Georges Méliès

Nain et géant, 1901, 0m54s
Star Film Catalogue No. 386

A man, clad in a hat and a sheet, walks through a stone archway onto a street. He looks to his left, then right, and discards the hat and sheet before acknowledging the audience. He makes a demonstrative gesture with his hand, and splits into two identical twins. They have a conversation about the similarities in their height before the twin on the right puffs himself up to gigantic size. Towering over the other twin, he points and laughs before producing some confetti from his pocket and sprinkling it over him. He then shrinks back to normal size, and the twins merge back into one. He dances a pirouette, and splits back into twins again. They thumb their noses at each other before leaving.

In The Dwarf and the Giant, Georges Méliès continues to explore the same superimposition-plus-dolly effect that he used in The Man with the Rubber Head (L’Homme à la tête en caoutchouc) and The Devil And The Statue (Le Diable géant ou le miracle de la madone, both 1901), though this film, despite being chronologically later - at least according to Méliès’ Star Films catalogue number - has more of a feel of a special-effects exercise than a fully worked-out narrative. As in The Four Troublesome Heads (Un Homme de têtes, 1898) and The One-Man Band (L’Homme orchestre, 1900), Méliès essentially plays himself, with no costume or make-up - in fact, he turns up clad in a hat and white sheet which he makes a rather over-elaborate point of discarding - an echo of the opening of The Man with the Rubber Head.

Where the film marks an advance on its two immediate predecessors (and “immediate” is the operative word, as the Star Films catalogue suggests they were indeed made one after the other, with nothing in between) is that Méliès is combining two superimposition effects - the new expanding/shrinking one, and a familiar “twinning” one that places two identical Mélièses on the screen at the same time. Typically for Méliès, he ups the ante by having the giant Méliès sprinking confetti over the smaller one, though it’s a pity that he ends the film with a glaring technical flaw. As the Mélièses lean forward to thumb their noses at each other, their rears are cut off by the matte, and they then unrealistically disappear into the sides of the archway - thus underscoring the impression that this was primarily a technical exercise.

Some mild tramlining and odd spots of black debris aside, any flaws in the picture on Flicker Alley’s DVD appear to be the fault of the original, as the image gets appreciably softer and loses contrast as soon as the first superimposed effect comes into play. But plenty of fine detail is still visible (the copyright-asserting ‘Star Film Paris’ sign on the left-hand wall is easily readable), and it’s otherwise a very satisfactory transfer.

Links

• Internet Movie Database entry.
• Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forum)

Le Diable géant ou le miracle de la madone, 1901, 2m03s
Star Film Catalogue Nos. 384-385

In a lavishly appointed room, a woman is serenaded by a man playing a lute while balanced on a ladder propped up just outside her window. After they clasp hands and gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes, he descends to the ground. She crosses the room, beside herself with emotion. A devil appears in the alcove, causes bars to appear on her window, taunts her, and then performs a suggestive dance, gradually growing in size until he towers above her. In desperation, the woman pleads to a statue of the Madonna, who comes to life and shrinks the devil back to his original size, causing him to disappear. She then banishes the bars, and the lovers are reunited.

The Devil and the Statue is a variation on a theme established by The Man with the Rubber Head (L’Homme à la tête en caoutchouc, 1901), in that once again the narrative is essentially an excuse for a living creature to appear to grow to gigantic size, by dint of superimposing a shot with the camera tracking in over a shot of a static room. (In this case, the joins are more obvious, and the floor on which the expanding and contracting devil is standing is all too visible).

Here, the effect is in the context of a love story, in which a courting couple is forcibly separated by the devil before being brought back together by a statue of the Madonna coming to life - a rather simpler effect than was the case in earlier Méliès films like The Magician (Le Magicien, 1898), as it only seems to involve the actress in question standing very still for most of the running time. However, it’s unlikely the audience would have been looking at her given the attractions of the increasingly imposing devil. Whereas the title character of The Man with the Rubber Head consisted entirely of a head, and therefore posed no threat, the newly gigantic devil is much more alarming.

However, despite the impressive build-up (in every sense), the dénouement can’t help but be a little disappointing, consisting largely of a reversal of the previous effect, at the end of which the devil simply fizzles out. Compared with the Grand Guignol head explosion of the previous film, one is entitled to feel a little short-changed, and for all the elegance of the set (the Renaissance Italian ambience is very effective), this is one of Méliès’ minor efforts.

The untinted print on Flicker Alley’s DVD opens with severe chemical damage, but quickly settles down to present an image that’s generally in very good condition, with plenty of fine detail visible (including, as mentioned above, the floor on which the devil is standing), only occasionally beset by tramlines. Joe Rinaudo’s electronic-organ accompaniment uses scales to create the impression of things growing and shrinking in size.

Links

• Internet Movie Database entry.
• Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forum)

L’Homme à la tête en caoutchouc, 1901, 2m31s
Star Film Catalogue Nos. 382-383

In a laboratory, a scientist mixes some fluids together in a bottle before opening the doors to an anteroom. There, he finds a table and carries it out. On it, he places a smaller stand with a tube emerging from its base. He extracts a human head from the box and places it on the stand. The head is alive, and looks around quizzically. The scientist removes his wig to reveal that he’s the spitting image of the severed head. He picks up a set of bellows and attaches it to the tube. The head inflates to many times its original size, to its evident alarm. The scientist then turns on a tap connected to the pipe, and the head shrinks back to its original size. The scientist summons an assistant and invites him to inflate the head again - but he does it too enthusiastically, and it explodes. Enraged, the scientist throws him out before bursting into tears.

