The Mysterious Knight
Le Chevalier mystère, 1899, 1m34s
Star Film Catalogue Nos. 226-227
A knight draws a picture of a man’s head in chalk. He then plucks the head out of the blackboard, and balances it on top of a bottle on a table. The head comes to life and looks around, watching as the knight crawls under the table. The knight removes a mounted sword from the wall, and impales the head on it. The head seems unperturbed, and strikes up a conversation with the knight. The knight removes the head from the sword and replaces it on the bottle while he erects a tripod. He then places the head on the tripod, wraps a cloth round its legs, and removes it to reveal the head has grown a body. The knight parades his new friend around the room, before shaking a fan at him and making him slowly disappear. He then makes him reappear on the table, helps him onto his feet, makes his body disappear, and replaces the head on the blackboard, where it reverts to the original chalk drawing. The knight begins to wipe the blackboard.
After the elaborate multi-shot narratives of The Dreyfus Affair (L’Affaire Dreyfus, 1899) and Cinderella (Cendrillon, 1899), The Mysterious Knight is something of a step backwards, at least in terms of cinematic ambition. However, while clearly modelled on such earlier trick films as The Adventures of William Tell (Guillaume Tell et le clown, 1898) and The Four Troublesome Heads (Un Homme de têtes, 1898), in that it too relies on the notion of a head being detached from its body while remaining alive, it has enough original touches to distinguish it from its predecessors.
We have already seen a chalk drawing coming to life in The Astronomer’s Dream (La Lune à un mètre, 1898), though the effect here is much more elaborate, with the bearded protagonist literally plucking his drawing of a head out of the blackboard. Unsurprisingly, it comes to life when prompted - but there then follows something entirely new, when he produces a large sword and impales the head on it. The potential unpleasantness of this moment (it’s certainly one of the most violent images in a Méliès film to date) is offset by the head’s blithe lack of concern, striking up a cheerful conversation with his impaler. As with The Four Troublesome Heads, the joins are certainly visible (you can clearly see the black-clad body of the actor playing the ‘head’), but this doesn’t detract from the overall technical achievement.
When the knight later mounts the head on a tripod, Méliès is harking back to a similar effect in The Magician (Le Magicien, 1898), though when he banishes the head and its newly-formed body, the fade-out is entirely new (at least in Méliès’ surviving work). This seems to have been achieved via a well-timed jump-cut (the flourishing of a fan distracting the viewer’s attention), and then a combination of a superimposed image being faded to black - because the underlying image remains constant, this creates the impression of the man literally dissolving into the ether. It is worth noting the way both the knight and the man seem to acknowledge the audience before this stunt is pulled, since it would have been impossible to pull this off on stage (at least not with the knight not just holding but prodding the man’s arm to establish that it isn’t some kind of Pepper’s Ghost-style trick with mirrors).
There are some marked exposure fluctuations at the beginning of the print on Flicker Alley’s DVD, and a nasty vertical gouge that spoils the first head-related special effect. The image overall is quite contrasty and grainy, but not enough to muffle fine detail. Eric Beheim’s electronic score makes use of tinkling bell effects to enhance the effect of a well-rehearsed stage performance.
Links
- Internet Movie Database entry.
- Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forum)