Dreyfus Put In Irons
L’Affaire Dreyfus, Mise aux fers de Dreyfus, 1899, 1m06s
Star Film Catalogue No. 208
1896. In a hut in the Devil’s Island stockade, Alfred Dreyfus is sleeping. Two guards walk in, one holding a lantern and some leg-irons. The other wakes him, and produces a written order, which he reads aloud. Dreyfus is clearly distressed by its contents, and pleads for mercy. However, the guards hold him down on his bed, fit metal bands round his ankles, attach them to the leg-irons and fix the latter to the bed. The guards quickly check the contents of the room and leave.
Dreyfus Put In Irons is, in effect, the second half of a diptych that began with Devil’s Island - Within the Palisade (L’Affaire Dreyfus, L’Île du Diable, 1899), the two films from Georges Méliès’ eleven-film The Dreyfus Affair series that specifically cover his incarceration in the French Guyana prison. While the earlier film showed his psychological torment (denied all but the most basic of human contact, as the guards are barred from speaking to him), this depicts rather more physical discomfort.
The film is clearly set within the same stockade depicted in the previous film, as the same distinctive outer wall made from pointed whitewashed wooden planks is visible through the rear window. However, this time we’re in Dreyfus’ cell, reasonably spacious but otherwise spartan in both décor and amenities: a bowl, a bucket and a jug. Even these will shortly be out of reach, as soldiers clap him in leg-irons that fasten him to the bed, performing the task with a matter-of-factness that underlines the fact that they’re only obeying (written) orders.
Curiously, one of the soldiers has been given a lot of business to do with the lantern - he’s constantly holding it up with the apparent intention of revealing important details. However, the ambient light in the cell is more than adequate, and the lantern doesn’t appear to be emitting any of its own: presumably the insensitive film stock of the time would not have been capable of registering a genuinely lantern-lit scene. So while this is arguably both a technical and a dramatic flaw (the soldiers’ gestures suggest an altogether more crepuscular environment), it’s a forgivable one under the circumstances.
While the untinted print on Flicker Alley’s DVD displays the usual blend of surface and chemical damage, the underlying image is so sharp and clear that this is very easy to tune out. Eric Beheim’s electronic score consists of a slow descent, paralleling Dreyfus’s darkening mood as the guards make it clear that there’s no room for clemency.
Links
- Internet Movie Database entry.
- Wikipedia article on Devil’s Island
- BFI Film and TV Database entry on the whole cycle (including an invaluable synopsis sourced from assorted catalogues)
- Dreyfus Rehabilitated - a huge site about the Dreyfus affair
- Wikipedia on the Dreyfus affair
- Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema - Stephen Bottomore’s entry on Dreyfus, which is a condensation of his Sight & Sound
Posted on 31st May 2008
Under: Historical Re-enactments, 1899 | No Comments »
Alfred Dreyfus, clad in white suit and helmet, paces up and down in a small prison stockade. He eventually sits down to read a book, but dashes it to the ground in frustration before holding his head in his hands. A guard enters and hands him a letter. Dreyfus attempts to engage him in conversation, but without success. After the guard leaves, Dreyfus reads the letter, but it does nothing to alleviate the gloom.
To emphasise this, two additional touches contribute to the overall effect. Firstly, the set (or backdrop) has been painted using Méliès’ usual foreshortened perspective, which here has the side-effect of intensifying the sense of being hemmed in (the backdrop, lighting and Dreyfus’s white suite all contribute to the impression of scorching heat). Secondly, the guard delivering the letter is walking with the aid of a stick, suggesting that he has either been invalided out of more conventional military duties or has sustained an injury in the course of his work at the prison.
France, late 1894. After consulting with colleagues, French Army officer Mercier du Paty de Clam orders an underling to bring Captain Dreyfus to him. Dreyfus enters and salutes, and du Paty de Clam orders him to sit down at the table. He takes out a piece of paper and dictates names to Dreyfus, who writes them down. When he has finished, du Paty de Clam accuses Dreyfus of being the author of the ‘bordereau’, the list of military secrets from which he was dictating. Dreyfus denies it. Du Paty de Clam indicates the revolver on the table, and turns his back. Dreyfus refuses to commit suicide. Du Paty de Clam’s colleagues escort him out of the office. 
