Georges Méliès

La Tentation de Saint Antoine, 1898, 1m10s
Star Film Catalogue No. 169

In his cave, the hermit Saint Anthony prays before an effigy of the crucified Christ. A scantily-clad woman suddenly appears, and St Anthony shields his eyes from the sight of temptation. She vanishes, and he recommences reading the Bible. Two women appear either side of him, and he recoils in horror. They vanish, and he picks up a skull from the base of the cross. However, when he kisses it, it turns into another woman, with two more appearing in quick succession. They dance in a ring around the tormented Saint Anthony before vanishing. A desperate Saint Anthony kneels before Christ, who turns into another woman. But an angel also appears, to which Saint Anthony turns with undisguised relief. The woman vanishes and Christ reappears.

Although The Temptation of Saint Anthony contains a familiar collection of Georges Méliès’ trademark jump-cut-triggered appearing and disappearing acts, the overtly religious elements are entirely new - at least when it comes to his surviving titles (I don’t count the devil in The Astronomer’s Dream/La Lune à un mètre, 1898, as his role is more akin to the horror film than any spiritual dimension). The subject of the various mental and moral torments of Saint Anthony was already well established, having inspired sixteenth-century masterpieces by Hieronymous Bosch and Mathias Grünewald, though Salvador Dalí’s variation was still several decades away.

From a distance of over a century, it’s hard to know how seriously to take Méliès’ film, since in essence it’s very similar to The Vanishing Lady (Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin, 1896) - the only differences being that the various scantily-clad ladies are appearing and disappearing entirely unbidden by the hapless Saint Anthony, who would rather be left alone to read his Bible in his cave.

The first two encounters - with one and two women respectively - help set the scene, but Méliès then rings a more intriguing change as he has Saint Anthony picking up a skull from the base of the effigy of Christ on the cross, kissing it as if to exorcise the image of the women. But the skull then turns into another woman, followed by two more, who join hands around him, completely trapping him in a circle of temptation. Having failed to obtain satisfaction with the skull, he turns to the effigy of Christ Himself - surely He will remain pure? But no - his eyes are further sullied by the image of a crucified woman clad in a diaphanous dress, who descends from the cross and advances on him. When an angel then appears and banishes her before blessing Saint Anthony, his relief is almost palpable.

Although on a technical level The Temptation of Saint Anthony is something of a step back for Méliès (there are no effects more sophisticated than those he developed two years earlier), it nonetheless marks an advance in terms of subject matter, being one of the earliest films to tackle an explicitly religious theme. In this respect, Méliès proves himself the ancestor of Cecil B. DeMille and Franco Zeffirelli, whose own religious epics offer a similar blend of the solemn and the kitschy.

The print on Flicker Alley’s DVD is marred by noticeable chemical blotching pretty much throughout, though the underlying image is very sharp and clear - rather too much so, in fact, since it is obvious that Christ is a painted flat, as is the cave set. Neal Kurz’s piano accompaniment begins with shimmering scales before heavier chords signal the increasingly intolerable moral pressure being placed on Saint Anthony.

Links

• Internet Movie Database entry.
• Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forum)
• Illustrated Wikipedia overview of other treatments of the Temptation of Saint Anthony

Un Homme de têtes, 1898, 1m04s
Star Film Catalogue No. 167

A stage magician stands between two tables, removes his head and places it at the far left of one of them. He then grows another head and crawls under the table to prove that the head is indeed completely detached. He then removes his second head and places it alongside the first one: they strike up a conversation. Having grown a third head, the magician removes it and places it on the right-hand table. He grows a fourth head, picks up a banjo and starts to sing, the three other heads joining in. Unable to stand the racket, the magician hits the two left-hand heads with his banjo, and they vanish. He removes his head and tosses it away, replacing it with the head on the right-hand table. He bounces the new head on his shoulders as though it was a football before taking a bow.

At least in terms of his surviving films, The Four Troublesome Heads marks the most sophisticated advance in Georges Méliès’ special-effects arsenal since his discovery of the jump-cut some two years earlier. That was a primitive but effective technique that facilitated rapid appearances, disappearances and transformations, but the superimpositions on display here push Méliès’ cinema further away from his theatrical roots and towards something altogether new.

