After the Ball
Après le bal, 1897, 1m12s
Star Film Catalogue No. 128
A woman enters her boudoir, and her maid helps her to undress, peeling off her outer garments until she is clad in a shift and stockings. She sits down, and the maid helps remove the latter. Almost naked aside from skimpy underwear, the woman gets into a tub and the maid pours the contents of a large jug over her, drying her off with a towel afterwards. They leave the room together. .
This slice of (very tame) erotica is very typical of a sub-genre that had already begun to appear in films on both sides of the Channel the previous year: Méliès’ film is a remake of Eugène Pirou’s Bedtime for the Bride (Le Coucher de la marié), while Esmé Collings’ British-made A Victorian Lady in Her Boudoir proceeds along very similar lines, though stops well short of Méliès’ film when it comes to clothes-shedding. Both Collings’ and Méliès’ films (and doubtless Pirou’s too) were marketed as being suitable for private screenings to broad-minded bachelors.
Essentially, After the Ball is a strip-tease, with an upper-class woman being gradually helped out of her voluminous clothes by a maid, from the cumbersome outer garments down to her individual stockings. The woman is played by Jeanne d’Alcy (1865-1956), who previously played the title role in The Vanishing Lady (Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin, 1896) and would go on to make several appearances in subsequent Méliès films, including the seminal A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902) before marrying him in 1926.
When the woman gets into the bath, it’s not clear whether Méliès intended the effect of complete rear nudity - some form of underwear is clearly visible. It’s also unclear whether the dark powder that the maid pours over her was intended to represent water (it’s easy to see why the real thing might have been best avoided, given the likely side-effects in terms of cloth clinging alluringly to flesh) or was part of some arcane and forgotten powdering ritual, though it’s unlikely that the film’s audience at the time would have been pondering the technical details given the surprisingly extensive amount of female flesh on display. However, After the Ball is not, as has been widely claimed, the first “adult” film - Pirou’s work predated Méliès’ by several months and is reputedly rather more graphic, though less than a third of Bedtime for the Bride is believed to survive.
The print on Flicker Alley’s DVD is mostly in excellent condition aside from some minor jitter on occasion. Neal Kurz’s lyrical piano accompaniment is tasteful and unobtrusive, establishing the film firmly on the ‘art’ side of the art-vs-erotica divide.
Links
- BFI Film and TV Database entry.
- Internet Movie Database entry.
- Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forum).
Posted on 16th May 2008
Under: Erotica, 1897 | No Comments »
A man enters the guestroom of an inn, clearly tired and ready for bed. He puts his suitcase, umbrella and overcoat down on the bed, whereupon they promptly vanish. He rummages through the bedclothes, but is none the wiser. He removes his hat and places it on a small cabinet. It springs up of its own accord and scuttles across the room. He tries to light a candle, but it vanishes, reappearing on the other side of the room. A second attempt leads to it reappearing in its original location. Finally, he lights the wick, but it explodes. He removes his jacket and it drifts up the wall of its own accord. He sits down in a chair, only for it to vanish at the crucial moment, leaving him sprawled on the floor, the chair reappearing on the other side of the room. Holding it firmly this time, he successfully sits down and removes his boots, which shuffle away. The bedside cabinet vanishes, and his trousers climb the wall. Now too tired to care, he gets into bed, only for it to vanish, leaving him on the floor. He gets up, and the bed reappears, shortly followed by the rest of the furniture, stacked neatly on top of the mattress. The man can stand it no longer, and flees the room.
Although the film mostly consists of random inconveniences, there’s a sense of building towards a climax at the end, when the entire bed vanishes, only to reappear with the rest of the furniture stacked on top of it. The traveller is probably wise to flee: as Méliès had already demonstrated in such films as 
On a ferry between Calais and Dover, the choppy waters of the English channel cause the boat to roll from side to side, to the evident discomfiture of the passengers. A woman is violently sick into a receptacle held by her companion, while a heavily bearded man falls down a hole onto the lower deck. Meanwhile, an Englishman attempts vainly to hold onto the table containing his tea. Only the crew seems relaxed, though the waiter has has a momentary battle with the door and the captain is beset by demands from his underlings.
There’s an in-joke (or, more prosaically, an early attempt at asserting copyright) in the plaque advertising the ‘Robert-Houdin Star Line’ - Méliès owned the Robert-Houdin theatre (where this film would probably have had its premiere), and the Star Film company was launched in 1897, the year of its production: an altogether smoother and more successful embarkation than the one depicted here.
Tyrnavos, Greece, 12 April 1897. Just outside the doors of a garrison, three Greek guards fire rifles over the wall at an unseen enemy before summoning reinforcements: two more join them. Both the wall and its door are breached, and the guards retreat into the garrison. Five armed Turks invade and start hacking at the now-closed castle door. One of them orders his colleagues to take cover, and plugs dynamite into the lock. The resulting explosion blows open the door, and the Turks invade the building en masse.
The film’s only special effect (unless the flickering effect in the middle of the frame is a deliberate attempt at creating the impression of fire, as opposed to a by-product of print deterioration) is the blowing-open of the door. There’s a brief jump-cut as he lights the fuse, though the primary purpose of this seems to be to replace the original door with a noticeably different-looking one that’s clearly designed to fall apart on cue. Other than that, the explosion itself and the subsequent destruction of the door, are entirely mechanical, and almost certainly derive from Méliès’ arsenal of stage tricks.
A man defies warnings from his friend and prepares to spend the light in a haunted castle. He sits nonchalantly down in a chair - which vanishes and reappears on the other side of the room, causing him to fall to the ground. He gets up, looks around indignantly, walks over to the chair, reaches out to move it back, but is alarmed by the sudden appearance of a mysterious apparition clad in white robes and cowl and holding a box. Drawing a sword, the man runs him through, only to find the apparition turning into a skeleton. He shakes the skeleton and it turns into a burly guard clad in armour. He vanishes, and another man appears behind the central character, pointing out the reappearance of the white-cowled apparition. (The film ends abruptly here)
The final transformation to a burly guard is well handled, but after he disappears the film becomes incomprehensible, presumably thanks to a missing ending. Another man appears - he is not the colleague from the start, though he doesn’t seem to possess supernatural trappings - and points out the re-emergence of the cowled figure, but the film then ends just as Méliès seems about to explore similar variations to those that concluded A Nightmare.