Deservedly regarded as one of Georges Méliès’ supreme masterpieces, The Man with the Rubber Head represented one of his most significant technical advances since the not dissimilar The Four Troublesome Heads (Un Homme de têtes, 1898). That film featured a protagonist, played by Méliès himself, apparently detaching multiple versions of his own head, the effect achieved by a combination of mattes and superimpositions. Much the same is true of The Man with the Rubber Head, with an important difference: the head now seems to expand and contract.

Méliès achieves this by a simple trompe l’oeil effect: the background remains static throughout, but the superimposed element (Méliès’ own head) is filmed with a camera that is moving towards and away from it. Because the background fools us into thinking that the film has been shot entirely from a fixed camera position (as are the vast majority of Méliès’ films), the illusion is instantly convincing. Like all experienced stage performers, Méliès knew that a single head-inflation wouldn’t be enough - so he contrives to include two, the second culminating in an head-explosion that predates David Cronenberg’s Scanners by some eighty years.

But even without this central show-stopper, the film is a superb example of Méliès’ mastery of comic setups and timing. The film opens with the scientist idly mixing fluids to no great purpose: the sense of random pottering is at odds with the amount of work that must have gone into planning the film. The first visual coup comes when he takes a living human head out of a nondescript box, places it on the stand, and removes his own wig to reveal that the head resembles his own (evidently some bizarre cloning experiment has taken place just before the start of the film) - the kind of effect that would have been a central set-piece not that much earlier, but which is casually tossed off here as though it was a mere trifle.

The set design is more convincing than with many previous Méliès laboratories - for instance, the one in The Doctor and the Monkey (Le Savant et le chimpanzé, 1900) - because the painted element has been enhanced with a clearly genuine anteroom, thus creating a sense of three-dimensional space that helps render the “rubber” effect that much more convincing. The word ‘Laboratoire’ can be read at an acute angle on the right-hand wall, and a slightly incongruous ‘Star Film Paris’ sign is affixed on the left-hand side of the frame, to register Méliès’ claim to ownership at a time when moving image copyright was in its infancy. Given how far ahead he was of the competition, it’s all too easy to see why he was so keen to assert his rights.

Disappointingly, given this film’s seminal importance in Méliès’ catalogue, the untinted source print on Flicker Alley’s DVD has clearly seen better days. It opens with a great deal of damage, and although this settles down later on, the image is beset by tramlines throughout, and the picture overall shows more grain and contrast than the norm. Eric Beheim’s electronic score is a little too generic, with no real attempt made to match what’s happening on screen.

Links

• The complete film on YouTube
• BFI Film and TV Database entry.
• Internet Movie Database entry.
• Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forum)
• Paghat the Ratgirl’s review (Weird Wild Realm)

Panorama pris d’un train en marche, 1898, 1m15s
Star Film Catalogue No. 151

From the top of one of the carriages of a moving train, looking straight ahead over the roofs of the other carriages and over the steam engine pulling them, the viewer travels along a suburban Paris line, under bridges, past assorted buildings and through a station.

For those tracking Georges Méliès’ surviving films from the start, it has already become clear that for all his undoubted originality, he was also only too happy to jump on fashionable bandwagons. The self-explanatory Panorama From Top of a Moving Train is an example of a ‘phantom ride’, a surprisingly popular genre in late 19th-century cinema that capitalised on what was still the considerable novelty of the moving image.

The first ‘phantom ride’ is generally acknowledged to have been The Haverstraw Tunnel (1897), made by the American Mutoscope Company. By the following year, it had attracted dozens of imitations, all of which featured a similar principle: the camera would be strapped to the front of a moving vehicle of some kind, thus conveying the impression of forward motion. This in itself was an attraction, since most other films of the time were shot with an entirely static camera.

In essence, Méliès’ film is little different from its rivals, and there is certainly no indication of who shot it - the only clue that it’s a French film is provided by briefly-glimpsed posters on display on the footbridge over a station that the train passes through - the words ‘Vincennes’ and ‘Auteuil’ can be read, and the name ‘Bel-Air Ceinture’ can be glimpsed on the station itself. This makes it likely that the film was shot on the now disused Chemin de fer de Petite Ceinture, a line that ran between 1852 and 1934 in a circle around Paris’s outer rim.

One point of interest is the position of the camera - while most ‘phantom rides’ saw the camera strapped to the front of a train, thus featuring no visual representation of the means of transport, Méliès chose to position his viewpoint on top of one of the carriages looking ahead, the panorama occasionally obscured by smoke emerging from the engine and drifting across the lens. There’s a faintly clandestine and subversive feeling to this, since the position would only be adopted in real life by someone who for various reasons (dodging fares or officials) has opted to travel illicitly on the roof. Further interest and even a modicum of excitement is provided by the low bridges that the train passes under - at times, the camera seems only millimetres away from being knocked off.

Helped by the fact that the original film was shot outdoors on what appears to be a bright, clear day, the picture on Flicker Alley’s DVD is superb: so sharp and detailed that, as we have already seen, some text on passing posters is perfectly readable. Minor print damage comes in the form of tiny white blotches and occasional tramlines, but these are easy enough to tune out. Frederick Hodges’ Debussian piano accompaniment is built around a chugging rhythm befitting its subject.

Links

• BFI Film and TV Database entry.
• Internet Movie Database entry.
• Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forum).
• Christian Hayes’ Phantom Rides, for BFI Screenonline, offers a useful (if UK-biased) overview of the genre.
• Wikipedia on the likely route, the Chemin de fer de Petite Ceinture.