In the earlier The Magician (Le Magicien, 1898), Méliès used a combination of jump-cuts and cunningly-designed props (including a fake tripod stand that wasn’t as see-through as it appeared) to create the impression of a disembodied living bust. Here, by contrast, we can actually see Méliès apparently removing his own head and placing it on a table, where it continues to talk as though nothing had happened.

The initial effect is created with Méliès’ now-familiar jump-cut technique, firstly between a shot of Méliès reaching up to his head, and then one of him sporting a black bag on his real head (the lighting doesn’t quite manage to hide this, sadly) placing a dummy head on the table. But the next jump-cut leads to something altogether more sophisticated, as the dummy head is replaced by Méliès’ real one, superimposed via (presumably) a primitive matte arrangement onto the table top. Another jump-cut causes Méliès’ head to reappear (or rather appear, since there are now two on screen), and he then gets on his hands and knees to crawl under the table, proving to sceptics that it really is bearing a disembodied head. While the joins are certainly visible (in addition to the bag, the registration between the shots is imprecise, leading to flickering round the edges of the table), this arguably adds to the film’s charm, since the sheer amount of planning and effort is all too apparent.

He could easily have stopped there, and the film would be impressive enough. But instead, he repeats the trick a second and third time, so that he now has three separate heads on two tables. Meticulously calibrated timing means that they chat to each other and eventually sing in unison, accompanied by the full-bodied Méliès on the banjo. And then, in a moment that’s laugh-out-loud funny to this day, he detests their caterwauling so much that he beats the two left-hand heads with the banjo, causing them to vanish. Finally, almost as an encore, he removes his head again, replacing it with the remaining head on the table, “heading” it football-style before letting it find a permanent resting-place on his shoulders.

The sheer breadth of Méliès’ imagination and his technical adventurousness take the breath away to this day. It’s not certain whether this was the first example of synchronised split-screen multiple exposures in cinema history (on the other side of the channel, G.A. Smith made at least half a dozen similar films, and the surviving example, 1898’s Santa Claus, combines multiple exposure with parallel action), but it’s certainly one of the earliest - and very easy to believe that it was the most complex and fluidly achieved to date. Buster Keaton would go further, and with more technical finesse, in The Playhouse (1923) with its nine performing Keatons in perfect synchronisation, and of course such effects are easy enough to achieve in the CGI era without any of Méliès’ seams, but that doesn’t remotely detract from his achievement here. If he looks a little smug when he takes his final bow, that’s entirely understandable.

As already mentioned, the definition of Flicker Alley’s print is good enough to reveal the joins, though it’s beset with faint vertical tramlines pretty much throughout, as well as mild chemical blotching. There are also significant exposure fluctuations and the image as a whole is softer than on many other prints in this set. (However, this may be a side-effect of the multiple exposures in the original). Disappointingly, Neal Kurz’s solo piano accompaniment is fairly generic - there’s no attempt, for instance, at conveying an impression of the banjo-and-heads performance - though it otherwise does an adequate job.

Links

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

La Lune à un mètre, 1898, 3m13s
Star Film Catalogue Nos. 160-162

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.

At over three minutes, The Astronomer’s Dream is three times longer than a typical early Méliès short, and has duly been given three entries in his Star Film catalogue (presumably this meant he could charge triple the fee). It begins as a virtual remake of A Nightmare (Le Cauchemar, 1896), but it’s conceived on a far more elaborate scale.

The nightmare here is being suffered by an astronomer (dressed, rather charmingly, as a wizard complete with pointed hat and long white beard), who is first taunted by a devil and then by a moon that’s a very considerable advance on the cardboard cut-out in the earlier film. It’s also rather more threatening, as its grotesquely distended mouth chews up anything within range, be it objects, children or adults - and it also spits out severed limbs in a Grand Guignol moment reminiscent of the same year’s The Adventures of William Tell (Guillaume Tell et le clown, 1898).

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 terms of special effects, Méliès is still heavily reliant on the jump cut, but he also concocts some live animation (the blackboard with its moving diagrams) and his mechanical props, especially the man in the moon, are conceived on a greater scale than before. The set designs, too, use perspective to create a strong sense of three-dimensional space, with the moon visible in three planes: the far distance, just beyond the balcony, and in extreme close-up.

