The Rajah’s Dream
Le Rêve du Radjah ou la forêt enchantée, 1900, 2m27s
Star Film Catalogue Nos. 281-282
In his lavishly appointed bedroom, the Rajah stretches, yawns and rubs his eyes before going to sleep. A large butterfly flutters into the room, waking him up. He grasps a net and chases it around the room. After several attempts at catching it, he gives up, yawns, and lies back on the bed, only to find that the room has vanished around him and he’s now flat on his back in the middle of the grounds of his palace. He gets up and looks around, bemused. Spotting a chair, he tries to sit on it, but it vanishes, reappearing a few feet away. A gnarled tree also appears, which the Rajah tries to uproot. It sprouts a demonic head, and its branches become arms. Alarmed, the Rajah draws his sword, but as soon as the point touches the trunk, the tree turns into a man who chases the Rajah until the latter turns and pushes him, causing him to disappear in a puff of smoke. The Rajah gets back on his feet and a woman appears. Instantly smitten, the Rajah encourages her to sit on his lap. Several more women appear and throw him to the ground repeatedly, prior to chasing him. Finally, a platoon of female soldiers leads him to an execution block, but he successfully wrestles the executioner to the ground… or rather his bolster, as it was all a dream. He looks around, knocks his head, heaves a sigh of relief and goes back to bed.
Unsurprisingly for a filmmaker who specialised in the fantastical, dreams and nightmares have already featured in Georges Méliès’ work. We’ve already seen A Nightmare (Le Cauchemar, 1896) and The Astronomer’s Dream (La Lune à un mètre, 1898), in both of which the dreamer ends up menaced by a gigantic moon, and in Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc, 1900), he depicted supernatural visitations by Saint Michael and other angels.
The dream-narrative here is broadly a return to the territory of A Nightmare, both in terms of content and technique, though The Rajah’s Dream has a few original touches of its own. First of all, there’s the exotic Indian setting, at least in terms of the Rajah’s elaborately decorated bedroom and elaborate costume complete with turban, sword and bushy beard. Secondly, there’s the way his dream seems to explicitly confront some fairly primal fears, be they large insects (the butterfly is a distant cousin to the giant insect in 1896’s A Terrible Night/Une Nuit terrible), mysteriously animated fauna in the form of a demonic tree or, most disturbingly, a woman whose response to the Rajah’s crudely opportunist attempt at seduction is to summon up a female army which leads him to an execution block. By coincidence, this film would have been made within months of Sigmund Freud’s publication of the seminal ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, though one can have a pretty good guess as to the roots of the Rajah’s anxieties without requiring Freud’s assistance.
On a technical level, the film is rather less interesting, being essentially a return to now-familiar basics. The butterfly is dangling on a wire, the various appearances and metamorphoses and even the scene changes are achieved through jump-cuts (even though Méliès had already been experimenting with more sophisticated dissolves and superimpositions). That said, the timing of the cuts is as expertly judged as ever - especially when the Rajah begins to throw a punch at his would-be executioner, only for his fist to end up connecting with the bolster.
The untinted print on Flicker Alley’s DVD begins with the usual scratches and blotches, but for the most part it’s one of the better-preserved films, revealing plenty of fine detail. Eric Beheim’s tinkling electronic score is consistently and indeed repetitively upbeat: something darker-toned might have been more appropriate.
Links
- Internet Movie Database entry.
- Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forum)