Fat and Lean Wrestling Match
Nouvelles luttes extravagantes, 1900, 2m15s
Star Film Catalogue Nos. 309-310
Two female wrestlers help each other up and take a bow, their wrestlers’ outfits transformed into sober black dresses. They drape white sheets over themselves, removing them to reveal moustachioed male wrestlers, who begin a bout. The curly-haired wrestler is grappled to the ground, his body flung around as though weightless. Finally, he is tossed aside, but while his opponent is preening, the curly-haired wrestler gets up, forces the bald wrestler to his knees, and knocks his head off. He then rips off each of his arms, and tears his trunk from his legs. After claiming victory, he places the trunk in a nearby chair, and replaces its head and limbs. The bald wrestler comes back to life, and the two bow. Each wrestler plucks a female wrestler from behind his opponent. All four bow, then the men pick up the women, who vanish as they do so. The men then leave arm in arm. A much fatter wrestler enters, as does a thinner opponent, who tries and fails to lift him. The fat wrestler falls on top of him, squashing him flat. He places the completely flat body in a variety of poses, eventually rolling him up. The thin wrestler unrolls himself, grabs the fat wrestler and tosses him into the air. He looks up in the air, laughs, and the fat wrestler falls back down on top of him. The thin wrestler jumps on top of his belly, and the fat wrestler explodes, his limbs and head shooting in all directions. After the thin wrestler leaves, the limbs take on a life of their own, moving towards the trunk to reconstitute the fat wrestler. He looks in the direction of his now departed opponent and expresses outrage.
We first encountered Georges Méliès’ fondness for limb-lopping Grand Guignol effects in Adventures of William Tell (Guillaume Tell et le clown, 1898), and subsequently in The Astronomer’s Dream (La Lune à un mètre, 1898) and The Cook’s Revenge (La Vengeance du gâte-sauce, 1900), though these are mild compared with the sustained indignities meted out here. During a series of wrestling bouts, people (or, thankfully, obvious dummies) are casually flung around, their heads and limbs are torn off and, in a startlingly violent climax, a man’s stomach is jumped on, causing his body to explode and his various appendages to be scattered hither and yon.
The English title is more specific than the French original, which translates as ‘New and Extravagant Bouts’. It begins with two female wrestlers, having just finished a bout of their own - and when they bow, a jump-cut replaces their outfits with long, sober black dresses that wouldn’t look out of place in a photograph of the staff of a particularly strict academy for young Victorian ladies. Another jump-cut transforms them into male wrestlers, who would look almost identical if one wasn’t bald on top and the other possessed a full head of hair.
The first on-screen bout begins conventionally enough, but a third jump-cut then transforms the curly-haired wrestler into a dummy, which is flung around with delirious abandon, his opponent’s arms windmilling with all the manic energy of the still unborn Pete Townshend. Not to be outdone, when the curly-haired wrestler springs back to life, he also engenders a dummy substitution, only here it’s not just flung around but ripped apart.
Once these two have resolved their differences and left the arena (accompanied by the two female wrestlers, who put in a surprise reappearance), we’re introduced to two successors - this time the ones that give the film its English title. Their bout is just as violent as its predecessor, though Méliès here substitutes a dummy to make it seem as though the fat wrestler has literally flattened the thin one, in the manner of Jeff Brown’s classic (albeit not yet written) children’s book Flat Stanley. The thin man’s revenge, already described above, involves one of the most perfectly-timed jump cuts in Méliès’ entire output: the effect of a clearly living human being apparently exploding is alarmingly convincing.
What’s equally convincing is the coda, in which the now abandoned fat wrestler’s body parts automatically reassemble themselves. It’s hard to tell even from frame analysis whether this was created with strings or primitive stop-motion animation: the latter seems most likely.
Although the print on Flicker Alley’s DVD is very watchable, and surface damage is less prominent than usual (at least until the very end), the image is a trifle softer than average for this disc - though this has the side-effect of hiding some of the joins. Frederick Hodges’ lively ragtime piano accompaniment perfectly matches the knockabout tone.
Links
- BFI Film and TV Database entry.
- Internet Movie Database entry.
- Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forum) - part one/part two