Although there’s continuous chemical blotching throughout, the untinted source print on Flicker Alley’s DVD is impressively sharp - you can clearly make out every star on the astronomer’s hat and gown. Donald Sosin’s score blends piano with occasional percussion, becoming increasingly frenzied as the moon increases in menace.

Links

• BFI Film and TV Database entry.
• Internet Movie Database entry.
• Jshaide’s review - part one/part two (Rotten Tomatoes forum).

Guillaume Tell et le clown, 1898, 1m01s
Star Film Catalogue No. 159

A clown performs a quick tumbling routine before assembling various dummy body parts together in the guise of William Tell. He places a large loaf of bread on its head and goes to pick up his crossbow. The dummy comes to life and throws the bread at him. The clown jumps up and down in a rage and waves his fists. He then removes the dummy’s right arm and reattaches it. The dummy swipes him with it, knocking him to the ground. Enraged, the clown removes its head, kicks it and replaces it. The dummy comes back to life, knocks the clown to the floor and whirls his body around before leaving. The clown gets up, picks up his crossbow, and… (print ends here)

The French title, which translates as William Tell and the Clown, offers a rather more accurate impression of the film than the more evocative Adventures of William Tell, since this is essentially a knockabout farce based on jump-cuts and the timely substitution of dummies for real bodies. ‘Knockabout’ is the operative word here, since this displays a level of onscreen violence not previously seen in a surviving Méliès film, in which the participants are dismembered, beheaded, stomped on and generally tossed around like a limp dishcloth.

The central scenario involves the clown’s attempt to pay homage to the legend of William Tell by constructing a dummy resembling the famous archer. The clown places a loaf of bread on the dummy’s head (slightly deviating from the legend, in which Tell himself was the archer and his son was the one sporting an apple on his head), but before he can take advantage of this the dummy comes to brief but violent life, courtesy of one of Méliès’ usual well-timed jump-cuts. The clown is less than amused by this, and takes his revenge by tearing off the dummy’s arm and head in quick succession, before solicitously replacing them.

These sequences mark a bridge between the onstage effects of the famous Théâtre du Grand Guignol, with which Méliès was undoubtedly familiar, and countless later outpourings of comically extreme screen violence as seen in everything from Tex Avery cartoons to the early films of Sam Raimi. Under these circumstances, Tell’s revenge, which involves the clown being tossed and trampled (or rather an obvious dummy, substituted again by jump-cuts), seems entirely appropriate.

The film ends abruptly as the clown picks up his crossbow after Tell has departed the scene. It’s probably safe to assume that the original film ran a few more seconds, but probably featured nothing more dramatic than the clown exiting after Tell, bent on revenge.

The untinted print on Flicker Alley’s DVD is slightly marred by numerous thin vertical scratches, and occasionally deeper tramlines, together with exposure fluctuations and obvious splice marks around the jump cuts, while chemical damage has all but obliterated the final frames even before the print reaches its premature end. Eric Beheim’s tinkling, celesta-like electronic accompaniment sounds like a child’s music box, conveying an implicit message that we shouldn’t be taking the violence too seriously.

Links

• Internet Movie Database entry.
• Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forum).
• Wikipedia’s article on the real William Tell

Illusions fantasmagoriques, 1898, 1m14s
Star Film Catalogue No. 155

A stage magician produces a dove from his sleeve, kisses it and puts it in a large wooden box that is mounted on a small table. He then throws in various items of clothing and makes a symbolic gesture. A small child emerges from the box, and the magician carries him out, placing him on a small plinth. He then produces a large axe and cuts the boy down the middle, producing two identical children. They begin to fight each other, and the magician picks one up and turns him upside down. The boy is transformed into a piece of paper, which the magician rips up. He puts the other boy back in the box, whose walls he then systematically removes with a hammer, revealing nothing inside. He pats one of the now-separated sides of the box as it lies on the floor, and the boy reappears on top of it. The magician picks him up, and the boy turns into a couple of large flags, which the magician waves at the audience. Finally, he climbs onto the table, sits cross-legged and vanishes in a puff of smoke. He re-emerges from the side of the stage to take a bow.

