The Four Troublesome Heads
Un Homme de têtes, 1898, 1m04s
Star Film Catalogue No. 167
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.
At least in terms of his surviving films, The Four Troublesome Heads marks the most sophisticated advance in Georges Méliès’ special-effects arsenal since his discovery of the jump-cut some two years earlier. That was a primitive but effective technique that facilitated rapid appearances, disappearances and transformations, but the superimpositions on display here push Méliès’ cinema further away from his theatrical roots and towards something altogether new.
In the earlier The Magician (Le Magicien, 1898), Méliès used a combination of jump-cuts and cunningly-designed props (including a fake tripod stand that wasn’t as see-through as it appeared) to create the impression of a disembodied living bust. Here, by contrast, we can actually see Méliès apparently removing his own head and placing it on a table, where it continues to talk as though nothing had happened.
The initial effect is created with Méliès’ now-familiar jump-cut technique, firstly between a shot of Méliès reaching up to his head, and then one of him sporting a black bag on his real head (the lighting doesn’t quite manage to hide this, sadly) placing a dummy head on the table. But the next jump-cut leads to something altogether more sophisticated, as the dummy head is replaced by Méliès’ real one, superimposed via (presumably) a primitive matte arrangement onto the table top. Another jump-cut causes Méliès’ head to reappear (or rather appear, since there are now two on screen), and he then gets on his hands and knees to crawl under the table, proving to sceptics that it really is bearing a disembodied head. While the joins are certainly visible (in addition to the bag, the registration between the shots is imprecise, leading to flickering round the edges of the table), this arguably adds to the film’s charm, since the sheer amount of planning and effort is all too apparent.
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.
The sheer breadth of Méliès’ imagination and his technical adventurousness take the breath away to this day. It’s not certain whether this was the first example of synchronised split-screen multiple exposures in cinema history (on the other side of the channel, G.A. Smith made at least half a dozen similar films, and the surviving example, 1898’s Santa Claus, combines multiple exposure with parallel action), but it’s certainly one of the earliest - and very easy to believe that it was the most complex and fluidly achieved to date. Buster Keaton would go further, and with more technical finesse, in The Playhouse (1923) with its nine performing Keatons in perfect synchronisation, and of course such effects are easy enough to achieve in the CGI era without any of Méliès’ seams, but that doesn’t remotely detract from his achievement here. If he looks a little smug when he takes his final bow, that’s entirely understandable.
As already mentioned, the definition of Flicker Alley’s print is good enough to reveal the joins, though it’s beset with faint vertical tramlines pretty much throughout, as well as mild chemical blotching. There are also significant exposure fluctuations and the image as a whole is softer than on many other prints in this set. (However, this may be a side-effect of the multiple exposures in the original). Disappointingly, Neal Kurz’s solo piano accompaniment is fairly generic - there’s no attempt, for instance, at conveying an impression of the banjo-and-heads performance - though it otherwise does an adequate job.
Links
- BFI Film and TV Database entry.
- Internet Movie Database entry.
- Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forum).
- Paghat the Ratgirl’s review (Weird Wild Realm)
- The complete film on YouTube