The Christmas Dream
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)
Posted on 19th June 2008
Under: 1900, Dreams | 1 Comment »
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.
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.
At the age of thirteen, while tending sheep, Joan of Arc is visited by Saints Catherine and Margaret, and then by Saint Michael, who orders her to free France from the English yoke and to lead the Dauphin to the French throne. She returns home in a trance-like state, but won’t cross the threshold. Her uncle tries to persuade her to stay in her native village, but she refuses and runs off. She reaches the fortified city of Vaucouleurs, and persuades the guard to admit her. She finds the garrison commander, Robert de Baudricourt, enjoying a wild party with his friends. Joan tries to convince him of her plan, and though he initially rubbishes the idea (and has to be restrained from throwing her out), but Joan persuades him to give her his sword and entrust his army to her. Orléans is freed from the English oppressor, and Joan leads a huge army through the town. On 17 July 1429, in the cathedral of Rheims, King Charles VII is blessed by Archbishop Regnault. Joan and her army try to break in to the castle of Compiègne. After a pitched battle, Joan is captured by the English. Her followers try to scale the castle, but to no avail. Joan awakes in a cell, where she has another visitation from Saint Michael, this time flanked by Saint Margaret and Saint Catherine. The jailer orders her to accompany him. On 15 March 1431, Joan is put on trial, with the indictment read by Bishop Pierre Cauchon. He orders her to sign a retraction of her claim to have heard voices. She refuses and throws the quill on the floor. In the market square at Rouen, a pyre is constructed, with a sign reading ‘Relapsed Heretic’. Flanked by Cauchon and his allies, Joan is tied to the post and burned. A soldier adds fuel to the fire, and falls to the ground, overwhelmed both by the smoke and by the magnitude of what he has contributed to. But Joan has ascended to heaven.
Despite being made as early as 1900, Georges Méliès’ Joan of Arc was in fact the second adaptation of the legend: Georges Hatot’s The Execution of Joan of Arc (Execution de Jeanne d’Arc) was made in 1897. However, with its ten-minute running time and eleven separate scenes, Méliès’ film was undoubtedly the first to attempt an overview of the entire saga, from the teenage Joan hearing voices to her military triumphs, capture and execution. In fact, when compared with the earlier multi-sequence 
Other effects are more sophisticated, and are dotted throughout the film. The appearances of the various angels in the opening scene were achieved by a combination of dissolve and superimposition - not that much earlier, he’d have been forced to use a much cruder jump-cut. Saint Michael is sporting an animated halo, presumably a mechanical effect being cranked by an invisible underling. Later, Joan’s army lays siege to the castle of Compiègne (clearly visible as a painted backdrop, since it wobbles when a ladder is placed against it) before being captured and burned at the stake, an effect achieved by releasing lots of smoke and stencil-tinting the print so that it looks as though it’s glowing with unbearable heat. Finally, a gloriously kitschy conclusion in Heaven echoes the similar apotheosis that concluded Cinderella (1899).
The print on Flicker Alley’s DVD starts off in dreadful condition, with the whole of the first scene marred by severe damage. However, things quickly improve, and much of the rest of the film looks ravishing, augmented by the stencil colours. This is the first of a handful of Méliès titles to feature a soundtrack narration, delivered in heavily accented French by Lobster Films’ Serge Bromberg. The decision to record it in English triggered knee-jerk complaints from purists, though in actual fact this is Méliès’ original text, written in English to make his films more accessible to the international marketplace. (His films on the Dreyfus Affair would certainly have benefited from something similar). The narration is accompanied by an electronic score from Brian Benison, which makes frequent use of a martial mode as Joan’s military victories pile up.
An astronomer is writing notes at his desk. A devil appears in a puff of smoke and taunts him, but the astronomer ignores him. A woman with a crescent-moon tiara appears and banishes the devil before disappearing herself. Oblivious to all this, the astronomer gets up and draws a geometrically precise globe on his blackboard, complete with a moon in the top left corner. The moon grows a face and hair and descends to join the globe, which sprouts arms and legs. Annoyed, the astronomer dashes the blackboard to the ground. He picks up a telescope and tries to look through it at the moon, but it turns into a rolling pin, which pokes him in the eye. He angrily tosses it aside and returns to his desk, placing his head in his hands. The desk vanishes, and he topples over onto the ground. He looks through his large telescope and sees a gigantic face in the moon, which promptly invades his study and swallows the telescope and one of the astronomer’s chairs. He tries to retrieve his property, but is rebuffed. The moon emits a puff of smoke, knocking the astronomer to the ground. He picks up a parasol to shield himself, but it is torn to shreds. Two small, identical children emerge from its mouth, and the astronomer promptly hurls them back in. He then tries to hit the moon with a broom, but it retreats to a point beyond the end of the astronomer’s balcony. The astronomer tries to throw a chair, his notebook and a table at the moon, but they all vanish at the crucial moment. Suddenly, the moon becomes a crescent, supporting a woman in a bridal veil. She descends onto the astronomer’s balcony and removes the veil. He tries to hug her, but she shoots up in the air. Another woman appears on the crescent. The astronomer gets up to greet her, and falls through a trapdoor into a room where he is confronted by a suit of armour. He hits this with a broom, and is transported inside the moon’s mouth. The moon swallows him whole and spits out various limbs. The devil reappears, followed in quick succession by the moon-goddess, who banishes him and stuffs the limbs back into the moon’s mouth. As she does so, the astronomer reappears in his chair, bit by bit. The astronomer wakes up in his observatory, heaves a sigh of relief that it was only a dream, and returns to his desk.
But the most significant advance made by the film is that it develops a more or less continuous narrative across three minutes, making it the clearest precursor yet to Méliès’ far more elaborate fantasies of the early 1900s. The astronomer’s dream runs the gamut from battles between devils and angels, being terrorised by a vast moon, and seduced by a female figure initially seen reclining on the crescent as though practising for the DreamWorks logo a century early.
In the grip of a nightmare, a man tosses and turns in bed. He imagines a woman sitting at the foot end, clad only in a sheet, but when he reaches out to embrace her, she turns into a blackface minstrel with a banjo, and he reacts in horror, falling back onto the bed. The minstrel leaps up onto the bed and performs a song and dance routine. Unable to stand it any longer, the man grabs him by the shoulders, only to find him turning into Pierrot and the background changing to reveal a moonlit balcony. Pierrot leaps over it and runs away. The man in the moon comes closer and starts biting the would-be sleeper’s hand. He pushes it away, and Pierrot, the minstrel and the woman reappear on the balcony. He wakes up to find himself tangled up in the bedclothes. He puts his bed back together, looking nervously around all the while, before getting back under the covers.
It’s at this point that the film makes its historical mark, because this is the first - or at least the oldest surviving - example of one of Méliès’ lunar fantasies, which would culminate in the seminal A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902) six years later. Had A Nightmare been made later on, when he was more technically adept, Méliès would undoubtedly have attempted some kind of zooming effect so that the man in the moon would gradually bear down on the man in the bed, but he has to make do with another jump-cut. On the other hand, the abruptness also works well, since the sudden cut to a close-up man in the moon about to take a bite out of the would-be sleeper’s hand is genuinely startling.