The first film in the Dreyfus cycle started as Méliès meant to go on, presenting a sober, largely unsensationalised account of the initial investigation. This was conducted by French Army officer Mercier du Paty de Clam (1853-1916), later accused of being one of the key conspirators behind the plot to frame Dreyfus. Dreyfus is summoned to his office and du Paty de Clam asks him to take down a document, which turns out to be the notorious ‘bordereau’ (the film’s original French title translates as “the dictation of the ‘bordereau’”). Du Paty de Clam claims that the handwriting is a perfect match and - in the film’s one lurch into melodrama - signals to Dreyfus that he should commit suicide. Dreyfus proudly refuses to do so, and sets in train what may well be the cinema’s first genuine serial. To coin a phrase that Méliès himself eschews, To Be Continued…
A man walks behind a large, empty gilded picture frame, then round the front, then round the back again before stepping through it. He then rolls up the background scenery to reveal the grounds of a chateau. He picks up a canvas depicting a landscape and fits it into the frame. He then picks up a stool and places it within the frame. He takes a seat and observes the painting, which slips out of focus and then gradually sharpens to reveal the same man sitting on the stool. They gesture and react to each other, and appear to share a joke. Finally, the portrait slips out of focus again, revealing the empty stool in front of the landscape. (print ends here)
The essential theatricality of The Mysterious Portrait is emphasised at the start, when Méliès, after demonstrating that the frame is indeed empty by walking around and then through it, blithely rolls up the previous background, revealing it to be a painted backdrop on canvas. The function of this would seem to be not so much an implicit claim that nothing in this film is to be believed, as a deliberately clunky and obvious effect that would be registered by even the most dimwitted spectator. By contrast, the appearance of the portrait makes use of genuinely cutting-edge film technology, and would have looked far more impressive to an 1899 audience. An experienced stage illusionist, Méliès remained an incorrigible showman to the last.
In a room lined with grotesque statues, a green demon emerges from a large pan and performs a dance prior to setting light to the logs under the pan. He grabs a pair of bellows and pumps up the fire until a woman clad in a voluminous white dress emerges from the pan. She unfurls her dress and both the pan and the demon vanish. She performs an elaborate dance, the material of her dress swirling around her and changing colour. The room fills with smoke. The dance finishes, and she floats up to the ceiling. 
However, there is little discernible narrative content in Méliès’ film, the vast majority of which is taken up with Ayesha’s dance, performed after she has been successfully summoned by a green demon. There are a few examples of his trademark brand of jump-cut trickery, but for the most part the effects are generated with onscreen props - a large bellows, a torch emitting clouds of smoke, and of course Ayesha’s voluminous dress, the material of which gives her dance its primary visual interest. The set design is also splendidly grotesque, with its two bizarre statues on either side of the frame towering over the human performers. 
In a convent, a priest adjusts the position of some chairs before departing. As soon as he’s gone, the devil emerges from the font, and looks around. Spotting a rope dangling from the ceiling, he tugs on it, and a bell rings. He wraps his cloak around himself and turns into a priest. Seven white-clad nuns enter and kneel on the chairs as the priest/devil mounts the pulpit. He begins preaching, and the nuns cross themselves. He turns back into the devil, and they react with horror, fleeing the room as he laughs menacingly. He descends from the pulpit and makes the font and then the chairs disappear. He summons up demonic gargoyles to decorate the walls. He opens a trapdoor in the floor and two small children emerge. He conjures up a large pan, from which four other devils appear. A giant demonic cat-like head appears, from which three women emerge. The head turns into a gigantic toad, which the devil mounts while the others dance around him. A nun enters the room and holds up a crucifix. The devil reacts as though scalded, and the others vanish. He gets off the toad, which also vanishes. He confronts the nun, but cannot get past the crucifix. Three more nuns appear, each holding crucifixes, and they surround the devil. They then vanish, leaving the devil on the ground. He gets up, and is confronted by a guardsman. They fight, and the devil sends his opponent packing. Another man enters and chases the devil up to the pulpit. The devil jumps to the ground and vanishes. Bemused, the man descends from the pulpit, only to find the devil emerging from another trapdoor. The man tries to assail him, but the devil disappears down yet another trapdoor, immediately reappearing in the pulpit. A group of men and boys clad in white surplices enter. A statue of Saint Michel appears, and when the devil attempts to climb onto its plinth, the statue comes to life and throws him off. The devil disappears in a puff of smoke, while the men and boys file out.
As with The Astronomer’s Dream, the set design is most impressive. Although clearly consisting of two painted flats (so the nuns have a viable “corridor” to enter through), Méliès makes much use of foreshortened perspective to give a very real sense of depth, and he has a lot of fun with the devil decking out the walls with gargoyles: most vandalism isn’t nearly so aesthetically appealing. The giant feline head with its swivelling eyeballs and the equally grotesque toad from which the devil conducts his revellers are just as effective, though the fact that they’re also flat is emphasised by the final appearance of an equally fantastical but very three-dimensional Saint Michael. 
A stage magician props up a female dummy on a table and lets it fall back before grabbing it and transforming it into a live ballerina. He helps her down and she performs some ballet steps before sitting in a chair. The magician places a large tube on the table and covers her with a cloth. She vanishes, and reappears inside the tube. The magician helps her down again, and picks her up in his arms. She dissolves into a shower of confetti. He places the tube on the table again, stands over the confetti and drapes the cloth over himself. He vanishes and reappears in the tube. Jumping down from the table, he turns into the ballerina. She climbs back onto the table, jumps down, and turns back into the magician. He takes a step back and vanishes, re-emerging on the left-hand side of the stage. He gets on the table, sits cross-legged, and disappears in a puff of smoke.