The Famous Box Trick can be viewed as a kind of sequel to The Vanishing Lady (Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin, 1896) in that it reprises many of the same elements. These include a blatantly theatrical setting, whose audience is acknowledged throughout, a bearded magician (almost certainly Méliès himself, albeit sporting a wig) going through a stage routine, a title that implies that said routine is part of a longstanding tradition, and an assortment of specifically filmic special effects that give the lie to that impression.

Two years on, Méliès’ box of tricks was more copiously stuffed than was the case with the relatively primitive The Vanishing Lady. Although the jump-cut still reigns supreme, it’s combined here with an effect in which a boy is ’sliced’ with an axe, dividing him into two identically-dressed children. It’s an effect that both harks back to stage magic (the use of a double being the simplest way of implying that someone is either in two places at once or has made a physically impossible journey), only it’s triggered here by a jump-cut that would be impossible to duplicate on stage.

But it’s also worth noting that this effect is the first that we encounter in the film, and it doesn’t appear until near the halfway mark. Before then, the film does indeed seem to be a straightforward actuality record of a Méliès stage performance, starting with the dove being produced from his sleeve and being tossed into the box along with a set of clothes. Although there appears to be a jump-cut just before the boy appears, there’s no obvious need for one: up to this point there’s nothing in the film that couldn’t have been duplicated on stage.

The division by axe is by far the film’s high point, after which it returns to familiar Méliès territory, with both boys being transformed by more jump-cuts into a piece of paper and a couple of flags respectively, and we have also seen an exploding disappearing act in such films as The Bewitched Inn (L’Auberge ensorcelée, 1897) and The Magician (Le Magicien, 1898).

The print on Flicker Alley’s DVD is marked by white speckles and tramlines more or less throughout, though is otherwise very watchable. Frederick Hodges’ piano accompaniment is a jaunty theme-and-variations arrangement.

Links

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

Le Magicien, 1898, 1m10s
Star Film Catalogue No. 153

A man dressed as a wizard makes a table appear out of nowhere, and then conjures up a wooden box on top of it. He then leaps towards the box, and vanishes. A man dressed as Pierrot immediately bursts out of the box and jumps onto the floor (at which point a chair appears). He tries to make things appear on the now-empty table, but fails. Dejectedly, he sits on the chair, whereupon food and drink appear on the table. Delighted, he tastes the food and, satisfied, sits back down - but the chair, table and food disappear, leaving him on the ground. A man in Elizabethan doublet and hose appears and claps him on the shoulder, turning him into a bearded artist. The Elizabethan man vanishes, and the artist picks up a bust from the floor and puts it onto a pedestal. He chips at its face, whereupon it comes to life and grabs the hammer and chisel. It then grows an attractive female body, which the artist tries in vain to hug - it keeps disappearing and reappearing in various statuesque poses before vanishing for good in a puff of smoke. The Elizabethan man reappears and kicks the artist’s behind… (print ends here)

Very much in the tradition of Georges Méliès’ earlier A Nightmare (Le Cauchemar, 1896) and The Haunted Castle (Le Château hanté, 1897) and, doubtless, many other now-lost films, The Magician is another exercise in the art of the jump-cut, which is once again used to make objects and people appear and disappear in the blink of an eye.

In fact, this time round, Méliès seems so in thrall to his special effects that it’s hard to detect much in the way of continuous narrative. The title is The Magician (i.e. singular), which suggests that the wizard, the man in the Pierrot costume and the Michelangelesque sculptor are intended to be the same person in various states of metamorphosis, but this is not clear from the evidence on screen. It’s even less clear who the deus ex machina in the form of a gentleman in vaguely Elizabethan dress is intended to represent - he makes two appearances that seem largely irrelevant to the rest of the film. Although at over a minute the running time of The Magician is in line with other Méliès films of the period, the abrupt ending of the print under review suggests that some footage is missing.

