Georges Méliès

Rêve de Noël, 1900, 4m15s
Star Film Catalogue Nos. 298-305

On Christmas Eve, a child is tucked up in bed. In Father Christmas’s grotto, his servants are hard at work, but take advantage of his absence to admire an elaborate procession and perform a dance featuring a ballerina solo. Father Christmas returns, grabs one of his charges by the ear and cuffs him. On the town’s snow-covered rooftops, angels deposit presents down the chimney. Bellringers announce that it’s Christmas, and a group of people enters the church, shaking off the snow. Doves flutter around the gigantic bell. People parade through the town centre, many holding lanterns. A man interrupts a Christmas feast to ask for alms, and after a brief altercation is welcomed to join the revellers. In the child’s bedroom, various presents are unwrapped as other family members come with Christmas wishes. A long line of children dances in a snowy landscape.

The Christmas Dream returns to the fantastical territory of Cinderella (Cendrillon, 1899), though goes even further in its subordination of narrative to movement and dance. Essentially, Méliès seems to be creating an impressionistic portrait of Christmas from multiple viewpoints: the mythical (Father Christmas in his workshop), the religious (the church bells, the choir), the social (the scene at the feast) and the consumerist (the present-giving), though it’s been carefully structured so that each tableau blends more or less seamlessly into the next, courtesy of carefully calibrated dissolves.

After a brief introduction in which a child is tucked up in bed on Christmas Eve, we are transported to what is presumably Santa’s grotto, though many of the trappings of the myth that we recognise today had yet to be established - this Father Christmas is a long way from the jovial white-bearded red-costumed figure that we’d find comfortingly familiar. Instead, he comes across as a harassed manager, trying to browbeat his staff into greater efficiency and chastising them when they take advantage of his absence to perform an illicit dance (complete with giant drumming rabbit scurrying briefly across the frame). One of the dancers loses a shoe, and although this seems to be building to some kind of punchline, it does appear to have been a genuine accident - presumably Méliès was unable to shoot another take because of the in-camera dissolves bookending the sequence.

The mythical material continues into the next shot, as presents are deposited down chimneys - though in an unexpected touch, the deliveries are being facilitated by two angels, their wings offset by the snow-covered roofs depicted in a foreshortened perspective familiar from other Méliès titles, which has the effect of grouping the buildings tightly together. The church spire can be seen in the distance, towering over the rest, and the whole scene is being gently blanketed with presumably artificial snow.

If the rooftop scene showed the mythical giving way to the spiritual, the next sequences provide alternative viewpoints of the religious side of Christmas, starting with the bells being tolled by a quartet of somewhat harassed ringers, being drilled by what seems like a martinet of a boss (there are echoes of Santa’s portrayal from earlier). As the worshippers enter, shaking the snow off their cloaks, Méliès dissolves to the belfry, dominated by a single huge (and blatantly artificial) bell and a number of real pigeons who are scared off by a man with a lantern inspecting the area.

Like the roof scene, this acts as a bridge from the religious to the social aspects of Christmas, and the next scene incorporates the most detailed subplot, as a beggar sits huddled in the snow outside the venue for a lavish feast, holding his hat out for alms. Most people do give him something, though this background detail is gradually usurped by more elaborate choreography of various lantern-bearing functionaries lighting the way for the more distinguished guests. The scene then cuts to the feast itself, which the beggar decides to gate-crash - and is ultimately welcomed by the host: on Christmas Day, traditional hierarchies are temporarily levelled.

We then return to the child’s bedchamber, and while the social aspects of Christmas continue to be a running theme (though this time on a family level), the consumerist elements take over, as the child is given various large animal toys, a drum, a doll and other assorted knick-knacks. Finally, all the children dance around a Christmas tree, perhaps the single most universally recognised symbol of the season, which brings the film to a fitting close (albeit a somewhat abrupt one in the print under review, which seems to end fractionally too early).

The untinted print on Flicker Alley’s DVD is occasionally a bit wobbly (there’s evidence of warping), and some shots are in better condition than others (there’s quite a bit of surface damage and exposure fluctuation), but there’s also plenty of fine detail to appreciate. Donald Sosin’s wistful score (mostly piano, with occasional percussion) is scene-specific, and does an impressive job of timing itself to the dancers in the relevant scenes, and conveying the effect of falling snow in the exteriors.

Links

• BFI Film and TV Database entry.
• Internet Movie Database entry.
• Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forum)