The original French title, L’Illusionniste fin-de-siècle, translates as literally ‘The Turn-of-the-Century Illusionist’. Since the film was made almost exactly at the turn of the twentieth century, it presumably refers to the now formidable array of cinematic tricks that Méliès had developed since he discovered the cinema - beforehand, he had of course been an actual stage magician, but the illusions he was able to conjure up by now dwarfed anything achievable on stage. Although nearly all the effects here are based on the usual jump-cut transformation principle, the timing here is particularly adroit - there’s a real fluidity about the movements of both magician and ballerina that must have required a great deal of planning and rehearsal to get right. As usual, Méliès himself plays the magician.
In his cave, the hermit Saint Anthony prays before an effigy of the crucified Christ. A scantily-clad woman suddenly appears, and St Anthony shields his eyes from the sight of temptation. She vanishes, and he recommences reading the Bible. Two women appear either side of him, and he recoils in horror. They vanish, and he picks up a skull from the base of the cross. However, when he kisses it, it turns into another woman, with two more appearing in quick succession. They dance in a ring around the tormented Saint Anthony before vanishing. A desperate Saint Anthony kneels before Christ, who turns into another woman. But an angel also appears, to which Saint Anthony turns with undisguised relief. The woman vanishes and Christ reappears.
Although on a technical level The Temptation of Saint Anthony is something of a step back for Méliès (there are no effects more sophisticated than those he developed two years earlier), it nonetheless marks an advance in terms of subject matter, being one of the earliest films to tackle an explicitly religious theme. In this respect, Méliès proves himself the ancestor of Cecil B. DeMille and Franco Zeffirelli, whose own religious epics offer a similar blend of the solemn and the kitschy.
A stage magician stands between two tables, removes his head and places it at the far left of one of them. He then grows another head and crawls under the table to prove that the head is indeed completely detached. He then removes his second head and places it alongside the first one: they strike up a conversation. Having grown a third head, the magician removes it and places it on the right-hand table. He grows a fourth head, picks up a banjo and starts to sing, the three other heads joining in. Unable to stand the racket, the magician hits the two left-hand heads with his banjo, and they vanish. He removes his head and tosses it away, replacing it with the head on the right-hand table. He bounces the new head on his shoulders as though it was a football before taking a bow. 
He could easily have stopped there, and the film would be impressive enough. But instead, he repeats the trick a second and third time, so that he now has three separate heads on two tables. Meticulously calibrated timing means that they chat to each other and eventually sing in unison, accompanied by the full-bodied Méliès on the banjo. And then, in a moment that’s laugh-out-loud funny to this day, he detests their caterwauling so much that he beats the two left-hand heads with the banjo, causing them to vanish. Finally, almost as an encore, he removes his head again, replacing it with the remaining head on the table, “heading” it football-style before letting it find a permanent resting-place on his shoulders. 
An astronomer is writing notes at his desk. A devil appears in a puff of smoke and taunts him, but the astronomer ignores him. A woman with a crescent-moon tiara appears and banishes the devil before disappearing herself. Oblivious to all this, the astronomer gets up and draws a geometrically precise globe on his blackboard, complete with a moon in the top left corner. The moon grows a face and hair and descends to join the globe, which sprouts arms and legs. Annoyed, the astronomer dashes the blackboard to the ground. He picks up a telescope and tries to look through it at the moon, but it turns into a rolling pin, which pokes him in the eye. He angrily tosses it aside and returns to his desk, placing his head in his hands. The desk vanishes, and he topples over onto the ground. He looks through his large telescope and sees a gigantic face in the moon, which promptly invades his study and swallows the telescope and one of the astronomer’s chairs. He tries to retrieve his property, but is rebuffed. The moon emits a puff of smoke, knocking the astronomer to the ground. He picks up a parasol to shield himself, but it is torn to shreds. Two small, identical children emerge from its mouth, and the astronomer promptly hurls them back in. He then tries to hit the moon with a broom, but it retreats to a point beyond the end of the astronomer’s balcony. The astronomer tries to throw a chair, his notebook and a table at the moon, but they all vanish at the crucial moment. Suddenly, the moon becomes a crescent, supporting a woman in a bridal veil. She descends onto the astronomer’s balcony and removes the veil. He tries to hug her, but she shoots up in the air. Another woman appears on the crescent. The astronomer gets up to greet her, and falls through a trapdoor into a room where he is confronted by a suit of armour. He hits this with a broom, and is transported inside the moon’s mouth. The moon swallows him whole and spits out various limbs. The devil reappears, followed in quick succession by the moon-goddess, who banishes him and stuffs the limbs back into the moon’s mouth. As she does so, the astronomer reappears in his chair, bit by bit. The astronomer wakes up in his observatory, heaves a sigh of relief that it was only a dream, and returns to his desk.
But the most significant advance made by the film is that it develops a more or less continuous narrative across three minutes, making it the clearest precursor yet to Méliès’ far more elaborate fantasies of the early 1900s. The astronomer’s dream runs the gamut from battles between devils and angels, being terrorised by a vast moon, and seduced by a female figure initially seen reclining on the crescent as though practising for the DreamWorks logo a century early.