One immediate point of interest in The Magician, as it’s an effect not present in any previous surviving Méliès film, is the moment when the bust switches from a rather obviously painted prop (the protagonist was presumably meant to keep it facing in the same head-on direction throughout, but a slight shift in perspective betrays its essential flatness) to something that suddenly comes to life. Presumably the woman who plays the now-aggressive bust is mostly clad in black and standing behind the flat representing the stand, but the effect of a disembodied head and upper body anticipates the kind of multiple-exposure trickery that Méliès would soon undertake in such films as The Four Troublesome Heads (Un homme de tête, 1898).

Another point worth noting is the theme of objects coming to life and taking revenge on their human owners, as demonstrated by the scene in which the hapless Pierrot can taste the food but cannot eat it, since it immediately vanishes along with the chair and table. The Czech Surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, a known devotee of Méliès, concocted a very similar scenario at the mid-point of his film The Flat (Byt, 1968), and his pixilation technique isn’t that far removed from Méliès’ approach, consisting as it does of simply stopping and restarting the camera after making adjustments to the image.

The untinted print on Flicker Alley’s DVD is generally in acceptable condition, bar occasional flashes of physical and chemical damage and evidence of splice marks around some of the jump-cuts (presumably inherent in the original). The relentless, driving music is sourced from Edvard Grieg’s ‘March of the Dwarfs’ (from the Lyric Suite, op.54), given an electronic arrangement here by Joe Rinaudo, whose touch of the barrel-organ creates an appropriately vaudeville atmosphere.

Links

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

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.

Visite sous-marine du Maine, 1898, 0m51s
Star Film Catalogue No. 147

In Havana harbour, three men clad in cumbersome diving suits descend via rope ladder to the sea bed, where they begin to explore the wreck of the ‘Maine’. One enters the ship via a gash in its side and returns with the body of a drowned sailor. He is tied to a rope and hauled up. As one diver ascends the latter, another goes back inside the ship.

With only the exception of his very first, Playing Cards (Une Partie de cartes, 1896), all of Georges Méliès’ surviving early films from 1896-7 are set in a wholly artificial environment, the action usually playing out against very obviously painted stage flats. The following year’s Divers at Work on the Wreck of the ‘Maine’ is no exception, but this time Méliès ups the ante by creating the surprisingly convincing impression that it was filmed underwater.

He does this by means of his subtlest special effect yet - he simply placed a large fishtank between the camera and the painted backdrop of the wrecked ship ‘Maine’, which three divers are exploring. It’s a very simple trick, but it works brilliantly in practice - the fish are clearly real and clearly swimming, and contrast beautifully with the realistically sluggish movements of the actors playing the divers, completing the illusion.

The film is primarily a study in atmosphere, since there is little compelling narrative content: even the retrieval of what appears to be a sailor’s corpse is treated matter-of-factly. A contemporary audience would have filled in more details, since the wrecking of the ‘Maine’ was a very recent event. On 15 February 1898, the American battleship was anchored in Havana harbour when a massive explosion blew a hole in the site and sank the ship, killing 252 sailors. To this day, no satisfactory explanation for the explosion has been devised: it was long thought to have been a mine, but a forensic investigation conducted in 1976 suggested otherwise. Regardless of the cause, it led directly to the short-lived Spanish-American war, that lasted from April till August 1898.

Méliès’ was one of many films made that year that exploited the tragedy: others include the American Mutoscope Company’s The Wreck of the ‘Maine’ and Divers at Work on the Wreck of the ‘Maine’, the International Film Manufacturing Company’s Battleship ‘Maine’, all of which appear to have been remade by Méliès, since his catalogue mentions these presumed-lost titles: The Battleship ‘Maine’ (Le Cuirassé Maine), The Cuban War and the Explosion of the ‘Maine’ in Havana (Guerre de Cuba et l’explosion du Maine à La Havane) and Visit to the Wreck of the ‘Maine’ (Visite de l’épave du Maine).

The print on Flicker Alley’s DVD is in excellent condition, with physical damage kept to a minimum and only some faint exposure fluctuations on the debit side (and even these tend to enhance the underwater effect). Frederick Hodges’ piano score adapts the descending chords and deep bass responses of Debussy’s ‘Voiles’ (Preludes I) to good effect - as with his accompaniment to A Nightmare (Le Cauchemar, 1896), the music had yet to be written when the film was made - the piece dates from 1909-10.

Links

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