms over the family estate. Solicitor Bang is a rich man with financial power over a dowager baroness and her estate. However, Bang also wants power over the baroness’ daughter Lucy, whose heart belongs to the family doctor Sperling. Bang threatens to foreclose the estate if Lucy doesn’t marry him. The night before the auction, a ghost appears to Doctor Sperling and leads him to a chest in the basement. But is it a coffer or coffin?
The preserved fragment of the film lacks the beginning and the end. Read the full plot in the cinema programme.
The film’s visual effects, the transparent ghost, were probably made using a technique called double exposure in which the ghost would have been filmed first against a black background and then superimposed onto the rest of the scene. It required great technical ingenuity to keep track of the exposure, ghost placement, and of course the timing, to get the images to blend together properly.